(Faux Titre No. 403) Lautréamont, - Thomas, Andrea S-Lautréamont

Lautréamont,
Subject to Interpretation
FAUX TITRE
403
Etudes de langue et littérature françaises

publiées sous la direction de
Keith Busby, †M.J. Freeman,

Sjef Houppermans et Paul Pelckmans
Lautréamont,
Subject to Interpretation
Andrea S. Thomas
AMSTERDAM - NEW YORK, NY 2015

Cover Image: Eric Edelman, Lautréamont’s Children (2012). Digital collage
created & copyright © by Eric Edelman. All rights reserved.
The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of

‘ISO 9706: 1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents -
Requirements for permanence’.
Le papier sur lequel le présent ouvrage est imprimé remplit les prescriptions
de ‘ISO 9706: 1994, Information et documentation - Papier pour documents -
Prescriptions pour la permanence’.
ISBN: 978-90-420-3925-4
E-Book ISBN: 978-94-012-1207-6
© Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2015
Printed in The Netherlands
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations 7
Acknowledgments 9
Introduction 11
Lautréamontage:
Imaginary Portraits of Lautréamont 25
I – FIN DE SIÈCLE
Chapter 1: Outsiders at the Fin de Siècle 41
Chapter 2: Perish then Publish: Partial Truth in

the 1890 Edition of Maldoror 73
II – SURREALISM
Chapter 3: Investing in Lautréamont, 1920 105
Chapter 4: The Edition as Exhibition: A Surrealist

Retrospective, 1938 135
III – POST-STRUCTURALISM
Chapter 5: Lautréamont in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade 169
Chapter 6: Lautréamont Reincarnated 189
Conclusion: John Cage and the Chants de Maldoror:

Pulvérisés par l’assistance même 217
Bibliography 233
Index 245
List of Illustrations
Figure I.1 Felix Vallotton’s Lautréamont 27
Figure I.2 Enrique Ochoa’s Lautréamont 29
Figure I.3 Adolfo Pastor’s Lautréamont 30
Figure I.4 Salvador Dalí’s Lautréamont 31
Figure I.5 Man Ray, L’Énigme d’Isidore Ducasse 33
Figure I.6 Cabu’s Lautréamont 36
Figure 2.1 José Roy, frontispiece 81
Figure 2.2 “facsimile” letter, Genonceaux, 1890 95
Figure 4.1 Salvador Dalí, Canto IV, 2 143
Figure 4.2 Dalí, Canto III, 5 146
Figure 4.3 Dalí, Canto III, 1 150
Figure 4.4 Matta Echaurren, Dieu au bordel… 157
Figure 4.5 Joan Miró, Trois étoiles au lieu d’une

signature et une tache de sang au bas
de la page. 159
Figure 4.6 Max Ernst, C’est un homme ou une

pierre ou un arbre qui va commencer
le quatrième chant. 160
Figure 4.7 André Masson, Je suis sale. Les poux

me rongent. Les pourceaux, quand
ils me regardent, vomissent… 162
8 List of Illustrations
Figure 4.8 René Magritte, Où est-il passé ce premier

chant de Maldoror, depuis que sa bouche,
pleine des feuilles de la belladone… 165
Figure 6.1 Philippe Sollers, graph from

“La Science de Lautréamont” 198
Figure C.1 Jesús Galdón, conference poster 218
Figure C.2 John Cage, Les Chants de Maldoror

pulvérisés par l’assistance même, directions 230
Figure C.3 John Cage, Les Chants de Maldoror

pulvérisés par l’assistance même 231
Acknowledgements
I am indebted to Columbia University and Loyola University

Maryland for the research grants that made this book possible. Thanks
to the guidance of my mentors in the French and Romance Philology
Department at Columbia University, especially Elisabeth Ladenson, as
well as Joanna Stalnaker and Philip Watts, I was able to complete the
PhD thesis out of which the following project developed in a fairly
painless manner. Since then, the scholars behind the Association des
Amis Passés, Présents et Futurs d’Isidore Ducasse (AAPPFID) and
colleagues such as Peter Nesselroth and Michel Pierssens have opened
up exciting dialogues and provided me many opportunities to present
my ideas. Leslie Zarker Morgan, Sharon Nell, and my colleagues at
Loyola University Maryland have been invaluable in reading drafts
and offering moral support. My dear friends Annelle Curulla, Ana
Lazic-Paunovic, Charles Girard, and Priya Wadhera have helped me
enormously at every stage; special thanks go to Kevin Erwin for his
translating expertise. Danielle Whren and Marion Wielgosz from
Loyola University Maryland, as well as Christa Stevens at Rodopi,
Eric Edelman, and Cynthia Gladen have my gratitude for all the
practical aspects of this book. Susan Scott, Richard Thomas, and
Marcel de Fontaine, all unforeseen Lautréamont enthusiasts, inspire
me daily.
Finally, this project is dedicated to my loving and honest
husband, Andre de Fontaine, who is also my most loving and honest
critic.
Introduction
Isidore Ducasse, better known by the pseudonym le comte de

Lautréamont, presents an unusual case in the French literary canon.
First of all, only two works can be attributed to him: Les Chants de
Maldoror and the Poésies (in two volumes).1 Les Chants de Maldoror
is an epic prose poem composed of six cantos, each of which in turn
consists of a varying number of stanzas. The first canto was published
separately on two occasions: first, in a pamphlet in August 1868; next,
alongside other winners from a poetry contest in early 1869. Both
were signed by an anonymous three stars “***.” Ducasse’s pseud-
onym, “le comte de Lautréamont,” did not appear until the six cantos
were collected in one volume in 1869. That volume was printed but
never sold. Then, in 1870, a second work by Ducasse was published.
Called Poésies, although not poetry in the conventional sense, it
consists of two slim volumes of writings, presumed to be the preface
to a work that was never published. These two volumes were signed
“Isidore Ducasse.” Until 1890, when Léon Genonceaux published and
sold a new edition, both works remained for the most part unread.
Ducasse overturned literary conventions of his own era, and has
since inspired critics, poets, and artists who strive to do the same, the
most famous of whom are the surrealists. The content of Les Chants
de Maldoror touches on the thematic affinities espoused by his
successors: the apotheosis of the Satanic hero and the fight against
God, the liberation of cruel and erotic instincts, the cultivation of
incongruous and irrational images, and the castigation of traditional
literary conventions, all in the spirit of revolt. In the Poésies, the
reader finds a different technique at work, but essentially the same
project: to overturn literary conventions. Such spirit of revolt as
expressed in the content of Lautréamont’s work seduced the
twentieth-century avant-garde aesthetic.
1
Some historians have attributed, without evidence, two other pieces to Ducasse:
Ballade, imitée de Mürger and Choses trouvées dans un pupitre par ***. Both were
published in 1868 in La Jeunesse, the magazine that contained the first review of
Chant premier in 1868. Jean-Luc Steinmetz’s Pléiade edition (Paris: Gallimard, 2009)
of Lautréamont’s complete works includes them.
12 Lautréamont, Subject to Interpretation
The Chants can be categorized neither as prose poem, nor epic,

nor novel, while the Poésies are neither poems nor a preface. Besides
complicating matters for a bibliographer or librarian who attempts to
catalogue these works, Lautréamont’s resistance to classification
invites a wealth of interpretations, which assume as many disguises as
his villainous protagonist, Maldoror. A tortured romantic hero gone
awry, Maldoror is a monstrous and powerful creature who challenges
God (called le Créateur or le Tout-Puissant) to a battle. With super-
human powers and phantasmagorical accomplices such as a ceiling
rafter, a crowned madman, and a fishtail, Maldoror conspires to
salvage humanity by defiling it. In the last canto, which takes the form
of a roman de gare, or “airport novel” in English, Maldoror’s quest
ends in a diabolical crime in which he climbs atop the Vendôme tower
in Paris, lassoes and then flings his sixteen-year old victim, Mervyn,
all the way across the Seine to the dome of the Pantheon, where he
remains fixed for eternity. Just prior to Maldoror’s final crime, an
unnamed narrator explains in a self-analyzing tone that has often
captured critics’ attention:
Espérant voir promptement, un jour ou l’autre, la consécration de

mes théories acceptée par telle ou telle forme littéraire, je crois
avoir enfin trouvé, après quelques tâtonnements, ma formule
définitive. C’est la meilleure: puisque c’est le roman! Cette
préface hybride a été exposée d’une manière qui ne paraîtra peut-
être pas assez naturelle, en ce sens qu’elle surprend, pour ainsi
dire, le lecteur, qui ne voit pas très bien où l’on veut d’abord le
conduire; mais, ce sentiment de remarquable stupéfaction, auquel
on doit généralement chercher à soustraire ceux qui passent leur
temps à lire des livres ou des brochures, j’ai fait tous mes efforts
pour le produire. En effet, il m’était impossible de faire moins,
malgré ma bonne volonté: ce n’est que plus tard, lorsque quelques
romans auront paru, que vous comprendrez mieux la préface du
renégat, à la figure fuligineuse.
[Hoping promptly to see, some time or other, the consecration of

my theories accepted by this or that literary form, I believe that
after some tentative fumbling I have at last found my definitive
formula. It is the best: since it is the novel! This hybrid preface has
been set out in a way which may not, perhaps, appear natural
enough, in the sense that it—so to speak—surprises the reader,
who does not very clearly see where he is at first being led; yet
this feeling of remarkable stupefaction, from which one generally
seeks to shield those who spend their time reading books or
booklets, I have made every effort to produce. Indeed, it was
Introduction 13
impossible for me to do less, despite my goodwill: only later,

when a few novels have come out, will you better understand the
preface of the renegade with the dusky face.]2
Because of the imprecision of its subject pronouns and deictic words,

this passage, a digression from the narrative of the Chants, defies
consistent interpretation. It exemplifies the customary metamorphoses
that take place in the Chants, where the writer becomes author, author
becomes reader, and reader becomes subject. Reader, writer, author,
me, you, the renegade with the dusky face—all are pronouns referring
to no clear subject. Following the logic of the cited paragraph, the
preface surprises and engages a vague lecteur but ultimately a more
direct vous. As a “preface” that concludes the book, it is also out of
order. Maurice Blanchot sees Lautréamont surprising himself here, as
a reader and writer “en fuite vers l’inconnu” [fleeing toward the
unknown].3 In other words, the preface comes at the end rather than
the beginning, because, like Marcel from La Recherche du temps
perdu, Lautréamont only then becomes aware of himself as a writer.
Similarly, in an editorial note to this passage, Jean-Luc Steinmetz, the
editor of the most recent Pléiade edition (2009), compares the
protagonist with Ducasse himself: “une fois encore Ducasse et son
héros se confondent au plus près” [once again Ducasse and his hero
blend seamlessly together].4 Julia Kristeva and other post-structuralist
critics consider Lautréamont’s identity crisis here as a Lacanian
“becoming” of self. A passage like this, which can be read as a
Freudian death instinct taking hold of Ducasse, also provides material
for Kristeva’s discussion of alterity of the subject.5 To interpret
2
Lautréamont, Œuvres complètes, ed. Jean-Luc Steinmetz (Paris: Gallimard, 2009),
223; Lautréamont, Maldoror and the Complete Works of the Comte de Lautréamont,
trans. Alexis Lykiard (Cambridge: Exact Change, 1994), 190. References to works by
Isidore Ducasse come from the 2009 Steinmetz edition, unless otherwise noted.
Hereafter, this work will be abbreviated OC. Translations of Les Chants de Maldoror
and the Poésies come from the 1994 Lykiard translation, hereafter abbreviated Mal.
Page numbers from this work will be included in square brackets after references to
the French source. Other translations are my own unless otherwise indicated.
3
Blanchot, Lautréamont et Sade, 1949 (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1963), 167. The
translation is from Stuart and Michelle Kendall, Lautréamont and Sade (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 91.
4
OC, 653.
5
See Julia Kristeva, La Révolution du langage poétique (Paris: Seuil, 1974), 319-335.
Ducasse’s generic volte-face as “becoming” is problematic, however,

because Ducasse subsequently reneges his claim in the Poésies by
writing, “le roman est un genre faux” [the novel is a false genre].6
Significantly, the passage was of little concern to André Breton and
the surrealists; explicit questions of subjective alterity did not capture
their interest. The preface to which “this” refers remains equally am-
biguous: either it refers to the first five cantos as a preface to the last
canto or the first stanza as a preface to the last canto. Maldoror as an
epic preface to the novel genre. “This” could even refer to Les Chants
de Maldoror as a preface for the author’s second work, the Poésies.
The Poésies, then, which many critics read as a palinode to the
Chants, present yet another classification problem because the Poésies
are not in fact poetry. Rather, the Poésies consist of two volumes of a
preface in prose. In comparison to the hyperbole of Maldoror, the
Poésies appear conservative. In the first volume, Ducasse delivers a
tirade against romanticism so emphatic that many of his first critics
presumed the author to be in jest, repentant, or simply insane. The
second volume contains a series of maxims, most of which are
borrowed from classical thinkers such as Blaise Pascal, François de La
Rochefoucauld, and Luc de Clapiers, marquis de Vauvenargues, then
“corrected” to make them original. Like an early version of ready-
made art, Ducasse’s Poésies II are iconoclastic: they pervert the old
and call it new.
Ducasse’s exiguous literary production thus poses a major
problem for interpretation. On the one hand, mystery accompanies the
dearth of material, thereby encouraging critics to use their imagina-
tion. On the other hand, Lautréamont saturates his prose with so many
interpretative possibilities that a single reading can be difficult to
determine. For want of a larger corpus, many critics have to settle for
evaluating one work against the other.7
6
OC, 263 [Mal, 225].
7
Some critics argue that the two works are contradictory and that the Chants
influenced surrealism and Tel Quel more than the Poésies. See Philippe Sollers, “La
Science de Lautréamont,” in Logiques (Paris: Seuil, 1968), 250-301; and part three of
Richard Terdiman’s Discourse/Counter-Discourse: The Theory and Practice of
Symbolic Resistance in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1985). For counter-examples, see Jeremy Stubbs, “The Poesies of Isidore Ducasse and
the Birth surrealism” in Romanic Review 87.4 (1996): 493-511; and Michel
Pierssens’s influential study, Lautréamont: Éthique à Maldoror (Lille: Presses
Introduction 15
While the Chants de Maldoror and the Poésies may be inter-

pretatively malleable, their author has been co-opted to a comparable
degree. Facts about the life of Isidore Lucien Ducasse remain scarce.
After much investigation—and many errors—critics know that he was
born and baptized in Uruguay in 1846, attended secondary school in
France with little academic success, and died alone in 1870 at the age
of twenty-four in Paris “sans autres renseignements” [without
additional information], just after completing his magnum opus.8 Like
twentieth-century rock icons such as Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Jim
Morrison, and Kurt Cobain, whose premature deaths serve to cement
their myth, Ducasse’s death was probably his greatest professional
success because the mystery surrounding him continues to attract
devotees. Or, to borrow Blanchot’s words in Le Livre à venir,
“Chaque fois que l’artiste est préféré à l’œuvre, cette préférence, cette
exaltation du génie signifie une dégradation de l’art, le recul devant sa
puissance propre, la recherche de rêves compensateurs” [Each time
the artist is favored over the work, this preference, this exaltation of
genius signifies a degradation of art, a retreat from its very power, a
search for compensatory dreams].9 What “degradation” is for Blanchot
was what the surrealists considered “vulgarization” in the work of
Lautréamont, a fate from which they jealously tried to protect him.
Yet paradoxically, and perversely, this is also what the surrealists
found compelling. Since there is as little authentic information on the
author as there is on his works, the preference of Lautréamont over his
work, to use Blanchot’s terms, is doubly tempting.
Added to the problems above is another: no holograph exists for
either the Chants or the Poésies. Without handwritten documents to
authenticate (partially, at least) Lautréamont’s works, critics face a
number of obstacles, including: no proof that Ducasse created his own
pseudonym; no way to distinguish deliberate errors from accidental
ones regarding spelling, style, and grammar; no verification for
intended stanza divisions; and finally, no validation that the text
printed in 1869 matched Ducasse’s desired one. One critic has even
Universitaires de Lille, 1984), which marries the Poésies and the Chants as the same
project realized by two different strategies.
8
From the death certificate, OC, XLVI.
9
Maurice Blanchot, Le Livre à venir (Paris: Gallimard, 1959) cited in Marcelin
Pleynet, Lautréamont par lui-même (Paris: Seuil, 1967), 5-6.
suggested that the pseudonym “le comte de Lautréamont” was

possibly a creation of Ducasse’s first editor, Albert Lacroix, who had
recently published an edition of Eugène Sue’s Latréaumont.10 The
name is found nowhere except on the first complete edition of Les
Chants de Maldoror. In sum, Lautréamont’s work lacks authority.
Then again, when it comes to a literary work, what is authority?
Textual critics devote tomes to questions of textual authority. Literary
and cultural historians investigate the status of the author and the
reception of his or her works. Many literary critics explore a particular
author’s influence on his or her successors and their work. The present
work considers all of these problems by using Lautréamont as its case
study. Its purpose is to evaluate not only the ways in which
Lautréamont influenced his successors but also the ways in which his
successors influenced Lautréamont, his work and his texts.
These issues continue to arise in editions of Lautréamont’s work
because those seduced by the enigmas of Ducasse also perpetuate
them. Most prominently appropriated by the surrealist and the Tel
Quel groups, the image of Lautréamont also prompted twentieth-
century movements to confront questions related to their own artistic
production, based on the value of reproducing and editing
Lautréamont’s work. How do the editions of Lautréamont’s poetry
complicate the distinction between production and reproduction? In
what ways do editorial choices intersect with the creation of the
Lautréamont myth? In three parts which correspond with three avant-
garde movements, I show how editions of Lautréamont’s work reflect
the aesthetic strategies, polemics, and sociohistorical contexts of his
readers. In each part, I examine at least one complete edition of
Lautréamont’s works. This type of analysis reveals important aspects
of not only Lautréamont’s work, but also that of his successors. Some
of the first problems in editing Lautréamont’s work are the same ones
that would haunt his editors throughout the twentieth century.
Taken together, the obstacles of Lautréamont’s works paradoxi-
cally provide critics with seemingly endless liberty. “Work,” however,
is an elusive term. Because literature as an art employs the intangible
medium of language, works must be reconstructed through every
10
Henry Grubbs, “The Pseudonym of Isidore Ducasse,” Modern Language Notes 66
(1951): 98-100.
Introduction 17
interaction of a reader with a text. In this way, literature is more

similar to music in notated form—in which musicians must recreate
the work each time it is played—than to the plastic arts, such as
sculpture and painting. Once reconstructed, words in texts hold a
codified meaning, subject to interpretation in different cultural
contexts. In addition to authors (in their manuscripts, for example),
other people participate in this reconstruction. Thus one might say that
all texts are created by multiple authors and that appropriation, to
varying degrees, entails creation by readers, editors, actors, and other
audiences. To construct a credible text always requires subjectivity
from the editor; every edition both reflects interpretation and promotes
it. Whereas editors may once have relied on personal taste to prepare
someone else’s works, now there are many different schools of
thought on matters such as minimizing the editor’s own intrusion or
establishing a text as the author intended it. Literary critics, though
attentive to the exigencies of interpreting literature, often take for
granted the enormous confidence they place in an editor’s integrity.
Publishers can bolster this confidence by a variety of devices.
The Library of America or W.W. Norton in the United States, for
example, or what is collectively dubbed “Galligrasseuil” in France
(Gallimard, Grasset, and Éditions du Seuil) boast the most prestigious,
authoritative editions available. Some publishers, on the other hand,
pride themselves less on a reliable text than on a sumptuous edition:
illustrated, collector’s, genetic, and so on. To many publishers, both
the work and text serve a personal interest. As a springboard for
interpretation, self-promotion, and sometimes financial gain, a work
of literature can quickly develop into a commodity. Lautréamont’s
editors have consequently played a number of different roles: reader,
writer, distributor, critic, scofflaw, and businessman.
Although historians have agreed since the nineteen-fifties that the
surrealists did not discover Lautréamont, his marginal status prior to
surrealism can be explained in large part by his works’ publication
history.11 Sometime in 1867, Ducasse moved from Uruguay to Paris,
11
Gérard Bauër, “C’est la Belgique qui a découvert Lautréamont,” Le Figaro
littéraire, February 27, 1954, 5, was the first to dispel the wide-spread belief that
André Breton’s group discovered Lautréamont. Also in 1954, in a series of articles for
Les Lettres nouvelles, Maurice Saillet catalogued all the “Inventeurs de Maldoror,” in
an attempt to undo what he called Lautréamont’s “sequestration” by the surrealists.
where he would become a poet and spend the last three years of his
life.12 He published the first canto separately, à compte d’auteur, at
Balitout, Questroy et Cie, located close to the Palais Royal and very
close to Ducasse’s own residence. Its offices were significantly
located at the same address as the bookstore of Lacroix and
Verboeckhoven, future editors of the complete Chants de Maldoror.
The first canto sold for 30 centimes and, according to a letter written
by Ducasse to a critic, was sold in two bookshops, both of which were
located in his neighborhood. Funded by an ample allowance from his
father, François Ducasse, a French consular officer, Ducasse first
lodged in a quarter which was then one of the liveliest neighborhoods
of Paris, especially for the arts. Though legend might suggest the
contrary, Ducasse’s life in Paris was not the difficult one led by other
struggling poets of his era. Because he left no trace of correspondence
with other Parisian literati, this mysterious gap has been filled by a
century and a half of speculation about the tumultuous life he must
have led.
The first canto was then published a second time after Ducasse
submitted it to a poetry contest in Bordeaux. This publication was also
financed by Ducasse’s father and was printed at the end of January
1869. Later in 1869, Albert Lacroix printed the complete six Chants.
A branch of Lacroix’s business was located in Paris, but most printing
was done in Brussels. Before Belgium developed its own national
literature with national poets and novelists, the country had a
reputation for reprinting French works in order to export or sell them
more cheaply than in France. This commercial endeavor, called
contrefaçon, was legal until 1852, when a Franco-Belgian bill was
passed to end it and to sanction literary property in France. The
Belgian press then became best-known for publishing works that were
otherwise unpublishable in France. Pascal Pia, in “L’édition belge au
temps de Baudelaire,” suggests that the contrefaçon bill would have
12
Ducasse returned to Uruguay in May of 1867 one year after finishing high school in
Pau, France. Historians still do not know exactly when Ducasse arrived in Paris from
his trip to Uruguay. Jean-Jacques Lefrère, Isidore Ducasse, auteur des Chants de
Maldoror par le comte de Lautréamont (Paris: Fayard, 1988), speculates a departure
from South America in December 1867 and arrival in Paris sometime in the early part
of 1868. During this time, he would have had to begun writing the Chants because the
first canto was published in July or August of 1868.
Introduction 19
drastically hurt the Belgian press if the restriction on freedom of

expression in France had not opened a new door for them in the
fruitful business of producing editions of obscene literature.13
Henceforth, the Belgian publishing industry gained renown as the
seamy underbelly of literary production.
The average post-contrefaçon editor and bookseller essentially
had three options to maintain his company. He could either publish a
work that he was certain would sell, legally or illegally, reaching a
sufficiently wide audience for a moderate price. An example of this
type was Victor Hugo, whose works a publisher would bid for the
right to publish. In spite of Hugo’s literary success in France, after
1851 he was forced to publish elsewhere because of his political views
and criticism of French government.14 The second option was to risk
financial loss by publishing a newcomer who, via his or her social
sphere or potential for success, might bring a profit to the company.
An example of this option was Emile Zola’s first work, published by
Lacroix. On Hugo’s insistence, Lacroix was obliged to publish Zola’s
works, although these editions were initially commercial failures.
Finally, a third option was to publish à compte d’auteur, or paid for by
the author, an option which aimed to not lose money, but which
assumed a potential legal risk to the company. These sorts of works
were normally subversive, either politically or morally, at least for the
French censors of the time. Authors were often simply seeking
diffusion of their work, and were willing to pay for it. Isidore
Ducasse’s Les Chants de Maldoror exemplifies this type.
Limits imposed by censorship laws, which had oscillated since
1830 but still favored repression, reached a peak in 1869, when
Ducasse was attempting to publish. This is where historiographical
accounts divide on the publication of Les Chants de Maldoror. Some
contend that because Ducasse paid only a third of the amount owed,
Lacroix could not finish the publication. Others suppose that the
scandalous content of Lautréamont’s work posed such legal risks that
13
Pascal Pia, “L’Édition belge au temps de Baudelaire,” Études baudelairiennes 3
(1973): 80-87. On contrefaçon publishing, see François Godfroid, Aspects inconnus et
méconnus de la contrefaçon en Belgique (Bruxelles: Académie royale de langue et de
littérature françaises, 1998).
14
See Les Éditeurs belges de Victor Hugo et le banquet des Misérables: Bruxelles
1862 (Bruxelles: Crédit communal, 1986).
Lacroix feared heavy fines and jail time. In his preface to the 1890
edition of Maldoror, for example, Léon Genonceaux suggests that the
work was not sold because of “violences de style qui en rendaient la
publication périlleuse” [stylistic abuses that made publishing it
risky].15 A third possibility is that Ducasse’s father was so outraged by
the content of his son’s poem that he not only withdrew funds to
finance the book, but also insisted that it not be published. For many
historians, this hypothesis also explains the thematic contrast of the
Poésies with Maldoror: the “good” Poésies function as a ruse to
maintain his father’s financial support to publish the “bad” Maldoror.
Still critics tend to agree, without substantiation, that Lacroix kept the
copies of Maldoror out of a personal appreciation for the work.
When Lacroix’s company went out of business, the copies, along
with other material from his company, were given to Jean-Baptiste
Rozez, a Brussels-based bookseller and editor.16 In 1874, Rozez
published a volume of Charles Baudelaire’s Épaves with a famous
frontispiece by Félicien Rops, presumably without the permission of
Baudelaire’s first editor, Auguste Poulet-Malassis. That same year,
Rozez bound the loose copies of Maldoror, but marked them with
neither colophon nor editor. The copyright of this edition of Les
Chants de Maldoror, which is called the “first-second” edition, is
marked at the foot of the title page: “Tous droits de traduction et de
reproduction réservés” [All translation and copy rights reserved], and
on the foot of the verso of the half-title page is the location and name
of the printer: “Bruxelles. – Typ. de E. Wittmann.” Because there is
no publisher’s name, the only accountable participant in this edition
appears to be the printer, whose name is legally required to be printed.
In the summer of 1885, a group of bold young poets at La Jeune
Belgique, a Brussels literary magazine, discovered Maldoror. In the
October 1885 issue, the Jeune Belgique staff reprinted the 11th stanza
of the first canto, and then sent copies of both the Chants and their
15
OC, 335.
16
Rozez was originally from the Tarbes area in France, where Ducasse went to high
school. He also published Auguste Scheler’s Glossaire érotique de la langue
française, depuis son origine jusqu’à nos jours, contenant l’explication de tous les
mots consacrés à l’amour in 1861, a new edition of Baudelaire’s Les Épaves in 1866,
and Gautier’s Les Jeunes-France in 1867. On Rozez, as well as Lacroix, see René
Fayt, Auguste Poulet-Malassis à Bruxelles (Bruxelles: Palais des Académies, 1988).
Introduction 21
magazine to several eminent literary personages in Paris, including

Léon Bloy, Joris-Karl Huysmans, and Joséphin Péladan. Though it
remains a landmark in Lautréamont’s posterity, the magazine’s
reproduction of the Chants is misleading with respect to Lautréamont
and his poem. In chapter one, I assess this reproduction, exploring La
Jeune Belgique’s rationale for using Lautréamont as a prop to be
recognized by eminent Parisian poets and critics. Then, I study the
French reaction to the poem, in particular Léon Bloy’s vehement
criticism of it. With attention to symbolism and Franco-Belgian poetic
exchanges, I focus specifically on passages from Lautréamont’s poem
that best typify fin-de-siècle aesthetic strategies.
Then, in 1890 the editor Léon Genonceaux, who was as
enigmatic a character as Ducasse, published and sold a 140-copy
edition of Les Chants de Maldoror. Genonceaux embellished this
edition with a sinister frontispiece and a deceiving preface, which
prevails in Lautréamont’s posterity as the first biography. Chapter two
evaluates the integrity of this preface as a biography, arguing that
many of Genonceaux’s claims are doctored to paint a portrait of
Lautréamont as a poet but not a madman, who could possibly have
been the next Baudelaire, but whose career was tragically interrupted.
In this edition, the last until 1920, Genonceaux constructed an image
of Lautréamont that has endured from succeeding generations to this
day. That most editions still cite Genonceaux’s preface attests to its
significance.
From 1920-1940, during Lautréamont’s surrealist revival, ten
separate editions of his work were published in France. Most of them
were riddled with errors, either in confused facts of the author’s life or
in various miscalculations of how many stanzas make up the Chants.17
In chapter three, I examine the early surrealists’ investment in
Lautréamont as a precursor by focusing on their 1920 edition of
Poésies at the publishing firm Au Sans Pareil. The Poésies had never
before been published in a single volume, let alone appropriated as a
kind of poetic manifesto of a generation. In particular, I explore how
Lautréamont compares with other surrealist precursors, note which
passages in the Poésies seduced the surrealists, and examine how their
17
See Henry Grubbs, “The Division into Strophes of the ‘Chants De Maldoror,’”
Modern Language Notes 68 (1953): 154-157.
appropriation became a tool deployed to depart from symbolism and

Dada. In chapter four, I explore the relationship between surrealism
and visual images by way of the 1938 GLM edition, prefaced by
André Breton and illustrated by twelve eminent artists including Max
Ernst, Joan Miró, and Man Ray. As a surrealist retrospective, which
excludes certain individuals such as Salvador Dalí from participation,
this edition of Lautréamont’s complete works vaunted surrealism’s
accomplishments in art and poetry during the preceding twenty years.
Just as he does in the 1920 edition, Lautréamont here serves as a
screen on which the surrealists project their philosophy and triumphs.
Although Lautréamont was widely published after surrealism, he
was not considered a muse again until the late sixties by a pioneering
group of young artists, scholars, and theorists responsible for the
avant-garde magazine Tel Quel.18 From 1967 to 1974, in particular,
the Telqueliens aspired to detach Lautréamont not only from his
surrealist associations but also from what they considered a general
misreading. Instead, they offered a post-structuralist reading of
Lautréamont, aimed to reassess liminal figures of literature in order to
prevent cultural ossification. Because of his relative lack of
biographical information, Lautréamont offered an ideal subject for Tel
Quel’s trans-historical approach and textual analysis of transformative
literature. Paradoxically, the post-structuralists’ analytic, scientific,
and scholarly treatment of Lautréamont still intended to marginalize
him as non-canonical literature. In 1970, despite these efforts of the
avant-garde intelligentsia surrounding Philippe Sollers, Julia Kristeva,
and Marcelin Pleynet, Lautréamont’s work found a place in the
publishing hegemony of the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. Lautréamont’s
leather-bound complete works were shared in one volume with those
of the poet Germain Nouveau. Chapter five examines this Pléiade
edition and the rationale of its editor, Pierre-Olivier Walzer, in
emending, annotating, and preparing Lautréamont’s entrance into the
18
The lack of interest in Lautréamont is not complete, however. Lautréamont
scholarship continued during the fifties. Scholars, such as Frans de Haës, have
suggested that researchers had been scared off by the surrealist appropriation of
Lautréamont and began to investigate only after they determined the surrealist
movement finished. That other groups (existentialism, for example) rejected the
importance of Lautréamont during this period reveals as much about their own
aesthetic strategies as those of the Tel Quel movement twenty years later.
Introduction 23
French literary canon. Some of these editorial decisions detract from

characteristic, possibly intentional features of Lautréamont’s work.
Chapter six then analyzes the post-structuralist conceptualization of
“the text” by way of Tel Quel’s understanding of it. In this chapter, I
explore the ways that Tel Quel imitates Lautréamont’s style in order to
reveal his transformative, revolutionary project. I also demonstrate the
limitations posed by Tel Quel’s vision of a liberated, conceptualized
text, especially given Lautréamont’s obscurity.
I begin with “Lautréamontage,” a short chapter on the imagined
portraits of Lautréamont from 1896 to 1970, that introduces some
problems that traverse all three periods: assimilation of Lautréamont
with other poets, with the portraitist himself, or with Lautréamont’s
protagonist, Maldoror. In the conclusion, I analyze a curious 1971
musical performance piece by John Cage, the American avant-garde
composer, called “Les Chants de Maldoror pulvérisés par l’assistance
même” in order to demonstrate how the manipulation of Maldoror
extends beyond Europe and how, with music, Cage has best been able
to capture Lautréamont’s legacy.
In 1967, the Tel Quel group poet Marcelin Pleynet summarized
the Lautréamont myth best when he stated that “les Chants de
Maldoror ne parlent pas, ils font parler” [do not talk, they make you
talk].19 Or in Roland Barthes’s terms, one might say Pleynet
considered Maldoror a “texte de jouissance” [thrilling text].20
Pleynet’s remark reveals an implicit tendency of Lautréamont’s
critics, and perhaps of all literary critics: writing about Lautréamont is
illusive because a critic’s imagination blurs the line between work and
criticism. Every portrait of Lautréamont is to varying degrees a self-
portrait.
When historians find documentation about Ducasse’s otherwise
mysterious life, they eagerly display it. This partially explains why
different facts and miscalculations have determined Ducasse’s
biography since 1890. The presentation of Ducasse varies in age,
demeanor, intelligence, talent, mental stability, physical health,
political engagement, sexual orientation, and so on, according to both
19
Pleynet, Lautréamont par lui-même, 24.
20
Roland Barthes, Le Plaisir du texte in Œuvres complètes, 5 vols. (Paris: Seuil,
2002), 4: 220. In French, the term jouissance can mean both enjoyment and sexual
climax.
fact and fiction. Thus, I have tried to follow the most up to date
biography, Jean-Jacques Lefrère’s, Isidore Ducasse, auteur des
Chants de Maldoror par le comte de Lautréamont (1988) and his
Lautréamont (2008).
Finally, a disclaimer about naming the author. Which works
should be considered Lautréamont’s and which should be considered
those of Isidore Ducasse? Some editors and critics distinguish
Lautréamont (or le comte de Lautréamont), the author of Les Chants
de Maldoror, from Isidore Ducasse, the author of the Poésies. Some
avoid the problem by referring to the scripteur or écrivain as opposed
to naming him. Others alternate without apparent pattern (e.g. Pleynet,
who refers to Ducasse’s letters as Lautréamont’s notes, while
maintaining that the pseudonym is a cover-up). Though I may also
confuse the two, I prefer Lautréamont as the author of Maldoror and
Isidore Ducasse as everything else, except for the narrator of Les
Chants de Maldoror who is called “the narrator.” The protagonist
Maldoror should not be confused with any of these names, of course,
but he has often been, as we shall see in what follows.
Given that the Tel Quel and post-structuralist movements are now
becoming historicized, a new approach to the Lautréamont myth is in
order. By tracing Lautréamont’s legend through editions and reception
of his work, broader questions about criticism and interpretation arise,
such as: Does influence necessarily entail exploitation? How
important is an author and authorial intention? Does an author’s very
absence better suit a critic’s motives? Perhaps Ducasse anticipated the
critic’s impact on his fame, as this oft-quoted plea from one of his
letters affirms: “ce que je désire avant tout, c’est être jugé par la
critique, et, une fois connu, ça ira tout seul” [What I desire above all is
to be judged by the critics, and once known, it’ll be plain sailing].21
21
OC, 306 [Mal, 258].
Lautréamontage:
Imaginary Portraits of Lautréamont
I do not paint a portrait to look like the

subject, rather does the person grow to
look like his portrait.
— Salvador Dalí
When Félix Vallotton was asked to illustrate Remy de

Gourmont’s 1896 Livre des Masques, to create a face to match each
unique detail of the era’s symbolist writers, perhaps the most difficult
portrait was that of Lautréamont. Without a photograph or
biographical clues, the enigmatic Lautréamont was a man without a
face, whose physical features could only be conjectured from his
poetry. Unbeknownst to Vallotton, this first imagined portrait of
Lautréamont would set the standard for many years to come.
Both visual and verbal portraits of Lautréamont privilege an
interest in authorship, a desire to recognize a face behind the work.
Though they may be referential, these fictional portraits have an
essentially unknown referent. Traced over time, they present a
changing vision of the author’s and reader’s function with respect to
Lautréamont’s work. In his 1969 lecture “Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?”
Michel Foucault asserts that “un certain nombre de notions qui sont
aujourd’hui destinées à se substituer au privilège de l’auteur le
bloquent, en fait, et esquivent ce qui devrait être dégagé” [a certain
number of notions that are intended to replace the privileged position
of the author actually seem to preserve that privilege and suppress the
real meaning of his disappearance].1 The fictional portraits of
Lautréamont from 1896 to the present day provide a concrete example
of Foucault’s claim; they preserve Lautréamont’s existence in spite of
his absence, revealing the intolerability of an anonymous author.
A year after Chants de Maldoror was printed, Ducasse died in
Paris, alone. Though his remains were lost, a death certificate was
1
Michel Foucault, “Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?” in Dits et Écrits, 2 vols. (Paris:
Gallimard, 1994), 1:793-4. The translation is from “What is An Author?” in The
Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 103.
found, stating that he was born in Uruguay and died from unknown
causes at 8 a.m. on November 24, 1870. Not until fifteen years later
did critics begin to speculate that Les Chants de Maldoror was the
creation of a madman, a genius or, as some hoped, both. In 1890, the
devout and divisive Léon Bloy declared that a pitifully insane person
was speaking in Maldoror and was so terrifying that his work acted as
a prophylactic against madness. Léon Genonceaux, however, the
editor of the 1890 edition of Les Chants de Maldoror, investigated to
find the real man who authored a monster. Seeking a physical
description of the poet, he went to the poem’s first editor, Albert
Lacroix, and received what was for years the first and only
description: “C’était un grand jeune homme brun, imberbe, nerveux,
rangé et travailleur” [He was a tall young man with brown hair,
cleanshaven, highly-strung, tidy and industrious].2 Since this first
meager description, Lautréamont’s face has been subject to more than
a century of composite sketches.
The following portraits, shown in chronological order, represent
an imagined author based on various expectations of him.3 Some are
visual translations of verbal descriptions, usually based on the cliché
of mad genius, while some are pure fantasy usually deriving from
association with other poets, self-depiction, or from Lautréamont’s
poem itself. Others, such as those by Man Ray and Cabu, speak to the
larger, more theoretical issues involved in the iconography of an
author. These two portraits address the fracture between Lautréamont
and his image by calling attention to it.
The conventionally figurative portraits of Lautréamont illustrate
how both the symbolists and surrealists respectively deal with
questions of mimesis on the one hand and originality on the other. By
Gourmont’s definition, the symbolist emphasizes those particularities
that distinguish him from other men.4 To Gourmont, unique traits of
every individual from the god-like to the criminal are interesting, so
long as they are distinctive. The surrealists likewise preached non-
conformism, but in a more collective way. In addition to his
2
Léon Genonceaux, ed., Les Chants de Maldoror, by le comte de Lautréamont (Paris:
Genonceaux, 1890), v [Mal, 273].
3
The portraits included here are by no means exhaustive.
4
Remy de Gourmont, Le Livre des Masques, 1896 (Paris: Mercure de France, 1963),
13.
Lautréamontage: Imaginary Portraits of Lautréamont 27
imaginative poetry and eradication of stylistic conventions,

