Well. What can I say about Les Chants De Maldoror by Comte de Lautreamont? It is a book. It is a good book. It is a difficult book to read. And honestly, I wouldn't have wanted to be caught in flagrante delicato reading it. It's about as beautiful as a chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table. Honestly, it's a rough read. It's a celebration of evil and besides that it's way out there. Much of it is incredibly dark. But, I can understand why the surrealists held it up as the godfather of their artistic movement.
While I'd probably need to read it more thoroughly to fully grasp everything that was said in it, there were some points in it that really stuck out to me. In talking about man he writes, "As for me, I presume that he believes in his beauty only from pride, but that he is not really beautiful and that he suspects this, for why does he contemplate the countenance of his fellow man with so much scorn?" (Lautreamont, 18). It's a damning indictment and one that sticks well.
"Legislators of stupid institutions, inventors of narrow morality, keep your distance from me, for I have an impartial mind" (Lautreamont, 231). He celebrates the pride he has, but it is a wicked pride. Although it is truly reprehensible, he does it is an amazing and captivating style. He may be bad but he's perfectly good at it... Again he celebrates his pride. "Human justice has not yet surprised me in flagrante delicatu, despite the incontestable skill of its agents" (Lautreamont, 234).
"The theatre of war is nothing but a vast field of carnage when night reveals her presence and the silent moon appears between the rags of a cloud" (Lautreamont, 236). A pretty, but sad sentence.
"It is possible that in this manner you will succeed in rejoicing extremely the soul of the dead person who is about to take refuge from life in a grave" (Lautreamont, 237). A very pretty way to describe death - a refuge from life in the grave.
There are also fairly funny sentences that are truly surreal in nature. For example, "I began the preceding sentence, I calculate mentally that it would not be useless here to construct the complete avowal of my basic impotence, when it is especially a matter, as at present, of this imposing and unapproachable question" (Lautreamont, 239). "But there will be no more anathemas, possessing the specialty of provoking laughter; fictitious personalities who would have done better to remain in the author's brain" (Lautreamont, 256). And then he made me laugh, in public, caught in the act (in flagrante delicatu). "I no longer recall what I was intending to say, for I do not remember the beginning of the sentence" (Lautreamont, 261).
On a personal note I understood a short tale he told within the story. "He had contracted the habit of getting drunk; during the moments when he returned to the house after having visited the cabaret bars, his madness would become almost immeasurable, and he would strike out indiscriminately at any object that came in sight. But soon, under the protests of his friends, he reformed completely, and sank into a taciturn frame of mind. No one could come near him, not even our mother. He nursed a secret resentment against the idea of duty, which prevented him from having his own way" (Lautreamont, 282). I understand that resentment better than I wish I did.
In the Poésies he writes, "Judgments on poetry have more value than poetry. They are the philosophy of poetry. Philosophy, thus understood, comprises poetry. Poetry cannot do without philosophy. Philosophy can do without poetry." (Lautreamont, 330).
"We must not believe that what Nature has made friendly should be vicious. There has not been a century or a people that has not established imaginary virtues and vices" (Lautreamont, 340).
I think I'd like to reread this, but with a commentary. Or a couple of commentaries. But, as for why the surrealists and why they held it up as a precursor for them, I understand. Breton was amazed when he found the sentence, "as beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table ". He held it up as the beginning of the surrealist aesthetic. Max Ernst used this imagery to define the structure of a surrealist painting. He said that it linked two realities that have nothing to link them in a setting that shouldn't be linked with either of them. That is the essence of surrealism.
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