Lautréamont. The profane youth

Pedro Tamen's translation of the work whose destructive fury has resounded since the end of the 19th century and which has decisively marked all literature since then returns to bookstores, crowning the Maldoror seal, a work that, in its fourth edition, is accompanied by the surgical intervention of René Magritte, a series of drawings scratched with a fingernail on the walls of the room where that heartbreaking howl can be heard again these days according to the intonation and hatred of each new reader.

Lautréamont was prescient when he declared: “As I write, new shivers are running through the intellectual atmosphere; it is only a matter of having the courage to face them head on.” At the same time, and looking around him, in a letter he wrote in 1870, he expressed enormous disdain for the state of poetry: “The poetic groans of this century are nothing but horrible sophistry. To sing of boredom, pain, sadness, melancholy, death, shadow, obscurity, etc., means only wanting to look, necessarily, at the childish reverse side of things. Lamartine, Hugo, Musset have voluntarily metamorphosed themselves into girls. They are the Soft Heads of our time. Always whining!” It was up to him, at just over twenty years old, to bring about a change in the heavy lethargy of that environment, causing “a massive short circuit” (Soupault). If Apollinaire had no doubts in stating that his youth owed more to him than to Rimbaud, it was Breton who best understood the endless consequences of the irascible epic that he had cast like a plague on French literature, a work supremely demoralizing to literary prestige: “The word, no longer understood as style, enters a fundamental crisis with Lautréamont; it marks a new beginning. The limits within which words could relate to words, and things to things, have come to an end. A principle of perpetual mutation has taken hold of both objects and ideas, tending towards their total liberation — which also implies that of man. In this sense, Lautréamont’s language is simultaneously a solvent and a germinal plasm without equivalent.” But in strictly critical terms, leaving aside apostolic eagerness, it was not until 1950 and Blanchot’s Lautréamont and Sade that everything became clearer. Blanchot was the first to recognise that the main character of the Cantos is the reader – the reader that Lautréamont transforms himself into as he writes his astonishing adventure. There is an “implacable logic” at work in the darkness of Evil, just as there will be an equally implacable logic in the apologia for Good. Man is evil, he who created him is evil; all the impeccably feverish stanzas of the Cantos remind us of this with a mathematical mastery of delirium, served by a terrorist humour. Is it serious? Yes, very much so. Is it comical? Equally so. This is what forever disorients the human being. From this point on, the rust of doubt reigns, acting on everything and never again allowing anything to assume an incontestable power. The very idea of ​​the classic was collapsing rapidly. But through this tumultuous inversion, by giving primacy to the reader, we entered a truly promising chapter… Let him come, Lautréamont demanded, and he appeared in this condition, warning: It is time to erode discourse and method, not to decide where it begins or ends, but rather for each one to approach from the side that most intrigues him. No chronologies, a deck so mixed up that it is not even worth it. Places, names – only to nauseate certainties even more. Doubt, yes, always allows us to open new paths. And, thus, you too will decide what you want. There appeared a novel turned inside out, which provided the key to turning everything upside down, an anti-novel, a course that follows by means of detours, like a plot that by all means avoids being conditioned by reason, preferring instead to bring war. It gives or it does not, leaving room for others to come along for the ride. It is a road, but it leads nowhere. And without a doubt he had a fever. He was consumed by a delirious obstinacy, and perhaps this degree of hallucination allowed him to see and hear what, otherwise, cannot be seen or heard. The Cantos are letters from one reader to others, announcing the beginning of an insurrection in relation to texts, to consecration, to this petrifying esteem and admiration. They are absolutely disproportionate letters, which show us how the worst, the most intolerable would be this continuous movement, this regime of authors, the monumentality of literary achievements. From this point on, audacity, daring, will take the lead. All liberties can be taken, without obtaining permission. It is also better to erase the empty sum of our pronouns. No one should be blamed, it is a necessary insult, which gains from being carried out by everyone. “What he seeks,” Blanchot tells us, “is a light that is equal in all its points, the same for everyone, and where, all being reconciled, the “all” is, for each one, the truth of which the “each one” would be the complete appearance.” Well, there we see this truculent impulse, this gesture that repugnant to schemes and literary stories, which become something that must be dispensed with. Aragon, in a resounding double article, reacting to a book that portrayed the antecedents of the surrealist movement, was led to remember his youth, the meeting with Breton at the age of 20, in Val-de-Grâce: the vigils as auxiliary doctors in the “fever room”, among the madmen. He recalled how they were stunned by the Cantos de Maldoror , how they recited them aloud during the German bombings on Paris. “Sometimes, behind locked doors, the madmen would howl, insulting us, pounding the walls with their fists. This gave the text an obscene and surprising commentary.” It was Breton, shortly afterwards, in 1919, who copied the Poems in their entirety into the Bibliothèque Nationale. They were finally published in the magazine Littérature : the movement was launched.

