Isidore Page 15

  Lautréamont entered the 20th century as the proto-romantic rebel, but unlike his own literary heroes, Goethe, Byron, Baudelaire, Poe and Eugene Sue, he arrived with a payload that launched him deep into the new century with sufficient power to keep on reinventing himself as a spearhead to disaffected youth. Lautréamont superseded the limits of his influences by daring to go much further. There are novels written about madness, Nerval's Aurelia, Gogol's Diary of a Madman, Strinberg's Inferno, Alfred Kubin's The Other Side and Anna Kavan's Asylum Piece, all of which address the issue of insanity that threatens the author; but The Songs of Maldoror differs in that madness is its discourse, rather than its subject. Lautréamont's creative core erupts in an autonomous stream of verbalised psychotic phenomena.

  The psychiatrist Jean-Pierre Soulier argues in his study Lautréamont Genius or Madman, that the author's tone of emotional detachment when describing sadistic fantasies is in keeping with the dissociation common to various categories of mental illness, like paranoia, schizophrenia and psychosis. His thesis that linguistic control may be sustained over a coherent system of imagery, despite the existence of a pathology is a challenging one by no means inconsistent with Lautréamont's method. That the book was written in a state of acute crisis is indicated by its tone, which is invariably one of hysterical assault. Even the black humour that permeates scenes of sadistic violence has about it the unrepentant laughter of an author delighting in his imaginary repertoire of crimes. It's possible of course that Ducasse terminated his life because of symptoms that he found intolerable, and anticipated worsening. In his early twenties he was of an age when paranoid schizophrenia very often manifests itself in the susceptible. He may have found himself subjected to audible hallucinations, as well as visual disturbance, and considered the possibilities of a future characterised by mental illness insupportable.

  Madness and poetry are closely linked, but not usually by a pathology. It's more that the poet risks insanity by the nature of his unlimited access to the unconscious, rather than uses madness as the tool to inspiration. If the psyche is considered the epicentre of the poet's activity, the source from which the archetypes reveal themselves as images, then the poet is distinguished by his ability to make these real, for imagination is reality. I would argue that the poet, and this holds good for Lautréamont, insights the mythical base for a psychopathology that exists within the imagination. By writing the poem the poet de-fuses the potential for his own madness. He has triggered its possibilities at source, but has then applied control to his discoveries, and somehow got them out into the open. In writing a poem we could say with James Hillman that 'The pathology and the cure are there together.'

  It's within the context of the imagination reviewing its exhaustive capacity for burn-up, that I read Lautréamont's escalating catalogue of kamikaze imagery. It's not psychosis, so much as the fear of going crazy that has him write with the precise mapping of someone totally in control. 'In a moment of agitation', he threatens, 'I might take your arms and twist them the way one twists the water out of wet washing, or break them with a snap, like two dry branches, and then force you to eat them. I might take your head between my hands, and in a caressing and soft manner, push my greedy fingers into the lobes your innocent brain, to extract – with a smile on my lips – a fatty ointment good for bathing my eyes, which are sore from the eternal insomnia of a lifetime. I might sew your eyelids shut with a needle and deprive you of the spectacle of the universe, and making it impossible for you to find your path: I would not be your guide. I might lift your virgin body with my iron arms, hold you by the legs and swing you around like a slingshot – concentrating all my strength on describing the final circle – and then hurl you against the wall. Every drop of blood splashed on a human breast frightens men, and so I will put before them an example of my wickedness! Without pause they will tear tatters and shreds of flesh from themselves, but the drop of blood will remain in the same place, indelible and shining like a diamond. Remain calm, for I will order half a dozen servants to keep watch over the revered remains of your body, to protect them from the hunger of ravenous dogs. No doubt the body is still stuck to the wall like a ripe pear and has not yet fallen to the ground. But dogs can leap very high, if one is not careful.'

  Here the pathological module, the step by step perpetration of violence in the mind is given its exact equivalent in terms of artistic control. The atrocity happens within the imaginative context of the poem, but the way it's carried through stage by stage, with accelerating momentum, frames the action with the cold savagery of a real killing.

