Review of Maldoror and Poems by Comte de Lautréamont

To read Lautréamont; one is mugged by him in a mental dark alley, beaten with a cudgel of heresy, left marveling at the strange, beautiful bruises.

If Pascal was a mathematician of the spirit, Lautréamont is the original gangster edgelord of literature: a refuter of Pascal’s humble trembling before God, adopting the very cadences of his method only to shove them into a burning ditch. Willful contradiction not as error but as sport — Lautréamont reasons and defiles his conclusions in the same breath, a boy-king who ascends the throne of God to moon the congegation.

Aside from non sequiturs, he layers image upon image, fastening his abusive accusations onto Romantic notions and established creed.

His pseudonym, Comte de Lautréamont, is a mask communicating bored disdain like a paper crown: flaunted, and discarded as soon as the whim passes. The work is a binary star system: Maldoror and Poésies, rotating around each other, casting fractured shadows with the latter acting like a crystal moon, more clearly disdainful, less diluted with asides. Maldoror is a gory, operatic hymn. Poésies is its dissembling twin, a work that bows and scrapes to convention, only to knife it under the fifth rib.

He revels in the redefinition of morality — presenting cruelty with the glee of a child smashing a hornet’s nest — the other him who presents the Poems pretends to rebuild ethical systems with Platonic sobriety, all while dropping sly bombs of subversion. Thesis meets antithesis; man collides with nature, and the result is neither synthesis nor reconciliation but a screaming collision that leaves moral shrapnel embedded in the battlefield. Elements are always at war. Man is a beast first and a spiritual being second in his book.

Like watching the “derailment of a worn-out locomotive:” sparks flying, while “a nightmare holds the pen,” scribbling obscenities in the soot. The attitude of an upset schoolchild with the descriptive powers of a middle-aged poet. His contempt is palpable, and he lists off dozens of conventional and popular writers like criminals in a lineup, seeming to only like Racine for some reason, likening Voltaire to an “abortion.” One can only judge the beauty of life, he intimates, by the sumptuous horror of death — and his every page is a mausoleum frescoed with the grotesque.

He delights in misleading the reader, offering sentiments like a firing squad offering a blindfold . An eye for the obscene, an ear for the blasphemous, Lautréamont dislocate literary tradition, snapping the tendons of narrative until his creaky prose moves with spasmodic, unnatural elegance like an etherized frog primed for dissection. He flays the reader by using the second person, wields a scalpel of poetic eccentricity in a sort of short-sighted nihilism, looking at Death in the face without flinching, but chuckling, invoking every insult in turn toward the pismires of humanity he loathes. — it is the enthusiastic and analytical disregard of propriety, not with the slow philosophical fondling of de Sade, but a cataloging of every wart and maggot buried in civilized flesh.

A raw vivisection, through which Lautréamont reframes poetry itself: spitting upon the old ways – the lyre of the gods, instead “chanting” the forbidden thoughts people fear to name. hideous truths strut about in glittering robes, nightscapes etched in flesh with a bone saw, screeching through a tremoring landscape one recognizes as genteel France of writers like George Sand, whom he name drops in his catalogue of execrable writers (in his estimation).

open to countless interpretations, appalling and occasionally sublime, equally sloppy and polished, unfocused as it is unhinged— as it is meant to be. Lautréamont is a saucy saboteur taking out the trash of his opinions with a trance-inducing, beckoning, skeletal hand. The cover image of the Penguin classics edition is especially apt. A detail from a painting called Buried Alive.

The enlightened reader, deliciously unsettled, must crawl into this tomb of wretchedness, be nailed up with the dust and dark until the ooze penetrates deep into their soul. Naked and writhing visions— and the author, a false Count, who died as early as he might have predicted, laughs like a hyena amid the ruins of a humankind.