But what do we know about the man who wrote this work that was almost lost, only to suddenly re-emerge with astonishing emphasis and influence, about the man who wrote it at an unknown time in a room on the fifth floor? Only some distant and indirect information, too incomplete, which reinforces the hole where the only portrait we have of Isidore Ducasse was nailed. And he seems to have done everything to be real only in words, that being the only substance of his life. Thus, we know about the man who first made use of anonymity, and who when publishing the edition of The Complete Songs (1869) signed himself as “Count of Lautrèamont”, at the same time as the crazy Maldoror made an ambiguous projection of himself, that he was born in Montevideo, to French parents, in 1846, and that his mother died when he was still a few months old. At the age of 13, he was sent by his father to study in France. He boarded at two high schools, then another gap appeared, a long period during which we lost track of him. But perhaps we should start at the end. We know that at eight in the morning on 24 November 1870, aged 24, Ducasse died in the hotel room in Paris that he paid for with the allowance his father sent him. At the time, with France at war and the capital besieged by Prussian battalions, hunger, cold and fever made death an all-too-common occurrence; cemeteries seemed greedy. Not even the grave of that young man has ever been found. It is assumed that he died of consumption, and his body was buried in a temporary grave before being transferred to a mass grave a few weeks later, which was the most common procedure at the time in a context of the epidemic spread of tuberculosis. Thus, as Blanchot points out, “Lautréamont’s end retains something unreal”. “Attested only by the word of the law and by the brief mention on the death certificate, ‘deceased… without further information’, as close to banality as possible, it seems that this end is missing, as if it did not need to happen in order to take place. And it was through this end, so strangely erased, that Lautréamont became, forever, that invisible mode of appearing that is his solitary figure, and it was in the anonymity of death that, before the eyes of all, he finally manifested himself, as if, by disappearing in such a radiant absence, he had then found death, but also, in death, the exact moment and the truth of the day.”

With the publication of a pamphlet with the first Canto in 1868, Ducasse introduced himself to his hypothetical readers under the sign of three stars («***»), introducing this subterfuge that allowed him to abstract himself, placing in the foreground this «Maldoror», whose exalted appearance appears as an element of revolt, in an insolence that parodies the elements of the myth, producing a shock effect that made him, according to Gracq, “the great derailer of modern literature”. By placing on the same level the flow of blood, of moods, this collaboration between patience and violence that is birth, Lautréamont seemed to definitively repel Isidore Ducasse, giving birth, as Blanchot suggests. “But for those who want to become masters of their origin, it soon becomes clear that being born is an infinite event.” Summoning an entire bestiary to give way to his aggressive impulses, he will use these “childishly observed animal forms” as instruments of attack and transubstantiation. Thus, he takes the most radical initiative. This is because in Lautréamont, as Gaston Bachelard points out, the word immediately finds action. “Certain poets devour or assimilate space; one would say that they always have a universe to digest. Others, much less numerous, devour time. Lautréamont is one of the greatest devourers of time. This is the secret of his insatiable violence.” And if the events outlined in it oppose beings without any common measure to the apparent humanity of Isidore Ducasse, for Bachelard the fascination of this inhuman fable is linked to the way it makes us relive “the brutal impulses that are still so strong in the hearts of men.” Throughout these pages, Maldoror becomes an eagle, a crab or lobster, a vulture, a cricket, an octopus, a shark — the hair takes the floor — the lamp swims or flies with angel wings. And as Gracq says, “the most constant feature of these unstable beings, and their profound meaning, is probably that of manifesting the possibility of an amphibious life — which all of Lautréamont’s genius strives to legitimize — always extracting oxygen between two waters: between the gratuitousness of harmless dreaming and the possibility of a distressing irruption into the world where we are so comfortably seated. The passage from ghost to monster is thus consummated thanks to the exemplary transmission of the vital breath.”