  Violence repeats, like a pathological loop, throughout the book, as though Lautréamont has developed the compulsion of a serial killer to keep on adding to his score. At the same time the author is constrained by firing blanks. No matter his role as a psychic assassin, he can't make what he imagines real; and this of course is the key to his frustration. Maldoror may shoot god in the form of a rhinoceros through the head, but the poet is still up in the night, seated at his piano, and outwardly nothing has happened.

  But more than William Burroughs' Naked Lunch or J.G. Ballard's Crash, or Jean Genet's preoccupation with evil in his novels, and nobody has ever conceived of these writers as insane, Lautréamont's The Songs of Maldoror begs the question of its author's sanity. It's not only our lack of biographical knowledge of Lautréamont, that encourages speculation about his mental state, it's also the peculiar aura generated by his writing that plays into the myth of the poet as madman. Although Maldoror is undoubtedly permeated by shock-waves of black humour, the territory it tracks has things in common with schizophrenic thinking, in which abstract ideas are linked to a vocabulary of sexual body images. Lautréamont's compulsive need to juxtapose the makings of a personal mythology with a scatological interpretation of sex, in which the body is almost always violated, suggests that the building blocks of schizophrenia may well have been active in his mind.

  Even Rimbaud at his most delirious uses his body as a shamanic instrument for channelling, rather than as a vehicle to push over the edge, like a car cliff-hopping into the Atlantic. Rimbaud by comparison, never deserts his sanity. His excursions into the visionary are followed by re-entry to his customary earthiness. You can almost hear Rimbaud slicing through the barrier of the earth's atmosphere, as he returns to the trusted base of his native soil. Rimbaud journeys in and out of his poetic field with a fluency that I doubt Lautréamont ever possessed. If Rimbaud is necessarily detached from the explosiveness of his shamanic probes, then Lautréamont's dissociation is of a different kind, and involves a complete inversion of moral values. Rimbaud does not so much hallucinate experience, as imagine what it is like to hallucinate. His particular genius was to empathise with madness, and access it through controlled channels of imagination. Whether Lautréamont had a window between himself and visionary experience is questionable, and the catastrophically up-ended world he describes may have been for him a concrete reality.

  When Lautréamont does celebrate human characteristics, rather than denigrate them, it is invariably to the homosexual milieu that he turns, as in the famous passage in Chant V, which begins: 'O incomprehensible pederasts, it is not me who will hurl insults at your great degradation; it is not me who will heap contempt on your infundibuliform anus.' Although the homosexual episodes in Maldoror are coloured by brutality as well as tenderness, it is clearly only in describing same-sex relations that he feels any affinities with his fellow beings. This is not to say that Lautréamont finds a resting place in his sexuality, but more that it opens a gateway to his understanding the essential nature of outsidership.

  Throughout the book Maldoror's agonised search to find a creature who resembles him leads nearly always to the attraction to his own sex. It has him confess, 'I do not like women… I need beings who resemble me' before giving voice to a detonative vision of brutal sex. 'Oh! if only instead of being a hell, this universe was an immense celestial anus – look at the motion that I am making with my lower a
bdomen: yes, I would push my penis into its bloodied sphincter, breaking the very walls of its pelvis with my impetuous movements! Misfortune would not then have blown entire dunes of moving sand into my blinded eyes; I would have discovered the subterranean place where truth lies sleeping, and the rivers of my viscous semen would thus have found an ocean into which they could rush!'

  Sex for Lautréamont is almost always an illicit attraction, one in which he tells us that his only moral reservation is that the boy should be at least 15; but the form of sex advocated is invariably counterpointed by the fear of disease, or heightened by the contingent risk of violence. There is little sense of reciprocation, and the act itself is seen as a violation of taboo. Lautréamont anticipates Genet in that both writers often turn upon themselves with self-loathing for being queer. Genet took a delight in mugging his own kind, and Lautréamont at times voices a similar antipathy to same-sex relations. He has Maldoror admit, 'I even killed (not long ago!) a pederast who did not respond sufficiently to my passion; I threw his corpse into a disused well, and now there is no decisive proof against me. Why do you tremble with fear, youngster who is reading me? Do you think I want to do the same to you? You are being extremely unfair... You're right: you had better not trust me, especially if you are handsome.'