Lautréamont fit the profile for both groups because of his mystery,
and because the particularities of his life could be only fantastically
inferred from his poem. What must the face look like of the author of
a poem as shocking and original as Maldoror? Paradoxically, his
individuality is often not so original at all, since his portraits not only
bear strong resemblance to other poets but also to other imaginary
portraits of him.
Vallotton, for example, later claimed that his first fictional
portrait of Lautréamont from 1896 was pure fantasy (Fig. I.1).
Figure I.1 Felix Vallotton, Lautréamont
It can be assumed that Vallotton had either read fragments from

Maldoror, heard the speculation of his madness, or at least read parts
of Gourmont’s verbal portrait of Lautréamont which begins thus:
“C’était un jeune homme d’une originalité furieuse et inattendue, un
génie malade et même franchement un génie fou” [He was a young
man of frenetic and unexpected originality, a mad genius, and frankly
even a maniacal genius].5 The two salient features of the portrait are
the bags under the eyes and the cleft chin. The eyes suggest a visual
translation of Gourmont’s description: they are sullen with sickness,
debauchery or fatigue, and his eyebrows are lowered in deep thought;
all are stereotypes of the mad genius cliché. What is less explicable is
the cleft chin but, given Vallotton’s graphic simplicity, it is an easy
way to give Lautréamont a distinguishing and original feature. On the
other hand, perhaps it resembles Lord Byron’s cleft chin, in which
case it is not original at all. The shadow of a mustache alludes to the
poet’s youth. His hair, moreover, is tousled in romantic distress and
recedes slightly on his especially broad forehead. The ironic effect of
the portrait is that Vallotton makes Lautréamont resemble another
unique genius: the young Edgar Allan Poe.
Around the same time of Vallotton’s portrait, Lautréamont’s
image appeared in Latin America where Ruben Darío, a Nicaraguan
modernista poet, wrote a book much like Gourmont’s called Los
Raros published in Argentina in 1896. Darío’s title suggests his
concern with those whose eccentricity and rebelliousness are to be
prized. In his discursive portrait, Darío portrays Lautréamont as
melancholic, comparing him to Job:
Like Job, he might exclaim: ‘My soul is weary of my life; I will

leave my complaint upon myself, I will speak in the bitterness of
my soul.’ But ‘Job’ means ‘he who weeps’; Job wept, yet poor
Lautréamont does not. His book is a satanic breviary, impregnated
with sadness and melancholy.6
Darío’s Los Raros and Enrique Ochoa’s portrait from the 1918
Mundo Latino edition of Los Raros, highlight two important problems
in representations of Lautréamont (Fig. I.2). First, Ochoa’s portrait is
clearly an echo of Vallotton’s, from the three-quarter profile to the
cleft chin, unruly hair and youthful skin, demonstrating that his
portrait derives from the illusory features created by his predecessor.
Second, they both assign an auto-biographical trait to the Chants.
Darío makes the mistake of confusing Maldoror, the hero, with
5
Ibid., 83.
6
Ruben Darío, Selected Writings, trans. Andrew Hurley, Greg Simon, and Steven F.
White (London: Penguin Classics, 2005), 430.
Figure I.2 Enrique Ochoa, Lautréamont
Lautréamont, the author, adding melancholy to the list of

Lautréamont’s imagined features. Ochoa renders this quality in
Lautréamont’s pensive eyes and frowning lips, translating melancholy
with a sadder, more morose version of the poet than Vallotton’s. In
this case, the romantic fallacy that the artist resembles his work, a
tradition in France dating back to the vidas and razos of the
troubadours, is exported to South America.
Another portrait from South America, dated 1925, shows the
ways in which imaginary portraits of Lautréamont had not only
become popular, but also profitable. After the surrealists’ revival of
Lautréamont in 1920, two researchers, Alvaro and Gervasio Guillot-
Munoz, returned to Ducasse’s native Uruguay, hoping to find some
biographical traces for their upcoming book on Lautréamont and Jules
Laforgue. A man from Montevideo, who was born eight years after
Ducasse died, claimed that his grandmother had been the Ducasses’
servant, and declared that he had a photo of Lautréamont. The
researchers described the profile of a pensive and beardless young
man, with angular, determined traits. Commissioned to reproduce the
portrait for the 1925 Lautréamont et Laforgue, Adolfo Pastor drafted

this portrait which he later confessed was, like Vallotton’s, pure
fantasy (Fig. I.3).
Figure I.3 Adolfo Pastor, Lautréamont
Lautréamont’s beardless face and intense expression resemble the

two previous portraits, perpetuating the pensive motif, but the
distinguishing feature here is obviously Lautréamont’s receding
hairline and deep facial lines, making him appear more serious and
significantly older than the other portraits. Pastor’s age-progressed
image seems to make Lautréamont outlive the real Isidore Ducasse,
who actually died at twenty-four, revealing that the idea of
Lautréamont had taken on its own life.
A contrasting vision is Dalí’s portrait of Lautréamont from 1937,
obtained by his paranoiac-critical method (Fig. I.4). Entitled
“Imaginary Portrait of Lautréamont at the Age of Nineteen, Obtained
by the Paranoiac-Critical Method,” this 535 x 362 mm portrait
appeared for the first time in 1937. It was later used in the Corti
edition of Lautréamont’s Œuvres complètes in 1938, the same year as

the illustrated surrealist GLM edition.
Figure I.4 Salvador Dalí, Imaginary Portrait of

Lautréamont at the Age of Nineteen, Obtained
by the Paranoiac-Critical Method
© Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí,
Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2013.
This portrait is characteristic of Dalí’s method in that

Lautréamont is presented by his delirious associations and inter-
pretative qualities, but not by any kind of rational knowledge, as the
other imaginary portraits above might suggest. In 1932, when Dalí
suddenly saw paranoid hallucinations in Jean-François Millet’s
Angélus, they became “‘subitement’ pour moi l’œuvre picturale la
plus troublante, la plus énigmatique, la plus dense, la plus riche en
pensées inconscientes qui ait jamais été” [suddenly, for me, the most
troubling pictorial work there ever was, the most enigmatic, the
densest, and the richest in unconscious thoughts], and he endeavored
to systematize the sensation.7 According to Dalí, objects have minimal

meaning in themselves but, when they are viewed, the mind conjures
phantom images which are the result of unconscious acts. One famous
example of the 1935 visage paranoïaque serves as a pretext for the
myriad of associations that derive from it. It depicts an image of a hut,
which, when turned on its side, resembles a face. To André Breton,
the face resembled that of the Marquis de Sade, whereas to Dalí, it
resembled that of Breton himself.
To Dalí, a less familiar object or image provides a greater
potential for meaning:
Leur possibilité concrète de néologisme s’impose par l’extrême

originalité globale et analytique et la bizarrerie extrême de leur
aspect délirant. Le sentiment de ‘jamais vu’ caractérisant au
premier chef de telles images m’avait décidé à les transcrire
immédiatement pour les utiliser dans mes tableaux.
[Their real possibility for neologism comes in to play through their

total and extreme analytical originality and the extreme weirdness
of their freakish look. The feeling of ‘never- before-seen’ which
characterizes such images first and foremost led me to transcribe
them immediately for use in my paintings.]8
Accordingly, Dalí’s image of Lautréamont at nineteen is also an

optical illusion, based on Lautréamont’s spiritual associations with
Arthur Rimbaud. Lautréamont is depicted as the perennial enigmatic
shadow of his twin brother. Lautréamont shares the face of Rimbaud’s
famous portrait, but the erased hair and tie invite a host of
associations. The jeu de lumière renders Lautréamont angelic,
reminding the viewer that despite the somber and cruel content of his
poem, Lautréamont was not only a young poet, but conceivably an
innocent one.
As these portraits suggest, Lautréamont is at once whatever the
artist wants him to be and a collective image of Les Chants de
Maldoror. Two more examples of these imaginary portraits offer a
humorous, self-reflexive approach to the association of Lautréamont
with his hero, Maldoror; physiognomy of mad genius; age progression
7
Salvador Dalí, Oui (Paris: Éditions Denoël/Gonthier, 1971), 25.
8
Ibid., 37.
similar to that of forensics; and association of Lautréamont with other

writers, such as Lord Byron, Poe, or Rimbaud. Rather than imagine a
realistic face to the mysterious man, these two portraits instead focus
on his mystery.
Figure I.5 Man Ray, L’Énigme d’Isidore Ducasse

© 2013 Man Ray Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY / ADAGP, Paris
Photo Credit: ©Tate, London 2013 Image Credit: L’Énigme d’Isidore Ducasse,
1920, remade 1972, Man Ray (1890-1976). Tate Collection.
First, Man Ray’s 1920 sculpture, now lost, reveals an unusual

approach to Lautréamont’s image (Fig. I.5). Composed of a sewing
machine, wool, and string, and remade in 1972 at 355 x 605 x 335
mm, the sculpture was originally designed to be photographed and
then destroyed. Man Ray’s sculpture therefore allowed the artist to
maintain complete control over the spectator’s point of view. Once the
desired effect was achieved, the object was permitted to return to its
functional context. In this piece, an unidentifiable object is wrapped in
a horse-blanket and secured with a piece of rope. Rather than attempt
to give a human face to Lautréamont, Man Ray plays an intricate
game with the viewer. Instead of a representation in the traditional

sense, the object is a kind of ironic portrait of Lautréamont’s famous
metaphor, used as a synecdoche to represent Lautréamont himself.
This metaphor is probably the best-known of Les Chants de Maldoror,
and comes from canto 6, chapter 1:
Je me connais à lire l’âge dans les lignes physiognomoniques du

front: il a seize ans et quatre mois! Il est beau comme la rétractilité
des serres des oiseaux rapaces; ou encore, comme l’incertitude des
mouvements musculaires dans les plaies des parties molles de la
région cervicale postérieure; ou plutôt, comme ce piége à rats
perpétuel, toujours retendu par l’animal pris, qui peut prendre seul
des rongeurs indéfiniment, et fonctionner même caché sous la
paille; et surtout, comme la rencontre fortuite sur une table de
dissection d’une machine à coudre et d’un parapluie!
[I know all about telling age from the physiognomical lines of the
forehead: he is sixteen years and four months old! He is fair as the
retractility of the claws of birds of prey; or again, as the
uncertainty of the muscular movements in wounds in the soft parts
of the lower cervical region; or rather, as that perpetual rattrap
always reset by the trapped animal, which by itself can catch
rodents indefinitely and work even when hidden under straw; and
above all, as the chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing-
machine and an umbrella!]9
The surrealists found inspiration in this passage to liberate themselves

from traditional literary constraints and from classical thinking. This
kind of “transcended contradiction,” as André Breton put it, was a
means of achieving a total disruption of sensibility by routing all
rational habits. It became a model for revelation of the merveilleux in
everyday life, of the beauty in chance. Later, Lautréamont’s
contradictory combinations essentially defined the surrealist image as
the bringing together of two more or less disparate realities.
Man Ray puts more into play than the juxtaposition of unusual
objects and words, however. First, he juggles the words in the title
with his so-called simple object to test the viewer’s knowledge of the
poem. L’Énigme d’Isidore Ducasse functions as a pun, referring to
both a riddle and an enigma, to play on both the object itself and on
the poet’s real name. To understand the object, and thus to get the
9
OC, 227 [Mal, 193].
joke, would be to understand its title, and to infer that the name of the
man, Isidore Ducasse, refers explicitly to the work of the writer,
Lautréamont. Second, Man Ray creates interplay between the object’s
form and its title. That the vague form of this enigmatic object alludes
to a sewing machine is also a test of the viewer’s knowledge of the
poem. If well-versed in Lautréamont’s poetry, viewers will suspect
that the enigmatic, hidden object is a sewing machine. Man Ray also
alludes to the umbrella, however, by suggesting that this blanket hides
much more than one single object.
Even if viewers are unfamiliar with Lautréamont’s famous
metaphor, they will at least recognize a proper name from the title and
seek a human form in the wrapped object. Since it is composed largely
of the contours of physical form, it could be a human-like object, a
profile of a person, or a head jutting out from the table. Because it
hides a mystery, the portrait evokes a sense of alienation as well as
self-sufficiency. The viewer wants to identify at least something from
its anonymity. Man Ray, then, highlights the mystery of Lautréamont
instead of imagining a face.
Like other portraits, Man Ray’s Lautréamont refers to a person
and suggests corporeal elements. In a certain way, it is similar to the
more life-like portraits in that it responds to a lack of information by
creating a fantasy of Ducasse. While the other portraits inscribe a
physiognomy to someone who could have written a work like
Maldoror, Man Ray’s portrait instead highlights the poem itself.
Significantly, the other portraits include the pseudonym in their titles,
erasing the real person (Ducasse) in favor of his image (Lautréamont).
Man Ray’s portrait, on the other hand, explicitly returns to the
supposed real name Isidore Ducasse. It depicts the man and his work
in the form of mystery, bondage, and concealment.
The second example of a self-reflexive portrait was created by
the cartoonist and caricaturist Jean Cabut, known as Cabu, and
exhibits more recent stages of reader-oriented visions of Lautréamont
(Fig. I.6). It comes from an article in Le Monde des Livres from
November 1967.10 Though it was created well after the symbolist or
surrealist movements, this portrait allows us to see four earlier
10
See Raymond Jean, “Présence de Lautréamont,” Le Monde des Livres, November 1,
1967, 4-5. The composite sketch is based on the four imaginary portraits in Pleynet,
Lautréamont par lui-même, 9-10.
portraits in one, and the collage effect underscores the vision of

Lautréamont as a collectively imagined identity based on our
expectations of him, while still highlighting his absence.
Figure I.6 Cabu, Lautréamont
As the title claims, this is a portrait-robot, much like the identikit, or

composite picture of a person whom the police wish to identify,
assembled from features described by witnesses. The witnesses here
are the other portraitists of Lautréamont, and the composite picture is
the unidentifiable Lautréamont. The upper left quarter of the collage is
filled with Vallotton’s tortured genius from 1896. The upper right
portion of the image is based on the hair from another portrait by
Hatim Elmekki, a Tunisian painter whose drawing first appeared in
August, 1947 in the journal Combat, to accompany an article by
Maurice Nadeau. It shares evident similarities with the famous portrait
of Rimbaud, shown above.11 The lower left is Pastor’s portrait from
11
Elmekki’s portrait is reproduced in Pleynet, Lautréamont par lui-même, 10.
1925 of an older, more aggressive Lautréamont. Finally, the lower

right represents Dalí’s imaginary cherubic youth from 1937.
Cabu doctored the four portraits to give this one an identity all its
own. He altered the gaze of Lautréamont so that he no longer looks
directly at the viewer, as in Vallotton’s portrait, but rather gazes off to
the side to match Dalí’s impression of him, suggesting a more
absorbed expression. The profile is modified from Pastor’s portrait to
turn him outward toward the viewer. The eyebrows, however, do not
match up, and while one looks critical, the other gives an impression
of youth, innocence, and wonder. Though he reshapes the originals,
this portrait works as a whole because it both incorporates the
collective nature of Lautréamont’s image, and accentuates the
obscurity of it. Each of these portraits carries validity as a compiled,
fanciful vision of the mysterious Lautréamont.
The date of Cabu’s composite sketch is significant to
Lautréamont’s evolution because he had been resurrected in that
period by students of structuralism in Paris, this time as the subject of
trans-historical, linguistic analysis. Barthes’s “La Mort de l’auteur”
was published the following year, and Foucault later discussed the
“author function” in “Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur” in 1969. It is no
coincidence, then, that some of their students such as Julia Kristeva
and Philippe Sollers would embrace Lautréamont, this time for the
sake of his absence. Cabu’s composite sketch illustrates a new, almost
criminal, notion of the author. By dismantling the mythical grasp that
the surrealists had on the poet and denouncing the traps they had
fallen into by what Sollers called their “verbal inflation,” the new
post-structuralist critics proposed a complete erasure of the author in
favor of scientific analysis of his text.12 Curiously, though it may be
composite, Ducasse’s face still matters.
For the symbolists a model of individuality, for the surrealists a
model of liberation, Lautréamont became for the critics of the late
sixties a specimen for their trans-historical, reader-oriented approach.
In recent years, the trend of visual portraits of Ducasse has been
supplanted by fictional biographies of him. These works that aim to
reinvent or resurrect Lautréamont, such as Camille Brunel’s Vie
imaginaire de Lautréamont (2011), Philippe Sollers’s Les Voyageurs
12
Sollers, Logiques, 250.
du temps (2009), and Ruy Câmara’s Les Derniers Chants d’Automne:

La vie mystérieuse et sombre du Comte de Lautréamont (2009), reveal
a revitalized concern for Lautréamont’s mysterious biography. Given
that Lautréamont left few traces of his identity and was unknown in
his lifetime, one might say that the real Isidore Ducasse matters little,
only his work is of value. But the composite portraits suggest
otherwise. They remind us first that Ducasse’s image is not complete-
ly arbitrary. There is at least some similarity to the imaginary portraits
and it is, in one way or another, based on the poem itself. Lautréamont
is intrinsically related to his poem, a kind of physical representation of
the author’s style: delirious, aggressive, incongruous, and marvelous.
They also illustrate that even as each portrait marks the absence of
Isidore Ducasse, the man, it presents a new image of the “author,” as
each movement and each generation sees him.
I
FIN DE SIÈCLE
Chapter One
Outsiders at the Fin de Siècle
The surrealists may not have discovered Lautréamont, but they

did make him famous. After the Second World War a desire to
redirect interest away from surrealism, and to prove that
Lautréamont’s influence ranged wider than the surrealists made
believe, led many detractors of the movement to investigate
Lautréamont’s status during the late nineteenth century. As existen-
tialism began to dominate French literature, for example, Albert
Camus expressed his disapproval of surrealism in a descriptively
titled essay, “Lautréamont et la banalité”: “les blasphèmes et le
conformisme de Lautréamont illustrent également cette malheureuse
contradiction qui se résout avec lui dans la volonté de n’être rien”
[Lautréamont’s blasphemy and conformism also illustrate this
unfortunate contradiction which ultimately comes down to his desire
to be nothing].1 Though Lautréamont was his direct target here,
Camus was actually criticizing the surrealists for forms that he
considered “les plus liberticides de l’action” [the most hostile to
freedom to act].2 Shortly after, Maurice Saillet began his inves-
tigation of the “Inventeurs de Maldoror,” published sequentially in
Les Lettres nouvelles starting in April 1954. Accusing the surrealists
of a “fatras lyrique et romanesque à peu près inextricable” [rather
inextricable lyrical and fictional morass], Saillet advocated a return
to the nineteenth-century “inventors” of Lautréamont. In these
1
Albert Camus, L’Homme révolté (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), 107.
2
Ibid., 107. Camus’s rebuke initiated an on-going dispute between Breton and
Camus, published in Arts in 1951. Breton’s article, “Sucre jaune,” a title which
comes from a line in Ducasse’s Poésies, reproached Camus for his indecency: “On
ne saurait trop s’indigner que des écrivains jouissant de la faveur publique
s’emploient à ravaler ce qui est mille fois plus grand qu’eux” [It is scandalous that
writers who find favor with the public should apply themselves to belittle what is a
thousand times greater than they are]. Breton, Œuvres complètes, 4 vols. (Paris:
Gallimard, 1988), 3: 913. The translation is from Michel Parmentier and Jacqueline
d’Amboise, Free Rein (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press: 1995), 246.
essays, Saillet proposed to release Lautréamont from what he

dubbed the surrealist “sequestration” of him.3
In 1939, one of these inventors himself, the Belgian symbolist
Valère Gille, announced that a group of young Belgian poets had
actually discovered Lautréamont in 1885, after which, he said, they
had sent copies of Maldoror to several important literary figures in
France. A closer look at some of these nineteenth-century inventors
reveals how they helped determine Lautréamont’s image and
transmit his work long before the surrealist period. Les Chants de
Maldoror was initially promoted by a trailblazing group of poets
from La Jeune Belgique, a literary journal that espoused two
formulas: l’art pour l’art and le culte de la forme. At the time,
Belgium was only beginning to develop a national literature. Young
Belgian writers, Walloon and Flemish alike, thus turned to French
writers as role models, some of whom had sought refuge in Belgium
from draconian French laws. By discovering an unknown French
poet, then transforming him into a post-romantic, partly decadent,
would-be symbolist, the poets of La Jeune Belgique co-opted
Lautréamont’s work so that they could be recognized by the Parisian
literary world. First, in 1885, they chose a specific stanza from
Maldoror to reprint in their magazine that strategically placed them
in the middle of a debate over Belgian versus French literature.
Second, by disseminating Lautréamont’s work to Paris, these
Belgian poets forged an entry into Parisian literary circles.
Although La Jeune Belgique succeeded in achieving recog-
nition, French reactions to Maldoror were conflicted. From 1886 to
1891, literary disputes in Paris both perpetuated the legend of
Lautréamont as a mad genius and ensured his notoriety. Critics of
Maldoror, in particular the fervent Catholic Léon Bloy and the
influential Remy de Gourmont, framed their interpretations
according to their own perception of the symbolist movement. Bloy,
who targeted Lautréamont as a symbol of what he believed to be
chronic pessimism in literature, succeeded in becoming a kind of
3
Maurice Saillet, Les Inventeurs de Maldoror (Paris: Le Temps qu’il fait, 1992),
24-25. Saillet is best known for his participation in the 1949 literary hoax of
Rimbaud’s Chasse spirituelle, in which he and Pascal Pia published a poem whose
authorship they attributed to Rimbaud. André Breton was first to publicly object to
the poem’s authenticity.
Outsiders at the Fin de Siècle 43
outcast himself. Gourmont, on the other hand, evaluated

Lautréamont not by the way he fit in to a literary system, but rather
by the newness and originality of his prose. As a marginal figure,
Lautréamont became a paradox: the peripheral Belgians sought
recognition through him; among the Parisians, Bloy became an
outcast himself, and Gourmont perpetuated outcast status as an
aesthetic value.
Whereas the interpretive flexibility of Lautréamont’s work
appealed to the surrealist aesthetic, it prevented agreement among
critics at the fin de siècle. Just as symbolist writers, including
Gourmont, advocated individuality in their own literary creations,
they also highlighted it in their interpretations of Maldoror. Saillet
and other critics such as Frans de Haes and Michel Philip have
identified many of the main players in the discovery of
Lautréamont.4 None, however, examines the possible connections
between these “inventors” and Lautréamont’s work or the internal
relationships that ended by promoting Les Chants de Maldoror at the
end of the nineteenth century. Moreover, critics like Robert Frickx
and historians like de Haes and René Fayt have traditionally
discussed the possible influence of Lautréamont on the later poets of
La Jeune Belgique, such as Maurice Maeterlinck.5 Less often
considered, however, is the fact that these poets first came into
contact not through Lautréamont’s complete work, but via one
selected excerpt reproduced in La Jeune Belgique. A more pertinent
question is therefore the inverse: the influence of the poets of La
Jeune Belgique on the image of Lautréamont and the Chants de
Maldoror. For this reason, Saillet’s term “inventors” is appropriate
because it conveys both discovery and fabrication.
4
Saillet, Inventeurs; Frans de Haes, Images de Lautréamont: Isidore Ducasse,
comte de Lautréamont: Histoire d’une renommée et état de la question (Gembloux:
J. Duculot, 1970); Frans de Haes, “Lautréamont, ‘La Jeune Belgique’ et après,” in
France-Belgique (1848-1914): Affinités-Ambiguïtés; Actes du Colloque des 7,8, et 9
mai 1996, ed. Marc Quaghebeur and Nicole Savy (Bruxelles: Éditions Labor, 1997),
273-287; Michel Philip, Lectures de Lautréamont (Paris: A. Colin, 1971).
5
Robert Frickx, “L’infleunce de Lautréamont sur les poètes de ‘La Jeune
Belgique,’” in Regards sur les lettres françaises de Belgique, ed. Paul Delsemme et
al. (Bruxelles: André de ache, 1976), 145-155; De Haes, “Lautréamont”; René Fayt,
Auguste Poulet-Malassis.
Young Belgium in 1885
Works such as Paul Verlaine’s 1884 Les Poètes maudits suggest

that outcast status was connected to a developing aesthetic by the
end of the nineteenth century. Of equal importance, however, is the
extent to which this outcast aesthetic functions as a marketing
technique. The poets at La Jeune Belgique, who invented the first
image of Lautréamont as an outcast and a mad genius, were some of
the first to take part in this popular paradox of being in by being out.
On a superficial level, they disseminated Lautréamont’s work by
reprinting one stanza of Les Chants de Maldoror (I, 11) and sending
copies of the unknown work to French writers with whom they
wanted to forge contacts. But the results of this gesture are
foundational to the early myth of Lautréamont. Though the excerpt
they chose to reprint seems innocuous, it was in fact a tool deployed
to promote their own literary identity.
Lautréamont is an outcast made by outcasts for outcasts, for the
promotion of maudit as a positive value. In discovering and dis-
seminating him in 1885, the poets of La Jeune Belgique were also
inventing and marketing themselves. According to Paul Aron, the
rise of the symbolist movement in Belgium can be directly related to
the peripherality of the young Belgian poets.6 Additionally, by using
the illegitimacy of outsiders or unknowns like Lautréamont to their
advantage, these young poets attempted to conquer a peripheral
movement in Paris, the center of French literary culture. With
Lautréamont, the Jeune Belgique poets offered an alliance between
Parisian writers and themselves. By the same token, Lautréamont’s
unknown status as a poet fit into a new fashion of obscurity. In the
wake of romanticism’s giant masters, and following Verlaine’s
Poètes maudits, generations of young poets were inspired to seek
new sources of inspiration or, in Michel Décaudin’s words, “se
cherche sur les thèmes de la modernité et de la décadence et semble
attendre, auprès de Baudelaire, des maîtres à admirer” [to try to find
6
See Paul Aron, Les écrivains belges et le socialisme, 1880-1913 (Brussels: Labor,
1997); “Pour une description sociologique du symbolisme belge,” in Le mouvement
symboliste en Belgique, ed. Anna Soncini Fratta (Bologna: Beloeuil, 1990), 55-69;
Paul Aron and Pierre-Yves Soucy, Les Revues littéraires belges de langue française
de 1830 à nos jours (Brussels: Labor, 1998).
themselves through themes of modernity and decadence, seeming to

be waiting for masters to admire in the vein of Baudelaire].7
From the point of view of a small Belgian literary journal,
reinventing Lautréamont as a maudit was a means of acquiring
legitimacy within late nineteenth-century literary culture. As Aron
suggests, young Belgian writers could turn disadvantage into
advantage in three ways: first, by investing in a literary production
no longer saturated by the dominant center; second, by offering
material aid to other marginal authors; and finally, by homing in on a
specific thematic. By diffusing a particular vision of Lautréamont’s
work, the poets of La Jeune Belgique, pioneers of a relatively new
concept of “Belgian literature,” wielded their marginality as an
advantage. Lautréamont functioned as a passport to acceptance
among the majority culture.
In 1874, Lautréamont’s first editor Albert Lacroix passed the
unsold copies of Les Chants de Maldoror to another Brussels-based
editor named Jean-Baptiste Rozez who, for whatever reason, gave
them a new cover page, but also failed to publish them in their
entirety. By the summer of 1885, Rozez, who was also publisher of
the Brussels literary review, La Jeune Belgique, had died. His widow
discovered the copies of a work that might pique the interest of the
young and rebellious poets, and offered them to the group’s leader,
Max Waller. The latter then presented the work to his friends at Café
Sésino where they sang and read passages aloud, laughed and
declared Lautréamont a madman. Iwan Gilkin took it home,
exclaimed that it was “fou peut-être mais génial” [crazy maybe, but
terrific], and, in the October 1885 issue of the journal, La Jeune
Belgique re-printed the 11th stanza of the first canto. So the story
goes as recounted over fifty years later by Valère Gille, a member of
the group who was not actually at the café the day when
Lautréamont was reportedly read aloud. Like most accounts of
Lautréamont’s discovery, even this one might be invented since it
was recounted a half-century later by one of the youngest members
of the journal.
The core of the Jeune Belgique had been formed in 1878 at the
University of Louvain. It started as a dispute between opposing
7
Paul Verlaine, Poètes maudits, ed. Michel Décaudin (Paris: Sedes, 1982), 8.
journals: La Semaine des Etudiants, founded by Émile Verhaeren,

Georges Rodenbach, Albert Giraud and Iwan Gilkin and Le Type
founded by Max Waller. After a fight ended publication of both
journals, the teams joined to create La Jeune Belgique, a significant
title which connotes assimilation by its obvious echo of the Parisian
journal La Jeune France from the same year 1878. Originally, the
founders considered naming the journal La Jeune France belge, a
title which reveals their affinity for a French model of poetry over a
unique national identity. La Jeune Belgique used its audacity to
forge a new literature in Belgium and became the best known
literary magazine of the period in a country which, before 1880, was
considered a cultural desert.8 Thanks in large part to the French
editors and writers who had come to Belgian soil to escape
prosecution and to publish an array of contraband books, the literary
climate of the second half of the nineteenth century in Belgium was
described by Camille Lemonnier as a sort of “half and half
pittoresque,” the lively spirit of French outcasts or “proscrits” in the
safe and more simple life of the Belgian capital.9 Harboring political
exiles and literary scofflaws, Belgium had gained certain renown
with the practice of publishing obscene French literature following
the contrefaçon period. The Jeune Belgique poets wanted to ex-
tricate themselves from this image, all the while profiting from it.
The roots of a national Belgian literature were directly tied to
cosmopolitanism.
From the beginning, La Jeune Belgique’s motto, “Soyons nous”
[be ourselves]—which later became “Ne crains” [don’t fear]—meant
finding a place for Belgian poets in the sun of French literature. For
the autocratic Max Waller, it was decidedly not to be a school of
literature or a form of partisan nationalism. Inspired mostly by
Lemonnier, together with some French naturalists and Parnassians,
they preached a double formula: l’art pour l’art and le culte de la
forme. Though they considered the deliberate expansion of the
artistic domain and of traditional notions of beauty as one of the
8
See Iwan Gilkin’s memoirs, “Quinze années de littérature,” in La Légende de la
Jeune Belgique, ed. (Bruxelles: Académie Royale de Langue et de Littérature
Françaises, 2000), 5-88.
9
Camille Lemonnier, Une vie d’écrivain: mes souvenirs (Brussels: Labor, 1945),
48; See also Lemonnier’s La Vie belge (Paris: Charpentier, 1905).
greatest glories of their century, they insisted that there be a formal

unity to the disorder resulting from such a development. In sum,
their objectives were more conservative than revolutionary: using
the French model, the poets of La Jeune Belgique searched for a
unique contribution of their own. Lautréamont, in this light, appears
a deliberate choice precisely because he was unread, undiscovered,
but still French.
Meanwhile, though they sought acceptance from the Paris
literary scene, the Jeune Belgique poets still had to defend their
position within Belgium against their rival journal l’Art moderne,
which claimed art should serve a social purpose and consequently
promote Belgian nationalism. Lautréamont’s appearance in the
journal was significant: positioned against its rival’s nationalism, La
Jeune Belgique began to actively solicit French contributions from
authors like Charles Buet, Joséphin Péladan, and Joris-Karl
Huysmans.
Although Lautréamont seemed to appear from nowhere, his
place in the symbolist context is calculated. The 11th stanza that was
reprinted in this issue was essentially made to fit their aesthetic. It is
misleading with respect to the original, because the stanza was
named simply “Maldoror.” With no indication that this stanza was
one of many, as the title Les Chants de Maldoror specifies—or even
that it is a poem at all—the excerpt could pass for a short conte
fantastique rather than a stanza from a longer prose poem.
Out of all 60 stanzas, why did they choose this one to reprint?
Characteristic of Les Chants de Maldoror as a whole, stanza 11
reveals a gratuity that renders it comic, what Huysmans charac-
terized as Lautréamont’s “lyrisme bouffe” [comic lyricism]. Yet its
ironic and hyperbolic style might very well have been taken for
macabre by readers of La Jeune Belgique if they had not received
and read a copy of the whole work. It was consequently interpreted
as a serious expression of dark and symbolic mysticism for which
Belgian symbolists were becoming recognized. Like its original
source, the reprinted stanza opens with: “Une famille entoure une
lampe posée sur la table” [A family, seated round a lamp set on the
table].10 Here, Lautréamont exaggerates the “good versus evil”
10
OC, 58 [Mal, 44].
cliché to the point of parody. As Georges Eekhoud later observed in

1925, this passage, steeped in Nordic mythology, resonates with
Goethe’s famous Der Erlkönig.11 The Erlkönig, or king of death, is a
Germanic mythical figure who threatens children. While neither a
lamp nor the domestic atmosphere features in Goethe’s poem, the
kernel of meaning is the same: death and evil pursue life and good.
The whole cliché becomes exaggerated by situating the family in the
evening around a lamp—traditionally a symbol of God—and
Maldoror threatening from the exterior. After Maldoror strangles
Édouard, the exaggeration is pushed to the point of bad taste, and
even absurdity. The child cries out for the help and benediction of a
“father,” either biological or spiritual:
– Mère, il m’étrangle…Père, secourez-moi…Je ne puis plus

respirer…Votre bénédiction!
Un cri d’ironie immense s’est élevé dans les airs. Voyez
comme les aigles, étourdis, tombent du haut des nuages, en roulant
sur eux-mêmes, littéralement fou-droyés par la colonne d’air.
[ – Mother, he’s choking me…Father, help me!... I can no

longer breathe!…Your blessing!
A cry of boundless irony rises up into the skies. See how
eagles fall stunned from the topmost clouds, tumbling over one
another, literally struck down by the column of air.]12
Read alone, the passage appears cruel or even satanic. But a

number of changes made by Lautréamont in successive versions of
the first canto indicate that he was deliberately using exaggeration
for comic effect. Four characters are presented in the first version
(1868) in dramatic exposition: la Mère, l’Enfant, le Père, and
11
Marcel Arland, ed., Le Cas Lautréamont: études et opinions (Paris: R. van den
Berg, 1925), 95. Eekoud writes, “Le passage…révèle beaucoup d’habilité de talent,
de raison; je dirais presque roublardise. Il s’agit d’une agréable paraphrase ou plutôt
d’une nouvelle version de la légende que Goethe utilisa pour son Roi des Aulnes. Le
morceau est on ne peut plus logiquement construit et ordonné” [The passage…
reveals a lot of talent and reason; almost cunning. It’s an enjoyable paraphrase or
rather a new version of the legend used by Goethe for his Erlkönig. The passage
couldn’t be any more logically constructed and organized]. Le Cas Lautréamont, 95.
Der Erlkönig, or le Roi des Aulnes, was translated by Gérard de Nerval, and
published in French in 1868, when Ducasse may have read it.
12
OC, 63-4 [Mal, 49].
Maldoror or La Voix (presumably of Maldoror). In addition, stage

directions are indicated with parentheses, such as “(Les cris
continuent à divers intervalles pendant que parle le père)” [The
screams continue at varying intervals while the father speaks] or
“(on entend dans le lointain des cris prolongés de la douleur la plus
poignante)” [I hear in the distance prolonged screams of the most
poignant anguish].13 The dramaturgic format is removed in the final
version (1869), leaving only dashes to mark dialogue. The directions
become entirely absurd in the final version, whereas in the first
version below, they are simple:
L’ENFANT. – Mère, il m’étrangle…Père, secourez-moi…

