Isidore Ducasse / Conde de Lautréamont/ Maldoror (1846-1870)

The Cursed Trinity

Risking from uncertainty has been the constant of those who submerged on the cloudy abysms of Isidore Ducasse (Montevideo, 1846 – Paris, 1870,) also known as the Lautréamont Count. The only certainty is that his life was completely uncertain. His biography is as vague as one can be. According to researcher and translator Manuel Serrat: “his biographers describe his life as a shadow’s life, a ghost’s” (1).

He was born in Montevideo, April 4 1846. As adolescent he travels to France to study. When he returns to Montevideo he becomes the Lautréamont Count, and writes “el libro más grande de nuestra literatura” (Our literature greatest book) (2), then he becomes Isidore Ducasse once again and starts writing poetry. Shortly after, on 24 November 1870 he is found dead of anguish, weariness, of desire to die or of scarlet fever, and that was all.

Young Ducasse, “tall, thin, pale and with a slight hunched back, (…) that was usually sad and quiet;” that foreigner that talks “with the sprightliness from those overseas countries where life was happy and free” (3,) according to the testimonies of those who affirm having met him, he hides under the name of the Lautréamont Count and writes a very significant work, not only in the Uruguayan literature, but the universal; controversial, rejected and directly influenced by Breton and Dalí, forgotten for almost twenty years and rescued by Rubén Darío. “Let´s hope heaven will like the reader, furious and temporarily as wild as what he reads about, find without disorienting the abrupt and wild path through the desolated swamps of theses somber and poisoned pages.” This is how Los Cantos de Maldoror, Maldoror’s Chants (1868 – 1869) which at the same time Ducasse attributes it to Lautréamont, he does it to Maldoror: “In a few lines, I will leave established that Maldoror was good during the first happy years of his life (…). Afterwards, he realized he had been born bad (…) and droves his life to evil definitely.”

In his evil path, Maldoror takes it with the Mankind, tearing out “the mask that covers his face of betrayal and full of mud,” and discovering, “one by one (…) the sublime lies he was deceiving himself with.” And goes even further, spitting in God’s face, the one guilty: “My poetry will not consist in anything else but attacking, by all means possible, to Men, that savage beast, and also to the creator, who should have never created such beast.”

Maldoror discovers evil and takes it, with his beautiful words, using his “genius to discover evil’s delights,” convinced that it’s the natural state of men, his putrid essence.

Maldoror absolves prostitutes, fornicates the louses and rapes a little girl while she sleeps; he sadistically approaches, almost with amusement, to god’s perdition, drunk and despised by all creation, searching for evil on the deeps of his beloved ocean: “(…) If Satan’s breath creates the tempest that elevates the salty waters to the sky, you have to tell me, because I would be very happy to know that hell is that close to men.”

But in less than a year, or he decides to die, or he is killed by Ducasse. The year he died, Poesías (Poetries) is edited, signed by Isidore Ducasse. In one of the book’s section you can read: “I replace melancholy for Courage, doubt for certainty, desperation for hope, complaints for duty, skepticism for faith, evil for good and pride for modesty.” For some, Ducasse becomes “the mask showed as a mask to hide Lautréamont’s face” (…), in simulating as telling the truth. He wants to be heard and he pretends he is himself” (4). The “murder” of Lautréamont is an alibi because, as one of the main researchers of Ducasse-Lautréamont Francois Caradec said, “If Lautréamont’s signature disappears, the fake regretting of the “Poetries,” leaves it intact” (5).

Others ask themselves: “Is that monster really dead? Did he quitted that open fight adopting the comfortable mask of the conformism tired of his frenetic rebelliousness?” (6). Maybe Lautréamont had already did it: “Oh Maldoror, has that day in which your abominable instincts have gone away?” Maybe Ducasse answers them in his “Poetries:” “We do not resign ourselves to the lives we have. We want to live in the idea of the others, living an imaginary life.”

Notes:

1. Quoted in: “Isidore Ducasse/ Conde de Lautréamont: La poética del Mal como antecedente del Simbolismo, Leticia Collazo Ramos, http://www.ucm.es/info/especulo/numero18/.html.
2. Felipe Polleri, El país Cultural # 834, 28/10/05.
3. Quoted in Capítulo Oriental # 44.
4. Hebert Benítez Pezzolano, El País Cultural # 348, 5/7/96.
5. Ídem.
6. Marguerite Duprey, Capítulo Oriental, ídem.