But why all this tangle of quotations? It would be somewhat absurd to try to convey something of the cataclysmic rapture that surrounds Lautréamont to the Portuguese reader today when he sees the best translation ever made of the Cantos and Poems reappear, for the first time accompanied by the ferocious and complicit drawings of René Magritte, without realizing what this was capable of unleashing, taking the pulse of readings that, more than forcing this supremely indigestible work down the public's throat, took turns magnificently resonating the possibilities of that plot, to such an extent that some of those who felt compelled to comment on and follow this movement, doing so with exemplary fervor, seemed to be committed to following it, as if adopting and adapting its impulse, fueling the expansion of this diabolical recital. Ultimately, what this work wants to do is get under the reader's skin, overwhelm their nerves, spin one stimulus after another, being a cause for intimate scandal, and setting a rhythm that is strange to everything, a poetry of excitement, that seeks that poetic vigor and speed, that of a time that is dying. Thus, it comes to hunt us, it comes and leaves the impression that “a nightmare has taken hold of the pen”, becoming so much more irresistible “due to its length and development (since duration is essential in this effort), than Rimbaud's Illuminations ”, as Blanchot tells us. “That is why it seems so important to us to read Maldoror as a progressive creation, made in time and with time, a work in progress , a work in progress that Lautréamont undoubtedly leads wherever he wants, but which also leads him where he does not know, of which he can say: 'Let us follow the current that carries us', not because he allows himself to be carried adrift by a blind and furious force, but because this 'dragging' force of the work is its way of being ahead of itself, of preceding itself — the very future of its lucidity in transformation.”

“– What are you thinking about, boy?

– I was thinking about heaven.

– You don’t need to think about heaven; it’s enough to think about earth. Are you tired of living, you who were just born?

– No, but everyone prefers heaven to earth.

– Ah, but not me. Because if heaven was made by God, like earth, you can be sure that you will find there the same evils as in this world. After your death, you will not be rewarded according to your merits, because if they are unjust to you here on earth (as you will later know from experience), there is no reason why they should not be unjust in the next life. The best thing you can do is not to think about God and to do your own justice, since others refuse to do it to you. If one of your colleagues offended you, wouldn’t you want to kill him?

– But it is forbidden.

– It is not as forbidden as you think. All you need to do is not let yourself be deceived. The justice of the law is worth nothing; what counts is the jurisprudence of the offended party. If you hated one of your colleagues, wouldn’t you be unhappy just imagining that you could have his thoughts before your eyes at every moment?

- That is true.

– There you have one of your colleagues making you unhappy all your life; for, seeing that your hatred is only passive, he will continue to mock you and cause you harm with impunity. There is, therefore, only one way to put an end to the situation: to get rid of your enemy. This is where I wanted to get to in order to make you understand on what basis today's society is founded. (…) When the shepherd David struck the giant Goliath in the forehead with a stone thrown from his sling, it is not surprising to note that it was only by cunning that David defeated his adversary, and that if, on the contrary, they had entered into a hand-to-hand fight, the giant would have crushed him like a fly. The same is true of you. In open war, you will never be able to defeat the men upon whom you wish to impose your will; but with cunning, you can fight alone against everyone. (…) Virtuous and good-natured means lead nowhere. It is necessary to use more energetic levers and wiser plots. Before you become famous for your virtue and reach your goal, there will be a hundred who will have time to do pirouettes over your back and reach the end of the race before you, so that there will no longer be room for your narrow ideas. You must know how to embrace the horizon of the present time more broadly.”