Ah!...Je ne puis plus respirer…Votre bénédiction! (Un cri
d’ironie immense s’élève dans les airs.)14
Adding the image of a scream so ironic and powerful that

eagles fall from the clouds in one stunned blow, the final image of
Maldoror’s evil appears completely ridiculous. Exaggeration is also
added in the refrain of the word “cri,” emphasizing the already
clichéd symbol of a Schopenhaueresque scream of angst. “Les cris
continuent à divers intervalles pendant que parle le père” becomes a
refrain repeated four times: “J’entends dans le lointain des cris
prolongés de la douleur la plus poignante.”
The Nordic tone of this issue of La Jeune Belgique is important:
with a collection of poems under the title “Nocturnes” by Iwan
Gilkin, “Sonnet à la nuit” by Emile van Arenberg, and “Demi-Deuil”
by the little-known French poet Edmond Haraucourt, the Northern
mysticism of the stanza chosen from Les Chants de Maldoror fits
perfectly. As Valère Gille wrote in his Memoires, the Jeune Belgique
took to this sort of symbolism with fervor: “On veut toujours être du
dernier bateau en partance pour des îles inconnues” [One always
wants to be on the last boat when headed for unknown islands].15
Northern influences of symbolism, he explains, came naturally to the
Belgians:
13
Ibid., 23-24 [46].
14
Ibid., 27-28.
15
Valère Gille, La Jeune-Belgique au hasard des souvenirs (Bruxelles: Lebègue et
Cie., 1943), 522.
La collaboration si efficace de nos poètes au mouvement

symbolique se peut expliquer aussi et surtout, par la nature
particulière de notre climat. Nous sommes plus au nord que
Paris. La pluie et les brouillards déforment les paysages des
Flandres, comme ceux du pays mosan. Ils leur donnent souvent
un aspect irréel et fantastique. Ceux qui y habitent ont pris le
goût du mystère.
[Our poets’ real contribution to the symbolist movement can be

explained above all by the particular nature of our climate. We
are further north than Paris. The rain and fog distort the Flemish
and Mosan countryside, giving them an unreal and fantastical
appearance. Those who live there have a taste for mystery.]16
Taken out of context, when Lautréamont’s passage is included

with the poems of Northern mystery, its elements of parody and
humor are lost. Not only did the poets of La Jeune Belgique adapt
the mood and tone of the whole piece, but they also got his name
wrong. They made no effort to reveal the author’s real name, as if to
perpetuate his mystique by perpetuating his pseudonym. Moreover,
they strangely demoted him from comte to vicomte de Lautréamont,
promising to reveal more in a forthcoming article on the vicomte.
This article was never written, and Lautréamont seemed to disappear
as quickly as he had appeared.
Why? One critic has written that Lautréamont’s revolutionary
aesthetic could have been a short-lived fascination for the poets, but
did not fit in to their ideal of beauty.17 From this perspective, their
oversight in terms of the genre of the poem makes sense due to its
lack of classifiable form. More likely, the publication of the excerpt
of “Maldoror” was both a deliberate effort to instantiate the Jeune
Belgique’s ideal of a universal, symbolic literature, while also
assimilating with the rising symbolist movement of Paris. After the
famous forerunners of Huysmans’s À rebours (1884) and Verlaine’s
Poètes maudits (1884), the key was to be unique like everybody else.
The most immediate reaction to Lautréamont in France attests to
this. In Jules Destrée’s journal from September 21, 1885, he
qualifies Maldoror as “un étrange bouquin de fou découvert
dernièrement à Bruxelles” [a strange book by a madman discovered
16
Ibid.
17
De Haes, “Lautréamont,” 277.
recently in Brussels]. Only days later, Huysmans wrote to Destrée of

his admiration for Lautréamont, this “bon fol de talent” [crazy
talent], soliciting both an article and more information on the life of
a person who could have written such a strange work as Les Chants
de Maldoror: “J’attends avec impatience un article sur le livre.
J’espère que vous aurez trouvé des renseignements sur la vie de cet
étrange bonhomme, qui a crié l’hymne à la pédérastie avec de belles
phrases” [I’m looking forward to an article on the book. I hope that
you find some information on the life of this strange gentleman, who
proclaimed a hymn to pederasty with such lovely lines].18
If, as most critics agree, the members of La Jeune Belgique are
those who really discovered Lautréamont, their discovery was
inextricably bound to a desire for French recognition and acceptance
of a Belgian view of early symbolism. In this way, they are
foundational figures in Lautréamont’s afterlife, because not only did
they diffuse the work, they also determined or at least influenced the
perception of the poet himself. The poets of La Jeune Belgique may
have been the first with Lautréamont, but were certainly not the last
to employ the popular-outcast paradox as a passport for legitimacy.
These Belgian poets explicitly chose a passage that expressed their
own expanding aesthetic interests as a literary group. Using the
magazine as their vehicle, they adapted Lautréamont’s work to cross
bridges between two literatures at the borders of the mainstream:
Belgian and symbolist.
Literary Pundits in France
Though it is problematic in many ways, Valère Gille’s

retrospective account of the Jeune Belgique’s discovery reveals that
Lautréamont’s return to France had important consequences on his
reputation, particularly from 1886 to 1891. Léon Bloy, a devout
Catholic and one of the Frenchmen to whom the Jeune Belgique had
sent a copy of the Chants, first included a few lines about
Lautréamont in his auto-biographical novel, Le Deséspéré (1886).19
In this work, Bloy attacks the contemporary literary climate and
18
J.-K. Huysmans, Lettres inédites à Jules Destrée (Genève: Librairie Droz, 1967),
52-3.
19
Léon Bloy, Le Désespéré (Paris: Mercure de France, 1943), 39-40.
consequently offended many friends, contributing to his rejection

from popular culture. Then, in 1890, as a new generation of
symbolists espoused originality in art and life and as Léon
Genonceaux prepared a new edition of the Chants de Maldoror,
Bloy returned to Lautréamont in his article, “Le Cabanon de
Prométhée.”20 In it, Bloy insists that he discovered Lautréamont’s
literary value in 1886, but he maintains that Lautréamont’s
pessimism is a sign of literature’s demise. What Bloy interpreted as
serious in the Chants de Maldoror, readers of 1890 were prepared to
read as comic. A battle of interpretations ensued between Bloy and
Remy de Gourmont as representatives of different stages, old and
new, of symbolism.
According to Gille, poets of the Jeune Belgique sent copies of
Les Chants de Maldoror in 1885 to Joséphin Péladan, Bloy, and
Huysmans.21 Most historians agree on these addressees, though the
other recipients of Maldoror have often been debated. According to
Saillet, one can assume that the “derniers grands seigneurs
romantiques” like Jules Amédée Barbey d’Aurevilly, Charles Buet,
and Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam received a copy as well, but to
this day, their reactions to Lautréamont and Maldoror are
unknown.22
The new generation of symbolists in France, including
Gourmont and Alfred Jarry, did not receive one of the copies of
Maldoror sent by the Jeune Belgique in 1885. They did, however,
receive what they considered Bloy’s effete interpretation of it.
Accordingly, they reacted to Bloy by promoting Lautréamont’s
quirky, ironic humor instead of his pessimism, an interpretation
enhanced by Gourmont’s discovery of Ducasse’s Poésies in 1890.
Paradoxically, Bloy’s aggressive insistence on his discovery and his
subsequent rejection from popular culture, Remy de Gourmont’s
advocacy of outcasts, and Genonceaux’s portrayal of Lautréamont as
an unknown genius all determined Lautréamont’s first moments of
fame.
20
Léon Bloy, “Le Cabanon de Prométhée,” La Plume, September 1, 1890, 151-4.
21
Saillet, Inventeurs, 39. In more recent years, there has been a debate as to the
addressors and addressees of these copies.
22
Ibid., 39.
Of the Parisian recipients of Maldoror, Bloy was the first to

publicly mention Lautréamont, but only in a few impassioned lines
from his 1886 Le Désespéré.23 The novel’s aptly named protagonist,
Caïn Marchenoir, is a fictionalized Bloy: a fanatical and beaten-
down writer who can no longer tolerate what he considers to be the
rotten values of his contemporaries. Marchenoir, like Bloy, is
destined for hopelessness and self-destruction. Early in the novel,
before he begins a spiritual cleansing, Marchenoir composes a
genealogy of misanthropic literature, a “littérature des désespérés,”
which includes Baudelaire, Byron, Chateaubriand, Alphonse de
Lamartine, and Alfred de Musset. Marchenoir completes the list with
an extreme example of this kind of literature:
L’un des signes les moins douteux de cet acculement des âmes
modernes à l’extrémité de tout, c’est la récente intrusion en
France d’un monstre de livre, presque inconnu encore, quoique
publié en Belgique depuis dix ans: Les Chants de Maldoror, par
le comte de Lautréamont (?), œuvre tout à fait sans analogue et
probablement appelée à retentir. L’auteur est mort dans un
cabanon et c’est tout ce qu’on sait de lui.
[One of the most blatant signs that our modern souls are pushing
everything to the extreme is the recent intrusion in France of a
monstrous book, still largely unknown even though it was
published in Belgium ten years ago: The Chants de Maldoror,
by the comte de Lautréamont (?), an unparalleled work calling
out to be noticed. The author died in a cell and that’s all we
know about him.]24
Here is where the myth of Lautréamont’s death from madness

begins. Marchenoir first considers Lautréamont a monstrous
intrusion on French soil, but then he clarifies: “Il est difficile de
décider si le mot monstre est ici suffisant. Cela ressemble à quelque
effroyable polymorphe sous-marin qu’une tempête surprenante
23
Bloy was not, however, the first Frenchman to mention Lautréamont, despite
what Saillet claims on page 44. Saillet’s anti-surrealist essays do not include a 1939
article by Curt Muller, “Documents inédits sur le comte de Lautréamont (Isidore
Ducasse) et son œuvre,” Minotaure, 3.12-13 (1939): 73-83, in which the author
reveals several 1868 articles reviewing Lautréamont’s Chant premier. On Bloy and
Lautréamont, see Saillet, Inventeurs, 44-9, and de Haes, Images, 62-4.
24
Bloy, Désespéré, 37.
aurait lancé sur le rivage, après avoir saboulé le fond de l’Océan” [It
is difficult to determine if the word monster is sufficient here. It
resembles some sort of dreadful polymorphous submarine that an
unexpected storm dropped on the shore, after having scraped along
the ocean floor].25 To Marchenoir, Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal pale
in comparison to the satanic litanies of Maldoror. Bloy writes that
Maldoror is a prophecy that anticipates “l’ultime clameur imminente
de la conscience humaine devant son Juge [the final impending
clamor of the human conscience before its Judge].”26 Suggesting
here that the excessive pessimism of Maldoror’s hero and this kind
of profane literature can no longer thrive, Bloy reads Lautréamont as
the end of romanticism. There is no literary form to speak of, he
insists, “c’est quelque chose comme la Bonne Nouvelle de la
Damnation. Quant à la forme littéraire, il n’y en a pas. C’est de la
lave liquide. C’est insensé, noir et dévorant” [It’s akin to the
heralding of Damnation. As for literary form, there isn’t any. It’s
liquid lava. It’s twisted, dark and all-consuming].27
Bloy neglects to cite passages from Maldoror, however, and
Lautréamont is never mentioned again throughout the remainder of
this long novel. With one exception, the passage went unnoticed
until 1890. In Émile Verhaeren’s review of Le Désespéré in the
Belgian journal, L’Art moderne, Verhaeren refers to this passage,
suggesting a spiritual connection between Marchenoir and Maldoror,
as well as between Bloy and Lautréamont: “Les deux écrits, le sien
et celui de Lautréamont, ont tel air de parenté. Ils sont tous les deux
énergumènes et grands, éclatants et désorbités. Oh! les belles
comètes errantes vers l’inconnu, tragiques!” [Both his piece and
Lautréamont’s are so similar. They are both magnificent, blaring,
disturbed fanatics. Oh! The beautiful, tragic comets wandering off
into the unknown!]28 It is difficult to distinguish protagonist from
author here in Verhaeren’s comment. Whereas Bloy intentionally
created his fictional double in Marchenoir, Lautréamont’s identi-
fication with Maldoror remains a mystery.
25
Ibid.
26
Ibid.
27
Ibid.
28
Émile Verhaeren, “Léon Bloy, Le Désespéré,” L’Art moderne 4 (1887): 35.
Widely considered a reactionary in both his criticism and

fiction, Bloy ruptured friendships with his bitter invectives, which
targeted many of his contemporaries in addition to Lautréamont.
Like his protagonist, Marchenoir, Bloy learns that that in order to be
a successful writer, one must subscribe to fashion. Marchenoir and
Bloy, “malheureusement incapable” of sharing the contemporary
vision of outsiders, therefore become outcasts themselves.29 In this
way, Bloy’s interpretation of Lautréamont is more avant-garde than
the avant-garde, because his marginality exceeds even that of the
outcasts. Bloy’s erstwhile friend, Huysmans, later intimated that
“[Bloy] est si connu et si méprisé à Paris que ses attaques ne portent
point. C’est un malheureux homme dont l’orgueil est vraiment
diabolique et la haine incommensurable” [Bloy is so known and
hated in Paris that his attacks don’t carry any weight. He’s an
unhappy man whose pride is truly diabolical and whose hatred is
boundless].30 As Albert Thibaudet puts it in his 1936 Histoire de la
littérature française, Bloy’s reactionary literature was for the most
part a reaction against literature, against his contemporaries, and
against the lieu commun.31
In 1890, after Bloy had fully developed his disagreeable
personality, he elaborated his earlier comments on Lautréamont in a
suggestively titled article, “Le Cabanon de Prométhée.” Early that
year, a correspondent of Bloy’s in Dijon read an announcement in
La Bibliographie de la France that Genonceaux was preparing a
new edition of the Chants de Maldoror.32 Bloy, who feared that
Genonceaux would neglect to credit him with the discovery of
Maldoror in 1886, rushed to publish an article on it before
Genonceaux’s edition was released. Bloy asked Rodolphe Darzens,
the young editor of La Revue d’aujourd’hui, to publish the article in
either the upcoming issue or the following one. Darzens agreed, but
29
Bloy, Désespéré, 34.
30
Letter cited in Georges Rouzet, Dans l’ombre de Léon Bloy (Liège: L’Horizon
nouveau, 1941), 99.
31
Albert Thibaudet, Histoire de la littérature française de 1789 à nos jours (Paris:
Stock, 1936), 385.
32
See Jean-Paul Goujon and Jean-Jacques Lefrère, Deux malchanceux de la
littérature fin de siècle (Tusson: Lérot, 1994), 59-71. On Genonceaux’s edition, see
my chapter 2.
then continued to put it off because he claimed he wanted to

coordinate Bloy’s article with the release of Genonceaux’s edition,
essentially as a book review, which was precisely what Bloy hoped
to avoid. In keeping with his acrimonious character, Bloy insisted
that Darzens return his manuscript when July arrived and “Le
Cabanon de Promethée” had not yet appeared in print. In a fury,
Bloy suggested that Darzens take advantage of his good relationship
with Genonceaux to propose the article as a preface to his
forthcoming edition. Genonceaux refused. He claimed that Bloy’s
article did no justice to the dead poet’s genius and his imaginative
accusations about Lautréamont’s death and lack of poetic form were
simply false. Furthermore, Genonceaux feared that if Bloy’s tainted
name was attached to his edition it might deter readers rather than
attract them, as this note from Darzens to Bloy indicates: “il
craignait que votre nom sur la couverture ne nuisit au volume” [he
feared that your name on the cover would be detrimental to the
volume].33 After the scandal caused by Le Désespéré in the Parisian
avant-garde, Bloy had become a maudit, but an unpopular one.
Bloy found a publisher for “Le Cabanon de Prométhée”
elsewhere, at La Plume, on September 1, 1890, only a few weeks
before the release of Genonceaux’s edition. In this version of the
article, Bloy throws several verbal jabs at both Darzens and
Genonceaux. First, in a footnote, he scolds Darzens for not returning
his manuscript:
En vue d’épargner de trop douloureux scrupules à M. Darzens

dont je n’ai pu découvrir l’adresse, je l’informe, par la présente
note, que j’ai cessé d’avoir besoin du manuscrit de cette étude,
qu’il n’a pas cru devoir me restituer depuis quatre mois, malgré
les plus pressantes réclamations.
[In order to spare M. Darzens—whose address I could not

find—any painful misgivings, I am informing him in this note
that I no longer need the manuscript for my study. He felt he
didn’t need to return it for four months in spite of my urgent
requests.]34
33
Letters cited in Rouzet, L’Ombre, 76. The story is recounted in Lefrère, Deux
malchanceux, 63.
34
Bloy, “Cabanon,” 151.
Bloy insists here for his readers’ sake that he deserves credit for
discovering Lautréamont. Yet he also insists that his Désespéré was
misunderstood:
Dans une sorte de roman intitulé le Désespéré, publié en 1887 et

tout de suite raturé, autant qu’il était possible, par le silence
hostile de la presse entière, j’avais écrit incidemment les
quelques lignes qu’on va lire, avec l’espoir, longtemps déçu, de
suggérer à un éditeur quelconque l’idée généreuse d’une
réimpression.
[In a kind of novel entitled Le Déséspéré, published in 1887 and

subsequently ignored with hostile silence from the press, I wrote
in passing these few lines that you will read here. It was my
hope, long disillusioned, to suggest to any editor the generous
idea of a reprint.]35
In reality, Bloy neither suggested the reissue of Maldoror in Le

Désespéré nor seemed disappointed by its absence. Finally, after
reproducing the passage concerning Maldoror from Le Désespéré,
Bloy accuses Genonceaux of greedy opportunism: “Il paraît
aujourd’hui que cet avertissement n’a pas été inutile et qu’une
édition nouvelle, enfin se prépare. L’affaire, je crois, sera bonne”
[Today it appears that this warning wasn’t useless and that a new
edition is finally in progress. I’m sure it will be a great success].36
Bloy bases the rest of “Le Cabanon de Prométhée” on the
argument that Lautréamont is what he calls a human ruin. For him,
Maldoror represents great scandal and fear; unlike his
contemporaries, Bloy seems not to notice the parody involved in
Lautréamont’s style and sense of humor. Lautréamont, Bloy writes,
is so miserable that he prevents any kind of “contagion”: “c’est un
aliéné qui parle, le plus déplorable, le plus déchirant des aliénés et
l’immense pitié mélangée d’indicible horreur qu’il inspire, doit être,
pour la raison, le plus efficace des prophylactiques” [it’s the most
appalling, the most heart-wrenching of madmen who speaks, and the
infinite mercy mixed with unspeakable horror that he inspires must
be the most effective prophylactic].37 Even though Bloy believes his
35
Ibid.
36
Ibid., 152.
37
Ibid.
readers are “saturés de mélancolie” [saturated with melancholy], he

also believes that Maldoror’s blasphemy can redeem them from sin
and lead them to virtue.
The problem with Bloy’s argument, however, is that he
systematically confuses Maldoror with Lautréamont. The passages
from Maldoror that Bloy reproduces in his analysis reveal that he
takes Lautréamont’s exaggeration seriously. Bloy insists that
Maldoror gives him this “singulière impression” on every page:
“l’auteur me fait penser à un noble homme s’éveillant au milieu de
la nuit dans le lit banal d’une immonde prostituée, toute ivresse finie,
se sentant à sa merci, complètement nu, glacé de dégoût, agonisant
de tristesse et forcé d’attendre le jour!” [the author reminds me of a
noble man waking up in the middle of the night in the modest bed of
a filthy prostitute, completely sober and at her mercy, totally naked,
paralyzed with disgust, sorrowfully agonizing and forced to wait for
daylight].38 The referent here is ambiguous: does Maldoror,
Lautréamont, or Bloy himself wait for daylight, frozen by disgust in
a prostitute’s bed? In order to clarify, Bloy cites a paragraph of canto
V, 7 in which Lautréamont describes a half-naked man (presumably
Maldoror) and satin sheets, but no prostitute. Bloy decontextualizes
the passage to such a degree that he not only further confuses the
“noble homme” referent, but also denies Lautréamont’s poem
obvious elements of parody. After describing this “singular
impression,” Bloy weaves Lautréamont’s poem into his own prose,
eliminating Maldoror’s narrative to depict instead a Baudelairian
vision of a man waking up in a prostitute’s bed at the “crépuscule du
matin”:
Il n’essaie pas de se rendormir. Il sort lentement, l’un après

l’autre, ses membres hors de sa couche. Il va réchauffer sa peau
glacée aux tisons rallumés de la cheminée [gothique]. Sa
chemise seule recouvre son corps. Il cherche des yeux la carafe
de cristal afin d’humecter son palais desséché. Il ouvre les
contrevents de la fenêtre. Il s’appuie sur le rebord. Il contemple
la lune qui verse, sur sa poitrine, un cône de rayons extatique, où
palpitent, comme des phalènes, des atomes d’argent d’une
douleur ineffable. Il attend que le crépuscule du matin vienne
38
Ibid.
apporter, par le changement de décors, un dérisoire soulagement

à son cœur bouleversé.
[He does not try to fall asleep again. He lifts his limbs off the
bed, one after the other. He goes and warms his icy skin at the
rekindled brands in the [gothic] fireplace. Only his night-shirt
covers his body. His eyes seek the crystal carafe, that he may
moisten his parched palate. He opens the outside shutters. He
leans on the window-sill. He contemplates the moon which
pours upon his breast a cone of ecstatic beams, in which silvery
atoms of ineffable softness flutter like moths. He waits for
morning’s half-light to bring, by a scene-change, an absurd
relief to his upset heart.]39
In this stanza, not a prostitute but a tarantula, or “vieille araignée de

la grande espèce” [ancient spider of the large species], causes
Maldoror’s distress.40 For many years, this tarantula has prevented
Maldoror’s sleep at night by coming out of her hole, grabbing on to
Maldoror’s neck with her legs, and then sucking blood through her
own stomach, a description to which Lautréamont adds, “Tout
simplement!” [As easy as that!]41 Out of the spider’s stomach appear
two adolescents, Réginald and Elsseneur, posing as angels and
dressed with swords, who are sent by an archangel to haunt
Maldoror’s sleep every night for ten years, or until they are
instructed to stop this wicked punishment. Elsseneur and Réginald
stir up troubling, dream-like memories of Maldoror’s youth and
consequently upset him.
Just before the beginning of Bloy’s excerpt, these two
adolescents tell Maldoror that his persecution has ended, and that the
spell that has weighed on his cerebro-spinal system for “deux
lustres,” or ten years, will now vanish. The spider and its contents
are not only central to the narrative, but they also reveal a possible
source of its parody. At the end of Aloysius Bertrand’s Gaspard de
la Nuit are two prose poems, published in order starting with “La
chambre gothique” followed by “Scarbo.” In the first, a dwarf-like
accomplice to Satan by the name of Scarbo comes to bite the neck of
39
Bloy, “Cabanon,” 152; OC, 220 [Mal, 187]. Bloy’s text does not include
“gothique” in the third sentence.
40
OC, 213 [Mal, 180].
41
Ibid., 213 [181].
the hero and cauterize the wound with an iron finger. In the second,
Bertrand describes a blood-sucking spider: “Aimes-tu donc mieux,
lui répliquai-je, larmoyant toujours, -aimes-tu donc mieux que je sois
sucé d’une tarentule à trompe d’éléphant?” [‘Would it please you,’ I
replied weeping still, ‘would it please you if I were sucked up by a
tarantula with the trunk of an elephant?’]42 Bloy’s excerpt, however,
alludes to none of this. Even Lautréamont’s vocabulary is not
respected: by removing the adjective “gothique,” found in
Lautréamont’s original text, Bloy removes Lautréamont’s explicit
reference to Bertrand’s “Chambre gothique.”
Bloy supports his argument that Lautréamont was a hopeless,
irreverent madman, by cutting and pasting passages of Maldoror to
match his own moral agenda. Because he neither references nor
sufficiently contextualizes these passages, however, Bloy alters
Lautréamont’s poem to resemble other, more famous examples of
sinful poetry. In the passage quoted above, for instance, Baudelaire’s
“Crépuscule du matin” comes to mind, a poem which Ducasse later
“corrected” from vice to virtue in his Poésies II. Bloy’s next
comment further augments the comparison with Baudelaire:
N’est-ce rien qu’une telle suggestion procurée par un

désespéré sans larmes qui porte refroidir son cœur hors de la
maison, sous un ciel polaire, au fond d’un sale et ténébreux
jardin, dans le voisinage d’un puant retrait; pour le rapporter
quand il ne palpitera plus, afin d’être en état de sophistiquer sa
douleur par l’ironie pacifique du parfait blasphème?
[Is it nothing but a suggestion given to a desperate, pitiless

man who brings his heart outside to chill under an arctic sky,
deep in a dirty and dark garden, near a foul-smelling hideaway;
to bring it back in when it stops beating, so as to be ready to
refine his suffering with the calming irony of perfect
blasphemy?]43
Mirroring Lautréamont’s own style, Bloy concludes here in this

long-winded suggestion that Lautréamont seeks atonement through
42
Aloysius Bertrand, Œuvres complètes (Paris: Champion, 2000), 165-168. The
translation is from John T. Wright, Louis ‘Aloysius’ Bertrand’s Gaspard de la Nuit
(New York: Univerity Press of America, 1994), 54.
43
his suffering. To Bloy, Lautréamont’s vices include the possibility of

redemption.
Then, Bloy returns to canto IV, 6, citing the stanza in which
Maldoror dreams that he enters the body of a hog. Taken out of
context, the passage serves Bloy’s purpose of reiterating
Lautréamont’s blasphemy because, in it, Maldoror welcomes his
transformation into the swine, the Biblical embodiment of demonic
possession. Bloy again permits himself poetic licence to amend
typographical features of Lautréamont’s poem. These alterations as
well as Bloy’s moralistic annotations cloud the original work and
thus alter its sense. Since the twentieth century, the hog passage has
commonly been explained by psychological desires: Maldoror
consciously identifies with the hog, symbol of abjection, so he
transforms subconsciously into one. Bloy, on the other hand, reads
Maldoror’s metamorphosis as blasphemy, since Maldoror prefers
life inside the swine to being human. Although he does not explicitly
call attention to it, Bloy takes this scene to be an elaboration of
passages from the Bible in which two demons beg Jesus to permit
them to be driven out in the bodies of swine, and they run violently
to the sea where they drown.44 Maldoror does not die inside the
swine, but rather enjoys his life there, and is disappointed only when
he must regain human shape. Bloy cites passages directly related to
the swine, and italicizes “qu’il ne m’était pas facile d’en sortir” for
emphasis:
Je rêvais, dit-il, que j’étais entré dans le corps d’un

pourceau, qu’il ne m’était pas facile d’en sortir, et que je
vautrais mes poils dans les marécages les plus fangeux. Etait-ce
comme une récompense? Objet de mes vœux, je n’appartenais
plus à l’humanité! Pour moi, j’entendis l’interprétation ainsi, et
j’en éprouvai une joie plus que profonde. Cependant, je
recherchais activement quel acte de vertu j’avais accompli pour
mériter, de la part de la Providence, cette insigne faveur…
Mais, qui connaît ses besoins intimes ou la cause de ses joies
pestilentielles? La métamorphose ne parut jamais à mes yeux
que comme le haut et magnanime retentissement d’un bonheur
parfait, que j’attendais depuis longtemps. Il était enfin venu, le
jour où je fus un pourceau! J’essayais mes dents sur l’écorce des
arbres; mon groin, je le contemplais avec délice! Il ne me restait
44
Matt. 8:28-34; Luke 8:26-38; and Mark 5:1-20 (RSV). See OC, 646.
plus la moindre parcelle de divinité: je sus élever mon âme,

jusqu’à l’excessive hauteur de cette volupté ineffable…
[I dreamed, he writes, that I had entered the body of a hog,

that it was not easy to extricate myself, and that I was
wallowing—my bristles in the muddiest marshes. Was this a
reward, the aim of my desires, that I no longer belonged to
humanity? Thus I interpreted it, and thence experienced a more
than profound joy. However, I was busily hunting for whatever
deed of virtue I had performed to deserve this signal favour on
Providence’s part…
But who knows his intimate needs or the cause of his plaguy
joys? To my eyes the metamorphosis never appeared as
anything but the exalted and magnanimous echo of a perfect
happiness I had long awaited. It had come at last, the day I
became a hog! I tried out my teeth on tree-bark; my snout I
contemplated with delight. Not the least whit of divinity
remained: I knew how to raise my spirit level with the excessive
height of that ineffable sensual bliss.]45
As a fervent Catholic, Bloy knows the swine’s diabolical reputation

in the Bible: “S’il est misanthrope, c’est qu’il se souvient que
l’homme est à la ressemblance de Dieu” [If he’s misanthropic, it’s
because he remembers that man is made in the image of God].46
From Bloy’s point of view, Maldoror’s satanic joy at being
transformed into the most ungodly of animals, as well as his delight
at being trapped inside, illustrate that Lautréamont is obsessed with
blasphemy. According to Bloy, the difference between Lautréamont
and his contemporaries, such as Baudelaire, is that Lautréamont’s
poetic blasphemy stems from madness.
Bloy takes back his earlier comment that Lautréamont’s poem
has no form and suggests instead that Lautréamont’s panic-stricken,
surprised outbursts of dementia enhance the poetic distress:
“L’originalité serait nulle sans le paroxysme très particulier d’un
certain accent qui doit étonner certains démons et que je n’avais
encore trouvé dans aucune littérature” [It would have no originality
at all if it weren’t for the very unusual frenzy of a certain emphasis
which must be shocking to even the most devilish of spirits and that
45
Bloy, “Cabanon,” 152; Mal, 148-9.
46
Ibid.
I have never encountered in any literature].47 That Bloy replaces

periods with exclamation marks when Maldoror delights in his hog
parts—or exclamation with question marks elsewhere—only
enhances Bloy’s analogy that Lautréamont’s style resembles “une
louve enragée” [a rabid she-wolf].
Further on, Bloy’s liberties with punctuation lead the reader to
believe either that Bloy did not care to respect the text of Maldoror
or that he did not have it in hand when he wrote the article. Bloy’s
alterations seem to enhance what he considers Lautréamont’s
madness. In a long sentence quoted from canto I, 8, for example,
Bloy adds staccatos of dashes and commas, and still more excla-
mation marks. What Bloy considers “paroxysmal” in Lautréamont’s
style, the surrealists considered convulsive; this characteristic has
much to do with Lautréamont’s punctuation. Yet because Bloy alters
most of the original punctuation, the actual degree of Lautréamont’s
spasmodic style is called into question. Instead, Bloy’s devices,
much like the imaginary portraits of Lautréamont, reflect his own
style. As a result, Bloy textually makes Lautréamont’s style more
than just spasmodic; he makes it look careless and inconsistent.
Given that the newest edition of Les Chants de Maldoror was not yet
available, Bloy’s typographical liberties cause both a literal and
figurative misreading of Maldoror.
With Lautréamont as his subject in the “Cabanon de
Promethée,” Bloy lambastes contemporary literature in general. For
the outmoded Bloy, however, the term “contemporary” is relative,
since his own literary career spans several generations. When he
discusses Maldoror’s hatred of God, for instance, Bloy indirectly and
sardonically targets the symbolists. Bloy claims that the object of
Lautréamont’s rage is vague because “il ne touche jamais aux
Symboles” [he never touches Symbols], whereas, he continues, “On
ne peut faire souffrir l’Impassible qu’en dressant la Croix et on ne
peut le déshonorer qu’en avilissant ce Signe essentiel de l’exaltation
47
Ibid., 153. Bloy’s article was reprinted in his Belluaires et porchers (Paris: Stock,
1905) and dedicated to Georges Roualt. Bloy removed the nasty footnote targeted at
Rudolphe Darzens, but the rest of the article is almost identical to the one in La
Plume from 1890. One difference is the citation above: in the 1905 publication Bloy
changes the plural “certains démons” to the singular “certain démon,” a change
which emphasizes Lautréamont’s originality, perhaps.
de son Verbe” [One can only cause the Emotionless to suffer by

raising the Cross and one can only dishonor him by degrading this
fundamental Sign of the glorification of his Word].48 With the
capitalization of religious terms such as “Impassible,” “Croix,”
“Signe,” and “Verbe,” a typically symbolist embellishment, Bloy
acerbically suggests here that his contemporaries promote their
blasphemy even more than Lautréamont does. Bloy disdains what he
calls the “littérature vécue” [lived literature] espoused by his
contemporaries and resents their “petites affaires de cœur” [petty
matters of the heart].49 The pain that Bloy attributes to Lautréamont
as real, however, confuses “lived” literature with imagined literature,
and Lautréamont with Maldoror.
In spite of his evangelical overtones, Bloy homes in on a
number of elements that now characterize Lautréamont’s work. In
particular, he calls attention to Lautréamont’s bizarre logic in the
“beau comme” metaphors. He also observes Lautréamont’s
obsession with math: “La catastrophe inconnue qui fit de cet homme
un insensé a dû, par conséquent, le frapper au centre même des
exactes préoccupations de sa science, et sa rage folle contre Dieu a
dû être, nécessairement, une rage mathématique” [The mysterious
catastrophe which made this man mad must have then hit him with a
preoccupation with science, and his stark-raving anger against God
must have necessarily been a mathematical rage].50 According to
Bloy, math equals rational thought; math and science therefore
facilitate Lautréamont’s attack on God and spirituality. Finally,
anticipating that the vogue for outcasts will soon include
Lautréamont, Bloy bitterly declares: “Quelque ridicule qu’il puisse
être, aujourd’hui, de découvrir un grand poète inconnu et de le
découvrir dans un hôpital de fous, je me vois forcé de déclarer, en
conscience, que je suis certain d’en avoir fait la trouvaille”
[However ridiculous it might be these days to discover a great poet
and to find him in a mental hospital, I see that I am forced to declare,
in good conscience, that I made this discovery].51
48
49
Ibid., 154.
50
Ibid., 153.
51
Saillet, Inventeurs, 47.
What Bloy considered serious in Lautréamont’s poem, Bloy’s

literary peers embraced as humor. Whereas Bloy situates Maldoror
in a genealogy of romantic works, the new generation updates the
poem to suit a new symbolist poetic ideal. Lautréamont’s contorted,
technical terminology as a symptom of his rage against God
becomes, in the new generation, a stylized and unique defiance of
logical thought.
In France, Remy de Gourmont, the influential critic of the
Mercure de France, is principally responsible for promoting this
new interpretation of Lautréamont as a fashionable outcast. After
Genonceaux released the 1890 edition of Les Chants de Maldoror,
Gourmont made his own discovery in Ducasse’s Poésies. Taken
together, this updated image and the Poésies paint Lautréamont’s
work in a new, satirical light. With Ducasse’s revealed name and a
work with which to compare the Chants, Ducasse could now be
considered an artist by the period’s definition of one. Bloy’s grim
visions no longer carry weight. Instead, Lautréamont’s work can be
read as craftily construed parody.
Genonceaux maintained a strong relationship with writers from
the Mercure de France because he published several works by
Rachilde, whose husband, Alfred Vallette, directed the journal. In
the January 1891 issue of the Mercure, Vallette first alerted his
readers to Genonceaux’s edition: “Nous nous contenterons
aujourd’hui de signaler cette œuvre étrange, et de féliciter M. Léon
Genonceaux de l’avoir remise en lumière et dans une édition si
soignée” [We are pleased today to announce this strange work and to
congratulate M. Léon Genonceaux for having brought it to light and
in such a carefully prepared edition].52 These words must have
infuriated Bloy. Vallette here also promised a forthcoming article on
Lautréamont by Gourmont. After investigating the Bibliographie de
France, Gourmont discovered both the Poésies and the first editions
of the Chant premier from 1868 and 1869, excerpts of which he
reprinted in this promised article on the Chants in the February 1891
issue of the Mercure. Gourmont later elaborated on this article, “La
littérature Maldoror,” for his 1896 Livre des Masques. It has since
served as the preface to many editions of Lautréamont’s work,
52
Ibid., 55.
including Blaise Cendrars’s 1920 edition of Les Chants de

Maldoror.53 In this way, Gourmont’s image of Lautréamont prevails,
whereas Bloy’s has faded into history.
In “La Littérature Maldoror,” Gourmont creates what Saillet
termed an “éloge de la folie.” He depicts Lautréamont as a mad
genius:
Il est évident, d’abord, que l’auteur, écrivain de dix-sept ans

(point vérifié et peu contestable), dépassait en folie, de très loin,
cette sorte de déséquilibre que les sots de l’aliénation mentale
qualifie de ce même mot: folie, et attribuent à de glorieuses
intelligences…
[First off, it is clear that the author, a seventeen-year-old author

