Maldoror [was: Stains]
Parry
> _Les Chants de Maldoror_ is a marvel.
> Lautreamont reminds me A LOT of Poe.
> Do you, or anyone, know if they read each other's work? If I recall
> correctly, Poe was much admired by the French during his lifetime.
Ducasse made a reference to The Raven in “Poésies” so he read at least
that much. Lykiard’s translation of “Poésies” carries a very nice
critical preface, by the way. Its bibliography says there are only two
(in 1978) full-length studies in English of Lautréamont’s work. One of
them is Peter W. Nesselroth’s “Lautréamont’s Imagery, A Stylistic
Approach” (1969). As the Nesselroth book is hard to find, and as there’s
the possibility someone might find this material interesting, I’m
attaching the book’s concluding chapter below.
-- Parry
------------------------------------------------
>From Peter W. Nesselroth’s “Lautréamont’s Imagery, A Stylistic Approach”
(1969).
CONCLUSION
The aim of stylistic analysis is to objectively locate and describe
expressive and affective devices. After this has been accomplished, it
becomes possible to attempt an evaluation, to proceed from stylistics to
literary interpretation.
In the methods of Leo Spitzer and of Erich Auerbach, the linguistic
feature was shown to be indicative of the psychological, historical or
sociological context of the author or of the period in which the work
was written. The weakness of the procedure, besides being too dependent
on the erudition of one scholar, is that it connects style to literary
history rather than to literary criticism.
This conclusion will try to integrate the stylistic analysis of
Lautréamont's imagery with other modes of investigation (the essentially
psychoanalytic reading of Pleynet and the myth reading of Zweig) and to
arrive thereby, it is hoped, at a more complete understanding of the
work. In this manner stylistics would serve to corroborate, correct or
dispute, not the validity of these other readings, but their
evaluations. Impressionism will be minimized because different exegeses
will have been verified by a methodical textual scrutiny. And, since
throughout my study, the emphasis has been on the shock effect of the
imagery, the converging judgments might enable us to determine why, when
we read Lautréamont, "les cadres de l'esprit semblent à jamais
pulvérisés."1
The reader brings to the texts certain expectations which are the result
of his culture. Since these expectations are being constantly denied, it
is his culture that is being put into question. He opens the book and,
because of literary experience, anticipates a *story* with a linear
development -- a beginning, a middle and an end -- where things happen
as a consequence of one another. But there is no story, no object that
the subject is about. This can only mean that the subject matter is
nothing but itself, which, as Marcelin Pleynet emphasizes, must be the
reader.2 Not only does Lautréamont say it at the very beginning (“Plût
au ciel que le lecteur, enhardi et devenu momentanément féroce comme ce
qu'il lit, trouve, sans se désorienter, son chemin abrupt et sauvage, à
travers les pages sombres et pleines de poison...”, p. 123) but the
non-linear development involves the reader directly. In a linear
progression, the stanzas would be in sequence, starting where the last
one ended. In “Les Chants,” the stanzas seem to have no relationship to
each other. This means that every stanza is a new beginning, stands in
isolation, and is part of a mosaic, as in Rimbaud's “Les
Illuminations.”3 The development is elliptical and Lautréamont tells us
so in Chant V. In an ellipsis, the reader must supply his own
connections and is thereby forced to participate.4
Since it is the reader who is at issue with the first few words, we must
begin by establishing what the reader's own *story* would be. Here, we
can only follow Pleynet and say that it is
"mythe-rhétorique-inconscient."5
>From the point of view of the unconscious, Freud is no help as long as
he is being used to interpret an author, an individual who doesn't
exist: Lautréamont is only a creation of Isidore Ducasse, who did his
best to erase his identity. (The first edition of the first Chant was
even published without any author's name, and the one biographical
reference -- Georges Dazet -- disappears in subsequent editions).6 The
author is the reader himself and Lautréamont only in so far as he is his
own reader. The mistake of a Freudian interpretation such as Marcel Jean
and Arpad Mezei's “Maldoror” is that it considers the text as the
expression of the experience of an individual, as probably Freud himself
would have done, instead of the neurosis of a culture. When Freud turned
his attention to culture, in “Civilization and Its Discontents,” his
evaluation was that repression of the instincts was a condition for the
survival of civilization, hence that the status quo, which is life
governed by the reality principle, is the only possible life. An
unrepressed civilization, i.e. life governed by the pleasure principle,
of which imagination is the surviving manifestation, would be
impossible. This conclusion explains Freud's incomprehension of what the
surrealists were trying to accomplish.7
The reader's expectations are the products of a culture dominated by the
reality principle: logic, lineality, cause and effect, clearly defined
categories, etc. The book, by denying the expectations, negates these
repressions and becomes an assertion of the pleasure principle, of the
life instinct. Freud is therefore relevant only if we disregard his
value judgment and consider the possibility of an unrepressed life. In
recent years, there have been several studies which envisage this
reinterpretation: Herbert Marcuse's “Eros and Civilization: A
Philosophical Inquiry into Freud” (Boston, 1955), and Norman O. Brown's
“Life Against Death” (New York, 1959) and “Love's Body” (New York,
1966). In the light of these essays, it becomes clear that Lautréamont
's experience, and ours as we read him, is the result of the basic
reversal of reality-pleasure principles, that all the reversals in the
book are the logical consequence of that initial step.
