Isidore Ducasse, il Conte di Lautréamont
I Canti di Maldoror - Poesie

There are writers whose works, while they are still alive, are completely (or almost) ignored. It often happens that such writers are rediscovered (if not discovered anew) after their death and subsequently gain fame they never would have imagined in life. A strange twist of fate: being more famous dead than alive... But there is one author in particular whose works were kept from the abyss of oblivion for decades. Isidore Lucien Ducasse, the Count of Lautréamont: an enigmatic figure of French literature in the second half of the 19th century, considered impious and immoral in life as much as he was acclaimed and regarded as a precursor of an entire literary movement after his death.

Ducasse was born in Montevideo (Uruguay) in 1846, to French parents. He was later sent to France to receive higher education (he would earn a diploma in scientific subjects). He then returned to Uruguay and finally settled permanently in Paris (1868). His life was brief: he died on November 24, 1870, at the age of 24, in his home, under circumstances still unclear. His death certificate reads: «homme de lettres [...] en son domicile [...] sans autres renseignements». Man of letters dies in his home, without other information. Neighbors say he used to write while playing the piano, at night, declaiming his compositions. What did this young man leave us, dead «sans autres renseignements»? Two things: the "Chants de Maldoror" and the "Poésies".

His magnum opus is these "Canti di Maldoror", problematic and impenetrable writings. They were printed for the first time in 1869, but the violence and atrocities in them were such that they blocked their distribution for fear of censorship, and the copies remained in warehouses until 1874, the year in which the work was published - with little success - in Belgium. It is thus with this unpublished work that the oblivion which would envelop this writer for a long time began, ending only in the first half of the 20th century.

What genre is it? Is it poetry? What is it about? Questions to which it is difficult to give a definitive answer. We can initially define it as "poetry". It is not in verse, but the text is ideally divided into "stanzas"; an answer now considered definitive is to regard it as an epic poem in prose. The whole is divided into 6 cantos, with the sixth forming a work within a work, a true novel (thus departing from the category of poetry).

The protagonist is Maldoror. And what does this Maldoror do? Well, his favorite pastime is reviling against humanity and the Créateur. With "Creator" one means both God and the orphic poet, the demiurgic poet who creates, the romantic conception of the poet, who acts through a kind of "divine" inspiration. Lautréamont-Maldoror is thus the champion of the destruction of canonical poetry. He desecrates the founding fathers of the French poetic tradition and beyond, taking as examples and at the same time defacing Baudelaire, Hugo, but also Byron, the gothic novel, the feuilleton, the Bible, even the style of the school textbooks he studied as a boy, and countless other sources. Composed with a perfectly standing syntactic construction that poses a formidable challenge to the reader (who easily gets lost), the Chants draw inspiration from infinite literary sources and mix it all together, without a true narrative line, giving vent to Maldoror's fantasies and thoughts, juxtaposing different and almost contrasting styles and abusing the poetic device par excellence: the simile. And so we witness odes to the "old ocean" (with echoes of Baudelaire and Byron), appearances of fantasy bestiaries, deplorable and impious acts, acts of absolute and gratuitous cruelty, up to the great and epic struggle between Maldoror and the Creator, guilty of having created man «in his image and likeness». In Maldoror there is an anti-humanism that turns into theophobia and Cainism (the deliberate choice of Evil by Maldoror, already marked in the name). His is a crusade against the Conscience, God's witness on Earth, his presence in Man, the "divine spark" that is in each of us. Lautréamont-Maldoror wants to destroy all this. In the Chants reigns the total destruction: Lautréamont spares not even himself, the Poet (as previously mentioned).

And he will do more: in the "Poesie" (printed and published in two installments in 1870, this time with his birth name, Isidore Ducasse) - a misleading title because this work has absolutely nothing poetic about it, being a reworking of maxims taken from many literary sources and a series of reflections on literature - he will completely deny what he wrote in the Chants, declaring the desire to sing only of Good and hope. A renunciation that is disconcerting but of little concern to Ducasse. After all, he has always shown a weakness for "captatio malevolentiae" rather than seeking the reader's understanding and assent.

It is here that the "Maldoror-Poésies device" activates, as named by Francis Ponge, an avant-garde poet of the 20th century: two works diverging to one extreme Evil and the other to extreme Good; but in both remains the same violence, the same defensive force of the two ideals. It is a "device" of total destruction, which nullifies the conscience's power to distinguish between Good and Evil and even goes so far as to annihilate literature itself. Ponge wrote: «Open Lautréamont! And all literature turns itself inside out like an umbrella. Close Lautréamont! And everything, soon, goes back to normal». Paradoxically, it is in this destructive power that Lautréamont's strength resides. This and his thought that "la poésie doit être faite par tous" (poetry must be made by everyone) will be, in the 20th century, one of the fundamental pillars of the Surrealist thought, which will revitalize Lautréamont, electing him as its precursor and giving him the notoriety that he never had in life.

It is thus the antithesis inherent in Lautréamont's work that outlines its function and strength. Usually, however, Ducasse is mainly remembered for the "Canti di Maldoror". To recommend reading it? No. No, I do not take that responsibility towards a potential reader. It is a difficult, labyrinthine, extreme, violent, grotesque, repugnant work, which makes it clear from the start that things will not be easy. You will get lost, feel disgust, think that this individual was just a lunatic. But this "lunatic", who died that morning of November 24th, «without other information», was one of the most indomitable and fascinating things that literature has ever had.