(little doubt about that), was exceedingly mad, with this kind of
imbalance that the fools of mental illness qualify with the word
madness, and attribute to great intelligence…]54
Unlike Bloy, who considered Lautréamont’s mental state

debilitating, Gourmont celebrates what he views as Lautréamont’s
ingenuity, a “folie lucide” [a lucid madness].55 Critics have since
praised Gourmont for emphasizing the qualities of Lautréamont’s
style that continue to interest readers.56 First, he treats the issue of
madness and genius. Then, he discusses the incongruity of the
Chants with the subsequent Poésies, anticipating twentieth-century
criticism from surrealism to post-structuralism. “On sent, à mesure
que s’achève la lecture du volume, que la conscience s’en va, s’en
va,” Gourmont meditates:
…et quand elle lui est revenue, quelques mois avant de mourir,
il rédige les Poésies, où, parmi de très curieux passages, se
révèle l’état d’esprit d’un moribond qui répète, en les défigurant
dans la fièvre, ses plus lointains souvenirs, c’est-à-dire pour cet
enfant les enseignements de ses professeurs.
53
See my chapter three. See also Nicolas Malais’s article, “Remy de Gourmont et
l’invention de la littérature Maldoror,” in Cahiers Lautréamont, Actes du septième
colloque international sur Lautréamont (Paris: Du Lérot, 2004), 97-104.
54
Remy de Gourmont, “La Littérature ‘Maldoror,’” Mercure de France 14 (1891):
97.
55
Ibid., 102.
56
See De Haes, Images, 67.
[One has the impression that little by little, his conscience is

drifting, drifting away. When it comes back to him, a couple
months before his death, he edits the Poésies, in which we find,
among other very curious passages, the spirit of a dying man,
repeating his distant memories, but disfiguring them in his
feverish state. For this child, these memories were his teachers’
lessons.]57
Finally, Gourmont describes the unique quality of Lautréamont’s

metaphors by the surprise they elicit in readers. What constitutes this
surprise is the contrast between the Chants and the Poésies and
Lautréamont’s style of metaphor, which Gourmont considers a
magnificent, but almost indescribable “coup de génie” [stroke of
genius]: “Cette valeur que je voudrais qualifier, elle est, je crois,
donnée par la nouveauté et l’originalité des images et des
métaphores, par leur abondance, leur suite logiquement arrangée en
poème…” [This value that I would like to qualify is, I believe, due to
the newness and originality of his images and metaphors, by their
abundance and by what happens next so logically arranged into a
poem].58 According to Gourmont, to appreciate the surprise, readers
must have a special kind of spirit which rejects traditional morality.59
With descriptive words such as “unique,” “originalité,” “génie,”
paired with the valorization of madness, Gourmont portrays
Lautréamont as the embodiment of genius as defined by his
generation.
Gourmont cites two refrains in Maldoror that illustrate
Lautréamont’s powerful imagery. Then, after he observes the
epithets that adorn most characters in Maldoror, Gourmont discusses
the poem’s images which, he says, show a “magnifiquement ob-
scène” violence.60 For Gourmont, obscenity and violence can be
magnificent, whereas for Bloy, they are sacrilegious. Gourmont cites
this passage from canto II, 15:
Il se replace dans son attitude farouche et continue de regarder,

avec un tremblement nerveux, la chasse à l’homme, et les
57
Gourmont, “La Littérature ‘Maldoror,’” 98.
58
Ibid.
59
Ibid.
60
Ibid., 99.
grandes lèvres du vagin d’ombre, d’où découlent, sans cesse,

comme un fleuve, d’immenses spermatozoïdes ténébreux qui
prennent leur essor dans l’éther lugubre, en cachant, avec le
vaste déploiement de leurs ailes de chauve-souris, la nature
entière, et les légions solitaires de poulpes, devenues mornes à
l’aspect de ces fulgurations sourdes et inexprimables.
[It reverts to its timid pose and trembling nervously, continues to

watch the manhunt and the vast lips of the vagina of darkness
whence flow incessantly, like a river, immense shadowy
spermatozoa that take flight into the dismal aether, the vast
spread of their bat’s wings obscuring the whole of nature and the
lonely legions of squids—grown downcast viewing these
ineffable and muffled fulgurations.]61
To Gourmont, the images evoked here resemble drawings by the

French symbolist artist, Odilon Redon, known for his mysterious and
imaginative works. Significantly, Redon, though Lautréamont’s
contemporary, did not become popular until Huysmans described his
work in symbolism’s defining novel À Rebours (1884). In the
passage above, Lautréamont depicts a typically romantic scene of
man’s battle with his conscience, much like Bloy’s protagonist, Caïn
Marchenoir, enacts in Le Désespéré. But Lautréamont’s imagery
pushes the limits of romanticism, creating as much an effect of
parody as one of obscenity. To Gourmont, this trait of exaggeration
indicates Lautréamont’s originality, even though it depends on stock
romantic themes to make sense.
Gourmont’s discovery of the Poésies influences his inter-
pretation of Maldoror as well. In Ducasse’s own words, the Poésies
I negate the Chants de Maldoror: good replaces evil, faith replaces
skepticism, and modesty replaces pride. In Poésies II, Ducasse
employs a new method of composition in which he takes familiar
maxims from mostly classical philosophers and makes them new by
“correcting” them or changing certain words to subsume the old
meaning under the new one. This compositional technique that Guy
61
Ibid. [Mal, 101-2]. Michael Riffaterre analyzes this particular passage by its
exaggeration of a romantic cainist theme in his “Sémiotique Intertextuelle:
L’interprétant,” La Revue d’esthétique 5 (1979): 128-150.
Debord later termed “détournements,” as opposed to “retourne-

ments,” added a subversive aspect to the process of correction.62
Gourmont reproduced only fragments of the Poésies in the
Mercure de France in February 1891, and only one of these seems to
be an evident “détournement” of a classical maxim. Pascal’s pensée,
“Le nez de Cléopatre: s’il eût été plus court, toute la face de la terre
aurait changé” [Cleopatra’s nose, had it been shorter, the whole face
of the world would have been changed] becomes Ducasse’s “Si la
morale de Cléopâtre eût été moins courte, la face de la terre aurait
changé. Son nez n’en serait pas devenu plus long” [If Cleopatra had
been less short on morals, the face of the world would have changed.
Her nose would have grown no longer].63 The logic of the original
maxim is turned on its head, but the new maxim still makes a kind of
sense. The few other maxims reproduced by Gourmont correspond
thematically to Les Chants de Maldoror.
Although Gourmont wrote this article as a favor to Genonceaux,
most likely he also foresaw his own discovery in it. Just as Bloy
shaped Maldoror to fit his agenda, Gourmont interprets Lautréamont
as the epitome of his definition of symbolism: the expression of
individualism in art.64 By the same token, Gourmont sought
recognition by his own literary mentors by updating what he
considered an outdated interpretation. In this way, Lautréamont’s
place in Gourmont’s Livres des Masques appears to complete the
now extensive list of Poètes maudits. Thanks to Gourmont and his
friendships with influential, “unique” writers such as Léon-Paul
Fargue, Paul Fort, and Alfred Jarry, Les Chants de Maldoror and
Ducasse’s Poésies had become property of the avant-garde.
Thus, while Bloy’s interpretation slipped into oblivion,
Gourmont’s portrait of Lautréamont remains. Ironically, back in
Belgium, the editors of the Jeune Belgique included Lautréamont in
their journal for the first time in five years, but only to praise Bloy’s
62
Guy Debord, La Société du spectacle (Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 1967).
63
OC, 278-9 [Mal, 236]. Since the surrealist period, editions of Ducasse’s Poésies
contain both Ducasse’s “new” saying and the classical one from which it is based.
The first to systematically comment on the pretexts was Éditions Le Terrain
Vague’s edition in 1962.
64
See Gourmont, Le Livre des Masques, 13.
“Cabanon de Promethée.” Valère Gille, the director of the journal at

the time, observed the following in the October 1890 issue:
Dans la Plume, un nouvel article de Bloy: Cabanon de

Prométhée. L’auteur, d’un Brelan d’excommuniés, consacre une
longue étude à un livre prodigieux publié en Belgique, en 1869,
et dont la Jeune Belgique publia des fragments, il y a quelques
années.
Il s’agit des Chants de Maldoror, par le comte de
Lautréamont. On se rappelle qu’après l’envoi, par nous, en
France, de cette œuvre extraordinaire, Léon Bloy y consacra
quelques lignes dans son Désespéré. La voix du grand écrivain
fera-t-elle enfin sortir de l’ombre ce livre dont la place est
marquée à côté des poèmes les plus beaux. Ici, en Belgique,
nous n’avons pu que le faire connaître des rares et purs artistes
qui nous secondent; peut-être à Paris, où Léon Bloy en a voulu
être le parrain, sera-t-il accueilli plus favorablement? N’importe!
le fier écrivain du Désespéré était seul digne de présenter ce
livre et nous l’en remercions.
[In La Plume, a new article by Bloy: Cabanon de

Prométhée. The author of un Brelan d’excommuniés devotes a
long study to a remarkable work published in Belgium in 1869,
of which La Jeune Belgique published several excerpts a few
years ago.
This book is Les Chants de Maldoror by the comte de
Lautréamont. You will recall that after we sent this extra-
ordinary work to France, Léon Bloy devoted a few lines to it in
his Désespéré. This great writer’s voice will finally allow this
book to emerge from the shadows, giving it a place among the
most beautiful poems. Here in Belgium, we were only able to
introduce the comte de Lautréamont to the few, but pure artists
who help us; perhaps in Paris, where Léon Bloy sought to be his
patron, he will be more favorably accepted? No matter. The
proud author of Le Désespéré was alone worthy of introducing
this book, and we thank him for it.]65
It is unclear whom Gille intends to boast of here, Bloy or La Jeune

Belgique. Bloy, who was by now an outcast in France, nevertheless
offered the even more outcast young Belgians an advantage. Critics
suggesting that Lautréamont entered the symbolist movement in
1891 as a result of Genonceaux’s edition and the Mercure de
65
Valère Gille, “Memento,” La Jeune Belgique 9 (1890): 387.
France’s promotion of it, neglect to consider that Lautréamont had

already been praised by the Belgian symbolists.66 As early as
November 1890, readers in Belgium searched for copies of the
1869/1874 edition of Les Chants de Maldoror. A note from O.
Colson, for example, the founder of the Belgian journal Wallonia, to
the Jeune Belgique reads: “Vous trouverez encore quelques
exemplaires des Chants de Maldoror chez Lacomblez, 33 rue des
Paroissiens, à Bruxelles, au prix de fr. 3-50” [You will still find
several copies of the Chants de Maldoror at Lacomblez, 33 rue des
Paroissiens, in Brussels, for the price of 3.50 francs].67 The relatively
low price of this edition is revealing: Genonceaux’s Maldoror that
year cost ten francs apiece, indicating not only the aesthetic value
that Genonceaux placed on newness, but also the financial one.
As well as to remind readers of their discovery, the Belgians
refocused their attention to Lautréamont in order to serve a political
agenda. Another series of contentious arguments arose in 1890
between Belgian journal directors Albert Mockel and Valère Gille.
Aftershocks of anti-Belgian, unedited notes by Baudelaire published
in Darzens’s Revue d’aujourd’hui in March of 1890 provoked these
disputes. Then an anti-Belgian article by Paul Adam in Entretiens
politiques et littéraires, entitled “Remarques sur la libération du
territoire,” exacerbated them. In the September issue of La Jeune
Belgique, Gille angrily criticized both Darzens and Adam for what
he called “une nouvelle croisade” [a new crusade] against the
Belgian school of literature. In his article, Gille sharply reminds
Darzens that some of his first poems were published in Belgium and
that the Belgians had always appreciated Adam’s work. This
confident counter-attack, along with Maeterlinck’s international
success, contributed to the foundation of an autonomous Belgian
national literature.68 Gille’s reply likewise justifies the Belgians’
66
See for example, De Haes, Images, 68: “Dès 1891, les Chants de Maldoror
pénètrent dans les milieux symbolistes. On s’intéresse à Lautréamont, sans plus,
comme Huysmans, ou l’on fait preuve de scepticisme comme, par exemple, Jean
Lorrain. D’autres encore gardent le silence.”
67
On the back cover of La Jeune Belgique 10 (1890).
68
Joseph Hanse, “Polémique littéraires en 1890: Lettres d’Albert Mockel et de
Valère Gille,” in Regards sur les lettres françaises de Belgique, ed. Paul Delsemme
et al. (Bruxelles: A. de Rache, 1976), 157-67, observes that this period of uneasy
endorsement of Bloy, who had maintained good relations with them

and whose disagreement with Darzens about “Le Cabanon de
Prométhée” coincided with their article. Gille’s article sheds light on
why the Belgian discovery of Lautréamont might have been used
once again to pursue literary autonomy.
The rush to discover Lautréamont from 1885 to 1891 suggests
that self-promotion, politics, and a changing value ascribed to out-
cast status all determine Lautréamont’s earliest literary identity. The
poets of La Jeune Belgique chose a particularly “northern,” symbolic
passage from Lautréamont’s poem in order to promote themselves
and identify with a Parisian literary vogue. Bloy instead condemned
contemporary literature, selecting and manipulating overtly anti-
Christian, erotic passages from Maldoror. In the end, however, Bloy
only succeeded in ostracizing himself from popular culture. Finally,
after Gourmont “discovered” the Poésies in 1891 and proclaimed the
uniqueness of Lautréamont’s incongruity in style and corpus,
Lautréamont became a master of his madness, willfully cultivating
dementia in order to parody it. As outcast status developed as a
positive trait, so too did Lautréamont grow into his outcast identity.
By the end of the nineteenth century, maudit had become an
aesthetic strategy. By promoting Lautréamont as an outcast, fin-de-
siècle writers facilitated their own promotion. Anyone could be
considered a successful, or at least recognized, writer if outcast or
unknown traits are deemed positive. Before a complete edition of his
work was even made available to the public, Lautréamont had
already become the epitome of a valorized maudit. This paradox of
being at once “in” and “out” may have originated with the avant-
garde, but it remains a guiding formula for contemporary literature
as well as for many contemporary interpretations of Lautréamont.
Franco-Belge relations has a lot to do with Léopold II’s personality and the politics
of the time. The French may have felt politically as well as aesthetically threatened.
Chapter Two
Perish then Publish:

Partial Truth in the 1890 Edition of Maldoror
Next to the person of a distinguished man-of-

letters, we desire to see his portrait—next to
his portrait, his autograph. In the latter,
especially, there is something which seems to
bring him before us in his true idiosyncrasy—
in his character of scribe.
— Edgar Allan Poe,
A Chapter on Autography, 1846.
By 1890, the rediscovery of Lautréamont had led to a demand for

a new edition of Les Chants de Maldoror because, even though it had
been printed before 1890, it had still never been sold.1 This project for
a new edition was undertaken by Léon Genonceaux. Historians are as
uncertain about Genonceaux’s discovery of Lautréamont’s work as
they are about this enigmatic publisher’s biography. Literary critics
have traditionally granted Genonceaux varying degrees of honor as
Ducasse’s first biographer. For this reason, Genonceaux’s preface has
been included in many editions of Lautréamont’s work, including both
the 1970 and 2009 Bibliothèque de la Pléiade volumes. Maurice
Saillet suggested that Genonceaux best contributed to demystifying
Lautréamont through his “patientes recherches” [in-depth research].2
Jean-Jacques Lefrère, though careful to draw attention to certain
dubious elements in Genonceaux’s preface, nonetheless qualified it as
a primary source for subsequent research:
Tout ce qui a pu être vérifié dans son étude l’a toujours été à son
honneur, et si certains éléments ont été mis en doute, ce fut par
1
With the exception of a couple of copies for sale in a Belgian “rare and curious”
bookstore in 1882 and 1889 that seem to have gone unnoticed. See Lefrère, Isidore
Ducasse, 642.
2
ceux-là même qui n’hésitaient pas à inventer de toutes pièces des

chapitres entiers de la vie de Ducasse.
[Anything that could be verified has always been taken at his word
for his study, and if certain parts were doubtful, it is precisely
those parts that have led to inventing all kinds of pieces in the
book of Ducasse’s life.]3
Genonceaux may well have been the first critic to show that
Lautréamont had an identity. This identity, however, is inaccurate and
largely imagined.
A preface, a facsimile letter written by Ducasse, and a fron-
tispiece all bedeck Genonceaux’s edition. These ornaments testify to
the various means by which what Gérard Genette terms “paratext” can
alter the reception of a literary work. Paratextual accessories, which
Genette argues serve to present the work and bring it up to date, are
“ce par quoi un texte se fait livre” [that through which a text becomes
a book].4 Genonceaux, Lautréamont’s first publisher in the sense that
he was the first to market and distribute Lautréamont’s poem, whereas
Albert Lacroix had not, provides these paratextual ornaments to ordain
Ducasse as an Author. Genonceaux argues that Lautréamont should
not only be considered eccentric, but a genius as well: a skillful artist
of his own transgression. He spins his preface largely to prove
Lautréamont’s mental stability, showing that he had a real name and a
real death caused not by lunacy, but by unknown causes. He exhibits
several autographed documents and employs an anonymous
graphologist who doubles as an alienist to confirm that the young
Ducasse was less a madman than an artist, a logician, and even a
musician. Weaving a strategic web of pseudoscientific proofs, he
claims there is method to Lautréamont’s madness. Such claims of
authenticity are misleading and in most cases false, indicating a
calculated effort to subvert Lautréamont’s image to marketable ends.
A review of the publishing situation in France and Belgium during
and immediately after Lautréamont’s life reveals why creating the
maudit image in 1890 could be both dicey and advantageous.
3
Lefrère and Goujon, Deux malchanceux, 61.
4
Gérard Genette, Seuils (Paris: Seuil, 1987), 7.
Perish then Publish 75
The Publishing Climate in Ducasse’s Lifetime—Droits d’auteur

and censorship
Hosts of critics and scholars have addressed the relationship of

the editor with the author, particularly in fin de siècle France and
Belgium.5 Both names, after all, appear on the cover of all books. In
terms of risk and success, one cannot exist without the other.
Numerous legal changes throughout the nineteenth century
contributed to a transformation of their respective roles as well.
Financial privileges began to favor the author over the editor and rules
for intellectual property became standard. The Paris Convention of
1883 introduced intellectual property laws, for example, while the
Berne Convention of 1886 officially protected literary and artistic
works. Meanwhile, advancements in printing technology lowered
book prices, while greater reading and writing populations increased
demand. Thus as authors became materially and legally sacralized,
they also became popular because they reached wider audiences.
Editing as a profession likewise took shape over the course of the
nineteenth century, when it separated from the combined role of
libraire [bookseller] and imprimeur [printer].6 As an autonomous and
accountable figure, the editor became a literary personality in his own
right.
Often, the specialization of one editor resulted because of close,
though not always friendly, relationships with authors: Pierre-Jules
Hetzel and Jules Verne, Poulet-Malassis and Baudelaire, Alphonse
Lemerre and the Parnassians, Léon Vanier and the Decadents, Michel
Lévy and Gustave Flaubert, Edmond Deman and Verhaeren, and
Georges Charpentier and Zola. Such pairings promoted social,
economic, and cultural capital for both parties and proved that by
5
See Jean-Yves Mollier, L’argent et les lettres: Histoire du capitalisme d’édition
1880-1920 (Paris: Fayard, 1988), 530-34.
6
The term “libraire” in the first half of the nineteenth century was used for both editor
and distributor. See volume 3 of Roger Chartier and Henri-Jean Martin, eds., Histoire
de l’édition française, 4 vols. (Paris: Promodis, 1983-86); Pascal Durand and Anthony
Glinoer, Naissance de l’éditeur: L’édition à l’âge romantique (Bruxelles: Les
Impressions nouvelles, 2005); Frédérique Leblanc and Patricia Sorel, Histoire de la
librairie française (Paris: Cercle de la Librairie, 2008); and Christine Haynes, Lost
illusions: The Politics of Publishing in Nineteenth-Century France (Boston: Harvard
University Press, 2009).
working together, authors and editors could both respectively gain

renown. Eventually literary reviews became publishing houses
themselves, as in the case of the Mercure de France or the NRF,
publishing their own contributors, combining creativity and commerce
all under one roof. As Jean-Yves Mollier has observed, if the
nineteenth century was the era of editors, freed from the business of
printing and selling their wares, the twentieth century was the era of
publishing houses.7
The nineteenth-century editor’s role is less analyzed, however,
when the role of the author himself is obscured, as in the case of
Lautréamont. At a time when copyright privileges were still emerging,
editions of a deceased author’s works were often considered open
territory, motivated by socio-political and economic factors.
Posthumous editions, for example, of works by great writers, and even
fragments or unfinished pieces, could become a commodity in an
author’s afterlife when they had been unprintable in his lifetime due to
censorship, time constraints, or even pertinence of the work.
Undertaking a posthumous edition was itself not devoid of risks,
however. Questions of financial viability as well as copyright must
still be taken into account. If the author no longer had rights, the editor
himself had to take financial responsibility for the project.
Added to the economic risk was the legal one, as is clear from the
case of Lautréamont’s Chants de Maldoror. Accountable not only for
copyright but also for censorship offences, the editor alone endured
the impact of accrued penalties.8 Although erotic and political books
attempted to reach a public that was willing to pay for shock and
scandal, it often goes unnoticed that most of these types of editions
also put publishers in debt. A posthumous edition of Pierre-Joseph
Proudhon’s work, for example, resulted in a fine and jail time for
Albert Lacroix, the first editor of Les Chants de Maldoror, and
Proudhon’s complete works did not sell out.9 Like many of the
7
Mollier, L’Argent, 403. See also Jean-Yves Mollier, Édition, presse et pouvoir en
France au XXe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 2008).
8
See “Propriété littéraire et artistique” in the Chronique of Bibliographie de la
France 3 (January 18, 1890).
9
Publishing anything by Proudhon in 1868 warranted a fine and jail time. The Garnier
brothers, for instance, who had abandoned the illicit traffic of books, nevertheless
published Proudhon’s De la justice dans la Révolution et dans l’Église (1868). They
marginal authors of the period, marginal editors were often financially

ruined by their publications. Lacroix also published Hugo’s Les
Misérables and the first works of Zola, which today sounds like an
honor but at the time was a risk.
In this context, Lautréamont could be published neither as a
contemporary nor as a predecessor. Albert Lacroix played an
ambiguous role: he copied the work and bound about 20 copies with a
cover page. The work was never completely paid for, however, nor
was it sold. The title page declares “Tous droits de traduction et de
reproduction réservés” [All translation and copy rights reserved], but
there was no editor’s name mentioned. The first and last mention of
Ducasse’s manuscript was in Genonceaux’s preface to his edition
(1890): “L’édition actuelle des Chants de Maldoror est la
réimpression, revue et corrigée d’après le manuscrit original, d’un
ouvrage qui n’a jamais paru en librairie” [The present edition of Les
Chants de Maldoror is the reprint, reviewed and corrected according
to the original manuscript, of a work which was never sold].10 No
proof copies were ever found either. It is not therefore Ducasse’s
intention on which subsequent editions are based, but rather the
editor’s (first Lacroix, then Genonceaux). The editor determined
which text the public would eventually read, and professional interests
naturally determined the editor’s choices. Lautréamont’s early death
necessarily changed the role of the publisher from diffuser of texts to
critic and interpreter.
The timing of Genonceaux’s edition is pertinent for several
reasons. Given the recent death of Ducasse’s father in 1889, the
material was unprotected by copyright laws or droits d’auteur.
Ducasse’s mother, Jacquette Davezac, had died in his early childhood.
Also, even though a new law in 1881 pronounced freedom of the press
and book trade, censorship of works considered indecent did not
end.11 While laws had relaxed slightly, they continued to pose a threat
to publishers by way of post-publication fines and jail sentences.
were fined 1,000 francs and sentenced to three years in prison, which they appealed
for 4,000 francs and four months in prison. See Odile and Henri-Jean Martin, “Le
Monde des éditeurs,” in Chartier and Martin, Histoire de l’Édition française, 3:169.
10
OC, 335.
11
See Elisabeth Ladenson, Dirt for Art’s Sake (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
2007).
Clearly, the thematic content of Lautréamont’s Chants de Maldoror

was not exempt from breaching bonnes mœurs. Furthermore,
Genonceaux’s publishing history and tastes suggest that if the poem
were harmless, he probably would not have chosen to edit it. His
preface is a covert form of publicity, strategically crafted with realistic
effects in order to both avoid charges of indecency and to solicit a
readership.
Fact-Checking the 1890 edition
Genonceaux himself was as elusive a character as Lautréamont

and, to this day, documents on his life are equally scant.12 Initially,
Philippe Soupault postulated that Genonceaux was the pen name of
Albert Lacroix, the first editor of Maldoror. In 1954 Maurice Saillet,
though criticizing Soupault’s error, claimed that Genonceaux’s
precious memoirs had been for sale, but then disappeared with an
anonymous buyer who subsequently hid away.13 Still later, in 1966,
Pascal Pia found “by accident” a lewd work published by Genonceaux
and authored by the Princesse Sapho who, Pia argued, was the
pseudonym of Genonceaux himself.14 Historians know next to nothing
about Genonceaux’s whereabouts after 1905, when he turned away
from publishing.
As a publisher and editor—both terms are conveyed by the
French éditeur—Genonceaux espoused freedom of expression. Born
in Belgium, he came to Paris in the 1880s where Lefrère writes that he
first worked as a secretary for the publisher Édouard Monnier.15
Monnier’s publishing house soon joined Maurice de Brunhoff’s, then
Alphonse Piaget’s, and finally Félix Brossier’s. Brossier, after being
arrested and fined for “outrage aux bonnes mœurs” in March 1890,
12
On Genonceaux (1856-?), see Lefrère and Goujon, Deux malchanceux.
13
14
De Haes, Images, 65. See also Pascal Pia, “Un des Inventeurs de Maldoror,” La
Quinzaine littéraire, April 15, 1966, 18. Segments of this article were reproduced as
the preface of an edition of Genonceaux/Sapho’s Tutu, Mœurs fin de siècle (Paris:
Tristram, 1991). In Tutu, two long passages from Maldoror are cited.
15
Lefrère and Goujon, Deux malchanceux, 47. Monnier, who edited Rachilde’s Tiroir
de Mimi-Corail in 1887, was later described fictitiously in Rachilde’s Le Mordu, as a
swindling editor and scandal-seeking opportunist. Le Mordu was published by
Genonceaux while he was with Félix Brossier, in 1889.
left Genonceaux as director of the firm.16 Following in the footsteps of

his predecessors and past employers, Genonceaux became best-known
for updating disreputable works with new and shocking illustrations to
improve their sales, such as Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s Isis and, of
course, Les Chants de Maldoror. Most famously, Genonceaux
published Rimbaud’s Reliquaire in 1891. Yet he also was recognized
for publishing contemporary writers: Huysmans’s La Bièvre and
several works by Rachilde, including the second and third editions of
Monsieur Vénus. In this respect, Lautréamont contrasted with
Genonceaux’s other authors because he was both deceased and
unknown.
Unlike some of these contemporary authors, Ducasse left no
explicit intentions for his text. Ducasse’s absence at once complicates
and liberates the editor’s primary task of establishing a coherent text
from a work that could be interpreted in a multitude of ways. Because
documentation by and about Ducasse is unrecoverable, Lautréamont’s
editors, like many medieval textual scholars, have frequently imagined
the author based on the text itself. Genonceaux, like most of
Ducasse’s editors since, creates a work according to his own vision,
taking into account Ducasse’s socio-historic milieu, the context of his
language, and everything else he knows or can discover about the
author’s life.
On the other hand, Lautréamont’s troublesome disappearing act
also offers his editors complete editorial freedom. In his preface and
editorial apparatus, Genonceaux indulges this freedom, presenting
only what he felt or hoped to be true. By weaving his own fantasy
with what he could gather from Maldoror itself, Genonceaux creates
an identity for Ducasse based solely on partial truths, summed up well
by Lautréamont himself: “…quelle source abondante d’erreurs et de
méprises n’est pas toute vérité partiale!” […what an abundant source
of errors and misapprehensions every half-truth is!]17
According to Genette, prefaces situate the author at the side of
the reader as some kind of authoritative mediator between morals and
art. Especially in erotic literature, famous examples such as Sade’s
philosophical meta-discourses on good and evil to Théophile Gautier’s
16
17
OC, 189 [Mal, 159].
preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin reveal the ways in which authors

use the context of good to justify evil. Baudelaire’s “projets de
préface” serve a similar purpose, even though he considered these
kinds of prefaces superfluous, expecting his only readers to be
intelligent ones.
In addition to his preface, Genonceaux uses devices such as a
high price and a cloaked yet graphic frontispiece to safeguard his
edition. As the minister of police had said in 1852, the worst page of
the worst book takes time to be read and a certain amount of
intelligence to be understood. The engraving, however, offers a direct
route to thought, as this circular from March 30, 1852 reveals:
[U]ne sorte de personnification de la pensée, elle lui donne du

relief, elle lui communique, en quelque façon, le mouvement et la
vie, présentant ainsi spontanément, dans une traduction à la portée
de tous les esprits, la plus dangereuse de toutes les séductions,
celle de l’exemple.
[[A] kind of personification of thoughts, it gives them depth, in a

way it gives movement and life to them, thus in a language
everyone can understand, it presents the most dangerous of all
seductions: the example.]18
The cover of Maldoror is plain light brown, unlike Genonceaux’s

other, often lewd publications, so that it exhibits all the exterior details
of a legal book. Its content, however, is subversive by the censor’s
standards. José Roy’s frontispiece engraving, tucked safely inside the
cover, captures Lautréamont’s poem: human and inhuman, corporal
and monstrous, evocative and explicit (Fig. 2.1). According to Lefrère,
Roy, who was best known for his playful illustrations of a work by
Joseph Gérard about venereal disease, demonstrates “quels efforts
désespérés font les éditeurs de notre temps pour égrillarder le public et
l’amener à l’achat de ces romans qui pullulent au point de produire ce
qu’on appelle aujourd’hui le krach du livre” [the desperate measures
taken by editors today to seduce the public into buying these bawdy
novels. There is a glut of books like this, creating what today is called
18
Pierre Casselle, “Le régime législatif,” in Chartier and Martin, Histoire de l’édition
française, 3: 53.
a book crash].19 Illustrations seduce, and dirty ones sell. Dazzling in

its vulgarity, the image beckons buyers like a peep show window.
Here Roy embellishes Bloy’s metaphor with an image of a scene
from canto III, 5: “…il traînait, à travers les dalles de la chambre, sa
peau retournée” […along the flagstones of that room he dragged his
hide—turned inside out].20 A man notices that he is in God’s bordello,
and his skin, like clothing, has become a symbol of dignity. Roy’s
image depicts a nude man becoming skeletal, dragging his skin behind
him in a dark, spider- and monster-inhabited room.21 Using words
such as “violences,” “véhemences,” “furieux,” and “inégal” to create a
tone for the poet’s style, Genonceaux claims that Lautréamont’s
excessiveness fosters the “profound beauty” of his poem, the at-
mosphere of which is evoked by Roy’s frontispiece.
Figure 2.1 José Roy, frontispiece
19
Cited in Lefrère and Goujon, Deux malchanceux, 64.
20
OC, 148 [Mal, 124].
21
The passage was subsequently cited by Alfred Jarry in “Visions actuelles et
futures,” Art littéraire 5 (1894): 77-82. The same passage is illustrated by Matta
Echaurren in the 1938 GLM edition of Lautréamont’s Œuvres complètes.
The high price of Genonceaux’s Maldoror also prevents the kind

of readers feared by the minister of police. Genonceaux caters to the
market by flattering it, declaring that his readers are intelligent and
enlightened:
Nous avons cru que la réédition d’une œuvre aussi intéressante

serait bien accueillie. Ses véhémences de style ne peuvent effrayer
une époque aussi littéraire que la nôtre. Si outrées qu’elles soient,
elles gardent une beauté profonde et ne revêtent aucun caractère
pornographique.
[We believed that a new edition of such an interesting work would

be welcomed. Its stylistic violence could never scare off an era as
literary as ours. As outrageous as it may be, its beauty is profound
and not pornographic in the slightest way.]22
The market price of his edition is significant: from the standard 3f50
as late as 1885, the price of the Chants nearly tripled. At 10 francs per
copy and 25 francs per deluxe edition, the Lautréamont of 1890 was
marketed to be exclusive.
Despite its limited copies, the edition did not sell out.23 Given the
fin-de-siècle climate of censorship, this limited, expensive edition
might have served a legal purpose. By restricting his audience,
Genonceaux prevented legal action for indecency. Then again, the
limited edition might have reflected a lull in the publishing industry.
The year 1890 was not only pivotal for Lautréamont, but also for the
book trade as a whole when, as expressed later by Stéphane Mallarmé
in his “Étalages,” a “crash” in the market led to more books than
buyers:
Une nouvelle courut, avec le vent d’automne, le marché et

s’en revint aux arbres effeuillés seuls: en tirez-vous un rétrospectif
rire, égal au mien; il s’agissait de désastre dans la libraire, on
22
OC, 336.
23
Lefrère observes in Deux malchanceux, 65, that Genonceaux’s print dropped from
500 to 250 to a final count of 150 copies, not including 10 copies on Japan paper at 25
francs apiece. See also Lefrère’s bibliography, 107, which counts an approximate 130
copies plus deluxe copies. In 1891, 43 copies still remained. The Walzer Pléiade
(1970) bibliography claims that there was a total of 250 copies (plus 10 deluxe).
Either way, it was a small count, not like the standard 3000 or so copies for a new
writer at the larger publishing houses. See Mollier, L’Argent, 430-434.
remémora le terme de “krach?” Les volumes jonchaient le sol, que

ne disait-on, invendus;...
[With the autumn wind, a rumor spread through the market

and lodged in the leafless trees: I don’t know whether it makes
you laugh retrospectively, as it does me; there was talk of a
disaster in the publishing business; the word “krach” [crash] was
bandied about. Unsold volumes littered the ground].24
As Mallarmé observes, and as the term “crash” suggests, over-

abundance in the book business can be devastating. In the US more
copyrights were bought than ever before.25 Genonceaux’s edition, seen
in light of this expanding reading and writing population, reveals the
difficulty an editor faces in attracting a reading public and dem-
onstrates what measures must be taken not only to produce, but also to
sell.
Genonceaux’s main contribution, however, is his preface. By way
of a kind of ersatz genetic criticism avant la lettre, Genonceaux works
Lautréamont into a mosaic of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Poe, into a
genealogy of subversion which had become acceptable, if not
commonplace, by the turn of the century. He portrays Lautréamont as
a master of his own madness through what one might call “inter-
paratexts,” in that he conforms to, yet subverts generic expectations of
editorial language. Genonceaux paratextually displays a fantasy not
only of Lautréamont, but also of himself as an editor.
24
Stéphane Mallarmé, Œuvres complètes, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1998), 2:218.
Although the article was published in the 1897 collection of Divagations, it first
appeared in the National Observer, June 11, 1892, 89-90. The translation is from
Barbara Johnson, Stéphane Mallarmé: Divigations (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press, 2007), 220.
25
In the end of 1890 and beginning of 1891, the Bibliographie de la France continued
to update its readers on the new copyright policy in the US as it became increasingly
stringent. In the US, national newspapers show that books were everywhere, and not
enough people were reading them. An article entitled “Books by the Million” in the
Washington Post, Nov. 23, 1890, for example, indicates that newly copyrighted books
had reached an average of 1,000 per month, and had exhausted shelf space at the
Library of Congress. On the book boom and crisis, see Robert F. Byrnes, “The French
Publishing Industry and Its Crisis in the 1890s,” The Journal of Modern History 23
(1951): 232-42, as well as volume three of Chartier and Martin, Histoire de l’édition
française.
As we saw in his exchange with Bloy, Genonceaux proclaimed

an “enquête très approfondie” [in-depth investigation] into Ducasse’s
life, but only weeks before printing did Genonceaux decide to include
a preface at all. What did he stand to gain from it? According to
Gourmont, Genonceaux’s publication was altruistic, made with the
“désintéressement d’un plaisir personnel” [selflessness that comes
from pure pleasure].26 Indeed, Bloy’s recent critique of the
blasphemous and damned Lautréamont in “Le Cabanon de
Prométhée” influenced the tone of Genonceaux’s preface. Since Le
Désespéré, Bloy had become known as the “mendiant ingrat”
[ungrateful beggar], and had created for himself what he termed a
“universal conspiracy of silence.”27 Bloy’s notoriety works in
Genonceaux’s favor because, unlike Bloy, Genonceaux depicts
Lautréamont as an artist who was conscious of the “beauté profonde”
of his work, but died too soon to refine it. In this way, Lautréamont
becomes a martyr not a madman. Yet even as Genonceaux purports to
demystify the earliest myth of Lautréamont, he creates another one to
replace it.
Genonceaux had never met Ducasse. It remains uncertain
whether Genonceaux had ever met Lacroix either, although he
dedicates his preface “à mon ami Albert Lacroix.” By naming the
well-known Lacroix, Genonceaux first establishes the authenticity of
the work, thus assuring his readers that the work is reliable. Then
Genonceaux establishes the authenticity of the text itself by
addressing the provenance of the edition, claiming that his copy-text,
or textual source, was Ducasse’s manuscript itself: “L’édition actuelle
des Chants de Maldoror est la réimpression, revue et corrigée d’après
le manuscrit original, d’un ouvrage qui n’a jamais paru en librairie”
[the present edition of Les Chants de Maldoror is the revised and
corrected reprint of the original manuscript of a work which was never
sold].28 Lacroix, Genonceaux writes, was unable or scared to sell
Maldoror because of censorship: “[le livre] allait être broché, lorsque
l’éditeur—continuellement en butte aux persécutions de l’Empire—en
suspendit la mise en vente à cause de certaines violences de style qui
26
Gourmont, “La Littérature ‘Maldoror,’” 97.
27
Léon Bloy, Celle qui pleure, cited by Georges Rouzet, Léon Bloy et ses amis belges
(Liège: Soledi, 1940), 14.
28
OC, 335.
en rendaient la publication périlleuse” [the book was about to be

bound when the editor, who was continually subject to censorship by
the Empire, stopped the sale because of certain stylistic liberties that
made its publication dangerous].29 Genonceaux seems to suggest
complicity with Lacroix here, as though Ducasse had left his
manuscript and several letters attesting to his “visée lyrique” [lyrical
design] to Lacroix, who then gave them to Genonceaux. Twenty years
after Ducasse’s mysterious death, Genonceaux justifies why the poem
merits being read in 1890, demonstrating his indebtedness to the first
editor and flattering an enlightened reader.
In the content of the preface, using truth effects, Genonceaux
creates major parts of the modern Lautréamont myth. Today it
remains impossible to discern his fact from his fiction. To take a basic
example of conjecture that lasted until very recently in Lautréamont
studies, Genonceaux writes in a footnote of the first page regarding
the 1874 edition of Maldoror: “Au verso du faux titre: Bruxelles –
Typ. De E. Wittmann. Cette dernière indication est fausse, aucun
imprimeur du nom de Wittmann n’ayant existé à Bruxelles.
Couverture brun-marron” [On the back of the half title: Brussels –
Printer, E. Wittmann. This last part is false, no printer by the name of
Wittmann ever existed in Brussels. Brown cover].30 Since every book
was legally required to specify the printer’s name, Genonceaux’s
claim started the myth that Lautréamont’s first posthumous
publication was clandestine. In 1939, Curt Muller speculated in his
“Documents inédits sur le comte de Lautréamont,” that the “real”
printer of the poem, a Belgian Vanderauwara, hid behind the name
Wittmann in order to avoid fines.31 De Haes himself claimed that the
name Wittmann was invented. In 1940, Georges Rouzet, in Léon Bloy
et ses amis belges, first raised the possibility that an actual Wittmann
did exist, but as a street name in Brussels. Later, in 1954, Maurice
Saillet, in his Inventeurs de Maldoror, elaborated Rozez’s rationale
for using a ficitonal printer: “…il existe à Bruxelles dans une rue
Émile-Wittmann: c’est donc sous le nom de quelque édile ou célébrité
locale que se sont ironiquement abrités les éditeurs des Chants de
29
Ibid.
30
Ibid., 336.
31
De Haes, Images, 40. De Haes himself claimed, “Le nom de Wittmann est en effet
inventé.”
Maldoror” [in Brussels, there is a street by the name of Émile-