We sense the element of terror in a blasphemous argument that unfolds, and at every turn, with every new suggestion, it gains momentum, drinking in the ecstasy of its angry rhythm, in its desire for revenge, placing at its base a feeling of hatred, turning its scream into a long plot, a form of intoxication. And, as if it feared losing its courage, the bestial element appears to guide it, as if invoking these aggressive signs, in order to mark this virulent intolerance of human weaknesses, of this condition that it seeks to debase by all means. Thus, as Bachelard explains, “it is from within that animality is observed in flagrant form in its atrocious, irremediable gesture, born of a pure will”. And he adds that it is “from the moment when one can create a poetry of pure violence, a poetry that raves with the total freedoms of the will” that we must consider Lautréamont a precursor. Other laws govern this immense room where one breathes a black air that alters the lungs, that will transform the nerve centers, and the ideas are led to a dynamic and fierce sensualism, to an exaltation that, like alcohol, undoes those inhibitions of a moral order that make us, in the end, such docile beings, so moved by their naivety, and so easy to deceive. He seems to recognize that a certain sensitive element served to addict us to a set of notions that make us prey to those who have freed themselves from these complexes. Thus, addressing the one who has always believed that he is composed of good and a minimal amount of evil, and who therefore lives in disagreement with his impulses, he abruptly shows that he is, on the contrary, composed only of evil and a minimal amount of good, captivating him to the frenzy of metamorphosis that finally tears him from his formlessness, making him capable of performing vigorous acts, conquering another movement, that is, a new time. In his view, there is a need to free this “resplendent greatness”, for man to see himself “reclaiming, as a right, his destroyed metamorphosis”. Thus, inverting the provisions of common morality, through Maldoror, he offers us this revelation full of consequences: “Metamorphosis never appeared before my eyes except as the high and magnificent resounding of a perfect happiness that I had long awaited. This finally appeared on the day I was a pig!”

One cannot really understand the intimate spectacle of this “progressive catatonia” (Bachelard) to which men find themselves, completely dominated by a slowness that Lautréamont saw as the deepest of the evils that afflict us, this stupor that leads us to impotence and submission, and one cannot admire the insolence of The Cantos without realizing that violence is the expression of a desire to live, polarizing the vital forces, this spirit that has been buried. That is why he set out to provoke a second fall, and continues to perpetrate this infamous work that instigates this desire to attack, and the consequent realization of a metamorphosing escape, to use Bachelard’s terms. Thus, and recognizing how “man also dies from the evil of being man, of realizing his imagination too early and too summarily, of forgetting, in short, that he could be a spirit”, this whole “indomitable pilgrimage” appears to us, this “polymorphous animality” that corresponds to delirious forms, to a successive element in which the function inspires and creates the organ, and little by little completely remakes our condition. “Man then appears as a sum of vital possibilities”, Bachelard tells us, fully assuming the privilege of making the invention of evil his own.

“What was Lautréamont thinking on the night he wrote the first words: ‘Would to heaven that…’?”, asks Blanchot. “It is not enough to say that at that moment he had not yet fully formed the memory of the six cantos he was going to write. It is necessary to say more: not only were the six cantos not yet in his head, but that head did not yet exist — and the only end he could have at that time was this distant head, this hope of a head that, at the moment when Maldoror was written, would lend him all the strength necessary to write it. (…) Is there another work that, like this one, being on the one hand totally dependent on time, inventing or discovering its meaning as it is written, closely complicit in its duration, yet remains this mass without beginning or end, this timeless consistency, this simultaneity of words, where all the marks of before and after seem erased and forgotten forever?”

