Isidore

by Jeremy Reed

  Isidore

  a novel about the

  Comte de Lautréamont

  Jeremy Reed

  Isidore – a novel about the Comte de Lautréamont

  by Jeremy Reed

  Copyright © Jeremy Reed 1991, 2014

  First published in 1991

  This new revised edition published in 2014

  Copyright © Jeremy Reed 2014

  All Rights Reserved

  The right of Jeremy Reed to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Reed, Jeremy

  Isidore

  1. Title

  823 914

  ISBN: 0-7206-0831-7

  For Rolf Vasellari

  Flaubert said to us today: 'The story, the plot of a novel is of no interest to me. When I write a novel I aim at rendering a colour, a shade. For instance, in my Carthaginian novel, I want to do something purple. The rest, the characters and the plot, is a mere detail. In Madame Bovary, all I wanted to do was to render a grey colour, the mouldy colour of a wood-louse's existence. The story of the novel mattered so little to me that a few days before starting on it I still had in mind a very different Madame Bovary from the one I created: the setting and the overall tone were the same, but she was to have been a chaste and devout old maid. And then I realised that she would have been an impossible character.'

  The Goncourt Journals, 17th March 1861

  Contents

  Does Anyone Know? An Interview with

  Isidore Ducasse, Comte de Lautréamont

  Part One

  Part Two

  Postscript: Death Certificate No. 2028

  Etching by Salvador Dali for the fine limited edition of Les Chants

  de Maldoror by Isidore Ducasse, Comte de Lautréamont, published

  by Skira in 1934. (Reproduced from W.J. Strachan, The Artist and

  the Book in France, Peter Owen, London, 1969)

  Does Anyone Know?

  An Interview with Isidore Ducasse,

  Comte de Lautréamont

  The interview takes place in the Sahara. White table and white chairs. A white canopy is spread over the speakers.

  Interviewer: You lived to see Les Chants de Maldoror published in a complete edition by Lacroix, Verboeckhoven, Brussels, in 1869. Censorship problems prevented the book from becoming known, and for almost half a century it remained an under-ground classic. Why was it that your book disappeared for so long?

  Lautréamont: At the time, there were hints of reviving the Tribunal de la Seine. It was impossible to publish in the latter days of the Second Empire without risking prosecution for obscenity. The book as I remember received a brief advertisement in Evariste Carrance's anthology Fleurs et fruits, and a note in the monthly Bulletin du bibliophile et du bibliothécaire, and that was it.

  Interviewer: When the surrealists placed you alongside Baudelaire and Rimbaud as one of the poetic revolutionaries whose work belonged to the twentieth rather than the nineteenth century, were you surprised?

  Lautréamont: I was out in the desert by then. That's my code word for the state in which I now find myself. Without realising it I suppose I liberated the stream of consciousness. I hit upon a detonative period. The old novel with its formalised plot was dead. Poetry with its inherited classicism was drained of all meaning. Without really trying for it, I aimed for something wild. I wanted a simultaneous reversion to primitivism and an imagery that was distinctly modern.

  Interviewer: You lived in turbulent times. I suppose you're unwilling to speak about your formative years in Montevideo, and the ones leading up to your disappearance in 1870?

  Lautréamont: In a letter to my publisher Verboeckhoven, which you assure me was dated 23rd October 1868, I outlined a belief that has come to be much quoted. I referred to Maldoror as 'the beginning of a publication which will only be completed later, after my death. Thus the moral of the end has not yet been drawn'. We weren't so very far away from the Commune and the siege of Paris by the Prussian Army. I was writing against the opposition asserted by my death, although I was convinced that the latter would come about in response to an inner dictate, and not as a consequence of revolution. I had already conceived the idea that my work would be taken up by a new generation and completed through the cataclysmic upheavals of a more violent century.

  Interviewer: I suppose you were too close to your work to realise its full significance. What I wonder would have happened had you known that Rimbaud was sixteen at the time of your disappearance, and had already written some of the most powerful visionary poems of his brief life? I still hold to the theory that he had read Maldoror before composing his own valediction to poetry — Une saison en enfer. How else explain the self-deprecatory pyrotechnics, the hallucinated vision that seems to stem from your seminal work?

  Lautréamont: Perhaps that's why we meet in the desert. But no, what happened was that we both located the subliminal unconscious at a time when no one else realised its potential. Rimbaud and I meet now, but at the time we were unknown to each other. He broke away to the desert in flight from a vision that threatened him with madness. Perhaps I was more detached. I channelled my delirium into my writing. It has been suggested by critics that I was mad, that I spent my Paris years in a madhouse. That I ate paper and wrote in blood on the walls of a cell. Evaluating my past, as much as we ever can do in the light of experience, I think there were other more controlled facets to my character.