Wittmann. Ironically, it was on a street with the name of some local
official or celebrity that the editors of Les Chants de Maldoror were
located].32 Genonceaux’s myth endured until 1993, when René Fayt
proved that a printer named Émile Wittmann existed and lived in
Brussels in 1874. That Genonceaux’s false detail endured for 100
years is significant: a conjecture to embellish Lautréamont’s
publishing legend can become historiographical fact.
An inaccuracy more directly related to the author’s character
occurs when Genonceaux confuses Ducasse’s age, suggesting he died
at twenty and not at twenty-four. Although this mistake was fairly
quickly corrected by Gourmont when he reproduced Ducasse’s birth
certificate in the November 1891 issue of the Mercure de France,
repercussions of it remain today. One possible explanation:
Genonceaux deliberately altered the death to retaliate against Bloy’s
declaration that Ducasse was insane. Ducasse’s youth is critical to
Genonceaux’s ensuing arguments, which demonstrate that insanity is
so rare in people under twenty that Ducasse must have been in solid
mental form. Later, in Le Livre des Masques, Gourmont, who had
corrected the birth date error, actually raised the death date as well, to
1874, the same year as the Rozez publication of Les Chants de
Maldoror. Another possible rationale for the error, as well as its
primary effect, is an explicit association with Rimbaud who, by 1890,
had already turned his back on literature. Informed by quasi-mystical
science, Genonceaux writes:
La Science, en effet, nous apprend que les cas de vraie folie

sont extrêmement rares au-dessous de vingt ans. Or, l’auteur
naquit à Montevideo le 4 avril 1850; son manuscrit fut remis à
l’imprimerie en 1868; on peut sans témérité présumer son complet
achèvement en 1867; les Chants de Maldoror sortirent donc de
l’imagination et du labeur cérébral d’un jeune homme de dix-sept
ans.
[Science informs us that cases of true madness are extremely

rare before twenty years old. The author was born in Montevideo
on April 4, 1850; his manuscript was sent to the printer in 1868;
we can without a doubt presume it was completed in 1867. Les
32
Chants de Maldoror are thus the creative and imaginative product

of a seventeen-year-old young man.]33
Although it is true that Ducasse was born on April 4, it is unclear how

Genonceaux gathered (in spite of his “actives investigations”) that
Ducasse was born in 1850, and not 1846.
What is clear, however, is that if Ducasse had been born in 1850,
he would have died at the same age as Rimbaud when he retired from
literature. Many associations can be made between Lautréamont and
Rimbaud, but the mistaken age first put forth by Genonceaux survives,
to the extent that the two are often regarded as twins. René Étiemble
argues in his Le Mythe de Rimbaud that the connection between the
two needs no explanation: “S’agissant là d’une attitude religieuse, on
ne donne guère d’explications. Le plus souvent, on ne daigne pas
justifier le couple sacré: il porte en soi, et sans sa nature même du
couple, sa propre justification” [As for the religious attitude here,
there is no need for explanation. Most often, we don’t need to justify
the sacred couple: its justification is intrinsic].34 Étiemble suggests
that the collectively acknowledged connection between Lautréamont
and Rimbaud began with André Breton’s 1920 proclamation in La
Nouvelle Revue française that “l’enfantillage littéraire a pris fin avec
eux” [literary childishness ended with them].35 To the contrary, it
seems that this proximity began with Genonceaux’s preface. Étiemble
also cites Léon Pierre-Quint’s explanation for the pairing, which relies
primarily on the false birthdate: “Remarque digne d’attention:
Lautréamont est mort à vingt ans. Rimbaud aussi, ou, ce qui revient au
même, c’est à vingt ans qu’il a quitté la littérature et les arts”
[Important note: Lautréamont died at twenty years old. Rimbaud did
too, or rather, it was at twenty years old that he left literature and the
arts, which is basically the same thing].36 This factual mix-up, first put
forth by Genonceaux, lives on, even so much as to place
Lautréamont’s 1970 Œuvres complètes alongside another of
Rimbaud’s supposed twins, Germain Nouveau.
33
OC, 337.
34
Étiemble, Le Mythe de Rimbaud, 4 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), 2: 278.
35
Breton, Les Pas perdus, in Œuvres complètes, 1: 236.
36
Ibid.
Furthermore, while the doctored birth date couples Ducasse with

Rimbaud, the death date renders him revolutionary. The fact that
Ducasse died during the Siege of Paris in 1870 aligns him with a
revolutionary aesthetic in spite of himself, associated with both his
work and the historical context of his death. Étiemble’s ironic
conclusion here is telling: “étrange coïncidence, en effet, celle qui fait
mourir à Paris en novembre 1870, un an avant Le Bateau ivre, un
poète avec lequel Arthur Rimbaud avait beaucoup en commun,
individualistes qu’ils furent l’un et l’autre, et révolutionnaires!” [That
he died in Paris in 1870, one year before Le Bateau ivre, is a strange
coincidence for this poet with whom Arthur Rimbaud had so much in
common, both as individualists and as revolutionaries!]37 They died at
the same time, figuratively or factually; both were revolutionaries,
literally or poetically; and paradoxically, both were unique: comparing
the two poets is simultaneously absurd and logical.
As regards Ducasse’s death, Genonceaux admits his lack of
information:
Nos actives investigations n’ont pas abouti à pénétrer, dans son

intégralité, le mystère dont la vie de l’auteur à Paris semble avoir
été entourée. La préfecture de police s’est refusée à nous seconder
dans ces recherches, parce que nous n’avions aucun caractère
officiel pour les lui demander.
[In spite of our efforts, we could not penetrate in its entirety the
mystery surrounding the life of the author in Paris. The police
headquarters refused to assist us in our investigation because we
had no official standing to ask them for it.]38
As Lefrère suggests in Deux malchanceux, this last consideration

appears almost ridiculous from an editor whom the censors had under
surveillance for other lascivious publications.39 In this way,
Genonceaux’s “investigation” appears tongue-in-cheek. It is difficult
not to see ironic humor in Genonceaux’s summary of the explanation
given by his graphologist—who doubles as a psychologist as well as a
man of letters—when the same source of authority refers to Verlaine,
37
Ibid.
38
OC, 337.
39
but by misquoting him. “Enfin,” the multi-faceted, anonymous expert

deduces, “si le volume est paru quand Ducasse avait dix-neuf ans, et
qu’il soit mort à vingt ans, voilà donc une aliénation qui aurait évolué
en un an…N’est-ce pas le cas de dire avec Verlaine: Tout cela est
littérature!” [Well, if the volume was released when Ducasse was
nineteen years old, and he died at twenty, then the madness would
have only developed over the course of a year…It’s like Verlaine
says: It’s all just literature!] Factual evidence, evidence that seems
factual, and evidence that is purely concocted by Genonceaux paint
Lautréamont as a credible poet, similar to Rimbaud in age and
demeanor.
Genonceaux’s pseudo-biographical preface not only makes a
connection between youth, premature death, and poetry, however. It
also develops Lautréamont’s image to correspond with a real-life
version of his protagonist. Ducasse, the father of Lautréamont, who is
the father of Maldoror, becomes Ducasse as a more refined Maldoror
in Genonceaux’s preface. To take a prominent example, Genonceaux
describes Lautréamont’s compositional process in musical terms.
From the very title of the poem, Les Chants de Maldoror invokes
sound, and this detail alone convinces Genonceaux that Ducasse must
have been a musician himself. Genonceaux thus personifies prosody:
Il n’écrivait que la nuit, assis à son piano. Il déclamait, il

forgeait ses phrases, plaquant ses prosopopées avec des accords.
Cette méthode de composition faisait le désespoir des locataires de
l’hôtel qui, souvent réveillés en sursaut, ne pouvaient se douter
qu’un étonnant musicien du verbe, un rare symphoniste de la
phrase cherchait, en frappant son clavier, les rhythmes de son
orchestration littéraire.
[He wrote only at night, seated at his piano. He used to

declaim, would coin his phrases hammering out his tirades with
the chords. This method of composition was the despair of the
hotel’s occupants who, often woken with a start, could have no
idea that an astonishing musician of the word, a rare symphonist
of the sentence, was searching, by hitting his keyboard, for the
rhythms of his literary orchestration.]40
40
OC, 337 [Mal, 273-4].
This endearing portrait depicts Lautréamont as both an impetuous

rascal and a unique, eccentric artist. By alliteration and assonance in
“plaquant ses prosopopées avec des accords,” Genonceaux mimics
what he says Lautréamont does. Put another way, Genonceaux mirrors
the metalepses that he describes in Lautréamont’s poetry. The
prosopopeia here is thus less a “tirade” as Alexis Lykiard’s translation
declares. It is instead a rhetorical figure, used to represent an in-
animate object with personal characteristics. After forerunners such as
Paul Verlaine, who proclaimed “de la musique avant toute chose”
[music before all else], Genonceaux associates music with poetry.41
Verlaine espoused poetic sonority and rhythm, yet he was not
necessarily a pianist. Genonceaux transforms Ducasse into a literal
musician: not only “of the word,” he writes, but also of instruments.
Genonceaux’s graphologist concurs, referring three times in his
analysis to the “harmony” of Ducasse’s handwriting. Genonceaux
permanently fixes musicality into Lautréamont’s legend.
Genonceaux substitutes Lautréamont with Maldoror a second
time when he translates Maldoror’s poetic invocation to mathematics
and the narrator’s technical vocabulary as a real-life predilection for
science. This substitution serves two purposes. First, for Genonceaux,
whose goal is to debunk the myth of Ducasse’s insanity, logic and
science equal rational thought. Second, it promotes an alternative
reading to the Chants de Maldoror beyond the satanic, sacrilegious,
dark, and brooding one offered by Léon Bloy and the poets of La
Jeune Belgique. Genonceaux provides the following conclusion to his
“active investigation” into Ducasse’s life: “Borné à nos seules
enquêtes, nous avons acquis la certitude que Ducasse était venu à
Paris dans le but d’y suivre les cours de l’École polytechnique ou des
mines” [Though limited to our own investigations, we are quite
certain that Ducasse had come to Paris to take classes at the École
polytechnique or the École des mines].42 This debatable claim still
pervades Ducasse research. As Lefrère explains, Ducasse’s high
school records make a reasonable claim for his pursuit of a higher
degree in the sciences. Lefrère is also skeptical, however, because
those who side with the Ducasse-mathematician theory generally
41
Paul Verlaine, Œuvres poétiques (Paris: Dunot-Garnier, 1995), 261.
42
OC, 337.
employ Lautréamont’s poem as proof. For example, Maldoror’s

famous “invocation aux mathématiques,” though technical in its
vocabulary, cannot prove that the author himself was mathematically
inclined. One of Ducasse’s schoolmates, Paul Lespès, raised this issue
when he recounted in 1928:
Au lycée, en rhétorique comme en philosophie, Ducasse n’a

révélé, que je sache, aucune aptitude particulière pour les
mathématiques et la géométrie dont il célèbre avec enthousiasme,
dans les Chants de Maldoror, la beauté enchanteresse.
[In high school, in rhetoric as much as in philosophy, Ducasse

never showed any particular aptitude that I am aware of for math
or geometry, whose enchanting beauty he celebrates with so much
enthusiasm in the Chants de Maldoror.]43
For some critics, Lespès’s memoirs testify that Ducasse’s inclination

to geometry is purely poetic or wishful thinking.
Ironically, other critics like Lefrère prove by way of Ducasse’s
plagiarism that he went to the École Polytechnique. One of the famous
“beau comme” passages, he speculates, comes directly from an article
in a science journal published by the École Polytechnique. This
article, entitled “De la courbe que décrit un chien en courant après son
maître” [On the curve described by a dog running after its master],
written by the polytechnician Boisaymé and published in 1811, serves
as the foundation of Lautréamont’s metaphor in Canto V, 2: “Le
grand-duc de Virginie, beau comme un mémoire sur la courbe que
décrit un chien en courant après son maître, s’enfonça dans les
crevasses d’un couvent en ruines” [The Virginian eagle-owl, lovely as
a thesis on the curve described by a dog running after its master,
swooped down into the crevices of a ruined convent].44 Lefrère
proposes that because Ducasse copied the title, he must have been a
polytechnician. Ever since Genonceaux, critics and editors have
debated the connection between Ducasse’s career in math and
Lautréamont’s poetic prose.
43
Cited in Pierre-Olivier Walzer, ed., Œuvres complètes de Lautréamont (Paris:
Gallimard, 1970), 1026.
44
OC, 197 [Mal, 166]; Lefrère, Isidore Ducasse, 294.
It is more likely that Genonceaux claimed Ducasse was

mathematical because it reiterated the image he was trying to create: a
rational thinker, conscious of the rules he was breaking. Ducasse’s
reasons for moving to Paris matter little if one considers that
Lautréamont cultivates scientific terminology in his poetry to turn
logic on its head. Genonceaux uses Lautréamont’s text for stylistic
effect to verbally sketch an image of Lautréamont as logical.
Furthermore, Lefrère emphasizes this subtle distinction: Genonceaux
wrote that Ducasse came to Paris with the goal of entering the
prestigious school, not that he actually attended it. According to
Genonceaux, Ducasse should above all be considered a poet—with a
back-up plan.
Again, the graphologist concurs with Genonceaux, explaining
that the harmony of Ducasse’s handwriting and the logic of his word
choice are directly connected:
Mais, continuons: l’harmonie m’a montré un artiste, et tout à coup

je découvre un logicien et un mathématicien. Les derniers mots:
“la bonté de me l’écrire,” cela ne ressemble-t-il pas à une formule
algébrique, avec l’abréviation de bonté, et un syllogisme, avec cet
étroit enchaînement des mots; et, il est si étroit, cet enchaînement,
le scripteur est tellement obsédé par la logique qu’il ne met les
apostrophes qu’après le mot fini, et sans en oublier une seule!
C’est admirable, je n’ai peut-être pas vu cela dix fois sur les
milliers de lettres que j’ai étudiées.
[But let’s move on: the harmony suggests to me an artist, and then
all of a sudden I see a logician and a mathematician. The last
words: the goodness to write me, does it not resemble an algebraic
formula, with the abbreviation of goodness, and a syllogism, with
this concise sequence of words? And it is so concise, this
sequence, the scriptor is so obsessed with logic that he only puts
the apostrophes after the finished word, and doesn’t forget a single
one! It’s admirable; I’ve seen this maybe ten times in the millions
of letters that I’ve studied.]45
In this passage, the anonymous graphologist illustrates Genonceaux’s

dual argument. By proclaiming the rarity of Ducasse’s handwriting,
the graphologist also tacitly reminds readers of his own authority. Out
of millions of letters he has studied, Lautréamont’s is uniquely logical,
45
OC, 338-9.
yet also artistic. While graphology might today be considered a silly

pseudoscience, at the time of Genonceaux’s edition it was considered
a valid discipline, indeed a form of literary criticism. Many writers,
including Edgar Allan Poe, as the epigraph to this chapter shows,
professed an interest in script and participated in this nineteenth-
century literary vogue. As Poe observes in his “Chapter on Auto-
graphy,” the tangibility of an author’s words brings readers closer to
the author and to his character of “scribe.”46 For the same reason,
virtually every edition of Ducasse’s work and many critical works as
well, display a magnified reproduction of one of Ducasse’s signatures.
Since no physical portrait can show Ducasse’s authenticity, the next
best thing is his handwriting.
Even the handwriting’s authenticity is called into question in
Genonceaux’s preface, however. Despite Genonceaux’s insistence that
he possessed many autographed works by Ducasse, including the
manuscript, only one of them has ever been found. It is the only one
reproduced in facsimile in Genonceaux’s edition, and it is the same
one that the graphologist analyzes. The graphologist, though
anonymous, is purported by Genonceaux to be knowledgeable or
“érudit” and curiously doubles as an alienist. However suspicious the
graphologist seems, he may not be entirely invented. Lefrère’s own
quotation marks around the word “graphologist” in his discussion of
Genonceaux’s specialist suggest that he, too, suspects the
graphologist’s authenticity. One graphologist in particular, Jules
Crépieux-Jamin, had become famous for introducing the idea of
harmony and non-harmony in handwriting as a basis for superiority,
and had recently published L’écriture et le caractère in 1888. In it, he
finds similar traits in the handwriting of superior men, great artists,
and sure enough, Ducasse: harmony, elegance, order, distinction, and
clarity.
The handwriting analysis serves multiple purposes in
Genonceaux’s preface, including identification, validation, docu-
mentation, and defense. First, the graphological analysis identifies
Ducasse as a human with a signature and a real name, as opposed to
Bloy’s monster or the Jeune Belgique’s brooding viscount. By
46
Edgar Allan Poe, “A Chapter on Autography,” Graham’s Magazine, November 19,
1841, 224-234.
reproducing a letter in facsimile at the front of his edition and by

naming him, Genonceaux authenticates Ducasse and provides a
human side for him. Second, the graphologist distinguishes Ducasse
as a great poet, since no one would care to see the handwriting of an
unimportant writer.
Third, the graphologist allows Genonceaux to display the only
handwritten document he actually possesses. Genonceaux mentions
Ducasse’s handwriting in three instances. In the very first paragraph,
he claims that the edition is based on Ducasse’s manuscript, which has
never been found. Next, he reproduces a letter in facsimile in the front
of the volume, which the graphologist analyzes in the body of
Genonceaux’s preface.47 One of the most significant shortcomings
about this facsimile letter, however, is that Genonceaux doctored it in
several places when he reproduced it for his edition. The graphologist
indicates the following idiosyncrasy in Ducasse’s letter:
Oh! oh! C’est joli, dit-il (c’est là une expression familière aux
graphologistes lorsque le sujet leur semble intéressant); singulier
mélange, par exemple. Voyez donc l’ordre et l’élégance, cette date
régulière en haut, cette marge, ces lignes rigides, et cette
distinction [sic] inattendue qui le fait commencer sa lettre à
l’envers en oubliant les initiales que porte le papier....
[Oh! oh! It’s lovely, he says (this is a familiar expression to

graphologists when the subject interests them); a unique mixture.
You see order and elegance, this regular date on top, this margin,
these rigid lines, and this unexpected distinction [sic] which makes
him start his letter backwards, forgetting the initials marked on the
paper.]48
Genonceaux’s parenthetical remark here reveals a certain irony

with respect to graphology as a discipline. Nevertheless, the
graphologist indicates that Ducasse’s idiosyncrasy can be confirmed
by the fact that he started his letter backwards. In other words, the
47
Lefrère, Isidore Ducasse, 537-38. Although this letter was the first to be shown in
facsimile, it is the second most recent letter to be found by researchers, in 1978. The
most recent letter, found in 1980, was a letter addressed to Victor Hugo.
48
OC, 338. The word “distinction” in this citation is found in both the 1970 and the
2009 Pléiade editions. In Genonceaux’s 1890 edition, this phrase reads: “et cette
distraction inattendue,” VI. Such a curious error provides one example of the Pléiade
edition’s subtle enhancements of Ducasse’s life and work.
graphologist suggests that Ducasse quirkily started his letter on the

last page of his monogrammed paper, which is not as it appears in the
facsimile reproduced at the front of the volume:
Figure 2.2 “facsimile” letter, Genonceaux, 1890
In a footnote, Genonceaux admits that the photogravure

transferred the initials to the head of the letter, where they would
typically appear. Genonceaux therefore doctored the authenticity of
the letter used to prove Ducasse’s own authenticity, and corrects
Ducasse’s oversight. Moreover, Genonceaux removed a date added by
the receiver of the letter and an ink mark that went through Ducasse’s
insignia on the last page. Genonceaux’s facsimile is therefore not a
facsimile at all, but rather a cleaner, more coherent version of the
letter, with Lautréamont’s real name, his handwriting, and an altered
stamp to prove it. As Lefrère indicates, this copy of Genonceaux’s
false facsimile appears in almost all contemporary editions of
Lautréamont’s work because editors most often do not have access to
the real manuscript of it.49
The third example of handwriting comes in the concluding
paragraphs of Genonceaux’s preface. It is a peculiar letter addressed to
49
Lefrère, Isidore Ducasse, 538.
Ducasse’s banker, from which Genonceaux cites only three segments,

and it has never been found. The salient difference between these
three segments and the other six letters which have been found is that
Ducasse’s style is suspiciously similar to that of Maldoror. It captures
the desired image of Lautréamont because, Genonceaux writes, “La
correspondance de Ducasse est curieuse et montre combien étaient
vives ses préoccupations littéraires” [Ducasse’s correspondence is
curious and shows how keen his literary interests were].50 This
enigmatic letter is virtually incomprehensible out of context, and is
therefore today considered nearly as precious as Ducasse’s manu-
script. Moreover, this letter, which embellishes all critical editions of
Ducasse’s complete works, begins to look more and more like an
actual letter even though it is not. Editors mark the date in the top
right corner and situate it chronologically with the others. From what
can be gathered by these segments, Ducasse writes to request money
from his banker and discuss the “bizarrerie” of his father, who seems
to have restricted his allowance. But the style is so convoluted that it
is difficult to draw meaning from it without the holograph. Lefrère
hypothesizes that Genonceaux intended only to reproduce the most
“piquant” passages from a much longer and more technical letter,
thereby creating the desired effect of ambiguity.51 Critics have tended
to explain the letter’s incoherence by referring either to Genonceaux’s
flawed critical judgment while copying the letter or to the traditional
association with Lautréamont’s protagonist, Maldoror. This strange
expression, for instance, has puzzled critics, mostly because it is
entirely out of context: “Présenter dix ongles secs au lieu de cinq, la
belle affaire: après avoir réfléchi beaucoup, je confesse qu’elle m’a
paru remplie d’une notable quantité d’importance nulle” [To present
ten dry fingernails instead of five, is that all it comes to: after giving
the matter much thought, I confess it looked to me full of a notable
quantity of unimportance].52 Some critics suggest that the ten dried
nails refer periphrastically to holding out one’s hands to be punished
50
OC, 340.
51
Lefrère, Isidore Ducasse, 435. Lefrère suggests that alternatively the banker’s
successor did not allow Genonceaux to reproduce potentially offensive passages from
the rest of the letter regarding Ducasse’s father or regarding his predecessor, the
banker to whom the letter was addressed.
52
OC, 341 [Mal, 257].
at school. Others, like Lefrère, suggest that Genonceaux miscopied the

original from “dix ongles sales” [ten dirty fingernails] to “dix ongles
secs” [ten dry fingernails], which might refer to school-day hand
inspections for cleanliness.53 Despite the passage’s general ambiguity
and periphrasis, however, almost all explanations reveal that the
passage is not completely incoherent. With this letter as proof,
Genonceaux proposes that Ducasse was under the financial auspices
of his wealthy father, that his epistolary style corresponds with his
poetic style, and, most importantly, that he was young. Since
Genonceaux claims that this letter is dated May 22, 1869, which
situates it shortly after the completion of the Chants de Maldoror, it is
possible that Ducasse’s epistolary style would match the tone of his
poem. By focusing again on Ducasse’s youth, Genonceaux illustrates
another function of the graphologist, that of a form of defense.
The graphologist’s youth argument contributes to the defense of
Ducasse’s mental stability and against possible negative criticism.
Genonceaux provides this disclaimer: “La Critique appréciera, comme
il convient, Les Chants de Maldoror, poème étrange et inégal où, dans
un désordre furieux, se heurtent des épisodes admirables et d’autres
souvent confus” [The critcs will appreciate, as appropriate, the Chants
de Maldoror, strange and unparalleled poem where some admirable
episodes run up against other often confused ones in a terrible mess].54
By anticipating negative criticism here, Genonceaux wards it off. He
explains the need to destroy legends already formed about
Lautréamont’s personality by responding directly to Bloy:
Dernièrement encore, M. Léon Bloy, dont la mission, ici-bas,

consiste décidément à démolir tout le monde, les morts comme les
vivants, tentait d’accréditer cette légende dans une longue étude
consacrée au volume: il y répète à satiété que l’auteur était fou et
qu’il est mort fou.
[Most recently, M. Léon Bloy, whose mission consists in

destroying everyone, the dead as well as the living, set out to give
credence to this legend in a long study devoted to the volume: here
he repeats ad nauseam that the author was insane and died
insane.]55
53
54
OC, 336.
55
Ibid.
In another jab at Bloy, Genonceaux adds that Ducasse’s lodging “n’a

jamais été ni un cabanon, ni une maison de fous” [was neither a
mental institution nor a madhouse].56 The graphologist/alienist then
testifies that Ducasse’s youth precludes insanity:
Mais je m’étonne qu’une pareille légende ait trouvé crédit

auprès d’esprits distingués; vous n’ignorez pas combien les cas de
folie à cet âge sont rares, j’entends de la vraie folie, car des idiots,
des débiles, des mélancoliques, des crétins, les asiles en sont
bondés, mais un vrai fou, un fou de vingt ans qui, de sa folie,
mourrait dans un cabanon, je doute qu’on en voie souvent….
[But it surprises me that such a legend gained credibility

among these distinguished minds; you have no idea how rare cases
of madness are at that age, and I mean real madness, for asylums
are packed with idiots, mentally challenged, melancholics, and
cretins. But a real madman, a twenty-year-old madman who died
from his madness in an institution, I doubt that you see that very
often.]57
The alienist’s rationale here assumes incorrectly that Ducasse’s poem

was conceived by a seventeen-year old, when in fact he was in his
twenties when he wrote and twenty-four when he died.
Finally, in Genonceaux’s conclusion, Ducasse’s early death is
deployed again as a kind of excuse: “L’extrême jeunesse de l’auteur
atténuera sans doute la sévérité de certains jugements qui ne
manqueront pas d’être portés sur Les Chants de Maldoror. Si Ducasse
avait vécu, il eût pu devenir l’une des gloires littéraires de la France”
[The extreme youth of the author will lessen the severity of certain
judgments which will no doubt be made of the Chants de Maldoror. If
Ducasse had lived, he could have become one of the literary stars of
France].58 That Ducasse gained fame from his early death is left
ambiguous in Genonceaux’s lyrical conclusion, in which he compares
Ducasse’s physical remains to his work:
Il est mort trop tôt, laissant derrière lui son œuvre éparpillée
aux quatre vents; et par une coïncidence curieuse, ses restes
mortels ont subi le même sort que son livre. Inhumé dans une
56
Ibid., 337.
57
Ibid., 339.
58
Ibid., 341.
concession temporaire du cimetière du Nord, le 25 novembre

1870, il en a été exhumé, le 20 janvier 1871, pour être réinhumé
dans une autre concession temporaire. Il se trouve actuellement
dans les terrains désaffectés et repris par la Ville.
[He died prematurely, leaving his work behind him scattered

to the four winds; and by a curious coincidence, his mortal
remains suffered the same fate as his book. Buried in a temporary
plot in the cemetery de Nord, November 25, 1870, he was
exhumed January 20, 1871, only to be reburied in another
temporary plot. At present, he is found in the disused land taken
over by the city.]59
By lamenting his death and comparing the scattering of his remains to

the scattering of his work, Genonceaux sacralizes Ducasse as a poet
and a genius, making him out to be a martyr when he had previously
been unknown. His eulogy again recalls Poe, whose death is also a
mystery. Mallarmé’s praise of Poe in his “Le Tombeau d’Edgar Poe”
describes a similar sentiment of misunderstanding and martyrdom,
especially in the following lines:
Son siècle épouvanté de n’avoir pas connu

Que la Mort triomphait dans cette voix étrange!
[His century appalled to not have known

Death triumphed in that strange voice!]60
Although Genonceaux strives to debunk the image of Lautréamont as

insane, the ambiguity of Lautréamont’s sanity works to Genonceaux’s
advantage. He aims not to make Ducasse appear anodyne but rather to
emphasize Ducasse’s awareness of his own transgression and his
cultivation of images of evil for the sake of poetry, thereby mirroring
Baudelaire, Poe, Rimbaud and Verlaine.
Even though Genonceaux’s preface illuminates aspects of
Ducasse’s real life, its ambiguous validity also obscures Ducasse
permanently. This uncertainty carries over to Genonceaux’s editorial
apparatus, as well. He claims first that his edition is based on the
59
Ibid.
60
Stéphane Mallarmé, Œuvres complètes, 2: 727. The translation is from Peter
Manson, Stéphane Mallarmé: The Poems in Verse (Oxford, OH: Miami University
Press, 2012), 169.
manuscript itself, then later that it is based on Lacroix’s edition. It

remains unclear which text or texts were used as a copy-text and what
his exact motivation was in this edition: to transmit a text as a
historical artifact or to update and adapt it for a current audience.
Genonceaux clarifies that his text contains only a fraction of
Ducasse’s promised corrections to the “véhémences de style” [stylistic
violence] that had made the edition unacceptable twenty years earlier.
Genonceaux states that his text is reviewed and corrected from the
original manuscript, but he fails to explain which parts he amended. It
is difficult to determine whether Genonceaux aimed to offer
Ducasse’s uninfluenced intentions or his final intentions as influenced
by Lacroix. Genonceaux neglects to mention that Ducasse self-
published his work but never paid in full, which possibly explains the
incomplete first publication. Instead, Genonceaux leads the reader to
believe that his text is the authorially intended one.
Moreover, he fails to mention that the first canto was published in
two places before it was finally collected with the other five. If
Genonceaux had in fact consulted Ducasse’s manuscript, the variants
from one publication to the next would have been evident. It is more
likely that Genonceaux based his edition solely on the first Lacroix
1869 edition, but never saw the original manuscript. Genonceaux
claims that Lautréamont initially refused to amend or remove the
audacious parts of his poem, but later consented to the changes,
presumably to complete the publication. “Cartons” or inserts were
supposed to replace the dangerous parts but, Genonceaux writes, the
war broke out in 1870 and “brusquement, l’auteur mourut, n’ayant
executé qu’une partie des révisions auxquelles il avait consenti”
[suddenly the author died having only finished part of the revisions
that he had agreed to].61 Genonceaux thus reproduces almost all the
original salaciousness that he claims Lautréamont originally intended
in his poem, but he neglects to indicate which parts had been removed.
In terms of modernization or normalization of spelling,
Genonceaux remains silent. At times he appears to modernize; at other
times, he appears to respect the spelling from Lacroix’s text. For
example, he modernizes the word “revolver” which, during Ducasse’s
61
OC, 335.
lifetime and in the 1869/74 edition, was spelled “révolver.”62 If

Genonceaux’s goal was to reproduce Ducasse’s text as a historical
document, the author’s spelling and punctuation should have remained
the same. Instead, variants are not mentioned between the alleged
manuscript and the first edition; errors are not mentioned, although
some are corrected; and finally, spelling and punctuation are only
sporadically modernized.
Because of these layers of uncertainty regarding both
Genonceaux’s life and his claims about Ducasse, many of the
erroneous details he doctored continue to deceive readers today. On
the one hand, the modern reader is tempted to return to Genonceaux’s
preface as the first biography on which to base future biographies, and
the text he establishes as a copy-text on which to base subsequent
editions. On the other hand, although it was the first look into
Ducasse’s life, Genonceaux’s preface is by no means definitive.
Critics have thus historically tended to correct certain errors even as
they take others to be true. Saillet, for example, observed that
Genonceaux had mistaken Ducasse’s address and age, but assumed
the rest of the preface was accurate. In addition to these errors, Lefrère
later acknowledged that Ducasse’s handwritten letter reproduced by
Genonceaux was not a facsimile at all and that Ducasse’s motives for
moving to Paris were unlikely to have been those set forth by
Genonceaux. Nevertheless, in an attempt to debunk other legends
about the cause of Ducasse’s death, Lefrère defends Genonceaux’s
explanation that Ducasse was “emporté en deux jours par une fièvre
maligne” [taken away in two days by a malignant fever].63
The biographical elements of Genonceaux’s preface cannot be
accepted as entirely truthful. They can be considered only partly true,
and do not paint a complete picture of Isidore Ducasse. Instead,
Genonceaux presents the reader with a poet deprived of a “glorious”
career in literature because of a mysterious and premature death.
Genonceaux’s paratexts likewise depict a specific image of the poem
to be read in direct relation with Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Poe
and other provocative poets. The year 1890, which can be character-
62
Genonceaux, ed., Les Chants de Maldoror, 382; OC, 253.
63
ized by the early stages of a crisis in the book trade, also inaugurated
publishing trends that affected the entire twentieth century.
That Genonceaux’s preface dictates nearly all future biographical
research on Ducasse, and that paratext frequently overshadows text in
Lautréamont’s posterity, make Genette’s formula “Attention au
paratexte!” [Pay attention to the paratexts!]64 particularly valuable to
Lautréamont scholars. Genonceaux’s edition first captured the tension
inherent in the act of reading Lautréamont. It is always an accretion of
the actual text on the one hand and interpretation of it on the other.
Genonceaux’s edition consecrates Lautréamont as an author in this
context. Not only did Genonceaux perpetuate the symbolic currency
of “discovering” an author, but he also created a financial currency out
of publishing Lautréamont’s work. In helping to break Lautréamont’s
silence, Genonceaux not only changed the image of the poem, but
permanently changed the image of the poet.
64
Genette, Seuils, 376.
II
SURREALISM
Chapter Three
Investing in Lautréamont, 1920
En poésie, nous n’avons guère derrière nous que des

pièces de circonstance. Et d’ailleurs la signification
propre d’une œuvre n’est-elle pas, non celle qu’on
croit lui donner, mais celle qu’elle est susceptible de
prendre par rapport à ce qui l’entoure?
[In the realm of poetry we have scarce more than

circumstantial verse under our belts. And besides, isn’t
the true meaning of a work not the one people think
they have given it but rather the one it is liable to take
on in relation to its surroundings?]
— André Breton, Les Pas perdus1
In 1920, under André Breton’s supervision, the publishing house

Au Sans Pareil published Ducasse’s Poésies in an unprecedented
single volume. Just months before, Blaise Cendrars, at Éditions de la
Sirène, published a 1,360-copy edition of Les Chants de Maldoror.
Both volumes quickly sold out. Fifty years after his death, Isidore
Ducasse had finally become a success. In what follows, these first
surrealist editions from 1920 are reexamined to show how, as editors,
the surrealists exploited Lautréamont in order to invest in a precursor
and their own fledgling movement. These editions serve as a screen on
which to project how the surrealists saw Lautréamont’s incarnation of
their group’s ideals. Yet they also reflect the personal and professional
rivalries within the surrealist movement, suggesting that the surre-
alists’ efforts to distance themselves from romanticism, symbolism,
and Dada all played a central role in Lautréamont’s revival.
Half a century earlier, in a letter begging Auguste Poulet-
Malassis (the famous editor of Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal) to sell the
published, but unsold, Maldoror Ducasse had intimated that he
expected a delay in fame: “Ce que je voudrais, c’est que le service de
la critique soit fait aux principaux lundistes. Eux seuls jugeront en
1
The translation is from Mark Polizzotti, The Lost Steps (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1996), 6.
premier et dernier ressort le commencement d’une publication qui ne

verra sa fin évidemment que plus tard, lorsque j’aurai vu la mienne”
[What I should like is that the service of criticism be made in the style
of the principal lundistes. They alone shall judge in the first and last
resort the beginning of a publication which will only, of course, see its
end much later, when I’ll have seen mine].2 Ducasse was right: he
died a year later. Although copies of his poem were printed during his
lifetime, they never reached the Parisian literary critics who were
called “lundistes” because their reviews were printed in the Monday
newspaper.
Every few years from 1890 to 1920 a poet or a publisher would
attempt to promote Lautréamont’s work, but none catapulted him to
fame with the same force as the surrealists. Even though critics have
since succeeded at dislodging Lautréamont from his surrealist
associations, Lautréamont is a product of surrealism largely because
the surrealists championed his work. Between 1920 and 1938, when
the surrealist illustrated edition was published, Lautréamont’s poetry,
once considered the immoral stuff of a madman, became a permanent
fixture of the avant-garde.
In his series of articles from the nineteen-fifties, “Inventeurs de
Maldoror,” Maurice Saillet had promised a final article called
“L’Exploitation de Lautréamont-Ducasse depuis 1920,” but for
reasons that are unknown he never completed it. Saillet’s title
implicates 1920 as a critical year, but the exploitation to which he
refers was not limited to surrealism. Publishing, poetry, and plastic
arts merged more than ever before in the interwar avant-garde. This
convergence, along with a need to make Lautréamont’s work available
to readers, gave cause to Lautréamont’s revival. In his Lautréamont et
Sade, Maurice Blanchot argues that posterity begins with the first
reader and the first critic. A work remains the same, but the
interpretation of it varies throughout history:
Dans la mesure où ce lecteur et ce critique maintiennent à son plus

haut niveau l’ouvrage qu’ils lisent, ce plus haut niveau est
momentanément juste, il constitue un point d’équilibre que
naturellement le cours de l’histoire fera varier, mais dont il tiendra
compte, fût-ce en le repoussant.
2
Letter dated October 23, 1869, in OC, 306 [Mal, 258].
Investing in Lautréamont, 1920 107
[To the extent that this reader and this critic maintain the work that
they read at its highest level, this highest level is momentarily just,
it constitutes a point of equilibrium that the course of history will
naturally shift, but which will account for it even in dismissing
it.]3
Blanchot indicates here that readers, promoters, and even detractors

can co-opt an author’s celebrity. Yet historically the readers and critics
of Lautréamont’s work have played an additional role: they are his
editors and publishers. Consequently, they alter the text even as they
interpret the work. Before 1920, the Bibliothèque nationale de France
housed the only copy of Ducasse’s Poésies, while the few remaining
copies of Maldoror were nearly impossible to find. The surrealists’
“invention” of Lautréamont and their publication of his work are
therefore inseparable.
Small publishing houses that worked exclusively with the avant-
garde were a distinguishing development in the French publishing
trade following the First World War.4 In the wake of fin-de-siècle
symbolist magazines like the Mercure de France, the Nouvelle Revue
française, and the Revue blanche, and the emergent anti-establishment
magazines like Nord-Sud, independent publishing houses provided
literary avant-garde groups with a venue to disseminate their work.
Far less established than the Gallimard or Grasset publishing houses,
small firms like Au Sans Pareil and La Sirène coupled the promotion
of young, unknown writers with book commerce.
Given the promotional aspect of these magazines, Lautréamont
can be seen as a surrealist contemporary. Yet while the surrealists
broadcast Lautréamont’s work, the exchange was not one-sided:
Lautréamont inspired the surrealists as an artistic muse. Even the
prayer-book size of their 1920 volume of Poésies reflects the
reverence with which the surrealists regarded Lautréamont. Though
most often associated with André Breton as the surrealist leader,
Lautréamont’s image permeated the lives of both core and marginal
surrealists.
3
Blanchot, Lautréamont et Sade, 86; Kendall, Lautréamont and Sade, 46.
4
For a chronology of these publishing houses and their intersections with literary
movements, see Pascal Fouché, Au Sans Pareil and La Sirène (Paris: Bibliothèque de
littérature française contemporaine de l’Université Paris 7, 1983 and 1984).
Investing in an Ancestor
It is not easy to pinpoint the precise moment when the surrealists