  Isn't there a possible echo here of the circumstances that may have led to Ducasse's own death? My theory that he was murdered, or more specifically suffocated by someone he had taken back to his room, is of course mere conjecture; but the cross-pollination of homosexuality with homicidal reprisals, as the book's unremitting sexual theme, argues a tenuous case for the whole mystery surrounding Ducasse's end. Did somebody slip into the hotel at 7 rue du Faubourg, Montmartre, unobserved; someone who was expected for a sexual liaison, and kill Isidore Ducasse? It's unlikely, given that Paris was in a state of social unrest, that the hotel proprietor, perhaps sniffing out the nature of the crime, would have taken the matter further. Ducasse after all, was weird: he rarely went out, he annoyed the other tenants by hammering on his piano at night, he was a foreigner, and there were no women in his life. The proprietor may have been glad to be rid of him, and so death certificate (no. 2028 ) was written out with no enquiry into the causes. There were no friends or immediate relatives to contact, and therefore no questions to be asked; and Ducasse's father, who had to all effects abandoned him was a busy government official in Montevideo. It could have been the perfect crime.

  One of the reasons that Lautréamont and Rimbaud after him terrorise the reader, is in part their refusal to ever be explicit. Both shoot down the poetic line in the instance of creating it, both throttle back on their theme, so that the image blows up in the reader's face, and any idea of linear progress is demolished. This constant breakage of the line and with it the rupture of narrative development is brilliantly exploited by Lautréamont in a work that is episodic, short-circuiting and ultimately circular. The pyrotechnical thrust of his method is like a loop, but one that is sequenced and creates the impression of madness on repeat. It's paradoxical that while Lautréamont obsessively evokes his literary influences in the course of writing Maldoror, he has in the process long outstripped them. He is no more interested in literature, per se, than Rimbaud, and his device of analysing his method as a means of deconstructing narrative provides an illuminating self-commentary on the poetic current at work in Maldoror.

  The writer in Lautréamont's schema is omnipotent as a Balzac or Hugo, only with a difference. The trick is that Lautréamont punishes the reader for believing in his authority. He constantly rips the stitches from the seams and lacerates the fabric. He shows you how it's done, and equally how it's undone. You take it or leave it. Lautréamont's own vision is so extraordinary that he can do as he likes. When he does give voice to how he insights poetic inspiration it is through characteristically stunning imagery. He tells us in Chant III of Maldoror that his dynamic is 'A hungry love which would devour itself if it did not seek nourishment in celestial fictions: creating, in the long run, a pyramid of seraphim more numerous than the insects swarming in a drop of water, and interlace them into an ellipse that it will whirl around itself.'

  Equally fascinating is the introduction of a spectator to the spectacular visionary landscape he is describing. Moving effortlessly towards the apocalyptically marvellous, he describes how, ‘During this time, if the traveller, who has stopped at the sight of a cataract, lifts his face, he will see in the distance a human being carried towards the cave of hell on a garland of living camellias!'

  It's passages like these that radically change the direction of literature. Not only is the imagery blindingly original, but it obeys the autonomy of imagination, rather than the sorting process of reason. Here it is the garland of camellias which carries the person, rather than the reverse, and what's more direct into the cave of hell. Historically, we could argue that Lautréamont was at the centre of the great explosion that took place in the European collective unconscious, in the second half of the 19th century, and that anticipating Rimbaud, Freud, Jung and the surrealists, Lautréamont decoded the timer, and took the initial shock of the blast. What he tapped into wasn't madness, but the weaponry of imagination. He discovered that imagination could be used like nuclear fission — and that the whole ideological premises of civilization could be shattered by its genocidal contents.

  For all their emphasis on individuation and social reform the Romantics had never arrived at this point. They had failed to see that revolution could be conducted from the unconscious, and that its imagery once released could. lethal as radioactive fall-out. Shelley's poetry for all its reliance on charged inspiration carries none of the cutting-edge properties of Lautréamont's offensive, and none of its shock tactics in upending how we visualise the universe. Shelley's poetry no matter its visionary bias, is ultimately a descriptive one, whereas Lautréamont's feeds off the chemical activity of his images, imparting to them a reality independent of their external associations. The Romantics set about trying to change the world simply by modifying the system of values they opposed. Lautréamont went further, and by involuntarily dispensing with rationale, hit on the imagination as the continuous thrust of revolution. In a real sense he is still arriving, his ideas carrying with them all the antagonism of a fighter jet cruising the foothills for terrorist splinter-groups.