  Interviewer: I'm interested in the intention behind your work. Andre Breton describes Maldoror as 'the expression of a total revelation which seems to surpass human capacities', and Henry Miller writes of you that 'His predecessor was Jonathan Swift and his chief executor was the Marquis de Sade'. These seem to me to be statements that leave you as an abstraction. They serve only to increase the idea of a person who may never have existed.

  Lautréamont: I'm not sure that I ever wrote for an audience. I remember connecting with a current that was so huge it impressed on me my isolation. Originally Maldoror contained specific references to Georges Dazet, a former school-friend, but I deleted these. There seemed little point in clinging to human reference. Implosions are a part of psychic spontaneity. The correspondence I found between an umbrella and a sewing-machine, for instance, opened up the way for a new manner of sighting metaphor.

  Interviewer: You wrote in your Poesies that 'To struggle against evil is to accord it too much honour.' There's a sense in everything you wrote of someone who saw too clearly to be constrained by a time or a place. Was literature then an accident? Could you as easily have become an arms dealer like Rimbaud?

  Lautréamont: I can only answer this question in part. It seems that poetry because of its peculiar synthesising properties picks up on external events through recourse to subjective crises. But then Rimbaud had a specific death. I was simply nominated Death Certificate no. 2028 signed by a Hôtel proprietor and a member of his staff. The question is left open in your mind as to whether I was temporarily buried in the Cimetière du Nord or lived on in another capacity. And if I did, would that person be any the less real than the one you confront now?

  Interviewer: Again, if I may quote a modern reading of your work, Andre Breton claims that The Songs of Maldoror is 'the very manifesto of convulsive poetry'. We have grown almost by association to think of you as connected with a movement in literature that was to occur half a century after Maldoror was conceived. And perhaps the biographical confusion stems from here. A full life in terms of years would have seen you live into the first decades of the twentieth century.

  Lautréamont: I suppose your question leads directly to the interpretation of literature. There is in ever
y epoch what we call an ideological tension. My childhood in South America was distinguished by political insurrection. Something of that must have contributed to the sadistic atrocities in Maldoror. How else can one explain the abnormal deviations in my work? Copulation with a shark, the crab that enters my anus, God's visit to a brothel, infanticides, murders, a pack laying into a transsexual in a wood. That would be one reading. But I'm careful to make clear that Maldoror inhabits 'the dark recesses and secret fibres of consciousness'. There is now a more distinct vocabulary for describing inner states, but I was concerned not so much with Poe's metaphysical hells as with mental images. A continuous psychic explosion. I had already found the tone of disgust that I relished in Baudelaire, but I wanted to push language to breaking-point and to explore the sexual fantasies which might have become pathological if they weren't cycled by the imagination into a poetic context.

  Interviewer: The dark glasses and white suit you have adopted for this interview enforce the almost predictable ambiguity that has come to surround your person. I spoke of Rimbaud earlier in connection with your work, but in this century your 'convulsive' imagination seems to have been inherited by Jean Genet. His early novels share your preoccupation with extravagant ritual as well as embracing sexual fantasies which are correspondingly mutilative. Would you comment on this?

  Lautréamont: It's natural that the outsider, the man in flight from himself, the sexual and social outlaw should inherit something of my preoccupations. Or what were mine. You must remember that I have acquired other dimensions since that brief intense period during which I wrote Maldoror. It was a time of unrealised strain. In finding a new mode of expression I intersected with what were to be the characteristics of a new age. Universal war and the discovery of the psyche. But I'd lived through that on an inner plane. Unresolvable moral issues still rage within the pages of my book.

  Interviewer: What little we know about your life has come down to us largely through the sketchy recollections of your school-friend, Paul Lespès. He didn't give us his portrait of you until he was eighty-one, so there may be reasons to doubt its accuracy. He mentions your long hair, shrill voice, intransigent nature, the extravagant imagery that characterised your schoolboy poetry. But the myth surrounding your madness is enforced by statements like 'above all, his groundless fits of bad temper, in short all his strangeness, made us feel that he was somewhat unbalanced'. He mentions also a speech you gave at school, 'La folle du logis', which, according to Lespès, 'piled up a frightening plethora of the most horrible images of death. It was nothing but broken bones, hanging guts, bleeding or pulped flesh'. Would you say that these statements contain at least a partial truth?

  Lautréamont: I have to be careful here. There's the myth attached to the writing and the one attached to the person. How do we ever differentiate between them? Reality is transformed by the imagination into fiction. Words are fictions — they alter how we see or experience the world. And because their function is the business of the poet, he either chooses to become their product — that is, mythicises himself — or else clearly distinguishes between the work and his person. My experience is that the two are inseparable. Sadism interested me in terms of the book I was writing, therefore it may have been a part of my person.

  Interviewer: How much of one's life does one remember?