There is a rupture here that became an axis, a fundamental knot in modernity, and that depended on this perspective that overcomes the “childish reverse side of things”, experiencing a heartbreaking joy, and it seems to have been necessary that, for this decisive act to be accomplished, and even then only in a clandestine and violent way, literature had delegated it to the young son of Chancellor Ducasse, sent from Montevideo to France to study there, as Roberto Calasso suggests. In one of the most captivating essays, and possibly one of the last to swell this tumultuous stream of readings that sought to live up to that malevolent prophecy, here is how he immediately tries to situate us in relation to other outrages that, at the time, suggested a general upheaval of consciences: “There is a zero point, a hidden nadir of the 19th century that is reached, without anyone noticing, when an unknown young man publishes Les Chants de Maldoror at his own expense in Paris. It is 1969: Nietzsche writes The Birth of Tragedy , Flaubert publishes L'Education sentimentale , Verlaine publishes Fêtes galantes , Rimbaud writes his first verses. Something even more drastic, however, is happening…” Today, we already know and, unfortunately for us, we have seen the example of this young man who, at the age of 23, assumed the pseudonym reduced to yet another somewhat retarded legend. Lautréamont, who said he had made “a pact with prostitution in order to sow disorder among families”, while praising pederasty, vampirism, cruelty, and exhorting cannibalism, in a series of statements that today are seen as somewhat crazy, speaking of a rather fallible prose poem, but which expresses an urge to provoke, which must have resisted, like a lamp swinging wildly in the darkest corner, allowing us to glimpse that figure that seems to smile and whose “pernicious breath”, as we approach, becomes heavier and heavier. The truth is that Isidore gave a very large sum (four hundred francs) to the Belgian Albert Lacroix, Zola’s publisher, to print The Cantos, and if he received them and had them printed, at some point he must have realized the risk he would be running in distributing that work, and changed his mind. As Lautréamont himself recounted in a letter, Lacroix “refused to publish the book because life was portrayed in too bitter a tone and he feared the attorney general”. It was almost certain that he would be caught up in a lawsuit, and his fears of being accused of blasphemy and obscenity were more than justified. “But why did Maldoror have this fear?”, Calasso asks, and immediately outlines an answer: “Because this book is the first – without emphasis – to be based on the principle of subjecting everything to sarcasm. Not only, therefore, the immense weed of the time that made ridicule triumph, but also the work for which ridicule showed all its contempt: Baudelaire, who would be irreverently defined as ‘the morbid lover of the Hottentot Venus’, and who it is plausible was the favourite poet, the immediate predecessor of Lautréamont himself.”

And he continues: “The consequences of this gesture are overwhelming: as if all the data – and the world is also a data – were suddenly torn from their supports and began to wander in a dizzying verbal current, raising all the outrages, all the combinations, by the work of an impassive prestidigitator: the empty author Lautréamont, who carries out a total, cold, cancellation of identity, more rigorous than that of Rimbaud, who was still theatrical. Dying at the age of twenty-four in a rented room on the rue du Fauborg Montmartre, 'sans autres renseignements', as one reads in Lautréamont's 'acte de décès', is a more reckless and more effective risk than giving up writing and going to sell weapons in Africa.”

There is something cancerous in the overwhelming mixture that prepares this “black lyric”, and perhaps the secret that explains the shocking effect is not exactly in the effects of distillation, in the refinement of a shrewd and mellifluous poetics, but even in the scratchy element, in the faded composition, in this magnetism of a metamorphosis that absorbs and assimilates the most disparate things, subjecting the literary to a dubious element, corrupting the discourse, with a demolishing eagerness that proposed to construct new meanings by mercilessly mutilating the old concepts of the time. And if, as the successive efforts to dissect The Cantos have demonstrated, the work results from a succession of pastiches, collages, unexplained insertions of creatively altered excerpts from others, plagiarism is still one of the most daring elements in the particular style of composition assumed by Lautréamont. If at one point Soupault even showed how he copied entire paragraphs from the conservative daily Le Figaro , in truth this does not in the least detract from the character of a work that makes us experience the series of forms in a fiery, dizzying unity, which, through its speed, makes us experience “the ineffable impression of a sensitive agility in the articulations, an angular agility”, totally opposed to the general graceful rapture of these cultivators of an immensely refined style. Here, force opts for devouring, with abrupt and irregular stops, discontinuities, a sense marked by predation, and which is clear in the way he embeds passages from other authors without citing them, having also proven how much of the bestiary that comes to light in the “Cantos” was extracted from scientific descriptions, working on them, hallucinating them. Thus, in his vast diet, Ducasse, in addition to being a voracious reader of natural history works, also brought to them the mechanisms of mystery typical of the intrigues of detective or black novels. “It is his own language that becomes a mysterious intrigue,” Blanchot tells us, “a marvelously orchestrated action like in a detective novel, where the greatest obscurities are revealed at the right moment, where theatrical coups are replaced by images, unusual murders by violent sarcasm, and where the guilty party is confused with the reader — always caught in the act.”