  Maldoror, the unkillable hero of Lautréamont's prose-poem — the guillotine bounces off his neck three times — anticipates Ted Hughes' equally protean antagonist — Crow. Both characters are misanthropic anti-heroes who undergo numerous metamorphoses in the process of asserting their mythopoetic dominance. For both characters good and evil are interchangeable. Maldoror thinks no more of killing for kicks than does Hughes' Crow; both delight in any state that alters consciousness.

  The most memorable scene of evil conceived as a liberating force in Maldoror, occurs in Chant II, when Maldoror butchers the survivors of a shipwreck, then proceeds to make love to a female shark. The episode has about it the hallucinated quality of film. Ecstatic at seeing the ship go down Maldoror focuses his attention on the death-agonies of its crew and passengers. If his voyeurism at first appears detached and spectatorial, then seeing rapidly gives place to an emotional investment in what he is witnessing. Unflinchingly reviewing the tragedy, and with no slightest impetus to help, Maldoror declares, 'O heaven! how one can live after experiencing so many sensual delights? I have just witnessed the death agonies of several of my fellows. Minute by minute I followed the vicissitudes of their agonies.' Not content with merely watching the survivors drown, Maldoror perversely attempts to empathise with their terror by jabbing a piece of sharp iron into his cheek, while telling himself: "They are suffering more." And when a sailor appears to be making it to shore, Maldoror takes aim with his rifle and shoots the man through the head, an incident that gives him little pleasure, as he has grown bored with killing. What is remarkable about the momentum of this scene, is not so much the cruelty it manifests, as the author's ability to work
through it stage by stage as though he is a direct participant in the action. Of course his own psychopathology may have been the complete opposite to Maldoror's, as is often the way with imaginative writers who identify with the shadow. We can either see the work as a means of exorcising a potential pathology, or as the representation of a particular mental state. In Lautréamont's case it's hard to come out on either side. There is disturbed imagination quite independent of mental illness, and there are equally creative expressions of madness.

  Like Rimbaud, Lautréamont invents a landscape that seems to owe its existence to no other source than imagination. It opens out with the momentum of direct discovery, like someone adjusting the viewfinder on a camcorder and filming from the passenger seat of a fast car. What is given us isn't so much described as discovered. It's a landscape that wasn't there before the writer created it by superimposing fragments of reality on an imaginary topology. ‘With our hair blown by the wind and inhaling the breath of the breeze, we walked on ahead for a few moments through thick groves of lentiscus, jasmine, orange and pomegranate, the scents of which intoxicated us. A boar in full flight brushed against our clothes, and a tear fell from its eye when it saw me with you: I could not explain its conduct. At nightfall we arrived at the gates of a populous city. The outlines of the domes, the spires of minarets and the marble spheres of the belvederes stood out sharply against the sky’s intense blue.'

  This city has no name, and is instantly dispensable as soon as it escapes the viewfinder. It is simultaneously imaginatively constructed, and deconstructed, and quickly abandoned by the restlessness of the author's need to move on. Lautréamont rarely looks back, or attempts to hold to narrative hooks. His story built out of discontinuous frames, advances, turns back on itself, then hijacks another scene. Even his characters are created to accommodate the spontaneity of the moment, rather than functioning as referential points in the reader's memory. He describes this method perfectly in Chant III. 'Let us recall the names of these imaginary beings of angelic nature which my pen, during the second canto, drew from a brain brilliant with a radiance that emanated from themselves. They die at birth, like those sparks whose fast obliteration on burning paper the eye can hardly follow. Leman... Lohengrin... Lombano... Holzer... for a moment, you appeared on my charmed horizon covered in the insignia of youth, but I let you fall into chaos, like diving-bells. You cannot leave it ever again. It is enough for me that I have retained the memory of you. You must make way for other substances, perhaps less beautiful, spawned by the stormy flood of a love that has resolved not to quench its thirst with the human race.'