On the archetypal level of mythology the culture heroes of repressive
civilization are Prometheus who "is the trickster and (suffering) rebel
against the gods, who creates culture at the price of perpetual pain. He
symbolizes productiveness, the unceasing effort to master life; but in
his productivity, blessing and curse, progress and toil are
intertwined,"8 and Apollo: "Apollo is the god of form -- of plastic form
in art, of rational form in thought, of civilized form in life. But the
Apollonian form is form as the negation of instict."9 Yet, mythology
also has heroes who represent the taboo side of the culture: Orpheus,
Narcissus and Dionysus. "The Orphic and Narcissitic experience of the
world negates that which sustains the world of the performance
principle. The opposition between man and nature, subject and object, is
overcome."10 Paul Zweig has analyzed the Narcissus aspect of
Lautréamont's attempt and revealed that its major manifestation is found
in the circularity of the themes and of the composition. 11
The Orphic element is apparent in the very title “Les Chants de
Maldoror,” in the homosexual episodes and in the stated purpose of going
back to the beginning of poetry: "La science que j'entreprends est une
science distincte de la poésie. Je ne chante pas cette dernière. Je
m'efforce de découvrir sa source." (p.388). And Maldoror has the aspect
of Dionysus when he appears as "the antagonist of the god who sanctions
logic, the realm of reason"12 and as the hermaphodite (II, 7) because
"Instead of negating, he [Dionysus] affirms the dialectical unity of the
great instinctual opposites: Dionysus reunifies male and female, Self
and Other, life and death. Dionysus is the image of the instinctual
reality which psychoanalysis will find the other side of the veil."13
Significant also in this context is the Ocean stanza: Marcuse says that
"Freud describes the 'ideational context' of the surviving primary
ego-feeling as 'limitless extension and one-ness with the universe'
(oceanic feeling). And later in the same chapter he suggests that the
oceanic feeling seeks to reinstate 'limitless narcissisms.'"14
On the level of rhetoric, imagery provides a perfect frame-work in this
search for the limitless, and Lautréamont knew it: "... la métaphore
(cette figure de rhétorique rend beaucoup plus de services aux
aspirations humaines vers l'infini que ne s'efforcent de se le figurer
ceux qui sont imbus de préjugés ou d'idées fausses, ce qui est la même
chose)..." (p. 278). In a simile, we have two literal sets of meaning,
the tenor which belongs to the fiction and the vehicle which is provided
by the poet's imagination and thus brings in material that is foreign to
the fiction. The simile, as a unit, brings together these two realities
and creates an image by establishing a correspondence between them. The
content of the vehicle is selected arbitrarily for what is considered
traditionally as a functional or ornamental purpose. In Lautréamont's
similes, we are constantly reminded that it is the fiction itself, the
tenor, which is arbitrary, i.e. the product of the imagination, while it
is the vehicle which brings in reality. Hence, the numerous literary
sources, other fictions, are used as tenor for the plagiarized, but
true, scientific material of the vehicle (and Lautréamont's plagiarisms
are always in the vehicle) as well as for the fantasy material, since
fantasy is imagination not dominated by the reality principle and,
consequently, also true. This reversal calls into question the
arbitrariness of all fictions: it is just as arbitrary to find a sunset
beautiful as it is to find the fortuitous encounter beautiful.15
The tenor is then an arbitrarily selected point, at which the poet is
standing, and from which he can elliptically encompass the world around
him. This is the technique which Lautréamont himself reveals at the
beginning of Chant III: "Amour affamé de la race humaine, qui se
dévorerait lui-même, s'il ne cherchait sa nourriture dans les fictions
célestes: créant, à la longue, une pyramide de séraphins, plus nombreux
que les insectes qui fourmillent dans une goutte d'eau, il les
entrelacera dans une ellipse qu'il fera tourbillonner autour de lui."