“discovered” Lautréamont because the accounts come primarily half a
century after the fact and are often laced with lyrical nostalgia.
According to Louis Aragon, who met Breton as an intern at Val-de-
Grâce military hospital in September of 1917, Lautréamont was a kind
of secret password that unlocked their friendship. Aragon recounts
their common passion: “À un moment…je ne pus me retenir de
demander à Breton comment il se faisait qu’il ne prononçât pas le nom
que j’attendais à côté de Rimbaud, et c’est lui qui s’étonna quand je
dis: Lautréamont…” [At one point…I couldn’t stop myself from
asking Breton how it could be that he hadn’t mentioned the name that
I expect next to Rimbaud, and it was he who was surprised when I
said: Lautréamont…]5 For Aragon, sharing Lautréamont confirmed
Breton as a friend: “ce fait singulier et merveilleux que désormais
nous n’étions plus seuls, l’un et l’autre” [The singular and marvelous
fact that, from then on, we were no longer alone, neither one of us].6
That Aragon’s memoirs were written and published in 1967 is
revealing: the date marks Tel Quel’s revival of Lautréamont,
inaugurated by Marcelin Pleynet’s publication of Lautréamont par lui-
même. Pleynet had reproached Lautréamont’s critics for neglecting
Lautréamont in order to promote themselves. In response, Aragon
cites Pleynet’s criticism in an epigraph to his work: “les
commentateurs de Lautréamont ‘ne parlent que d’eux-mêmes—ils ne
parlent pas de Lautréamont, c’est Lautréamont qui les fait parler’”
[Lautréamont’s commentators ‘only talk about themselves—they
don’t talk about Lautréamont, it’s Lautréamont that makes them
talk’].7 He substitutes “Lautréamont” here where Pleynet wrote “Les
Chants de Maldoror,” however, suggesting a subtle predilection for
the enigmatic man over his work. Aragon sees Pleynet’s criticism as
praise since, as he sees it, Lautréamont prompted the entire surrealist
movement. Aragon promises rather to “plonge[r] dans cet abîme”
5
Louis Aragon, Lautréamont et nous (Toulouse: Sables, 1992), 13.
6
Ibid., 11.
7
Ibid., 7.
[dive into this abyss], immersing his memoirs in the same lyricism
that Pleynet resents.8
According to Aragon, a small group soon formed around
Lautréamont: Breton, Aragon, Philippe Soupault, Theodore Fraenkel,
Jacques Vaché, and, shortly after, Paul Éluard. Aragon recounts that at
the height of the First World War, he and Breton would read passages
from Les Chants de Maldoror aloud with patients in the mental ward.
When they learned of the existence of Ducasse’s Poésies, Breton
hand-copied the only available print from the Bibliothèque Nationale,
then promptly mailed the copies to friends abroad.
Years after his own first encounter and with nostalgia comparable
to Aragon’s, Breton recalls that Lautréamont served as kind of “pact”
between friends:
Pour savoir jusqu’où pouvait aller notre exaltation à son propos, il

n’est que de se rappeler ces lignes de Soupault: “Ce n’est pas à
moi, ni à personne (entendez-vous, messieurs, qui veut mes
témoins?) de juger M. le Comte. On ne juge pas M. de
Lautréamont. On le reconnaît au passage et on salue jusqu’à terre.
Je donne ma vie à celui ou à celle qui me le fera oublier à jamais.”
Cette déclaration en forme de pacte, sans hésitation, je l’aurais
contresignée.
[To know just how far our exaltation could go on his account, I
just have to recall these lines from Soupault: “It’s not for me, or
for anyone (do you hear me, Sirs, who wants my witnesses?) to
judge M. le Comte. You don’t judge M. de Lautréamont. You
recognize him in passing and you salute him to the ground. I give
my life to he or she who could make me forget him forever.” I
would have co-signed this declaration, this form of a pact, without
hesitation.]9
Like Aragon, Breton here emphasizes Lautréamont over his poetry.

Breton’s deferential tone and Soupault’s humility create a religious air
that transforms Lautréamont into both a secret rite of passage among
friends and a mysterious force to be reckoned with.
In 1924, Lautréamont was officially recognized in the first
Manifeste du surréalisme as one of several precursors. Unlike the
8
Ibid.
9
Breton, Œuvres complètes, 3: 451.
other proto-surrealists, however, Lautréamont’s importance endured

when Breton drafted the second Manifeste in 1929. Of the group
including Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Poe, and Sade, only Lautréamont
managed to escape intact. In the second Manifeste, Breton declares
that ancestry is senseless and that “trop de fripons sont intéressés au
succès de cette entreprise de détroussement spirituel pour que je les
suive sur ce terrain” [too many scoundrels are interested in this
business of spiritual robbery for me to follow along with them].10 He
adds that Lautréamont is the only possible exception:
En matière de révolte, aucun de nous ne doit avoir besoin

d’ancêtres. Je tiens à préciser que, selon moi, il faut se défier du
culte des hommes, si grands apparemment soient-ils. Un seul à
part: Lautréamont, je n’en vois pas qui n’aient laissé quelque trace
équivoque de leur passage.
[In the matter of revolt, none of us needs ancestors. I want to add

that, in my view, it’s important to resist the cult of men, as great as
they may appear to be. With one exception: Lautréamont, I don’t
see anyone who has not left some questionable trace in his
wake.]11
Though Breton’s judgment oscillated about other predecessors, it

remained constant for Lautréamont throughout the surrealist period.
Although he ranked Lautréamont with the others, Breton did not
know quite how to classify him, calling him a “cas passionnant…sur
lequel je manque de données” [a fascinating case about which I lack
information].12 Later, in 1925, Breton criticized the classification of
Lautréamont—or any writer—as a special “case” in poetry, when a
Franco-Belgian journal, Le Disque vert, devoted a special volume to
the “cas Lautréamont.”13 Breton’s resentment prompted this disdainful
reply:
…Selon moi c’est pure folie de soulever publiquement la

‘question’ Lautréamont. Qu’espérez-vous, grand Dieu? Ce qui a
pu si longtemps garder de toute souillure, à quoi pensez-vous en le
10
Ibid., 1: 784.
11
Ibid.
12
Ibid., 1: 328.
13
Arland, Le Cas Lautréamont.
livrant aux littérateurs, aux porcs? Ne vous suffit-il pas de voir ce

qu’ils ont fait de Rimbaud?
[In my view, it’s pure madness to publicly raise the ‘question’ of

Lautréamont. What are you hoping for, good God? Kept for so
long from every blemish, what are you thinking, abandoning him
now to the literati, to these pigs? Isn’t it enough to see what they
14
did to Rimbaud?]
He continues, in a religious tone similar to the one above:

“...Lautréamont, un homme, un poète, un prophète même: allons
donc!” […Lautréamont, a man, a poet, a prophet even: come on!]
Though Breton first considered Lautréamont a fascinating case in
literary history, he soon became suspicious of anyone who agreed and
possessive of what he considered his discovery.
Other predecessors collapsed under Breton’s fury. In his early
years as a medical auxiliary in Nantes, he was “entirely possessed” by
Rimbaud, for instance, but due to Rimbaud’s popularization—in
particular, to what Breton viewed as Paul Claudel’s Catholicization of
him—Breton lost faith. In the first Manifeste, Breton describes
Rimbaud as “surrealist in life and elsewhere,” whereas he becomes an
unpardonable traitor in the second Manifeste:
Inutile de discuter encore sur Rimbaud: Rimbaud s’est trompé,

Rimbaud a voulu nous tromper. Il est coupable devant nous
d’avoir permis, de ne pas avoir rendu tout à fait impossibles
certaines interprétations déshonorantes de sa pensée, genre
Claudel.
[It’s useless to discuss Rimbaud still: Rimbaud made an error;

Rimbaud tricked us. He is guilty in our eyes for having allowed,
for not having made certain dishonorable interpretations of his
work impossible, those by Claudel, for example.]15
Rimbaud’s removal from the family tree corresponded directly to

conflicting interpretations of his work.
Similarly, Baudelaire, once called “surrealist in morality,” soon
became scornfully pious in Breton’s eyes. And Sade, once “surrealist
14
Ibid., 90.
15
in sadism,” was excommunicated with Georges Bataille for pushing

the tenets of surrealism too far.16 A number of collectively-written
tracts reveal the surrealists’ anti-establishment predisposition, aimed
at protecting writers from popularization. In 1927, for example, the
surrealists denounced a public monument to honor Rimbaud:
Nous sommes curieux de savoir comment vous pouvez concilier

dans votre ville la présence d’un monument aux morts pour la
patrie et celle d’un monument à la mémoire d’un homme en qui
s’est incarné la plus haute conception du défaitisme, du défaitisme
actif qu’en temps de guerre vous fusillez.
[We are curious to know how you can reconcile the presence of a
monument to those who died for their country with that of
monument to the memory of a man who incarnated the highest
form of defeatism, active defeatism that you fire at during
wartime.]17
This type of possessiveness of forerunners epitomized the surrealists’

cult of Lautréamont.
Though for years Breton castigated anyone who mythologized
Lautréamont, he occasionally admitted that the mystery of
Lautréamont seduced him, too. In Nadja, for example, he describes
the seduction: “Certes, rien ne me subjugue tant que la disparition
totale de Lautréamont derrière son œuvre…” [Surely, nothing
captivates me more than Lautréamont’s total disappearance behind his
work].18 Because an enigma posed no threat to surrealist inter-
pretation, Lautréamont became as unassailable as he was malleable.
Accordingly, the surrealists molded his poetry to suit their aesthetic
interests as a group; they shaped Lautréamont as a proxy for
predecessors that had departed, either by alleged treason or by death.
In particular, Lautréamont replaced two predecessors: Rimbaud for his
16
See the polemical exchange between Bataille and Breton, especially in Breton’s
second Manifeste and Bataille’s “Le Lion châtré” from Un Cadavre, a 1930
collectively written attack of Breton, in Georges Bataille, Œuvres completes, 12 vols.
(Paris: Gallimard, 1970), 1: 218-19.
17
Maxime Alexandre et al., “Permettez!” October 23, 1927, in Eric Losfeld and José
Pierre, eds., Tracts surréalistes et déclarations collectives, 2 vols. (Paris: Éditions Le
Terrain Vague, 1980-82), 1: 85.
18
poetic disobedience and Jacques Vaché for his absurdist sense of

humor.
For the surrealists, both Rimbaud and Lautréamont represented
the cult of youth in poetry. While both poets rejected constraints and
traditions in literature, however, Lautréamont arose as the emblematic
forefather of automatic writing. He was going to be, as Breton put it,
the contemporary Rimbaud: “Lautréamont sera le Rimbaud de la
poésie d’aujourd’hui” [Lautréamont will be contemporary poetry’s
Rimbaud].19 In a 1952 interview, Breton suggested an inherent
prestige to the myth of the poet who turns his back on his work to
inexplicably shun literature forever:
comme si, certains sommets atteints, elle ‘repoussait’ en quelque

sorte son créateur. Un tel comportement de la part de celui-ci prête
à ces sommets un caractère indépassable, quelque peu vertigineux
et, je le répète, leur permet d’exercer une fascination.
[as if, after reaching the summit, the work ‘rejected’ its creator.
Such behavior by this creator gives these heights an impassible,
dizzying character and, I repeat, allows them to elicit
fascination.]20
Rimbaud’s forsaking of literature attracted the surrealists whereas

Lautréamont’s mysterious death mesmerized them. Lautréamont’s
death from literature was premature, however, and though he was an
enigma, he was not a traitor. Unlike Rimbaud, Lautréamont cleared a
path that surrealism wished to tread.
This preference for Lautréamont is nowhere more explicit than in
Soupault’s preface to the 1920 edition of Ducasse’s Poésies. The
Poésies were unknown until Remy de Gourmont found them and
published only fragments of the first volume in the Mercure de
France in 1891. Whereas the surrealists regarded the Poésies as a
complete work, others considered them merely a preface to an
unfinished work, and therefore not worthy of an edition. Likewise,
their apparent contrast with the Chants de Maldoror posed an
interpretive challenge: seductive to the surrealists while baffling to
others. In his preface to the Poésies, Soupault responds to this
19
Aragon, Lautréamont et nous, 95.
20
problem by praising disparity in general. He compares Ducasse’s

complete turn-around with Rimbaud’s rejection of poetry following
Une Saison en Enfer. Whereas Rimbaud turned his back on poetry by
quitting, Soupault notes, Lautréamont pushed literature to its limits:
“Il sait en quelle estime il faut tenir la littérature, mais il continue
malgré tout à écrire” [He knows in what esteem one must hold
literature, but he nevertheless continues to write].21 As Soupault sees
it, Ducasse’s contradiction is strategic. The Poésies, he claims,
exemplify the poetic right to contradict oneself, a right which links
Lautréamont with Rimbaud: “La joie de se contredire, le besoin de se
moquer de soi-même et de ricaner, Rimbaud et Ducasse les
connurent” [The joy of contradicting oneself, the need to make fun of
oneself and to have a laugh, Rimbaud and Ducasse knew it].22 In the
eyes of the surrealists, Rimbaud abandoned literature whereas
Ducasse heroically persevered. After the failure of Maldoror and in
response to its romantic pessimism, Soupault suggests, the Poésies are
at once a sign of redemption and excess. In order to demonstrate
Lautréamont’s tenacity as well as to praise automatism as a writing
technique, Soupault cites the following passage from the second
volume of Poésies: “Je n’ai pas besoin de m’occuper de ce que je ferai
plus tard. Je devais faire ce que je fais. Je n’ai pas besoin de découvrir
quelles choses je découvrirai plus tard” [I need not bother about what I
shall do later. I ought to do what I am doing, I need not discover
whatever things I shall come across later].23
Soupault reads this passage, and indeed the entire Poésies, above
all as a prophecy of surrealism, citing passages that appear to presage
the surrealist cause. In the following extract, for example, later cited
repeatedly in discussions of Lautréamont’s ironic humor, the
surrealists see the “vous” addressed to themselves:
Allez, la musique.
Oui, bonnes gens, c’est moi qui vous ordonne de brûler, sur
une pelle, rougie au feu, avec un peu de sucre jaune, le canard du
doute, aux lèvres de vermouth, qui, répandant, dans une lutte
mélancolique entre le bien et le mal, des larmes qui ne viennent
21
Isidore Ducasse, Poésies (Paris: Au Sans Pareil, 1920), vii.
22
Ibid.
23
Ibid. In OC, 289 [Mal, 245].
pas du cœur, sans machine pneumatique, fait, partout, le vide

universel. C’est ce que vous avez de mieux à faire.
[Come on, music.

Yes, good folk, it is I who direct you to roast upon a red-hot
shovel, with a little brown sugar, the duck of doubt with lips of
vermouth, which, in a melancholy struggle between good and evil,
shedding crocodile tears, without an air-pump everywhere brings
about the universal vacuum. That is the best thing for you to do.]24
Ducasse describes his new method here in a loquacious style

reminiscent of Maldoror. With similar alacrity, Ducasse surrounds
every word with nearly every meaning possible for it. He transforms
the figurative “canard du doute” [duck doubt], referring to a
sensationalized and false story, into a real duck to be roasted on an
open fire. Likewise, he bestows this duck with vermouth lips, an
epithet that conjures another meaning of “canard”: a cube of sugar
saturated in alcohol.25 This meaning, in particular, is reinforced by the
reference to brown sugar. The epithet also refers to the epic hero from
Maldoror whose lips are frequently portrayed with a mineral attribute:
“lèvres de saphir,” “lèvres de bronze,” “lèvres de jaspe,” and “lèvres
de soufre” [lips of sapphire, lips of bronze, lips of jasper, lips of
sulfur]. Ducasse depletes his arsenal of literary description and
concludes in a negation with nothing more than a “vide universel” or
emptiness. For the surrealists, this sort of stylistic metamorphosis is
emblematic of automatic writing in which subconscious associations
translate to poetry. The title of Breton’s 1951 article “Sucre jaune”
refers directly to this passage, and Éluard’s 1939 collection, Donner à
voir, reproduces fragments from it in his own poems.
Soupault reads the Poésies’ apparent recantation of Maldoror as a
call to change tradition. He concludes that both Rimbaud and Ducasse
raise an important problem for poetry, which he invites the surrealists
to solve: “Un effrayant problème se pose. Rimbaud n’a pas voulu y
apporter de solution. Ducasse n’a pas vécu assez longtemps pour nous
le donner. Et nous-même, vivrons-nous assez pour la connaître? Il faut
attendre que s’éveille en un poète la même force” [A dreadful problem
24
OC, 268 [Mal, 229].
25
These definitions come from the Bescherelle dictionary, cited on the Hubert de
Phalèse database.
arises. Rimbaud didn’t want to offer a solution. Ducasse didn’t live

long enough to give us one. And what about us, will we live long
enough to know it? We must wait for the same force to come to life in
another poet].26 The problem for Soupault, it seems here, is the power
of poetry to rupture literary conventions. Rimbaud and Lautréamont
were poetic revolutionaries; the former quit and the latter was
interrupted. Now, Soupault suggests that the young and audacious
surrealists can continue their mission, as apostles to their pre-
decessors. Lautréamont thus gives inspiration to the surrealists’ poetic
revolution.
Soupault goes on to portray Lautréamont’s style and dark, lyrical
humor as a replacement for another precursor: Jacques Vaché. In
Breton’s Pas perdus, a work dedicated to Vaché, Breton characterizes
his primary source of inspiration: “c’est à Jacques Vaché que je dois le
plus” [I owe Jacques Vaché the most].27 Yet Vaché was not a writer;
his literary production is limited to letters from the war, published by
Breton himself. Vaché’s greatest exploit was to have died a premature
and mysterious death. Thereafter, he became a legend, propagated
above all by Breton. As Michel Sanouillet suggests in his Dada à
Paris, Breton alone constructed the myth of Vaché in order to
discover a posteriori a precursor to Dada.28 Like Lautréamont’s
mysterious death, Vaché’s was that of a martyr who died for the
surrealist cause. Vaché, like Lautréamont, was a mythic surrealist who
could have been great. As the surrealists saw it, both figures make
surrealism more than possible: they render it necessary, as though the
history of literature had been waiting for the surrealist movement.
Vaché supposedly received a copy of Les Chants de Maldoror
and the Poésies, yet he never mentioned Lautréamont.29 Nor did
Breton ever explicitly compare the two. Notwithstanding this apparent
neglect, Lautréamont and Vaché are often portrayed as having a
similar sense of humor. Vaché’s unequivocal opinions on literature
favored what he called “l’umour,” roughly defined as a sensation of
26
Ducasse, Poésies, 1920, vii.
27
28
Michel Sanouillet, Dada à Paris (Paris: J.J. Pauvert, 1965), 81.
29
In Lautréamont et nous, 14, Aragon recalls that Breton was especially eager to mail
Vaché a copy of Maldoror’s first canto.
the uselessness of everything.30 He describes an alarm-clock as an

example of “l’umour,” for instance, because it is at once meaningful
and absurd. As the spelling of “l’umour” suggests, Vaché especially
admired Alfred Jarry, creator of Ubu Roi.31 A salient feature of this
type of humor in Ducasse’s Poésies is the author’s constant
interjections, reminders that words are no more than artifice. In the
example cited above, the first line “Allez, la musique” fails to
correspond with the content of the passage, but instead serves as an
ironic reminder that, to Ducasse, words as well as themes are
melodramatic. Quips such as “Naturellement!” [Naturally] and “Je
vous demande un peu, beaucoup!” [I ask you a little, a lot] reinforce
Ducasse’s sardonic tone in the Poésies.
In Vaché’s understanding of humor, this type of mockery also
depends on contradiction. In a letter to Breton in August 18, 1917,
Vaché embodies Ducasse’s style when he opines on art:
Et bien—je vois deux manières de laisser couler cela—Former

la sensation personnelle à l’aide d’une collision flamboyante de
mots rares—pas souvent, dites—ou bien, dessiner des angles, ou
des carrés nets de sentiments—ceux-là au moment,
naturellement—Nous laisserons l’Honnêteté logique—à charge de
nous contredire—comme tout le monde.
–O DIEU ABSURDE!—car tout est contradiction—n’est-ce
pas?
[Well—I see two ways to let it flow—form a personal

sensation with the help of a flamboyant collision of rare words—
not often, say—or, draw clean angles or squares of sentiments—
those of the moment, naturally—we will leave logical Honesty—
in charge of contradicting ourselves—like everyone else.
–O ABSURD GOD!—for everything is contradiction—isn’t
it?]32
30
Jacques Vaché, Lettres de guerre (Paris: Au Sans Pareil, 1919), 8.
31
In Les Pas perdus, Breton recalls that Jarry was one of the few writers whom Vaché
admired: “Nous nous entretenions de Rimbaud (qu’il détesta toujours), d’Apollinaire
(qu’il connaissait à peine), de Jarry (qu’il admirait), du cubisme (dont il se méfiait)”
[We spoke of Rimbaud (whom he had always hated), Apollinaire (with whom he was
barely familiar), Jarry (whom he admired), Cubism (which he distrusted). Œuvres
complètes, 1: 199 [Lost Steps, 7].
32
Vaché, Lettres, 18.
In a self-proclaimed automatic style, written “au hasard d’une

improvisation immédiate” [at random from a spontaneous impro-
visation], Vaché here explains to Breton that modernity in art is
defined by contradiction. Like Ducasse in the passage above about the
duck with vermouth lips, Vaché imparts flexibility to language when
he equates feelings to the “flamboyant collision of rare words.” He
simulates this collision by manipulating his words in their figurative
and literal sense. Flamboyance takes on a double meaning of flame-
like and ostentatious. Echoing Ducasse’s sardonic “naturellement,”
Vaché’s vision of art here illustrates that contradiction can be at once
absurd and meaningful.
In his preface to the Poésies, Soupault reiterates this value of
contradiction when he writes that the Poésies legitimate the Chants de
Maldoror by absurdity and contradiction: “La toute-puissance de la
poésie éclate dans les Chants de Maldoror. Elle est réduite à rien dans
la Préface” [The complete power of poetry explodes in the Chants de
Maldoror. It is reduced to nothing in the Poésies].33 The Poésies are,
to the surrealists, a magnificent demonstration of Reductio ad
absurdum, in which Ducasse “proves” Maldoror by refuting it.
Juxtaposed with the Chants de Maldoror, Ducasse’s Poésies I, in
particular, reinforce Vaché’s promotion of absurdity and contra-
diction. According to Vaché’s definition of art, opposition is both
positive and creative. By contrast, the second volume of Poésies, in
which Ducasse revises classical maxims of thinkers such as Pascal,
Vauvenargues, and La Rochefoucauld, illustrates a destructive type of
contradiction. Such negation of conventions, at this stage of sur-
realism, is chiefly endorsed by Dada.
The traits the surrealists most admired in Dada, such as
incongruity and nihilism, are also those that steered their interpretation
of the Poésies. Unlike the Dadaists, however, the surrealists aspired to
a productive form of negation. In this way, an aesthetic value of
precursors in general emerged: precursors helped distinguish the
surrealist movement from Dada and also became a strategy, as
exemplified by Ducasse’s poetic “retournements” or distortions of
classical maxims. Whereas Dada’s aesthetic strategy excluded
precursors, both the emergent surrealist movement and Ducasse
33
Ducasse, Poésies, 1920, vii.
depended on them for creative inspiration. Dissatisfied by the

shortcomings of Dada, the surrealists found a more meaningful,
productive alternative in Lautréamont.
By promoting Ducasse, the surrealists facilitated the transition
from being recognized by Dadaists to forming an autonomous
movement. Few Dadaists mentioned Lautréamont in their work,
mainly because Dada was an anti-movement for which precursors
were either unnecessary or something that had to be destroyed. For
surrealism, on the other hand, precursors served as a kind of invariable
in their poetic mission. Lautréamont, in particular, provided a reason
for the surrealist movement, whereas, for Dada, reason itself was
negated. That Breton sent Tristan Tzara, one of the founders of Dada,
a copy of Lautréamont’s Poésies before he sent the better-known
Maldoror is revealing: the Poésies, particularly the second volume,
corresponded better to Dadaist ideals than Maldoror did. In a letter
dated June 12, 1919, shortly after the death of Jacques Vaché, Breton
wrote to Tzara:
J’ai prié Paul Éluard de vous adresser Les Chants de Maldoror

qu’il possédait en double exemplaire. L’ouvrage est à peu près
introuvable et Bloch le vendrait plus de vingt francs. Je suis très
heureux que vous ayez pensé cela des Poésies. Après la lecture
des chants, la deuxième partie prendra pour vous, je crois, un sens
nouveau.
[I asked Paul Éluard to send you Les Chants de Maldoror, of

which he has an extra copy. The work is almost impossible to find
and Bloch would sell it for more than twenty francs. I am very
happy that you thought that about the Poésies. After you read the
chants, the second part will take on a new meaning for you, I
think.]34
Aragon later confirmed in Lautréamont et nous:
Une des données les plus singulières de la résurrection des

Poésies, c’est que l’exaltation qu’elle suscite chez Philippe, André
et moi coïncide avec la découverte, non point seulement de Dada,
mais de Tristan Tzara, à la fois comme poète et comme théoricien.
34
See the appendix in Sanouillet, Dada à Paris, 446.
[One of the most peculiar facts about the resurrection of the

Poésies is that the elation it sparked with Philippe, André, and me
coincides with the discovery not only of Dada, but also of Tristan
Tzara, both as poet and theoretician.]35
Parts of Lautréamont’s Poésies II compare to the most iconoclastic

Dadaist pieces: just as Marcel Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q. subverts the
Mona Lisa by decorating her with a mustache, Ducasse’s maxims
subvert classical thought as they call attention to it.
As in Dadaist pieces, Lautréamont’s “retournements” create a
humorous effect. For instance, in the following maxim, Ducasse
revises one of Pascal’s Pensées to turn it on its head. Pascal
conjectures that it is important to understand human weakness:
En écrivant ma pensée, elle m’échappe quelquefois, mais cela me

fait souvenir de ma faiblesse que j’oublie à toute heure; ce qui
m’instruit autant que ma pensée oubliée: car je ne tends qu’à
connaître mon néant.
[In writing my thought, it sometimes escapes me, but that makes

me remember my weakness that I constantly forget; this is as
instructive to me as my forgotten thought: for I strive only to
know my nothingness.]36
Ducasse deliberately misinterprets the maxim, writing instead that it is

important to understand human strength:
Lorsque j’écris ma pensée, elle ne m’échappe pas. Cette action me

fait souvenir de ma force que j’oublie à toute heure. Je m’instruis
à proportion de ma pensée enchaînée. Je ne tends qu’à connaître la
contradiction de mon esprit avec le néant.
[When I write down my thoughts, they do not escape me. This

action makes me remember my strength which I forget at all
times. I educate myself proportionately to my chained thought. I
aim only to distinguish the contradiction between my mind and
nothingness.]37
35
36
From Pascal, article sixième, I, in OC, 674.
37
OC, 279 [Mal, 236].
Ducasse thus comes to the same conclusion as Pascal, by borrowing

the latter’s words and then depleting them, emptying them of their
value and even their rhythm. Ducasse’s technique here appears to be
an early form of ‘Pataphysics, a meta-philosophy of meaninglessness.
Éluard and Breton later practiced this technique, called
“détournement” because of its simultaneously subversive and creative
possibilities. In Immaculée conception, for example, includes a piece
entitled “Il n’y a rien d’incompréhensible” [Nothing is incompre-
hensible], taken directly from a line in Poésies II. In this 1930
collective work, “détournements” and automatic writing combine to
create a surrealist philosophy of poetry. Parts of the work are based on
preexistent fragments and newspaper articles. Whereas the surrealist
agenda sublimated the image of Lautréamont while turning his
technique into a philosophy, Dada’s program consisted in not having
one. As a movement of négation totale, with no formal aesthetic,
Dada cultivated the anti-real. Surrealists, on the other hand, aspired to
a more sublime version of the real.
In exchange for Lautréamont’s contributions to the rejection of
conventions, absurd humor, flamboyant imagery, and creative
pilfering in poetry, the surrealists shaped him into a cult icon. André
Gide even considered it their greatest achievement: “J’estime que le
plus beau titre de gloire du groupe qu’ont formé Breton, Aragon et
Soupault, est d’avoir reconnu et proclamé l’importance littéraire et
ultra-littéraire de l’admirable Lautréamont” [I reckon that the greatest
glory of the group formed by Breton, Aragon and Soupault is to have
recognized and proclaimed the literary and ultra-literary importance of
the admirable Lautréamont].38 With the prefix “ultra-,” Gide’s
sentiment confirms that Lautréamont’s influence extends beyond the
literary. As Breton would have it, Lautréamont’s importance was sur-
literary, because he influenced not only literature, but also life.
Investing in His Work
Although Lautréamont’s aesthetic significance had been

established by 1920, the surrealists could not spread his message until
they addressed the unavailability of his work. Thus, in 1920, they
38
Arland, Le Cas Lautréamont, 3.
published the Poésies in a single volume, under their own auspices at

Au Sans Pareil. In it, a new, surrealist face of Lautréamont replaced
the insane, extreme romantic image leftover from symbolism. Despite
their mistrust of popularization, the surrealists transformed
Lautréamont from an underground figure into a public one.
Breton’s earlier preface to the serial publication of Poésies, in
several 1919 issues of the first surrealist magazine Littérature, already
suggested an aesthetic penchant for the Poésies over the Chants. The
Poésies, Breton argued, should be considered less an inferior
appendage to the Chants than a preliminary piece of an unfinished
work: “J’ajoute qu’elles ne leur sont en rien comparables, donc point
inférieures, puisque les deux fascicules imprimés n’en constituent que
la préface, ne peuvent passer que pour un Art poétique et que le
recueil demeure jusqu’à ce jour inconnu” [I will add that they aren’t
even comparable, thus hardly inferior, since the two printed booklets
only constitute the preface, can only pass for a poetic art, and that the
collection remains unknown to this day].39 Breton, like Soupault a
year later in his 1920 preface, reads the Poésies as a prelude to a new
art, that of surrealism. Once considered a curious palinode of the
Chants, the Poésies thus become an independent and meaningful work
with the power to influence surrealist values even better than the
Chants.
Breton’s observations about incomparability reflect his reaction
to the symbolists from whom the surrealists inherited Lautréamont.
Aragon recalls that, before surrealism, Lautréamont was considered
much less an idol than an eccentric:
Tout le monde, y compris Paul Fort, le regardait en ce temps-

là comme une curiosité littéraire qui venait accroître le nombre de
ces excentriques de l’écriture dont Nerval a fait un livre. Il était
parfaitement inutile de mettre le lyrisme de Maldoror au compte
d’autre chose que de la folie (c’était la thèse de Gourmont).
[Everyone, including Paul Fort, thought of him at that time as

a literary curiosity which increased the number of literary
eccentrics about which Nerval wrote a book. It was perfectly
39
useless to attribute Maldoror’s lyricism to anything other than

madness (which was Gourmont’s hypothesis).]40
By Aragon’s account, his friends shared a copy of the first canto only,
printed in a 1914 issue of Paul Fort’s Vers et Prose. This fin-de-siècle
view of Lautréamont as an insane or deliberately eccentric literary
curiosity depended as much on the only text available to
Lautréamont’s readers as it did on the thematic content of that work.
From 1905 to 1914, Vers et Prose served to link remaining symbolists
to the young surrealists. Instead of creating a new preface to suit the
tastes of twentieth-century readers in this post-symbolist publication,
however, Paul Fort reproduced Léon Genonceux’s preface to the 1890
edition of the entire Chants de Maldoror. In 1890, the Poésies were
still unknown and Genonceaux admired Lautréamont not for his
cultivation of the absurd, but for his salacious themes. Consequently,
the remaining symbolists still interpreted him through this nineteenth-
century bohemian perspective.
Like Vers et Prose, Jean Royère’s journal La Phalange (1906-
1914) connected remaining symbolists with early surrealists. In its last
year of publication, La Phalange printed excerpts of Ducasse’s
Poésies with an accompanying article by Valéry Larbaud.41 Larbaud
later wrote in Une Campagne littéraire, Jean Royère et La Phalange
that this small journal, with fewer than four hundred readers, played a
major role in discovering contemporary literature, turning lesser-
known writers into big literary names. It introduced new poets—
Breton published his early work here, as did Guillaume Apollinaire,
Paul Fort, and Léon-Paul Fargue.
A surrealist edition of the Poésies provided a clean break from
Lautréamont’s symbolist associations. Though symbolism and
surrealism shared a common goal for poetry—to find a new field for
language and a new form of perception—they approached it with
different techniques. The symbolists valued two meanings, one
symbolic and one literal, whereas the surrealists aspired to a single
vision of language and not two. Meaning for the surrealists, like life,
was inharmonious, incongruous, and absurd, and, in their quest to
40
41
Chant Premier appeared during January, February, and March of 1914 and
Larbaud’s article on the Poésies appeared on February 20, 1914.
change poetry, they celebrated anything that provoked or celebrated

revolt.
Just as Ducasse questioned romanticism by way of the romantics
in Poésies I, the surrealists questioned symbolism by way of the
remaining symbolists. A new surrealist edition of the Chants and the
Poésies offered readers access not only to the work, but also to a new
way of reading it, thereby transforming Lautréamont’s image from an
excessively romantic poet with a curious taste for contradiction to a
surrealist avant la lettre. Breton’s literary career blossomed in the
same symbolist magazines that reproduced Lautréamont’s work,
revealing that until he had a motive to promote surrealism, Breton
overlooked Lautréamont. Three of Breton’s earliest poems were
published in the issue of La Phalange following the Poésies issue, but
he only discovered Lautréamont four years later.42
Thus, in 1919, the surrealists read the Poésies against Larbaud’s
symbolist interpretation of it, the effects of which emerge in their
1920 surrealist edition. More broadly, they read Larbaud’s fairly
dismissive analysis of the Poésies in La Phalange as an open
invitation for dispute. Larbaud classifies the Chants as more
extravagant than original, more sophomoric than mature: “une
production extraordinaire, d’une splendide extravagance…le suprême
excès du romantisme” [an extraordinary production, of splendid
extravagance…the supreme excess of romanticism].43 He considers
Lautréamont’s Poésies I a disavowal of the Chants and a professional
mistake. Larbaud hypothesizes that Ducasse must have died before
realizing and rectifying this mistake, seeing the Poésies as an “attaque
violente contre tout ce qu’on réunit sous le nom de romantisme”
[violent attack against everything brought together under the name of
romanticism].44 He further hypothesizes that Ducasse sought his
father’s emotional or financial support, which explains why the
Poésies were so rational in comparison with the Chants. Or maybe,
Larbaud speculates, the Poésies were simply a schoolboy’s joke,
42
In volume 93 of the same year, March 20, 1914. These poems, “Le Saxe fin,”
“Rieuse et si peut-être,” a poem dedicated to Paul Valéry, and, finally, “Hommage,”
reflect Breton’s self-proclaimed Mallarmean style and indicate his lingering symbolist
tastes in 1914. See Breton, Œuvres complètes, 1: 199.
43
Larbaud, “Les ‘Poésies,’” La Phalange 92 (1914): 149.
44
Ibid.
“comme ces enfants qui, en bêtifiant, sans le vouloir, ridiculisent les

paroles qu’ils ont entendu prononcer devant eux par des grandes
personnes” [like these children who, talking nonsense and not really
meaning to, mock the words that they have heard adults use in front of
them].45 In sum, Larbaud says, the Poésies are the creation of someone
who has read more than he has experienced life.
The surrealists, on the other hand, who celebrated youth as well
as any challenge to authority, found that Larbaud’s interpretation was
unfair to Ducasse’s overall poetic goal to rupture tradition.
Accordingly, in his preface to Ducasse’s Poésies in Littérature (1919),
Breton counterattacks the critics who had classified Lautréamont as
“parmi les fous” [among the madmen] or had attacked his form before
commenting on his ideas. With an indirect reference to Larbaud,
Breton suggests that “bien autre chose que le romantisme est en jeu”
[something besides romanticism is at stake].46
The surrealists primarily opposed Larbaud’s claim that the
Poésies can neither be read alone nor even combined with the Chants
as part of a complete work:
Mais malgré ces quelques pauvres lueurs, les Poésies ne

supportent pas la comparaison avec les Chants de Maldoror. Elles
sont inconnues, mais elles ne sont pas méconnues. Elles ne
supporteraient pas d’être publiées séparément; tout au plus
pourrait-on se risquer à les donner en appendice à un livre incitulé
[sic]: Isidore Ducasse, sa Vie et son Œuvre; et encore faudra-t-il
les faire précéder d’un avis plein de réserves et de ménagements.
Elles ne sont guère utiles que d’un point de vue biographique, et
pour compléter la Bibliothèque de Ducasse.
[But in spite of these few glimmers, the Poésies do not support

a comparison with the Chants de Maldoror. They are unknown,
but they are not unrecognized. They would not support being
published separately; at most one could risk giving them as the
appendix to a book entitled: Isidore Ducasse, his Life and Work;
and still it would be necessary to preface them with reservations
and precautions. They are hardly useful except from a biograph-
ical standpoint and to complement Ducasse’s Bibliothèque.]47
45
Ibid., 153.
46
47
Larbaud, “Les ‘Poésies,’” 154.
As a result, the surrealist 1920 edition accordingly presents the

