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Compared to those of the Middle Ages (with their sadistic contraptions and spectacular stagings), the torments that the heretics of late 19th-century French poetry had to endure seem like nothing: isolation (spiritual as well as physical), hunger (for recognition before any kind of sustenance), self-financing for the publication of their manuscripts.
But there's one little thing though. A little thing that perhaps might not have the same emotional impact as a Virgin of Nuremberg or a Bull of Phalaris on the imagination of posterity, but the little thing is there.
Where then do we put the outpouring of bile? The certainty of the value of one's work and the futility of attempts to surface, frustrated (first and foremost) by the dullness of the masses who allowed the guidelines of bribed (or simply obtuse) critics to replace their sensitivity and judgment. The deafening silence of the so-called brother artists; their satisfied, complacent and complicit faces only towards everything that was comme il faut.
Baudelaire's greatest mistake was becoming Baudelaire; becoming it definitively, irrevocably, completely. Having established (reluctantly?) a canon, having suggested to publishers and Parisian literati (drunk on urban spleen and cynical dandyism) an orthodoxy that marginalized anyone who showed scant affiliation to the miasmas of those unhealthy flowers of his.
The scornful grin lost in the iconoclastic reel of the "Yellow Loves" of Tristan Corbière, the intoxicating glimmers of a youthful Dionysus that substantiated the "Illuminations" of Arthur Rimbaud and finally the "Songs of Maldoror" by Isidore Ducasse (aka Count of Lautréamont): here in all their splendor are the three heads of Lucifer that continuously chewed and spat out French Symbolism, here is the triad of heretics.
While the first two were (re)discovered a few years after Verlaine's apocryphal gospel ("The Accursed Poets"), Lautréamont did not receive this honor (but only because Paul never had the chance to know his work) and it would be necessary to wait for Breton, Aragon and the pleiad of surrealists to spread his Word.
The Songs of which this book is composed are 6, each divided into stanzas of a dark, monologuing, fluent, imaginative, wild poetic prose. It is an exaggerated book, unbelievably convoluted, naïve and clumsy at times, feverish always; a book that screams, raves, and reeks... And it is a masterpiece.
Published in 1869 when Isidore Ducasse was 23 years old, this work is that of a revolutionary, a bomber, a visionary intolerant of the direction poetry was taking, or rather, of a nihilist who wanted to tear poetry apart.
And to do so he even chose a double mask: he renames himself Count of Lautréamont and stages a kind of theater of horrors; a long, overflowing, obscene, anti-lyrical writing attributed to the mysterious Maldoror (perhaps an allusion to "mal d'aurore"), an embodiment of rage, the disease that gives the author no respite.
Isidore Ducasse is a poet, the Lautréamont/Maldoror binary is his pathology.
To convey the idea of our maudit and define his style we shall borrow his words and say that Isidore is "beautiful like the two long tentacle-like filaments of an insect, or rather like a hasty burial; beautiful like the law of reconstitution of mutilated organs, and, above all, like a highly putrescible liquid". A beauty and a writing that, essentially, have two targets.
God, le Créateur, seen by Lautréamont as sitting "on a throne made of human excrement and gold, from which he reigns with idiotic pride, with his body covered by a shroud made of unwashed hospital sheets". A cruel God who kills for the pleasure of it and of whom the author has too often seen "the foul teeth chattering in anger and the beard full of brains".
But there's no escape even for human beings, these "ferocious beasts", these "miserable caricatures of beauty, who take the ridiculous braying of their sovereignly despicable souls seriously". Human beings whom Maldoror enjoys torturing and killing with the precision of a serial maniac and that Lautréamont describes in minute detail; a de Sade in a delirium of omnipotence, a Torquemada in epileptic spasms.
Then there would be a third victim that "The Songs of Maldoror" does not spare: poetry. The despicable and deformed metaphorism, the similes fished from the filthiest corners of the natural realm, the unrestrained imagination tending towards the darkest Gothic and the vilest sadism, makes this book a muddy puddle that takes no direction, an open-air sewer with which the author enjoys stunning us with its stench.
But, since we're talking about heretics, let's try to compare their doctrines.
If in Rimbaud the words were suggested by the vision that uprooted the symbol from its most immediate sense and projected it into other orbits through his bitter jests, in Lautréamont it seems the opposite occurs: it is the relentless whirlwind of his wandering soliloquy that gradually carves out the visions of each stanza and which, at certain moments, seems to alarm the author himself.
The sarcasm that Corbière vomited on the symbolist cathedral was always conducted by poetic tools used to dismantle symbols piece by piece and reassemble them through his acrid fumistery; Lautréamont instead corrodes, disfigures, and tears to pieces the very elements normally used by a poet and leads the language to a kind of congenital autophagy.
Today Lautréamont's book is no longer that putrid and incomprehensible monstrosity as it must have appeared to his contemporaries, but one is nevertheless stunned by the density of its writing, by images that seem to constantly bounce off the surface of diabolical mirrors, by sudden accelerations that overwhelm the reader like a lava flow.
He died a year later, at 24, alone, in circumstances never fully clarified (murder? Suicide? Tuberculosis?). He was working on the preface of what was to be his second work, of which only two pieces remain that seem to renounce everything laid out in these Songs. Who knows, perhaps his conversion?
He died instead as a heretic, a heretic who had seen too much to continue living.
The heretic is dead, long live the heretic!
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