(p.220).16
In metaphors, there is a figurative focus in a literal frame. The
literal meaning of a word is the dictionary meaning, the realistic
usage. The figurative meaning of a word is the imaginative usage. In a
traditional metaphor, the focus is restricted by the frame because the
words must share some associated commonplaces for their interaction to
be logical. In other words, the focus has to have enough connotations so
that the reader may recognize that it is used metaphorically.
Imagination is dominated by the reality principle, by the finite. If,
however, as is the case in Lautréamont 's more salient examples, the
focus is too poor in associations to be read figuratively (*les halliers
de l'espace*), then there is a fusion of reality and imagination, a
metamorphosis. But this is only possible when both the focus and the
frame are concrete. When the focus is in an abstract frame (*les
kanguroos implacables du rire et les poux audacieux de la caricature*)
it cannot be viewed as a physical transformation of the world and
becomes a nonsense metaphor, which means that it is free from the
finiteness imposed upon it by reality, and not forced into the
recognizable category of imagination. This unsettles the reader who is
accustomed to clearly be able to see the figurative word and the literal
word, to be able to distinguish between reality and imagination.
Paradoxically, the fusion of categories involves a fragmentation of our
normal perception, real unity is actually fraction. Paul Zweig thinks
that, because of the metamorphoses of Chants IV and V, Lautréamont's
Narcissistic experience is ultimately a failure: "Lautréamont a fait de
son poème un 'tourbillon' dont il devait être lui-même le centre. II a
voulu étendre le règne de ses images pour que chaque moment du cerde
reflète son désir de Narcisse. Mais à la fin la violence bouleverse
l'univers de ses fictions.... Les métamorphoses expriment l'écartèlement
de cette vision d'un Narcisse qui a voulu trouver son image au sein d'un
océan de formes fracassées. Car l'image qu'il y découvre a subi aussi la
magie des renversements. L'échec paradoxal de Narcisse lui a rendu sa
propre forme mêconnaissable."17
This conclusion is reached because of the basic assumption that the
narcissism in “Les Chants” is the manifestation of an individual
personality, that the metamorphoses shatter an ego which had attempted
to make the world like itself. However, Isidore Ducasse, by making the
author of “Les Chants” a known fictional character (Eugène Sue's
Latréaumont [sic])18 and by erasing from this work all biographical
references, depersonalized himself. The narcissism in “Les Chants” is
therefore *primary narcissism*, the feeling which exists before the
differentiation of the Self and the Other. "It is significant that the
introduction of narcissism into psychoanalysis," writes Marcuse, "marked
a turning point in the development of the instinct theory: the
assumption of independent ego instincts (the self-preservation
instincts) was shaken and replaced by the notion of an undifferentiated,
unified libido prior to the division into ego and external objects."19
The metamorphoses in “Les Chants,” instead of destroying the ego, are
steps toward the creation of the person. Lautréamont becomes the creator
of Isidore Ducasse, i.e. his own father: “... le pseudonyme
(Lautréamont) a permis au nom propre d'avoir wi autre référent que
l'héritage paternel (le référent évident du nom propre). Ducasse est
désormais le fils de ses oeuvres.”20 He could thus have said, like
Artaud, "Moi, Antonin Artaud, je suis mon fils / mon père, ma mère / et
moi."21
The beginning of the book is for Ducasse, as well as for the reader, a
return to the Beginning, that is to a prebiographical and pre-historical
situation. Biography and history begin with “Poésies.” For, while in
“Les Chants” every effort was made to erase personal references,
“Poésies” lists not only Isidore Ducasse as author but dedicatees whose
relationship to the author is clearly indicated ("A mes condisciples",
"Aux Directeurs de Revues", "A Monsieur Hinstin, mon ancien professeur
de rhétorique"). It is revealing that it is through the names which
appear in this dedication that most of the biographical research on
Lautréamont has been accomplished. And, while the characters that are
used in “Les Chants” suggest typically fictitious heroes (Maldoror,
Falmer, Lohengrin, Lombano, Léman, Mervyn, etc.), “Poésies” refers to
literary figures, to the cultural history of Ducasse and of his reader.