Thus, the aggressiveness of his metamorphosis reflects this magnetic wave that drastically alters the very consistency of tradition and the literary framework within which this sarcastic hero emerges. It is not enough, therefore, to say that Lautréamont “associated his destiny with literature” insofar as, through plagiarism, he sought to “disappear in the word of another”, as Blanchot puts it, because this new condition that he offers the reader allows him to profoundly affect the destiny and meaning of works. “Plagiarism is necessary”, he argues. “It is progress that demands it. It follows closely the phrase of an author, uses his expressions, and eliminates a false idea, replacing it with the correct notion.” No longer would this odious figure of the author be protected in his status, his exclusive role being to illuminate and decide on the scope of his work. Everything was now subject to trespass, to a sudden assault and capable of using a certain persuasion to subvert its ends. For this very reason, the qualities that Lautréamont claims for himself are: cold attention , implacable logic , obstinate prudence , overwhelming clarity … And Blanchot emphasizes that the meaning of these becomes stronger as the labyrinth of his brilliance thickens, being qualities that he claims to have acquired through his dealings with the holy mathematics , but which were, at first, foreign to him. In other words, genius is no longer an essential condition, nor is originality, but rather that thrill of someone who assaults and takes possession in a vigorous and opportunistic way of what does not belong to him. There is a rapacious effect in which one recognizes that as a reader one is in a position to subject a text to a profusion of further meanings, directing them according to a disorder capable of calling them to an effect of irradiation that is much more unexpected, chaotic, unlimited. Providing itself with the materials that cover this need to feed itself and maintain a speed and a splendor that cannot be interrupted so that everything finds its most perfect formulation, tearing out from around it the pieces that it needs to remain startled, following and being followed, accumulating the effects of this furious lucidity, whose movement of involvement, of encompassing, continuing without respite, in the end manages to be much more instigating for whoever reads it.

“It is as if the very notion of level had been abolished,” warns Calasso. This is because suddenly it will never be so easy to say what is above or below, where the truly high values ​​lie, and what can be disregarded, denounced as rubbish. According to him, Lautréamont was a frequent visitor to “the disastrous scribblers: Sand, Balzac, Alexandre Dumas, Musset, Du Terrail, Féval, Flaubert, Baudelaire, Lecaonte and the Greève des Forgerons ”. The essayist who directed the Italian publishing house Adelphi, notes how “this list should warn us right away that a trap is being prepared: the inventor of Rocambole and the inventor of Madame Bovary are placed on the same level, along with the prolific feuilletonist Féval and Balzac, as well as Baudelaire and François Coppée”.

