Maldoror and Poems by Lautréamont

Maldoror is a fucking weird book. It was written in the late 1860s by Isidore Ducasse, a young South American-born Frenchman who chose to publish under the pseudonym “Le Comte de Lautréamont”. It is a proto-surrealist (according to the Surrealists) series of prose poems dealing with the various interactions between Maldoror (essentially evil incarnate, but not Satan, separate, but similar) and his two foes – God and Man. It is violent, sexually explicit (sexualised violence, too – at one point a woman is gutted through her vagina…), confusing, conflicting, baffling, but quite compelling…

Although it pertains to have an ongoing plot, it is really more a series of weird set pieces. I’m not well-versed in the literature of the French Surrealist movement, but I certainly saw a lot in this than I recognised from the Beats, who were familiar with Breton et al. Maldoror is reminiscent of Burroughs, a bit like a deliberately anti-accessible Howl… Lautréamont’s reader is thrown from idea to action to philosophy to horror to sex to humour to (when written) scandalising blasphemy with little warning. Though as a whole it is a rather draining piece to read (not really one meant to be consumed over a Summer weekend), there were some fantastically imaginative images created that will certainly stick with me…

Such as:

-Man shitting on the face of God, who has passed out drunk in the street;

-A hair of God, left in a seedy brothel after an intense rutting, grows to the size of a person and tries to hide its true identity;

-Maldorar finds his match in evil, a female shark who he assists in a fight then has “chaste”, years long, sexual congress with under the waves;

-Maldorar digs a pit and fills it with lice, which he harvests in hewn out cubes and disperses en masse to cities in order to have the flesh of Man eaten to the bone…

It is a bizarre, a strange, and a weird text. (Tautology, I know…) If you like your poetry dense, your pornographic sadism intellectually justifiable… Why not, give it a go. When it’s good, it’s interesting, funny, perceptive. When it’s bad, it’s confusing. If it sounds like your kind of thing, it probably is.