What is really shattered in “Les Chants” is not the identity of
Narcissus, but the lack of identity -- Lautréamont and Maldoror. After
the fragmentation, there is the personality of the author of “Poésies.”
These are not a reversal, a return to orthodoxy. They are, rather, a
logical outcome of the initial reversal which placed the work on the
side of the taboo. They do not represent a reassertion of goodness, in a
dialectical struggle between good and evil, but the destruction of the
dialectical situation. As Philippe Sollers remarks, "L'englobement va
substituer à l'*ambiguïté * contradictoire de l'époque parlante un
redoublement, une répétition destinès à marquer le milieu de la
séparation sans communication de l'affirmation et de la négation: non
plus la loi d'une unité confuse et double (passant de l'un à l'autre
sans savoir dire ni oui ni non) mais les lois d'un *ordre* duel de
permutation (où tout est oui/tout est non)."22 The form which is best
suited for this “ordre duel de permutation" is the aphorism, the form of
“Poésies.” An aphorism is a fragmented form which gives everything once,
without any need for justification: "La maxime n'a pas besoin d'elle [la
vérité] pour se prouver. Un raisonnement demande un raisonnement. La
maxime est une loi qui sentence un ensemble de raisonnements. Un
raisonnement se complète à mesure qu'il s'approche de la maxime. Devenu
maxime, sa perfection rejette les preuves de la métamorphose" (p. 380).
Hence, the clear awareness of the arbitrariness of fictions, of "tics",
of descriptions: "Les descriptions sont une prairie, trois rhinocéros,
la moitié d'un catafalque. Elles peuvent être le souvenir, la prophétie.
Elles ne sont pas le paragraphe que je viens de terminer" (pp. 383-384).
No matter what its content may be, an aphorism is always true: Pascal,
La Rochefoucauld, Vauvenargues can be corrected in the sense of
optimism, but the form remains. They become Ducasse corrected in the
sense of pessimism. Stated as an aphorism, an idea is no longer subject
to critical scrutiny: "Il faut que la critique attaque la forme, jamais
le fond de vos idées, de vos phrases. Arrangez-vous." (p. 374). This is
what Camus, when he spoke of "les banalités laborieuses des
‘Poésies,’"28 did not seem to realize. Commencement addresses may
contain nothing but banalities. Yet it is certainly not banal to say
that "Les chefs-d'oeuvre de la langue française sont les discours de
distribution pour les lycées, et les discours académiques" (p. 364). As
the title of the work indicates, these statements are to be regarded,
not as *Pensées* or *Sentences* or *Maximes*, but as *Poésies*. It was
Lautréamont's discovery that the fragmented form of the aphorism is the
poetic form which unifies opposites, which is capable of satisfying his
*besoin d'infini*. In the words of Norman O. Brown, "Aphorism is
exaggeration or grotesque; in psychoanalysis nothing is true except the
exaggerations; and in poetry 'cet extrémisme est le phénomène même de
l'élan poétique.' Aphorism is exaggeration, extravagant language; the
road of excess which leads to the palace of wisdom.... Aphorism, the
form of the mad truth, the Dionysian form."24
The remarkable aspect of Lautréamont 's work is the consistency with
which it is developed, from the initial reversal of author as reader and
reader as author, that is from the moment it became narcissistic and
replaced the reality principle with the pleasure principle. I do not
mean to imply that Lautréamont knew what the outcome of the experience
would be. He did not know that any more than the reader. But he realized
from the very first stanza that the Apollonian cultural norms of the
reader would be destroyed. That is why he advised him to act like the
crane who is not stupid and to take "un autre chemin philosophique et
plus sûr."