  Lautréamont: Not that much when we're living it. Then it appears like a film, only it's speeded up, and we imagine that it is life which is directing the camera independent of us, and not we who are responsible for consciousness. My life was divided roughly into two halves. My childhood years in Montevideo and the years spent at Tarbes and later in Paris. My childhood was a solitary one spent in French colonial South America, but the natural beauty of the place, combined with a sense of not really belonging, helped to create the solitary vision I was to bring to Maldoror.

  Interviewer: When a work like Maldoror, which so radically alters the shift of consciousness, appears, the silence with which it is greeted by the Establishment invariably means that the vision expressed awaits discovery. You were particularly fortunate to find in André Breton so eloquent and revolutionary a spokesman. Is it chance, accident or design which has placed Maldoror in the mainstream of European literature?

  Lautréamont: This desert light is painful. I'm still not used to it even after a century. To get back to your question, though, I suppose in the heat of writing Maldoror I didn't care about the book's future. You have reminded me that I wrote of my intentions: ‘It is not right that everyone read the pages that follow; very few will be able to taste this bitter fruit without danger.' Youthful admonition or a truth? Those who took up my thread had realised in themselves its continuity through their work. Isn't that always the way?

  Interviewer: In Maldoror you confess to crimes that we can either take literally or interpret within the context of the violence generated by the work. How are we to read this claim: 'I even murdered (not long ago!) a pederast who was not responding adequately to my passion; I threw his body down a disused well, and there is no decisive evidence against me.'

  Lautréamont: The question is too personal. We've already proposed that in the absence of a biography the work lives in the place of the author.

  Interviewer: It interests me as to how you originally conceived the form that Maldoror was to take. It is only late in the book that you express your belief in the affirmative power of the novel, by which time the book has acquired its own fragmentary narration.

  Lautréamont: Anything that starts out with the intention of being a novel is a lie. The imagination works contrary to the arbitrary impositions of character and plot. I went with the stream of consciousness. When I saw that certain threads remained consistent, I pulled a noose before letting my subject drop.

  Interviewer: You end Maldoror on the image of a hanged man, a policy of mutilation begun almost at the book's outset when the protagonist slashes his mouth with a penknife. For we the readers it's convenient to link the self-destructiveness manifested in your work with your early death. But for you the process must have been quite different. How would you describe the relationship between the two?

  Lautréamont: There isn't one. A century in the desert has convinced me that the attempt to construct a life — that is to say, what you have tried to do in your novel — is simply one fiction elaborating another.

  Interviewer: And in the end?

  Lautréamont: Does anyone know?

  Two empty white chairs face a white sun. A car driven off at high speed raises a dust-cloud.

  *

  Woodcut of Lautréamont by Adolfo Pastor, after the daguerreotype

  by Armand Vasseur © La Quinzaine littéraire 1972

  PART ONE

  The Eye 1

  Subject: Isidore Ducasse. Born 9 a.m., 4th April 1846 Place of birth: Calle Camacua, Montevideo. Father: Francois Ducasse (b. 1809), Deputy Secretary, French Consulate; Mother: Célestine-Jacquette Davezac (b. 1821), deceased.

  16th November 1847: Isidore-Lucien Ducasse christened at the Metropolitan Church of the Immaculate Conception, Montevideo. Education: Private tutor — Gustave Flammarion, bachelor (?).

  Notes compiled for Francois Ducasse

  I have begun to follow your son with increasing regularity. The boy's solitary nature confirms your anxiety about his being too much alone. I have noticed that he treats his tutor with a disdain uncommon in one so young and thinks nothing of riding into town when he should be attending a tutorial. It would appear indiscreet of me to suggest that Monsieur Flammarion, far from Isidore taking disciplinary action, seems to be a complicitous or consenting party to your son's truancy. You ask me for facts and I present them. I cannot pursue that avenue of inquiry without your permission. Gustave Flammarion may or may not be responsible for your son's early failings, but he has a part in them.

  The books that your son takes such pains to conceal are by authors that you will recognise as inflammatory to the imagination. Byron's Manfred, Mickiewicz's Konrad Walle
nrod, Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal, the works of Poe and the more conventional likes of Lamartine, Hugo and Alfred de Musset.

  On two occasions last week I followed Isidore Ducasse to the town centre. He has a favourite cafe in Independence Square called El Sol Negro, where he sits alone drinking coffee and observing Montevideo's cosmopolitanism. He rarely speaks to strangers, his purpose being to watch.

  In fact it is the degree of his inaction which fascinates. On two separate occasions he has been approached by men and held in conversation for longish periods. His natural shyness dissipates at such times. These types are usually foreigners, single, resident at the American or Imperial Hôtel.

  You ask that I spare you nothing in my confidential reports, and I venture to suggest without conclusive proof that your son is attracted to members of his own sex. For a young man he expresses little interest in women. He has to this date shown no interest in the town's brothels and formed no friendships. He is always alone, whether it is in the town, riding without permission in the countryside or sitting knees up, meditating for hours on a deserted beach.