The songs of Maldoror

The songs of Maldoror (in French, Les Chants de Maldoror) are a set of six poetic songs published in 1869, the work of Writer Isidore Ducasse, better known by his pseudonym Count de Lautréamont, considered the great innovator of French poetry of the XIX century.

Postula to the 1890 edition by Léon Genonceaux

My poetry will consist, only, of attacking by all means man, that wild beast, and the Creator, who would not have given birth to such garbage.

Song II

The songs of Maldoror, one of the most atypical and surprising works in literature, were written between 1868 and 1869 and published that same year. The songs that make up the book are the work of a twenty-two-year-old man whom death will take barely a year later. The echoes of these pages will increase throughout the XX century, in particular due to the impulse of André Breton, who saw in that book «the expression of a total revelation that seems to exceed human possibilities». Thus, the surrealists considered the book as a precursor.

Structure of the work

The songs of Maldoror obey a structure to which the author tries to be faithful, despite the fact that its evolution testifies otherwise. The 1868 publication (only the first canto) presented some dialogue parts with scenic indications that were suppressed in the following ones. They bear the stamp of the texts from which Lautréamont was initially inspired: Lord Byron's Manfred, Adam Mickiewicz's Konrad, Faust Goethe's i>. Of these figures, he retained, above all, the idea of a negative, satanic hero, in an open fight against God, although the style chosen finally has the characteristics of epic literature. In fact, each of his songs is divided into stanzas, with the exception of the sixth and last, where a twenty-page novel develops that changes the style adopted until then.

Aspects of the work

Maldoror, superhuman being, archangel of evil, fights in different guises against the Creator, often ridiculed as God in the brothel. He commits murders in which he evidences his sadism and perversion. In the 1868 version, one of the first scenes refers to a dialogue with Dazet (a school friend from Tarbes, whose name will be suppressed in subsequent editions), which clearly allows us to see that, beneath the fiction, lies a biographical background.

Expressing the epic world in which these extreme acts take place, the objects and animals speak, the metamorphoses multiply, the emphasis and the gigantism of the characters are allowed. But a constant irony warns the reader, forces him to distance himself, face to face with the narrative and to judge the literary phenomenon that he has before his eyes. More and more this critical voice is mixed with the text. We are invited to the spectacle of doing and undoing the work.

From the fourth canto it is no longer possible to ignore this contradiction, its vampiric phrases dominate the substance of the poem. The final novel uses the bizarre style and, more specifically, the serial that was abundant at that time in large-circulation newspapers. This last fiction develops an intrigue outlined in the preceding pages.

The adolescent Mervyn, seduced by Maldoror, will be uselessly protected by God and his animal emissaries. A last grandiose scene sees him projected behind the Vendôme column to the dome of the Pantheon, and one can guess in this incongruous act a way of getting rid of all the novels in the world, but also of the sentimental anguish that inspires them.

If Ducasse finds extreme pleasure in fostering scenes of rare violence, in which misfortune and bad intention have a sublime point, it is no less visible that he thus adjusts the tone, combining the amplitude of the rhythm and the superior disappointment, a kind of inescapable and powerful principle of antigravity.

The activity also goes through plagiarism, appropriating different fragments of texts, including the Apocalypse, to integrate them into his own. Different theses in recent years also point to pointing to Ducasse himself as the father of surrealism. The Uruguayan Fernando Butazzoni has indicated that the plastic work of Salvador Dalí is essentially a "plagiarism" of the literary images written by Ducasse in his book.

Origin of names

More than one exegete has wondered about the name "Maldoror". We only know that the words "evil" and "aurora" or "horror" can be found in the expression, the last two homophones in French (respectively aurore and horreur).

As for the pseudonym chosen by Ducasse, it is reminiscent of the Latreaumont (different spelling) of Eugène Sue. Perhaps Ducasse did not choose it himself: he listened to the advice of Lacroix, Sue's publisher, and added a peerage comparable to the illustrious Comte de Vigny and Vicomte de Chateaubriand. ^{[citation required]}

Another theory holds that, at a time when The Count of Monte Cristo was fashionable, he chose to call himself the Count of Lautréamont (l' autre mont, in Spanish 'the other mountain') to show their opposition to Christ and therefore to God. ^{[citation required]}

A third theory alludes to the origin of Ducasse. Isidore was Uruguayan, more specifically, a Montevidean (that is, "from monte video", according to the etymology of the name), but he also lived in the Montmartre neighborhood (in the Mont Martre that is to say the 'Monte Martre') of Paris, which would correspond to the "other mount" of his pseudonym. ^{[citation required]}

Translations

• The Uruguayan Gabriel Saad translated this work into Spanish.