Footnotes:
1. Léon Pierre-Quint, “Le Comte de Lautréamont et Dieu,” p. 173.
2. "Dès la première ligne, dès la première strophe du premier chant,
nous n'entrons pas ailleurs que dans cet espace de la lecture, nous ne
rencontrons pas d'autre fiction que celle que nous posons, que nous
constituons comme lecteur (comme "le lecteur"), pas d'autres limites que
les nôtres: dans la mesure où nous pouvons devenir *comme* ce que nous
lisons, dans la mesure où nous pouvons nous trouver désorientés où nous
apporterons et n'apporterons pas une *logique rigoureuse et une tension
d'esprit égale au moins à notre dèfiance*." “Lautréamont par lui-même,”
p.109.
3. Angus Fletcher, “Allegory,” points out that surrealist isolation of
parts, is a traditional allegorical device: "An allegorical world gives
us objects all lined up, as it were, on the frontal plane of a mosaic,
each with its own 'true', unchanging size and shape... Religious
painting demonstrates this isolation in showing descents of angels who
visit mankind in completely discrete, discontinous forms. Even more
isolation is apparent when we turn to the diabolical imagery that
accompanies the histories of saints or pictures of the Day of Judgment.
So too the imagery of modern surrealism, metonymic and synecdochic in
character, presents the *objet trouvé*, which has a direct antecedent in
the emblematic devices of the earlier centuries. These latter devices
are likewise 'found objects,' although they are organized into
traditional iconographies which we recognize more readily than the
chiefly Freudian iconography of surrealism." pp. 104-lO6.
4. Fletcher, ibid., p. 107, "The price of a lack of mimetic naturalness
is what the allegorist, like the Metaphysical, poet, must pay in order
to force his reader into an analytic frame of mind. Ellipsis in speech
has just this effect, in much the same way that any fragmentary
utterance (the rhetorician's *aposiopesis*) takes on the appearance of a
coded message needing to be deciphered. We shall find that a strict
order of elements is another aspect of the allegorical coding process,
but for the moment it suffices to point out that by having a
surrealistic surface texture allegory immediately elicits an
interpretive response from the reader."
5. Pleynet, op. cit., p. 128.
6. Pleynet, pp. 113 and 129. For Georges Dazet, see above (p.59 n. 12).
7. See in this connection, André Breton "Interview du Professeur Freud"
in “Les Pas perdus,” pp.117-118, and the Breton-Freud correspondance in
“Le Surréalisme au service de la r~volution,” vol. V, p.11.
8. Marcuse, “Eros and Civilization” (Vintage Books), p.146.
9. Brown, “Life Against Death,” p.174.
10. Marcuse, op cit., pp. 150-151.
11. Paul Zweig, "Lautréamont ou les violences du Narcisse," p. 11.
12. Marcuse, p. 146.
13. Brown, op cit., p.175.
14. Marcuse, p. 153.
15. See Pleynet, "Le Topos du monde renversé," in “Lautréamont par
lui-même,” pp. 136-137.
16. Pleynet quotes Emile Benveniste who suggests that the ellipsis is
the proper device for symbolic connections, op. cit., pp. 130-131.
17. Zweig, loc. cit., p. 63.
18. On Sue’s “Lautréamont,” see Jean and Mezei, “Maldoror,” pp. 167-177.
19. Marcuse, p. 152.
20. Pleynet, op. cit., p.157.
21. Quoted by Philippe Sollers, "La Science de Lautréamont," “Critique,”
245 (October 1967), 794, n. 3.
22. Sollers, ibid., p. 824.
23. Albert Camus, “L'Homme révolté” (Gallimard, 1951), p.105.
24. Brown, “Love's Body,” p. 187. Quote from Bachelard, “La Poétique de
l'espace,” p. 189.
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brandon...@my-deja.com
> As the Nesselroth book is hard to find, and as there’s the
> possibility someone might find this material interesting, I’m
> attaching the book’s concluding chapter below.
Thanks.
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