This is the insatiable root and the secret of a work that is constantly shaking us, surprising us by not clinging to a conclusive effect, much less a reclusive one, wielding crystalline and convincing formulas regarding the knowledge they are covered with, preferring instead to reach us in the expectations we create, thus showing itself to be much more attentive, surrounding, taking away from us “any hope of escaping it”, says Blanchot. “Movement? Yes, the immanence, in which it tries, however, to recapture the infinite reality of a transcendence that has never separated from itself and made both accomplice as an adversary. It is this infinite demand that leads him to the lowest (which is also the highest), in the perspective of a metamorphosis in which the limits of his person and the easements of human reality - and that now lead him, Metamorphosis: that of absolute banality, where, this time, the acceptance of the limit becomes the unlimited, and where the movement that represents the extreme point of consciousness, reason, and sovereignty coincides with the abandonment of all sovereignty and all personal consciousness. ”

An air of crime is breathed in these phrases, nothing is too significant, because what is decisive in this effect of monstrosity is this dark appeal, this inexhaustible compulsion, and thus it succeeds its shadowy maxims that sound like the reverse of phrases emitted with that resounding weight of the culture that seeks immobilizing us. Many of his phrases are adulterated quotes from French moralists such as Vauvenargues, La Bruyère, Pascal and La Rochefoucauld. They go there to seek the clipping, kidnap the sovereign emphasis to betray it, inflecting them in a sedicious way. "Now we see ourselves in a sarcastic consciousness, superiorly active and almost impossible to catch in missing. Now this omnipresent agility, this whirlwind of distinct lightnings, this accumulated storm of meanings no longer gives us the image of a spirit, but rather that of a heavy, blind instinct, of a compact thing-from the tenacious density of decaying bodies, the substances touched by death." BLANCHOT.

Thus, the central experience in this work is this return-face, the incessant defenections that is capable of an imagination that is biting and leaving the signs of incessant aggression, leading to tireless manipulation of formidable and fascinating images. This is therefore a poetic work that brings to the extreme a regime of critical action, which progresses through decomposition, reviving, redoing, betraying and releasing the hidden hypothesis, the alternative. This devilish effect that reverses the signs, replacing the original meaning, gives this work an unusual vertigo, encouraging a continuous critical movement that shows us the potential of revolt and desecration that opens us the game of submitting everything to its opposite formulation. Lautréamont thus proceeds for both the exaggeration and the imposition of parody, irony, emphasizing the essential paradox of any effect of authority. Also the way he denounces the sacredity of the very idea of authorship, and, from the outset of originality, is immensely productive, instilling in bed the notion that it should be interested in what is not ours, because nothing is truly. In this regard, and to humiliate the consciences that ride virginally through the literary swamp raising over the head the poor lamp that offer them notions such as that of originality, this kind of parable of Bertolt Brecht: “Nowadays,” mourned Mr. K., “Pululating those who are publicly bragging for being able to write great books alone, and this is still accepted by everyone. From age, Chinese philosopher Chuang-TSI wrote a book of a hundred thousand words in which nine tenths consisted of quotes. In the days, books can no longer write, for lack of inspiration. Quoted. How little these people need to work! Build your huts! They don't know larger buildings than these, of which a man is enough to raise them! ”

Lautréamont not only reneged on these smug papalvices, but has surrendered to the opposite frenzy, the most dissolute and more damage to our affective and moral plots, bringing an order of dread not only to the ultra -romantic elements, which has served and denounced, but extending their sarcastic uses to the structure of epic and even epithets and even the epithets and even the epithet Homeric. Taking advantage of the rocking of the prosopopeia, each singing opens with an exordium to the reader, situating what he is reading, but soon serves this to guide him to some extent and soon leave him helpless, since, as the Argentine poet and essayist Aldo Pellegrini noted, the songs assume a labyrinthine form, and the dialogues oscillate between the severity and the Dantesque and the Dantesque and the Dantesque and the Dantesque and the Dantesque and the Dantesque and the Dantesca ridicule of the leaflet. And he uses an emphatic tone and comes with hymns, reflections on the human being, considerations about God, precisely how much him interests him to lower all this, impose the most absurd comparisons, images that all conspire and offend. This tangle, which adds a horror element, then is not a mere effect of degradation, but can produce a humor and a kind of unique melody by the syncoped and rapid succession of the elements, which reaches their degree of most exalted flowering through these bizarre and captivating images, these unusual images that seem to emerge from dreamy impulses, being taxed this style of poetic findings that had a huge findings that have had a huge findings that had a huge findings Diffusion in modern poetry, and that surrealists led to exhaustion with analogies that sought to bring immensely disparate and even opposite realities closer. The image of Breton's “soluble fish” and so many others who followed have as its initial chisp the famous “fortuitous encounter, a dissection table, a sewing machine and an umbrella”, which started to function as a “symbol of the union of contrary, the identity of opposites”, as Pellegrini explains. And the black humor so expensive to the surrealists and that would become the revolver at the head of most poets, as an aspirin fired in the sense of awakening the spirit of revolt, also achieved in this work a very particular definition, proving so effective in attacking the conventions of the whole order. This misconduct, wicked mood turned all naivetely, taking nothing more for its facial value, but always introducing an element of mockery, irony, which was even particularly truculently in relation to everything that intended to be a solemnity effect. This does not rule out the absolute seriousness of humor, which actually works to summon the individual to the center of the questions, as if everything in any way concerned him. For this reason, as Vinca Pellegrini, contrary to what is usually said, "humor is not cheerful, but distressing, and is often the perfect garment of deeper pessimism." Moreover, it is in the work Le Comte de Lautréamont et Dieu , who. Léon Pierre-Quint defines humor as a way of affirming not so much “an absolute revolt of adolescence and an inner revolt of adulthood” as mainly “a superior revolt of the Spirit”, with Breton with this definition that later reproduced in the preface to his influential black humor anthology.

If, today, mood is increasingly co-opted by the plots of lightness, exhausting arguments in its defense by the essential role it would have to produce some relief in the degrading conditions of life in general, and the social rights in particular, that satire that transforms the buffors of our constant advertising media, preaching the liberal values that should rescue us from the Putrian breath of the fanaticism and forms Contemporary narcissism, in fact, preserves the same moral values that now appear corroded, and still persists on the side of this conformist common sense. On the contrary, in Lautréamont the sarcastic laugh is the corrosive action of the spirit over the mask of an artificial, hypocritical and conventional world, that its mood seeks for all means disintegrating. It is black because it assumes the scam that is present in the norms and principles we judge unshakable, exposing the whole system of false values that is used to subjugate us. Maldoror is an incarnation of this humor that arises as a fristic and “reaches the incandescence of irrigation” (Calasso), giving proof of ferocity and cruelty that today is all absent from this increasingly nervous laugh of beings who only feel the spirit as an anthill in this entirely powerless region. Of all values - says Breton - humor reveals a constant rise. It is undoubtedly the most specific feature of modern sensitivity. It feeds on all forms of the arbitrary and the absurd, and comes out of delirium, precipitating us in a busy sea that must free our impulses. Thus, it is up to the unsubmissive spirits to develop monstrosity from the interior of the order, to bring things to the extreme, to produce a vast malaise, ridiculing all the rules. And, as León Bony said, who was the first reader of Lautréamont, the one who made the discovery of this work alone and realized his immense destructive force: "It's a liquid washing. It's foolish, black, devouring." A work written by a young man who has experienced almost total loneliness, capable of expanding infinitely. For if we know almost nothing about the end that led him, however gaps are the biographies of Lautréamont, "in reading them," as Julien Gracq says, "it reinforces that, in this dead being, an event-his forced stay in the school-left an indelible mark, and that what can be well called the interunion. Of acuity and anguish. Direct references to the environment and the objects of school worship abound in the corners of Maldoror (the 'severe mathematics' - 'The student who looks obliquely to the one who was born to oppress him!' Afternoon)-In my view, it is an undeniable influence on the formation of its genius, and whose obsession is far from being private. Especially that it must have been in accordance with Lautréamont for this aura of abandonment that in schools involves inmates from foreigners or colonies, those who weigh the curse of Sundays without joy and, even worse, from the holidays in high school. ” Thus explains that “born and princely disgust of the reasonable order” and which is, according to this essayist, an imprint of eternally anarchic childhood. Lautréamont is, therefore, the criminal child who is born every time the reality proves to be a scam and can die after expressing this absolute hatred for having come to a world where, true, no one can live.