Poésies as a separate work with no disclaimer about its literary worth
or lack thereof.
Along with their new interpretation of his message, the surrealists
envisioned a new medium for Lautréamont’s poetry. Since his
material was preserved only at the Bibliothèque nationale or in
fragment form in symbolist magazines, a complete surrealist edition
proved both tactical and necessary. But enmity, in addition to self-
promotion, compelled the surrealists to publish the Poésies. After
Blaise Cendrars, a detractor of the surrealist movement and a loyal
adherent to some symbolists, re-edited the Chants de Maldoror earlier
that year of 1920 at La Sirène, the surrealists’ preference for the
Poésies became not only aesthetic, but also practical.
Blaise Cendrars, Éditions de la Sirène, 1920
Much of the rivalry between Blaise Cendrars and André Breton is

played out in the history of their editions of Lautréamont’s works.
Although several years passed before the project was realized,
Cendrars’s idea to publish Lautréamont’s works coincided with his
meeting of the members of the fledgling surrealist group in 1917.
Introduced to the surrealists by Apollinaire, Cendrars felt an
immediate aversion to their leader:
L’un des nouveaux venus au Flore exerce une évidente

autorité sur le groupe qui l’entoure: il porte sur son visage une
expression de superbe défi et, lorsqu’il parle, c’est sur le ton
d’assurance que lui permet sa prestance et que lui autorisent ses
vingt et un ans. Il s’appelle André Breton, élève médecin
auxiliaire, lui aussi. Dès l’abord, ça ne “colle” pas avec Cendrars;
deux personnalités trop fortes pour s’accorder, des sensibilités
diamétralement opposées.
[One of the newcomers to the Café du Flore exerts an evident

authority over the group that surrounds him: he wears an
expression of superb defiance on his face and, when he speaks, it’s
a self-assured tone that permits his imposing manner and justifies
his twenty-one years. His name is André Breton, also a student of
medical auxiliary. Right from the start, he didn’t “click” with
Cendrars; the two personalities were too strong to agree, and their
sensibilities were diametrically opposed.]48
Cendrars confirmed this contemptuous sentiment for Breton:
le vavassal André Breton, qui portait déjà cet air ubuesque de

grand homme de province à qui, un jour la patrie SERAIT
reconnaissante et qui n’a jamais pu se libérer de cette grossesse
nerveuse de gloire anthume.
[the vavassal André Breton, who already had the ubuesque air of a
big man from the countryside to whom the country WOULD one
day be grateful and who never could free himself from this false
pregnancy of anthumous glory.]49
Cendrars disparaged the group for laying claim to poets like Rimbaud
and Lautréamont and for preventing access to them by anyone outside
the group:
D’ailleurs, le comportement des surréalistes me dégoûte et

jamais je ne me serais laissé aller à cette diatribe après
Apollinaire, Max Jacob et bien d’autres morts qui n’en peuvent
mais, André Breton n’avait voulu accaparer Rimbaud et
Lautréamont en toute exclusivité, et je me demande comment cela
a été possible dans un pays comme la France et qu’on l’a laissé
sévir à coups d’ukases et prikaz dans la libre République des
Lettres? Les gens s’inclinent.
[Moreover, the surrealists’ behavior disgusts me and never

would I have let myself go to this diatribe after Apollinaire, Max
Jacob and other dead men who can’t take it anymore, André
Breton wanting to have Rimbaud and Lautréamont all to himself,
and I wonder how it is possible that in a country like France he
gets away with issuing ukases and prikaz in the free Republic of
Letters? People give in.]50
The imperialistic vocabulary here reinforces Cendrars’s tsar-like

image of Breton. In this monarchy, Cendrars suggests, where Breton
48
Miriam Cendrars, Blaise Cendrars (Paris: Balland, 1984), 306.
49
Blaise Cendrars, Blaise Cendrars vous parle (Paris: Denoël, 1952), 48-9.
50
Ibid., 49-50.
orders the forceful sequestration of icons like Lautréamont, literary

freedom is anything but free. Rather, it is tyrannical.
From 1918 to 1919, Cendrars served as director of Paul Laffitte’s
publishing firm, Éditions de la Sirène. La Sirène quickly became an
influential publisher of illustrated editions, boasting Raoul Dufy
among its illustrators. When, in 1919, Cendrars left the publishing
house to pursue other goals, he was still bound by a contract to com-
plete the Maldoror project. In his monograph La Sirène, Pascal
Fouché reproduces the contract made with Laffitte, which confirms
that Cendrars’s plan to publish Lautréamont preceded that of the
surrealists and indicates that Cendrars had originally planned to
publish not only the Chants, but also the Poésies: “M. Paul
LAFFITTE versera à M. CENDRARS une somme de CINQ CENT
francs par œuvre le jour où paraîtront en librairie les LES CHANTS
DE MALDOROR et les POÉSIES DE LAUTREAMONT” [Mr. Paul
LAFFITTE will pay Mr. CENDRARS the sum of FIVE HUNDRED
francs per work when LES CHANTS DE MALDOROR and the
POESIES DE LAUTREAMONT come out in the bookstores].51
Cendrars knew of Breton’s intentions to publish an edition of the
Chants, but he had thought of the idea first. Printed in 1,360 copies,
La Sirène’s Les Chants de Maldoror gained instant success and
immediately sold out. Au Sans Pareil could not compete. As Fouché
demonstrates, it is no coincidence that in response to Cendrar’s
successful edition of Maldoror, Breton quickly published the Poésies
at Au Sans Pareil, even though they had already been announced at La
Sirène.52 As promised, Cendrars published the Poésies as well,
although not until 1922, and not under the title stated in the contract,
but rather as Préface à un livre futur. Documents found in March
1919 by the printers at La Sirène show that the preparations of these
new editions were under way before Cendrars’s departure in 1919.
The Sirène edition of Maldoror reflects Cendrars’s admiration for
Remy de Gourmont by reproducing his 1896 article on Lautréamont
from Le Livre des Masques as an introduction.53 Cendrars therefore
perpetuates the symbolist image of Lautréamont that the surrealists
were ardently resolved to destroy, as the first sentence from
51
Fouché, La Sirène, 71.
52
Ibid., 79.
53
Gourmont’s introduction reveals: “C’était un jeune homme d’une

originalité furieuse et inattendue, un génie malade et même
franchement un génie fou” [He was a young man of frenetic and
unexpected originality, a mad genius, and frankly even a maniacal
genius].54 Cendrars explicitly shows that Lautréamont is not a
precursor to surrealism, as the surrealists might have hoped, but rather
an extreme romantic. Although the surrealists did not explicitly
mention Cendrars’s edition of the Chants in their edition of the
Poésies, Soupault was careful to challenge Gourmont’s opinion that
Lautréamont was mad. In his conclusion, Soupault writes that
Gourmont and the others who passed Lautréamont’s creativity off as
insanity were incapable—unlike the surrealists—of seeing the poetic
anxiety in the work.
A number of textual deficiencies characterize the Sirène edition.
For one, it was the first of many to inaccurately number the stanzas of
Les Chants de Maldoror, a blunder that continued for nearly 20 years
until the 1938 GLM illustrated surrealist edition corrected it. Whereas
the Chants are composed of 60 stanzas, the Sirène edition only
counted 59 because it attributed number “42” to two consecutive
stanzas.55 Second, by numbering stanzas continuously rather than
dividing them by a simple line, as the 1869 Lacroix edition did, the
Sirène edition gives the Chants a novelistic quality that textually
denies the work its generic features. Finally, the editor did not correct
the biographical errors committed by Gourmont, for example, that
Ducasse died at twenty-eight instead of twenty-four, thereby
contributing textually to the mystery surrounding Lautréamont and
confusion about his life.
André Breton, Au Sans Pareil, 1920
When the “vavassal Breton” was beaten by Cendrars to an edition

of the Chants, Breton chose instead to introduce the literary avant-
garde to Ducasse’s Poésies, prefaced by Philippe Soupault. Along
with Aragon and Soupault, Breton created the magazine Littérature at
approximately the same time that René Hilsum, Breton’s high school
54
Blaise Cendrars, ed., Les Chants de Maldoror (Paris: Éditions de la Sirène, 1920),
1.
55
See Grubbs, “Division into Strophes,” 154-7.
friend, opened the publishing house Au Sans Pareil. From its outset in
1919, Au Sans Pareil accompanied and supported the surrealist
movement. It specialized in publishing and promoting first works of
the latest avant-garde authors. To finance the new publishing firm and
Littérature, Breton and Hilsum initially bought Rimbaud’s unknown
poem Les Mains de Jeanne-Marie (1871) from Rimbaud’s widowed
brother-in-law, Paterne Berrichon. With some financial assistance,
Breton and Hilsum bought the poem for 500F and then sold each copy
in pamphlet form under the title “la Collection de Littérature.”56
Regardless of Breton’s feelings about exploiting his idols, the
successful sale of Rimbaud’s poem funded the magazine and the
publishing house to then publish Breton’s Mont-de-Piété. With the
pamphlet’s success, Hilsum and the directors of Littérature began a
viable commercial relationship. Littérature advertised for Au Sans
Pareil and, on Breton’s consultation, Au Sans Pareil published the
unknown names behind Littérature, such as Tzara, Francis Picabia,
and André Derain.
In 1925, André Gide disclosed that the surrealists had planned to
publish both Les Chants de Maldoror and the Poésies at Au Sans
Pareil in 1920. The surrealists had proposed to Gide the honor of
prefacing their Chants and, he writes, “Rien ne pouvait me flatter
davantage, que la demande qu’ils m’ont faite d’écrire une préface pour
la réédition qu’ils préparaient des Chants de Maldoror” [Nothing
could flatter me more than being asked to write the preface for the
revised edition of the Chants de Maldoror that they are working on].
Gide declined because, he continues, “j’estimais impertinent
d’expliquer, de présenter même, cette œuvre à un public avec lequel
elle n’avait que faire…” [I thought it impertinent to explain, even to
introduce, this work to a public that it had no business with...]57
Maurice Saillet later suggested that Gide salvaged his integrity and
good taste by declining to preface the work: “son nom n’ayant rien à
faire dans cette aventure qui s’était si bien passée de lui jusqu’à ce
jour” [his name having nothing to do with this adventure that was
doing perfectly fine without him up to that point].58
56
See Fouché, Au Sans Pareil.
57
Arland, Le Cas Lautréamont, preface.
58
By 1922, Breton’s pugnacious behavior compelled Hilsum to end

his professional relationship with the surrealist group. According to
Hilsum, Breton capriciously dictated who could be published and who
could not. For a time, Cendrars was refused publication even though
Hilsum considered him a valuable poet of Au Sans Pareil. Hilsum
recounts the slowly deteriorating relationship:
Breton était très autoritaire,…il a voulu régenter aussi notre

librairie, nous interdire de vendre tel livre…Quand il avait des
problèmes avec tel ou tel écrivain, on devait cesser de le vendre, le
mettre à l’index en quelque sorte. Alors nous avons refusé
d’obtempérer. Cendrars et Max Jacob, il a fallu à un moment
refuser de les vendre. Nous avons refusé d’obtempérer à ses
jugements et nous nous sommes brouillés à ce moment-là. Les
surréalistes ont suivi Breton. J’ai dû continuer à faire de l’édition
sans les surréalistes.
[Breton was very authoritarian…he also wanted to rule over our

bookshop, forbidding us to sell such a book…When he had
problems with one author or another, we had to stop selling him,
blacklist him in a way. So we refused to cooperate. Cendrars and
Max Jacob, at one point we had to refuse to sell them. We refused
to obey his decrees and had a falling out at that time. The
surrealists followed Breton. I had to continue to publish without
the surrealists.]59
Although other surrealists followed Breton after he left, Fouché

indicates that Soupault continued to edit and publish at Au Sans
Pareil. Authors such as Cendrars and Jean Cocteau, who had
previously been rejected, became the literary stars of the firm after the
departure of the surrealists.
As both a muse and a sounding board, Lautréamont became a
commodity after 1920, a free agent in the publishing industry. As
Maurice Saillet puts it, the reinvention of Maldoror ceded to the
exploitation of Maldoror. From the 1920 editions to the 1938
surrealist edition of œuvres complètes, Lautréamont’s work was
published several more times, and began to be renowned for its
illustrated éditions de luxe. In 1925, Au Sans Pareil published five of
Ducasse’s letters in facsimile. Breton never ceased to rail against these
59
Fouché, Au Sans Pareil, 35.
editions because, as Lautréamont’s primary advocate and publicist,

surrealism was implicitly connected to each. In the new series of
Littérature, Breton publicly criticized anyone outside his immediate
group who approached Lautréamont’s works. In response to a
commemoration of the 50th anniversary of Ducasse’s death, for
instance, Breton wrote: “Non, nous ne permettrons pas que
Lautréamont serve à remonter le niveau des morts pour la patrie
(M.P.L.P.). Nous sommes prêts à tout pour empêcher cette
mascarade” [No, we will not allow Lautréamont to be used to raise the
level of the ‘died for country.’ We are ready to do anything to prevent
this farce].60
Although Philippe Soupault was excluded from surrealism
immediately after the split with Au Sans Pareil, he, too, went on to
publish Lautréamont’s works. In 1927, Soupault was responsible for
the first édition de luxe of Lautréamont’s œuvres complètes at Au Sans
Pareil. Although this volume of complete works was the first of its
kind, it has since been ridiculed because it is replete with factual
errors. Soupault lets his imaginative depiction of Lautréamont as a
rebel run wild, citing political pamphlets and confusing Isidore
Ducasse for Félix Ducasse, a revolutionary who was supposedly
murdered in 1870. This edition warranted a disgusted public letter
from Breton, Aragon, and Éluard to Soupault. In it, they vituperate
Soupault for exploiting Lautréamont’s work for financial gain:
Nous disons que M. Soupault triche, le plus apparemment, le plus

misérablement du monde, à la seule partie où il se devrait peut-
être de ne pas tricher. Il triche, non pour tricher, mais pour gagner
ce qu’en échange de son pire renoncement, lui octroient les
éditions du ‘Sans-Pareil.’ Combien?
[We say that M. Soupault is cheating in the most obvious, most

miserable way in the world, on the one thing which perhaps he
owes it to himself not to cheat. He’s cheating, not for cheating’s
sake, but to earn what the editions of ‘Sans-Pareil’ grant him in
exchange for his worst renunciation. How much?]61
60
La Rédaction, “Lettre ouverte au Comité Lautréamont,” March 1, 1922, in Losfeld
and Pierre, Tracts, 1: 8.
61
Aragon, Breton, and Éluard, “Lautréamont envers et contre tout,” April (?) 1927, in
Losfeld and Pierre, Tracts, 1: 66.
This indiscretion is unacceptable, say the surrealists, because

Soupault’s exploitation of Lautréamont indicates that he had betrayed
their secret:
L’humanité est dans le sac et les œuvres complètes de chacun

ne cessent de paraître. Celles du comte de Lautréamont (mais je
me vois vivre, tu te vois vivre, ils meurent, nous sommes
transparents comme si Lautréamont avait mille ans) ces œuvres
paraissent pour la sixième et la dernière fois.
[Humanity is in the bag and each one’s complete works keep

coming out. The comte de Lautréamont’s (but I see myself live,
you see yourself live, they die, we are transparent as though
Lautréamont were a thousand years old), these works are being
published for the sixth and last time.]62
In addition, on the bottom of the cover page of Soupault’s 1927

edition, a blurb reads: “La place de Lautréamont est entre Baudelaire
et Rimbaud” [Lautréamont’s place is between Baudelaire and
Rimbaud]. The surrealists respond: “Nous nous opposons, nous
continuons à nous opposer à ce que Lautréamont entre dans l’histoire,
à ce qu’on lui assigne une place entre Un Tel et Un Tel” [We are
opposed, we continue to be opposed to Lautréamont entering history,
to assigning him a place between so-and-so and so-and-so].63
In a footnote, the surrealists criticize yet another edition from
1927: “Ne parlons pas de l’édition (illustrée!) que prépare le relieur
d’art Blanchetière. L’exemplaire: 1 200 francs. A ce prix, nous
sommes déchireurs” [Not to mention the (illustrated!) edition that the
art bookbinder Blanchetière is preparing. One copy: 1,200 francs. At
that price we’d rip it up].64 The price of this deluxe, three-volume
Blanchetière edition is 100 times that of Cendrars’s edition. Out of
1,360 copies, Cendrars’s 1920 edition sold out quickly at 12 francs for
each standard copy. All 596 copies of Breton’s edition of Poésies that
year at Au Sans Pareil sold for five francs apiece. When the next
edition of the Chants was published at Au Sans Pareil in 1925 in the
“Bonne Compagnie” collection, which boasted sumptuous, expensive
editions for bibliophiles, Lautréamont ranked seventh out of eight
62
Ibid., 65.
63
Ibid., 67.
64
Ibid.
publications in the collection.65 The 1,100 copies quickly sold out at

30 francs per copy. Au Sans Pareil consequently launched another
edition in 1927, this time as a volume of complete works. Combining
the same Poésies from 1920 and the same Chants from 1925, this
edition sold for 50 francs apiece for a collector’s edition or at 20
francs for a standard edition. This time, 4,450 copies were printed and
sold.66 The escalating price and the number of copies of these editions
are significant: at one time, Lautréamont’s work could hardly be given
away, but now his books were in high demand. Furthermore, the
commercial success of these editions reveals the paradox inherent to
the surrealists’ appropriation of Lautréamont: he was the secret that
everyone should know about.
Since the first publication of Les Chants de Maldoror,
Lautréamont’s legacy has been tied to the aesthetic strategies of those
who promote the work. As the history of the surrealists’ appropriation
and publication of Lautréamont illustrates, editions bear the signs of
these strategies and consequently alter the way Lautréamont is read. In
1958, José Corti even produced a complete works of Lautréamont,
celebrating all the famous authors who had already prefaced and
published his work. Among them are Léon Genonceaux, Philippe
Soupault, Edmond Jaloux, Roger Caillois, Julien Gracq, and Maurice
Blanchot.67 Although André Breton was not included as a prefacer in
this edition, his role as Lautréamont’s publisher did not end in 1920.
Although they had criticized Lautréamont’s popularization, and
perhaps in order to exercise their right to contradict themselves, the
surrealists published a lavish illustrated edition of Lautréamont’s
Œuvres complètes in 1938. This time, their motive was not to
establish their movement but rather to vaunt two decades of its
accomplishments.
65
The writers given an édition de luxe were Tinan, Gobineau, Gide, Philippe,
Huysmans, Hamsun, Lautréamont, and Apollinaire, in that order.
66
The prices of Breton’s and Cendrars’s editions are found on the back cover of the
volumes. Other information comes from Fouché, Au Sans Pareil, bibliography.
67
The 2009 Pléiade edition repeats this formula by including Lautréamont’s texts
along with his most famous readers’ impressions of them.
Chapter Four
The Edition as Exhibition:

A Surrealist Retrospective, 1938
Thirteen years before Breton prefaced the 1938 GLM edition of

Lautréamont’s Œuvres complètes, he began an essay on surrealism
and painting to refute Pierre Naville’s comment that there is no such
thing as surrealist painting.1 In this essay, Breton confirms his status
as spokesperson and polemicist of surrealism, arguing that there is, in
fact, a visual language, and he is best fit to evaluate its present state or
to recall it “s’il est nécessaire à sa raison d’être” [if necessary, to its
true principles].2 According to Breton, visual language is no more
artificial than discursive language, and it allows him to exercise
control over the real or what is understood “vulgairement par le réel”
[vulgarly by the real].3 For Breton, what is evoked and what is have no
perceptible difference, and both are equally real. The great error of art
up to the modern era, as he sees it, is a narrow concept of imitation: to
reproduce models from an external world when they would be better
left to exist there on their own. Instead, he calls for a revision of “real”
values in poetry, art, and life, insisting that the plastic work of art will
either refer to a “modèle purement intérieur, ou ne sera pas” [purely
internal model or will cease to exist].4 Breton’s plea for a revolution in
art raises two issues: first, about revolution; and second, about what is
understood by an internal model. To tackle both of these problems,
and thus to define surrealist painting, Breton promptly returns to the
constant and loyal Lautréamont.
Breton’s vision of a purely internal model for art and poetry is
manifested in the illustrated editions of Lautréamont’s work. Two
1
André Breton, Surrealism and Painting, trans. Simon Watson Taylor, intro. Mark
Polizzotti (Boston: MFA Publications, 2002), xiii. Translations of Breton’s Le
Surréalisme et la peinture come from this translation, hereafter abbreviated SP, in
square brackets.
2
Breton, Œuvres complètes, 4: 350 [SP, 2]
3
Ibid.
4
Ibid., 4: 352 [SP, 4].
editions, in particular—Salvador Dalí’s 1934 Skira edition of Les

Chants de Maldoror and the surrealists’ 1938 GLM edition of
Lautréamont’s Œuvres complètes, prefaced by Breton—serve as can-
vases on which the surrealists display individual styles and aesthetic
motives of the group. Far more than an inspiration to artists,
Lautréamont’s work legitimizes their cause, a cause which alternately
aims to upstage their creative rivals, gain renown, or publicize an
upcoming event. Dalí’s edition, for instance, exhibits his own
paranoiac-critical method (creation of new images by evoking
subconscious associations with existing objects) while neglecting
Lautréamont. The 1938 GLM edition subsequently excludes Dalí,
whom Breton debarred from surrealism, showcasing instead twelve
renowned surrealist artists as well as the remaining surrealist poets.
This GLM edition testifies to final endorsements of surrealism. It
displays within one volume surrealism’s internal polemics, rela-
tionship to visual language, possessive appropriation of Lautréamont,
and perpetuation of Lautréamont as the forefather of automatic writing
and similar techniques in literature.
Breton argues that, in poetry, both the concept of the purely
internal model and of revolution originated with Lautréamont.
Lautréamont was one of the first poets to concentrate on the isolation
and exploration of the mind in and for itself, and to find freedom of
expression as a result. The liberation of the word and the elasticity
between what is permitted and what is forbidden had reached a point
where, he writes, “les mots famille, patrie, société, nous font l’effet de
plaisanteries macabres” [the words family, fatherland, society, for
instance, seem to us now to be so many macabre jests].5 Poets like
Lautréamont, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé initiated a reliance on the self
for redemption; any future poetry is then a desperate attempt to pursue
their footsteps, he writes, “que nos yeux, nos chers yeux reflétassent
ce qui, n’étant pas, est pourtant aussi intense que ce qui est, et que ce
fussent à nouveau des images optiques réelles…” [so that our eyes,
our precious eyes, have to reflect that which, while not existing, is yet
as intense as that which does exist, and which has once more to
consist of real visual images…]6 Thus the poetic image is a virtual
5
Ibid., 4: 353 [SP 4].
6
Ibid. [SP, 5].
The Edition as Exhibition 137
one. If visual, the task of the image is to give materiality to what has
hitherto remained fantasy.
The passage below, drawn from canto IV, 2 of the Chants de
Maldoror, demonstrates this modèle purement intérieur whose
creation Breton attributes to Lautréamont. A typical episode of both
Lautréamont’s style of imagery and humor, it functions through the
comparison of two disparate, yet recognizable objects in order to
highlight—and consequently subvert—an unrecognizable but com-
mon attribute:
Deux piliers, qu’il n’était pas difficile et encore moins

impossible de prendre pour des baobabs, s’apercevaient dans la
vallée, plus grands que deux épingles. En effet, c’étaient deux
tours énormes. Et, quoique deux baobabs, au premier coup d’œil,
ne ressemblent pas à deux épingles, ni même à deux tours,
cependant, en employant habilement les ficelles de la prudence, on
peut affirmer, sans crainte d’avoir tort (car, si cette affirmation
était accompagnée d’une seule parcelle de crainte, ce ne serait plus
une affirmation; quoiqu’un même nom exprime ces deux
phénomènes de l’âme qui présentent des caractères assez tranchés
pour ne pas être confondus légèrement) qu’un baobab ne diffère
pas tellement d’un pilier, que la comparaison soit défendue entre
ces formes architecturales…ou géométriques…ou l’une ou
l’autre…ou ni l’une ni l’autre…ou plutôt formes élevées et
massives.
[Two pillars, that it was not difficult, and still less impossible,
to take for baobab trees, were to be seen in the valley, taller than
two pins. Actually they were two enormous towers. And although
at first glance two baobabs do not resemble two pins, nor even two
towers, nevertheless, while cleverly pulling the strings of prudence
one can affirm without fear or error (for if this affirmation were
accompanied by a single iota of fear it would no longer be an
affirmation; although the same name expresses these two
phenomena of the spirit which present characteristics distinct
enough not to be lightly confused) that a baobab is not so different
from a pillar as to prohibit comparison between these architectural
forms…or geometric forms…or both…or neither…or rather,
raised and massive forms.]7
7
OC, 159 [Mal, 133]. For other interpretations of the stanza, see Ora Avni, Tics, tics
et tics: figures, syllogismes, récit dans Les chants de Maldoror (Kentucky: French
Forum, 1984), 90-103; Ph. Fédy et. al, Quatre Lectures de Lautréamont (Paris: Nizet,
Technically, the first sentence here is not independently a metaphor,

because “prendre pour” and “plus grand que” introduce a literal as-
sessment and not a substitution or transference. Already, Lautréamont
undermines a metaphor by disrupting it, introducing a pseudo-
metaphor and immediately sullying it by his “et encore moins
impossible.” The second sentence, on the other hand, introduces a
succession of comparisons that lead to the complete metaphor for the
pillar-baobab-needle-tower’s common attribute: “formes élevées et
massives.” He exaggerates and multiplies the comparison to such a
degree here that it results in a parody of metaphor, a telescopic
metaphor gone awry.
Lautréamont plays these sorts of poetic games throughout the
Chants, inviting the reader to compare and contrast expectations of
poetic language.8 On the one hand, Lautréamont’s use and intentional
disruption of language to unravel itself is what many critics consider
his literariness. Each comparison is caricatured or enlarged just
enough to elicit complicity with the reader and render the comparison
humorous, since it is so unexpected. Thus, a comparison that begins as
hyperbole (or exaggeration, expansion, amplification, or dilation)
results in contradiction and negation of the original object of
comparison.
What makes Lautréamont’s work literary also makes it hu-
morous. Insofar as one essential aspect of comedy is the literal mise en
scène of a stereotyped figure, comedy works only if the reader at least
partially understands the reference. If man is commonly referred to as
a beast, for example, Lautréamont discursively transforms him into an
animal.9 This stylistic quality renders his characters’ beastly meta-
1972), 343-68; Liliane Durand-Dessert, La Guerre sainte, 2 vols. (Nancy: Presses

universitaires, 1988), 2: 621-35.
8
See, for example, Michael Riffaterre, “Generating Lautréamont’s Text,” in Textual
Strategies (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), 404-20; and Riffaterre,
“Semiotique Intertextuelle.” Riffaterre reads the textuality of Lautréamont’s work
through its intertextuality, in that reading a text is a constant activity of reference
between the text to decipher and other “intertexts” that the reader recalls. See also
Michel Déguy, “Citations de Maldoror,” in Figurations (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 233-
268.
9
In many comedies, suggests Michel Déguy in Figurations, from Aristophanes to
Ionesco, the same technique is at work. A figure of speech is taken to the letter, and
morphoses and epithets particularly comical. Significantly, when

Ducasse emended the two separate versions of the first canto for the
complete volume of Chants in 1869, he intentionally enhanced this
quality. The proper name “Dazet,” for example (Ducasse’s close
childhood friend), became “D” in the second version, and finally
“l’acarus sarcopte” [acarus sarcoptes], “pou vénérable” [venerable
louse], “crapaud” [toad], or “les quatre pattes-nageoires de l’ours
marin de l’océan Boréal” [four flippers of the sea-bear of the Boreal
ocean], among other unflattering transformations.10
In his 1940 Anthologie de l’humour noir entry on Lautréamont’s
humor, Breton recycles his preface from the GLM edition and repro-
duces the entire baobab stanza in order to reflect on Lautréamont’s
humor. He writes that humor, above all, unifies the apparent contrasts
within Lautréamont’s work. In order to create, Breton argues,
Lautréamont undermines logical and moral reasoning by manipulating
them both. He does this by way of several techniques: “surenchère sur
l’évidence, appel à la cohue des comparaisons les plus hardies,
torpillage du solennel, remontage à l’envers, ou de travers, des
‘pensées’ ou maximes célèbres, etc…” [overstatement of the obvious,
a slew of the most audacious comparisons, demolition of anything
solemn, cockeyed or topsy-turvy reconstructions of famous ‘maxims,’
etc].11 Although Breton does not analyze the baobab stanza that he
adjoins to his preface in the Anthologie, this passage nevertheless
effectively demonstrates his argument. After such verbose and
technical comparisons, Lautréamont concludes by unraveling the
metaphor he has created, reducing it to its common attribute, since all
of these things are “raised and massive forms.” The metaphor
functions as no more than an artifice to describe two massive, elevated
shapes in the distance.
results in its literal transformation. One example is Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, in which the
metaphor “people are animals” is taken literally.
10
Interpretations of these animal metamorphoses abound. See Gaston Bachelard’s “Le
Bestiaire de Lautréamont,” La Nouvelle Revue française, November 1, 1939. Maurice
Viroux, “Lautréamont et le Dr. Chenu,” Le Mercure de France, December 1, 1952,
revealed that many of these emendations were copied directly from an Encyclopedia
of Natural History.
11
Lautréamont, Œuvres complètes, 1938, xiv; Breton, Œuvres complètes, 2: 988. The
translation is from Mark Polizzotti, Anthology of Black Humor (San Francisco: City
Lights Books, 1997), 134.
Lautréamont also mediates the leap from metaphor to comic to

literary by way of his imagination. According to Breton,
Lautréamont’s poetic imagination relies on the supreme modèle
purement intérieur to which all art should aspire. It is, Breton asserts,
the product of a rupture between “le bon sens et l’imagination, rupture
consommé le plus souvent en faveur de cette dernière et obtenue
d’une accélération volontaire, vertigineuse du débit verbal” [good
sense and imagination, a break that is most often consummated in the
latter’s favor and obtained by a voluntary, dizzying acceleration of the
verbal flux].12 After a parenthetical reference to Lautréamont’s avowal
of the “développement extrêmement rapide” [extremely rapid
development] of his sentences, Breton reminds his readers that this
same technique brought automatic writing into being: “On sait que de
la systématisation de ce moyen d’expression part le surréalisme” [we
know that the systematization of this means of expression was the
starting point of surrealism].13 According to this hypothesis,
Lautréamont’s baobabs arise from pure fantasy.
What are these two massive forms, then, and how or why should
they be illustrated with a picture? Traditionally, in illustrated books,
an artist engages in dialogue with the work, representing a viable
image to interact with its contents. A surrealist who abides by a purely
internal model, however, excavates his subconscious to create visual
images from within. Just as Lautréamont manipulates words and
expectations to negate poetic conventions, the surrealist artist negates
classic models of imitation to instead produce visual fantasies.
Lautréamont’s poetic language therefore provides an ideal point of
departure for the surrealist image, which reconstitutes description, yet
at the same time, negates it. No illustration in the surrealist editions of
Lautréamont’s poetry is entirely automatic. Rather, each one subverts
classical representation.
According to Breton’s view, virtual (poetic) and material (visual)
images are characterized by a deliberate ruin of classic description and
of history. External reality is satisfactory as it is, but the revised quest,
or duty, of the surrealist visual artist or poet is to seek out an internal
reality and give it substance, since the external world, according to
12
Ibid., xiii; [Anthology of Black Humor, 133].
13
Ibid. [Anthology of Black Humor, 134].
Breton, is increasingly suspect. As a believer in the cause of his own

revolution, Breton argues that the artist’s responsibility is to allow the
internal model to dominate over imitation.
In the remainder of Breton’s essay on surrealism and painting, he
extols a number of visual artists whose careers were just beginning.
Though the essay began as a challenge to Naville’s comment, it ended
in creating an exchange between the poetic and visual arts that would
last the duration of the surrealist movement.14 Breton expresses, for
example, an early admiration for five out of the twelve artists who
later illustrated his 1938 edition of Lautréamont’s Œuvres complètes:
Max Ernst, Man Ray, André Masson, Joan Miró, and Yves Tanguy.
Ernst, the creator of frottage, a rubbing technique, brought to art a
“sort of jigsaw puzzle of creation” where “toutes les pièces,
invraisemblablement distraites les unes des autres, ne se connaissant
plus aucune aimantation particulière les unes pour les autres,
cherchaient à se découvrir de nouvelles affinités” [the pieces were all
incredibly separated from each other, and since they no longer
experienced any mutual magnetization they were seeking to discover
new affinities for themselves].15 Man Ray, he writes, uses photog-
raphy as an impetus to negate it, “à lui ôter son caractère positif” [to
the task of stripping it of its positive nature].16 Breton praises André
Masson for his “chimie de l’intelligence” [chemistry of the intellect]
which seeks the admixture of two elements that, in the words of Edgar
Allan Poe, results in “un produit nouveau qui ne rappelle plus rien des
qualités de tel ou tel composant, ni même d’aucun d’eux” [something
that has nothing of the qualities of one of them, or even nothing of the
qualities of either].17 Miró, who passes for the most surrealist of all, is
considered the master of linking the incompatible. Finally, Yves
Tanguy materializes the surrealist image by mediating the unknown
through familiar images. “Ce contact,” Breton writes, “lui permet de
s’aventurer aussi loin qu’il veut et nous livrer de l’inconnu des images
aussi concrètes que celles que nous nous passons du connu” [This
contact, which remains precious to him, permits him to venture as far
as he wishes and to bring back to us, from the unknown, images that
14
Breton, Surrealism and Painting, xvii-xxx.
15
Breton, Œuvres complètes, 4: 378 [SP, 25].
16
Ibid., 4: 387 [32].
17
Ibid., 4: 392 [35].
are just as concrete as those that we take for granted as being

known].18
Earlier in his Pas perdus, Breton wrote that the artists mentioned
above had no antecedents in the plastic arts. In poetry, however,
Lautréamont is their poetic prototype. “La vérité, à partir de Ducasse,”
Breton writes, “n’a plus un envers et un endroit: le bien fait si
agréablement ressortir le mal. Et où ne pas prendre le beau?” [Truth,
after Ducasse, no longer has a right or wrong side: good so nicely
brings out evil. And where will we not find beauty?]19 To illustrate
Lautréamont’s work means to pay homage to his model of poetic
creation; by the surrealist definition, the artist’s technique cannot
simply copy Lautréamont’s poetic images, rather, it must offer an
alternative interpretation.
Dalí, Albert Skira, Les Chants de Maldoror, 1934
As early as 1930, just one year after joining the surrealist group,
Salvador Dalí was sketching out his ideas for paranoiac-criticism. In a
1930 speech, Dalí proclaimed an interest in anything that might
contribute to the ruin and discredit of the rational world through a
“violently paranoid will to systematize confusion.”20 For Dalí, the
paranoiac who organizes reality to control an imaginative construction
emerges everywhere in the form and content of the Chants de
Maldoror.
The famous 1934 illustrated edition of Les Chants de Maldoror
exemplifies Dalí’s paranoiac-critical method. Dalí converts
Lautréamont’s prose poem into a canvas to display his technique in its
entirety. For example, while there are indeed two of most objects in
the illustration for the baobab-pillar stanza (Fig. 4.1), the image has
very little to do with the language of Lautréamont’s poem. Two lamb
chops, two knives, two breasts, and two arms reflect Dalí’s interpret-
pretation of two baobabs, towers, and so on. Because there is no
legend that links his pictures to Lautréamont’s text, Dalí makes it
difficult for the viewer to perceive an obvious connection between the
18
Ibid., 4: 403 [44].
19
Ibid., 1: 301 [Lost Steps, 117-18].
20
Dalí, Oui, 110.
Figure 4.1 Salvador Dalí, Canto IV, 2

© Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador
Dalí, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
2013. Salvador Dali, Spanish, 1904–1989.
Albert Skira (publisher), French. Roger
Lacourière (printer), French. Philippe Gonin
(printer), French. Comte de Lautréamont (au-
thor), French, 1846–1870. Untitled, be-tween
pgs. 114 - 115, in the book Les Chants de
maldoror by Comte de Lautréamont (Paris:
Albert Skira, 1934), 1934. Photogravure re-
worked in drypoint on Arches paper. Sheet: 13
x 9 13/16 in. The Fine Arts Museums of San
Francisco, gift of the Reva and David Logan
Foundation, 1998.40.28.25
two. Instead, the text from canto IV, 2 is simply parted to make room
for this full-page image.
This “paranoid” technique is precisely what Dalí intended when
he visually wove his paranoiac-critical method into the language of
Maldoror. Dalí claimed that his inspiration for the paranoiac-critical
method came entirely from Lautréamont’s metaphor of the fortuitous
encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissection table;
however, many other passages from the Chants also offer a point of
departure. The remainder of the baobab stanza above, for instance,
confirms Dalí’s method: “les plus grands effets ont été souvent
produits par les plus petites causes” [the greatest effects have often
been produced by the smallest causes].21 The laws of optics prove it:
“je me suis basé sur les lois de l’optique, qui ont établi que, plus le
rayon visuel est éloigné d’un objet, plus l’image se reflète à
diminution dans la rétine” [I based my observation on the laws of
optics, which have established that the further the line of sight from
the object, the smaller the image reflected on the retina].22 Two trees
can reasonably be seen as two pillars because an object’s size
corresponds directly with its distance from the subject. Like
Lautréamont, Dalí offers a technique and a pseudo-technical
justification for it.
Dalí purports to destroy perceptible, rational reality with paranoid
and consequently demoralizing images. He writes that the paranoid
mechanism is the key to understanding hidden and multiple secrets of
simulacra. As Dalí sees it, comparing similar objects is therefore
impossible: “Comparing two things would only be possible if no link
of any kind existed between them, conscious or unconscious. Such a
comparison, if made tangible, would illustrate for us the clarity of the
idea we had formed for ourselves of the arbitrary.”23 Thus Dalí
permits no image to directly resemble the poem’s language.
Instead, Dalí associates Millet’s famous painting, L’Angélus, with
poetic images in the Chants de Maldoror. In “Millet’s Angélus,” a
preface written for the 1934 Paris exhibition of his edition, Dalí
clarifies his intentions. His epigram to the preface verbally merges
two images: “Millet’s Angélus, beautiful like the fortuitous encounter
on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella!”24
Accordingly, Dalí entwines visual aspects of the Angélus with his
illustrations of Lautréamont’s poem (Fig. 4.2).
Just as Lautréamont’s method involves a literal interpretation of
language so as to ruin its logical sense, Dalí’s method subverts images
21
OC, 160 [Mal, 134].
22
Ibid., 161 [134].
23
Dalí, Oui, 117.
24
Salvador Dalí, The Collected Writings of Salvador Dalí, ed. Haim Finkelstein
(Cambridge University Press, 1998), 279.
in the visual field by interpreting them literally. Dalí calls a metaphor

“nutritional” if it furnishes language with multiple associative
possibilities; he bases the concept of metaphor less on resemblance
than on divergence. Millet’s Angélus therefore illustrates Les Chants
de Maldoror in the most delirious way. Dalí writes that the Angélus is
“the only painting in the world that comprises the unmoving presence,
the expectant encounter, of two beings in a desolate, crepuscular, and
deadly environment.”25 Dalí perceives Lautréamont’s dissection table
as this “deadly environment.” Then, he associates the dissection table
with a dining table, because he sees “fertility” and food in the
Angélus’ plowed farmland. The sewing machine and umbrella on top
of the table become “a pitchfork plunged into the real and substantial
meat that the plowed land had been for man through all time.”26 He
transforms Lautréamont’s two objects into a masculine figure and a
feminine figure, similar to the pious man and woman depicted in
Millet’s Angélus. Dalí’s method emphasizes the comparison of
disparate objects, yet his images are to some degree literal. However
delirious Dalí intended them to be, these images illustrate connections
that are not as disparate as the viewer might expect.
It is remarkable that Dalí should develop forty-two images based
on Lautréamont’s one famous metaphor, particularly because
Lautréamont’s original use of the sewing machine, umbrella, and
dissection table refers in no way to farmers or fecundity, but to the
beauty of Mervyn, one of the adolescent boys Maldoror pursues. Less
an illustrated edition in the classical sense where images match up
with the action or intrigue of the story, Dalí’s interpretation is
concerned with interpretation itself. Dalí finds a canvas in
Lautréamont’s work on which to publicly launch and broadcast his
method. His images simply parallel Lautréamont’s metaphors. Just as
Lautréamont destroys the function of the metaphor as a figure, Dalí
destroys the traditional function of the image as representation.
Dalí’s concept of paranoiac-criticism is tied to Sigmund Freud’s
theory of dreams and therefore applies Freudian terminology to
describe the early traits of his method.27 “The umbrella,” Dalí writes,
25
Ibid., 280.
26
Ibid.
27
Freud’s “Psychoanalytical notes upon an autobiographical account of a case of
Paranoia,” in Three Case Histories, intro. Phlip Rieff (New York: Simon & Schuster,
Figure 4.2 Dalí, Canto III, 5

Salvador Dali, Spanish, 1904–1989. Albert
Skira (publisher), French. Roger Lacourière
(printer), French. Philippe Gonin (printer),
French. Comte de Lautréamont (author), French,
1846–1870. Untitled, between pgs. 106 - 107, in
the book Les Chants de maldoror by Comte de
Lautréamont (Paris: Albert Skira, 1934)., 1934.
Photogravure reworked in drypoint on Arches
paper. Sheet: 13 x 9 13/16 in. The Fine Arts
Museums of San Francisco, gift of the Reva and
David Logan Foundation, 1998.40.28.22
1996), first published in 1911, is Freud’s only work on paranoia. Dalí also shares his
definition of paranoia with the specialist Jacques Lacan, who completed his 1932 PhD
dissertation, “De la psychose paranoïaque dans ses rapports avec la personnalité”
(Paris: Seuil, 1975). Lacan, who was a reader of Dalí and the surrealists in 1930, later
arranged an interview with Dalí.
is a “surrealist Object functioning symbolically,” and is a well-known

symbol of masculine erection. The sewing machine is “an extremely
characteristic feminine symbol.” Together, the two are sexually
expectant on the dissection table. Dalí appropriated this connection
from Breton, who had already written in Les Vases communicants
(1932) of the evident sexual overtones in Lautréamont’s most famous
metaphor. Breton interprets this passage according to a Freudian
explanation of dream images. Here, Breton discusses the “extra-
ordinary force” of Lautréamont’s poetic image:
si l’on veut bien se reporter à la clé des symboles sexuels les plus
simples, on ne mettra pas longtemps à convenir que cette force
tient à ce que le parapluie ne peut ici représenter que l’homme, la
machine à coudre que la femme (ainsi, du reste, que la plupart des
machines, avec la seule aggravation que celle-ci, comme on sait,
est fréquemment utilisée par la femme à des fins onanistes) et la
table de dissection que le lit, commune mesure lui-même de la vie
et de la mort. Le contraste entre l’acte sexuel immédiat et le
tableau d’une extrême dispersion qui en est fait par Lautréamont
provoque seul ici le saisissement.
[and if you consult the key to the simplest sexual symbols, it will
not take you long to admit that this impact consists in the ability of
the umbrella to represent only man, the sewing machine only
woman (like most machines, furthermore, the only possible
problem being that the sewing machine, as everyone knows, is
often used by woman for onanistic purposes), and the dissection
table only the bed, itself the common measure of life and death.
The contrast between the immediate sexual act and the picture of
extreme dispersion that Lautréamont makes of it is enough to
provoke a thrill all by itself.]28
Before Breton, Freud had written in The Interpretation of Dreams that

“all elongated objects, such as sticks, tree-trunks and umbrellas (the
opening of these last being comparable to an erection) may stand for
the male organ—as well as all long, sharp weapons, such as knives,
daggers and pikes.”29 About female objects, Freud explains: “Tables,
28
Breton, Œuvres complètes, 2: 140. The translation is from Mary Ann Caws and
Geoffrey T. Harris, Communicating Vessels (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1990), 53.
29
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, in Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London: The
whether bare or covered, and boards, are women, perhaps by virtue of

contrast, since they have no protruding contours.”30 On beds, tables
and sexual acts: “Since bed and board (mensa et thorus) constitute
marriage, in dreams the latter is often substituted for the former, and
as far as practicable the sexual representation-complex is transposed
to the eating-complex.”31 Finally, machines are generally male: “All
complicated machines and appliances are very probably the genitals—
as a rule the male genitals.”32 A sewing machine, however, is
complicated; while it is a machine (masculine), it also refers to the bed
and board symbol (feminine). In Dalí’s Chants de Maldoror
illustrations, the female character from the original Angélus is
accordingly bestowed with a pitchfork, whose shape becomes an
elongated wishbone to match the food motif.
Thus Dalí’s interpretation of Lautréamont’s famous metaphor is
neither shocking nor entirely original. Dalí began to outline his
paranoiac-critical method as early as 1930, but he made no reference
to Lautréamont’s metaphor until 1934, the year of his exposition for
the illustrated edition. Dalí simply applied Breton’s (or Freud’s)
analysis to his own paranoid image of L’Angélus. He took it one step
further, however: the umbrella and dissection table transpose into an
obsessive image of a praying mantis.33 According to Dalí, the praying
mantis resembles the reverent figures in the Angélus because it is
literally pious (la mante religieuse) in the “nutritional” metaphorical
sense. Deadly in the sexual sense, the female praying mantis
“empties” the male just as, Dalí imagines, the sewing machine attacks
the umbrella with its stitching needle.
As a result of his obsessive paranoiac-critical method, Dalí’s
illustrations for Les Chants de Maldoror are all variations based on a
theme, manifested by various symbolic objects. Mineral and inorganic
silverware—forks, knives, and spoons—complement food objects in
their nutritive and fecund form—cabbage, eggs, slabs of meat,
Hogarth Press, 1953), 5: 354. Freud does not mention the sewing machine, the
interpretation of which Breton seems to have cleared up.
30
Ibid.
31
Ibid.
32
Ibid.
33
Freud, much to Breton’s dismay, never took the surrealist research of
psychoanalysis very seriously.
drumsticks and chops. Homely items such as a pillow or a bed and

combinations of needle and thread or pen and ink adorn the pages of
Lautréamont’s poem.
The etching for Canto III, 1 (Fig. 4.3), for instance, depicts a
baby under a sewing machine and an eggplant figure, supported by the
wish-bone/pitchfork, with a face devouring the baby. The image does
not directly refer to a passage in Lautréamont’s poem; instead, it refers
to Dalí’s paranoiac interpretation of the famous metaphor.
At one point, Dalí uses a nearly identical image to illustrate three
separate passages. The images differ only in shading and some kind of
added mysterious slime. These characteristic paranoiac-critical images
consist of one object that functions in two literal ways. While at first,
the image obviously resembles a profile of a person, the lips are
formed by two drumsticks, the eyelids are shaped from spoons, the
eyeballs from cabbage, the chin from a fruit, and so on.
Although Dalí appears to cultivate Breton’s purely internal
model in this edition, he primarily exploits Lautréamont to display his
paranoiac-critical method. Not by coincidence, Breton expelled Dalí
from surrealism in 1934, immediately after this Maldoror edition was
published. Dalí’s remark, “The only difference between me and the
surrealists is that I am a surrealist,” indicates that Dalí considered
himself superior to the surrealist group. To Breton, however, although
Dalí’s systematized and exploited delirium was initially laudable, it
eventually stretched surrealist values from sur-reality to the domain of
folie. Although Dalí was first praised as the “incarnation of the
surrealist spirit,” he was later ousted from the group for the same
reason.34 Dalí’s life was dangerously close to his art, in other words,
and he menaced Breton’s tyranny over the group. Dalí defined the
surrealist method as interpretation following delusion; his own method
instead suggested that interpretation and delusion go hand in hand.
Even Dalí avowed that, from his very acceptance into the group, he
was planning its demise by “occult, opportunistic and paradoxical
means.”35
Jealousy also played a role in Dalí’s ouster. Albert Skira, Dalí’s
publisher and a well-known publisher of art books, had previously
34
35
Dalí, Oui, 173.
Figure 4.3 Dalí, Canto III, 1

Salvador Dali, Spanish, 1904–1989. Albert Skira
(publisher), French. Roger Lacourière (printer),
French. Philippe Gonin (printer), French. Comte
de Lautréamont (author), French, 1846–1870.
Untitled, between pgs. 90 - 91, in the book Les
Chants de maldoror by Comte de Lautréamont
(Paris: Albert Skira, 1934)., 1934. Photogravure
reworked in drypoint on Arches paper. Sheet: 13
x 9 13/16 in. The Fine Arts Museums of San
Francisco, gift of the Reva and David Logan
Foundation, 1998.40.28.19
insulted Breton by suggesting that Breton collaborate with his enemy,

Georges Bataille, to produce Minotaure after Le Surréalisme au
service de la revolution (SASDLR) had failed.36 José Corti had
already resigned his sponsorship of the other surrealist magazine, La
Révolution surréaliste, when the magazine was no longer financially
36
A surrealist magazine from July 1930 to May 1933.
viable. Both editors approached Dalí to collaborate on illustrated

editions of Lautréamont’s Chants de Maldoror.
By 1934, Breton was exasperated with Dalí’s “occult, oppor-
tunistic and paradoxical means” of seizing power of the surrealist
group. By then, he could no longer tolerate Dalí’s obsession with
Hitler (who had begun his dictatorship in Germany), particularly when
Dalí explicitly compared Hitler’s “paranoiac” possibilities to those of
Lautréamont. In addition to this intolerable praise of Hitler, Dalí
insulted Vladimir Lenin, whom Breton admired, in the 1934 L’énigme
de Guillaume Tell. This last offense finally warranted expulsion.
Worse still, after attempting to justify his painting to Breton, Dalí then
integrated elements (such as the wishbone and piano) from it and from
the 1931 Hallucination partielle. Six apparitions de Lénin in the Skira
edition of Les Chants de Maldoror.
While Dalí’s illustrated edition served as a canvas on which to
exhibit his method, it also created a rift with Breton, who responded
by publishing his own illustrated edition. This edition exhibits twenty
years of surrealist achievements, yet it excludes Dalí. In contrast to
Dalí’s edition, it presents the most reliable edition of Lautréamont’s
texts since 1890.
André Breton, GLM, Œuvres complètes, 1938
Despite the surrealists’ condemnation of anyone who would use

Lautréamont to opportunistic ends, and at least in part to amend the
mistakes of their predecessors, Breton and the remaining surrealists
published their own illustrated edition of Lautréamont’s Œuvres
complètes in 1938. Dalí’s edition of Maldoror had insulted Breton, for
the reasons described above, and also because it disregarded the
Poésies, a work that Breton insisted was integral to Lautréamont’s
corpus. Moreover, Dalí’s Maldoror was less an edition than an art
book, a canvas for paranoiac-criticism more than a tribute to
Lautréamont. Examples of neglect for Lautréamont’s text in Dalí’s
edition include: a flagrant disregard for original stanza divisions, so
that 13 instead of 14 stanzas make up the first canto; neglect for
important generic distinctions in stanzas 11 and 12 of the first canto;
and an inattention for rhythmic pauses indicated by paragraph
divisions.37 Finally, this deluxe edition limited to 210 expensive

copies, each signed by the artist, contains no notes to the text and no
preface. Lautréamont’s text, in fact, matters little to the edition.
Whereas illustrated editions and art books do not traditionally
guarantee allegiance to the original text, the GLM edition at least
features an authorially-minded text, faithfully copied from the 1869
Lacroix edition of the Chants de Maldoror.
On the brink of the Second World War, the remaining surrealists,
led by Breton, made their own illustrated edition under the auspices of
the editor, poet, and artist Guy Lévis-Mano. A regular editor of
surrealist works, especially from 1936-39, Lévis-Mano was a typo-
graphical theoretician. He endeavored to consider the individuality of
each text, searching for an appropriate harmony between text,
illustration, and typography in his editions. For Lévis-Mano, the
editor’s task consisted in creating a proper climate for each work: the
first goal was readability, and the second was a “traduction fidèle de
l’atmosphère” [faithful translation of the atmosphere] of the work.38
Lévis-Mano opposed the imbalance of text and image in more
expensive illustrated books of the time. Instead, he preferred a
dialogue (though not necessarily a traditional one) in which text and
image respond to and complement each other.
The idea for the Lautréamont project began in 1937, one year
before the International Surrealist Exposition in Paris. At the time,
Breton was busily trying to repair important broken friendships to
ensure the upcoming exposition’s success. One such friendship was
with René Magritte, whose wife Breton had verbally attacked years
earlier for wearing a cross around her neck to a dinner party that he
37
Lautréamont, Les Chants de Maldoror (Paris: Skira, 1934), 15; stanzas 8 and 9
merge together. These dialogue scenes (23-33) are crucial to understanding the
significance of the poem and its intertexts. In the scene between Maldoror and the
gravedigger, the dialogue form refers to the same scene from Hamlet, a play which
inspired many of Lautréamont’s predecessors and contemporaries, and was performed
in 1868 at la Gaité and l’Opéra. Walzer, Œuvres complètes de Lautréamont, note
1097.
38
Antoine Coron, ed., Les Éditions GLM 1923-1974: Bibliographie (Paris:
Bibliothèque Nationale, 1981), xiii. See also Guy Lévis-Mano, GLM (Montpelier:
Fata Morgana, 1982).
hosted.39 Another was André Masson, whom Breton had praised in Le

Surréalisme et la peinture for his “chemistry of intellect” but whom
he had later rejected because of a friendship and collaboration with
Georges Bataille. Even the loyal surrealist, Paul Éluard, who had
organized the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition with him in
London, had begun to lose patience with Breton’s hunger for power,
and the two spent most of that exhibition avoiding one another.40
Breton was also making new friends in the international art scene
whom he would invite to participate in the GLM illustrated edition,
including Augustín Espinoza from Spain, Austrian-born Wolfgang
Paalen, Oscar Dominguez from the Canary Islands, and the Chilean
Roberto Matta Echaurren. Dominguez, who began spending time with
the surrealists in 1934, was praised by Breton for having created a
new surrealist technique of painting, called “décalcomanie sans objet
préconçu,” [decalcomania without preconceived object] where black
gouache is spread on paper and reapplied many times to create a
Rorschach-like result. According to Dominguez, “Qu’il vous suffise,
par exemple, d’intituler l’image obtenue en function de ce que vous y
découvrez” [all you need do now is study the resulting image long
enough for you to find a title that conveys the reality you have
discovered in it].41 Roberto Matta Echaurren, known simply as Matta,
a Chilean architect and painter, joined the group in 1937. Breton liked
his work and his childlike personality and invited him to contribute to
the GLM project.42 Some collaborators of this edition were part of the
stable core of surrealists: Max Ernst, Man Ray, and Yves Tanguy.
Others, like Victor Brauner, who had left Paris for his native
Bucharest, were invited to rejoin the surrealists after some time away.
Finally, one artist, the Swiss-born Kurt Seligmann, whose work
Breton never particularly admired, proved beneficial to the surrealists,
especially for the personal connections he offered during the 1938
39
Mark Polizzotti, Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton (New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), 334-5. This dinner party took place on December
14, 1929 at Breton’s house. On Breton, see also Henri Béhar, André Breton le grand
indésirable (Paris: Fayard, 2005).
40
Éluard still maintained connections with Dalí, either because of Gala or because he
felt that only pride had caused the split with Breton. See Polizzotti, Revolution, 430-1;
and Lewis Kachur, Displaying the Marvelous (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), 10-19.
41
Quoted in Breton, Œuvres complètes, 4: 504 [SP, 129].
42
Polizzotti, Revolution, 447.
Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme at the Galérie de Beaux-

Arts. Breton credits Seligmann for developing a new method of art
that experiments with four dimensions. Called “lithochronism”—
though its name only appears to resemble rock-painting—this method,
or “mécanisme de la solidification, de la pétrification du temps,”
[mechanism of solidification and petrification of time] incorporates
natural objects in sculpture.43
Breton’s formation of this all-star team of artists for the 1938
GLM illustrated edition was crucial, then, for establishing the artistic
and financial groundwork for their upcoming exhibition. The edition
itself, in turn, became an exhibition space. On the one hand, the sur-
realists were eager to show off their talents at this time, after twenty
long years of what they considered underappreciated achievement.44
On the other hand, they were impatient to discredit a number of inter-
national exhibitions that took place either without their participation
or with their opposition.45 Breton hoped to reclaim territory he might
have ceded to popularization over the years. Paradoxically, Breton’s
reclamation of Lautréamont involved the kind of “vulgarization” he
resented; whereas most GLM editions during the years of 1936-39
printed under 500 copies of each edition, Lautréamont’s complete
works were printed in 1,120 copies.46 A copy of this GLM edition
today costs roughly 250 dollars from an on-line book antiquarian.
From his experience in 1920, Breton knew Lautréamont’s potential for
generating publicity.
Breton set out to make the edition and the exhibition crowning
moments in surrealist history.47 He planned for both projects to
43
44
Nadeau, Histoire du surréalisme (Paris: Seuil, 1945), 208.
45
The “Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism” exhibit of 1937 in New York, for example,
was done without Breton’s or Éluard’s cooperation and cast Dalí, then living in the
U.S., as the leader of surrealism. Moreover, the surrealists criticized the organizers for
the “historical construction” of the exhibit, and sought to reclaim surrealism in Paris.
The Nazi-organized Entartete Kunst exhibit of the summer of 1937 in Munich, was
designed to display and condemn “degenerative art,” and featured De Chirico and
Max Ernst pieces. Ironically, it was one of the period’s best-attended modern art
exhibitions (Kachur, Displaying, 19).
46
See Coron, Les Éditions GLM.
47
See Georges Hugnet, Pleins et déliés; souvenirs et témoignages, 1926-1972 (La
Chapelle-sur-Loire: G. Authier, 1972), 323-345.
intersect experience with art and poetry. Similar to what the surrealists
dubbed “truffled” books, the 1938 edition contains mementos of
Lautréamont’s effect on poets and artists alike. These were special
editions of surrealist books, often owned by close friends, which
included manuscripts, letters, photographs, drawings, and fragments
or experiential paraphernalia (e.g. train tickets, leaves, newspaper
cuttings) related to the book and the experience of it.48 Lautréamont’s
mementos, or any rare document directly or indirectly related to
Lautréamont, also vaunt the surrealists’ influence on the poet,
transforming Lautréamont’s work into an album of surrealist memoirs
to complement the text. This edition not only includes Les Chants de
Maldoror and both volumes of Poésies, but also six letters written by
Ducasse, one published here for the first time.49 The edition also
contains an “autographe de Lautréamont,” or notes found in the
margins of a copy of Ernest Naville’s Problème du mal, presumed to
be in the penmanship of Isidore Ducasse. This “truffle” testifies to the
surrealist triumph of the discovery of Lautréamont’s work because
Éluard was credited with its acquisition.50 Additionally, it contains
variants in the first canto from the 1868 and 1869 editions, Ducasse’s
birth certificate, death certificate, and a bibliography. It also includes
over 40 pages of “premières repercussions du comte de Lautréamont,”
[Lautréamont’s first resonances] most of which had been printed in
surrealist periodicals since 1920. Finally, of nearly a dozen editions of
Les Chants de Maldoror printed since 1920, this 1938 edition is the
only one to respect the stanza arrangement given to the prose poem by
its first editors, and presumably by Isidore Ducasse himself.51 In sum,
it was the most comprehensive edition of Lautréamont’s work yet.
The crowning feature of the edition, however, was the mix of text
and image. Each of the twelve illustrators participated in the
International Surrealist Exhibition, and each of them responded to
48
In Breton’s Nadja, the “truffled” edition was published as such, including photos,
etc. On the relationship between publishing and experience, see Vincent Gille, “Books
of Love—Love Books,” in Surrealism: Desire Unbound, ed. Jennifer Mundy
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 125-135.
49
This letter was found by Jacques Guérin in a copy of the first Chant from 1868.
50
See Lefrère, Isidore Ducasse, 452 and 462, note 32. A truffle indeed, Éluard’s
annotated edition of Naville’s book later sold for the equivalent of more than $56,500,
the highest price ever paid for a work by Naville.
51
On the errors in strophe division, see Grubbs, “Division into Strophes,” 154-7.
Lautréamont’s poem with a personal style. Practically each one had

been praised by Breton for abiding by the modèle purement intérieur
that Lautréamont initiated in poetry. In addition to an occasion for the
surrealists to show off their talents, the edition was also the first and
last collective homage to the poet. While some of the participating
artists chose to illustrate the text in a classic and literal sense, most
chose to reflect an analogical relationship with the text rather than a
translation of it. Still others pooled poetic and material images. The
effect is an illustrated edition in the classic sense, but also a
transcendence of it, based on the surrealist definition of images.
The table of illustrations indicates analogical illustrations by
ellipses; it designates the passage from the Chants, page number, and
corresponding image. Matta, for example (Fig. 4.4), illustrates canto
III, 5 with one image, but does not restrict himself to a literal
illustration of any particular moment, as seen by the ellipses: “Dieu au
bordel...”52 Instead, he uses the whole stanza as a point of departure
for his visual interpretation. Lautréamont never actually uses the word
“bordel” in the Chants; however, the illustration demonstrates an
inference made by the artist, based on a number of associations
implicit in the poem. Based primarily on the layering of intertexts, the
stanza parodies spasmodically the cliché of deadly love, which
Matta’s image attempts to illustrate. It begins, for example: “Une
lanterne rouge, drapeau du vice, suspendue à l’extrémité d’une tringle,
balançait sa carcasse au fouet des quatre vents, au-dessus d’une porte
massive et vermoulue” [A red lamp, ensign of vice, hung on the end
of a rod and swung its carcass which the four winds lashed, above a
massive worm-eaten door].53 The first evident source of the sentence,
and perhaps the source of the whole stanza, is Baudelaire’s “Les
Métamorphoses du vampire,” which Lautréamont could easily have
read.54 Lautréamont’s stanza takes place in an old convent garden that
52
Lautréamont, Œuvres complètes, 1938, 414.
53
OC, 144 [Mal, 121].
54
Isidore Ducasse wrote to Auguste Poulet-Malassis, who published Les Épaves in
1866, requesting a copy of the Complément aux Fleurs du Mal de Charles Baudelaire
printed again in 1869 in Brussels. Though the letter was dated in 1870 (after the
publication of the Chants), it is assumed Isidore Ducasse had read these poems that
were excluded from the “definitive” edition of Les Fleurs du Mal. See Jean-Luc
Steinmetz, ed., Œuvres complètes du comte de Lautréamont (Paris: Garnier-
Flammarion, 1990), 453.
Figure 4.4 Matta Echaurren, Dieu au bordel…

© 2013 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New
York / ADAGP, Paris
becomes the garden of love-making and of death, because it functions

both as a whorehouse and a cemetery. When he is about to cross the
moat which protects the convent garden, Maldoror reads a Hebrew
inscription: “‘Vous, qui passez sur ce pont, n’y allez pas. Le crime y
séjourne avec le vice; un jour, ses amis attendirent en vain un jeune
homme qui avait franchi la porte fatale’” [‘Ye who pass over this
bridge, go not yonder. There crime sojourns with vice. One day his
friends in vain awaited a youth who had crossed that fatal gate’].55 The
sources here are multiple, from Dante’s Inferno to William Blake’s
“The Garden of Love,” where the sign “Thou shalt not” written over
the door of a chapel indicates a garden of love transformed into a
graveyard. When one of God’s blond head hairs falls unnoticed from
55
OC, 145 [Mal, 122].
his head, and then comes to life, an obvious association is also made
to stories such as Nikolai Gogol’s Nose.
Matta’s image collapses all of these elements of the stanza to
produce one single image which highlights the deadly love motif by
enlarging sexual organs and pubic hair to form a shelter. Combining
both sun and stars to form a sort of eclipse, similar to the midnight sun
of Blake’s paintings, the bed of love and graveyard of death are also
implicit in his illustration. Since it is not descriptive in the traditional
sense of book illustration, Matta’s animistic image is a more self-
reflective, dreamed metamorphosis than it is a visual translation of the
text.
Some of the GLM artists chose to illustrate the words of the text
literally, while altering its sense, in part abandoning the practice of
unconventional illustration. Essentially, these images are visual
translations of the surrealist definition of the image, using
Lautréamont as a point of departure. There is nothing particularly
abstract to these images; instead, they use the poem to play with the
image, and the image to play with the poem. Juxtaposing two
disparate realities, these illustrations pay homage to Lautréamont by
employing the same methods that he cultivated. Joan Miró’s
illustration of canto VI, Chapter 3, for example (Fig. 4.5), translates
the text to the letter: “‘Trois étoiles au lieu d’une signature, s’écrie
Mervyn; et une tache de sang au bas de la page!’” [‘Three stars instead
of a signature,’ cries Mervyn, ‘and a blood-stain at the foot of the
page!’]56 In the poem, the passage comes from the description of a
letter sent to Mervyn by Maldoror. Instead of a signature, the three
textual stars become three real stars and the blood stain becomes an
enormous, shapeless form.
56
Ibid., 233 [199].
Figure 4.5 Joan Miró, Trois étoiles au lieu d’une

signature et une tache de sang au bas de la page.
© Successió Miró / Artists Rights Society (ARS),
New York /ADAGP, Paris 2013
In Ernst’s and Masson’s illustrations, elements from other

passages in the poem are situated incongruously with their
corresponding image. Ernst illustrates canto IV, 1 (Fig. 4.6): “C’est un
homme ou une pierre ou un arbre qui va commencer le quatrième
chant” [A man or a stone or a tree is about to begin the fourth canto].57
The image not only incorporates the literal text, but also refers back to
the invocation to mathematics from canto II, 10. Ernst visually
clarifies Lautréamont’s incongruous use of logic and the syllogism:
Vous me donnâtes la logique, qui est comme l’âme elle-même de

vos enseignements, pleins de sagesse; avec ses syllogimes [sic],
dont le labyrinthe compliqué n’en est que plus compréhensible,
57
Lautréamont, Œuvres complètes, 1938, 414; OC, 157 [Mal, 131].
mon intelligence sentit s’accroître du double ses forces

audacieuses.
[You gave me logic, the very soul of your wise instruction, and
through its syllogisms whose involved maze makes them still
more comprehensible, my intellect felt its bold strength
redouble.]58
Figure 4.6 Max Ernst, C’est un homme ou une

pierre ou un arbre qui va commencer le
quatrième chant.
© 2013 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/
ADAGP, Paris
58
OC, 104-5 [Mal, 85]. Steinmetz does not correct the spelling of “syllogismes.”
The verbal, geometric images assail the inconsistency of logic and

emphasize the absurdity of the metamorphosed tree/stone/man
syllogism: Omne animal est substantia, omnis homo est animal, ergo
omnis homo est substantia, to form a new, harmonious image. Breton
valued Ernst’s graphic works for their capability of waking a book
from slumber, “le livre s’est éveillé—physiquement éveillé—de son
sommeil séculaire” [awakened the book, physically, from its
centuries-long slumber]59 Ernst creates this effect in his Maldoror
image by creating a visual conversation between passages of the
poem. It is also possible to see another correlation here with
Baudelaire’s Épaves, recalling the frontispiece designed by Félicien
Rops of a “squelette arborescent” [arborescent skeleton]. Here, the
mineral content is added to the animal/vegetable combination to
enhance the syllogism.
Masson’s illustration (Fig. 4.7), like Ernst’s, refers to another
stanza in order to accentuate the motifs particular to his own segment:
remorse and vengeance. Although Breton considered Masson an
automatic artist, Masson, who illustrated erotic books by
Aragon and Bataille, considered literal illustration as a “rule of the
game” for erotic texts. “In the erotic book,” he said, “the painter has to
be the author’s photographer,”60 and no automatism can be involved.
His illustration for canto IV, 4 is almost entirely mimetic, except for
two significant details: the flying octopus and the spider on the
figure’s neck. Almost the entire stanza graphically describes one
image, the directions for which Masson follows explicitly. The stanza
begins: “Je suis sale. Les poux me rongent. Les pourceaux, quand ils
me regardent, vomissent” [I am filthy. Lice gnaw me. Swine, when
they look at me, vomit].61
Rather than using it as a springboard for interpretation, Masson
illustrates a literal picture of Maldoror as described by the language of
the stanza: an enormous toadstool grows from his neck, he sits on a
formless chair, he is so old that his feet take root and form vegetation,
59
60
Cited in Gille, “Books of Love,” 130.
61
Lautréamont, Œuvres complètes, 1938, 414; OC, 169 [Mal, 142].
Figure 4.7 André Masson, Je suis sale.

Les poux me rongent. Les pourceaux,
quand ils me regardent, vomissent…
© 2013 Artists Rights Society (ARS),
New York/ ADAGP, Paris
a family of toads lives under his left armpit, and so on.62 The octopus
is not one of the many animals described in the stanza, yet one flies in
the top left corner of Masson’s illustration. It serves to recall to the
viewer the theme of crime and vengeance central to both this passage
and Canto II, 15, where the octopus actually appears:
Mais, le fantôme jaune ne le perd pas de vue, et le poursuit avec

une égale vitesse. Quelquefois, dans une nuit d’orage, pendant que
des légions de poulpes ailés, ressemblant de loin à des corbeaux,
planent au-dessus des nuages, en se dirigeant d’une rame raide
vers les cités des humains, avec la mission de les avertir de
changer de conduite, le caillou, à l’œil sombre, voit deux êtres
passer à la lueur de l’éclair, l’un derrière l’autre; et, essuyant une
62
OC, 169-172.
furtive larme de compassion, qui coule de sa paupière glacée, il

s’écrie: “Certes, il le mérite; et ce n’est que justice.”
[But the yellow phantom does not lose sight of him and just as
rapidly pursues. Sometimes on a stormy night while legions of
winged squids (at a distance resembling crows) float above the
clouds and scud stiffly toward the cities of the humans, their
mission to warn men to change their ways—the gloomy-eyed
pebble perceives amid flashes of lightning two beings pass by, one
behind the other, and, wiping away a furtive tear of compassion
that trickles from its frozen eye, cries: “Certainly he deserves it;
it’s only justice.”]63
In his 1979 article on the intertexts in this passage, Michael Riffaterre

highlights the typically romantic Cainian drama that Lautréamont
enacts. Just as man is linked to sin by Adam, he is linked to crime by
Cain, and what distinguishes man from animals is remorse. In
Riffaterre’s analysis, the scene is clearly reminiscent of a famous
painting by Pierre-Paul Prud’hon from 1805. In the passage illustrated
by Masson, however, the flying octopus recalls another painting with
the same theme, William Blake’s Body of Abel Found by Adam and
Eve (1825). By adding the flying octopus, Masson underlines the
image of flying avengers to highlight the theme of his stanza, and the
image of “la douleur qui te montrera le chemin qui conduit à la
tombe” [the sorrow that will show you the road leading to the grave].64
Masson’s illustration depicts a visual metamorphosis of man
becoming animal for lack of remorse, precisely as the stanza indicates.
Additionally, the spider which rests on the creature’s neck adds to
the animism of Masson’s illustration, but also recalls the spider from
canto V, 7, which resides in a wound on Maldoror’s neck (“dans
laquelle la tarentule a pris l’habitude de se loger, comme dans un
deuxième nid” [in which the tarantula has acquired the habit of
dwelling as in a second nest]).65 The spider in canto V, 7 holds two
sword-bearing adolescents in its stomach. The spider in Masson’s
illustration thus explains the sword image in the creature’s back and
repeats the vengeance motif. This spider nesting in the creature’s neck
63
Ibid., 122 [101]. See Riffaterre, “Sémiotique intertextuelle,” on the visual and
literary intertexts in this particular passage.
64
OC, 172 [Mal, 144].
65
Ibid., 214 [181-2].
confirms to the viewer or reader that this seated creature is, in fact,
Maldoror.
Finally, one famous image from this illustrated edition was
created without any direct reference to the text at all, and calls into
question the very motives of the edition. René Magritte simply
provides a version of his famous 1934 painting, Le Viol, as an
illustration for canto II, 1 (Fig. 4.8). Magritte, whose work plays with
the notion of representation in a way closest to that developed by
Lautréamont, conscientiously manipulates images in order to create
surprise. In Le Viol, for example, Magritte’s game involves intro-
ducing body parts where they do not logically belong. Magritte,
however, though close to Lautréamont in style, did not paint Le Viol to
correspond with the poem nor did he even intend to display it
alongside.
Regardless of Magritte’s original intentions for the piece, a
certain harmony joins his illustration to the text. When he discussed
Ernst’s collages for a work by Paul Éluard, Magritte declared that an
illustration need not respond directly to a poem, as long as it
“‘matche[s]’ through a related feeling, a similar freedom, the same
poetic state of mind.”66 To exemplify this type of dissimilar, yet
matching, illustration Magritte recalled that his Viol, though created
several years prior to the GLM edition, corresponded to Maldoror
even if it did not refer to it directly. Le Viol, though incongruous,
matched well with the poetic state of mind of the Chants. In 1948,
Magritte illustrated his own edition of the Chants at La Boétie in
Brussels, but did not include this image. Instead, Magritte’s images in
his 1948 edition followed conventional guidelines for illustration.67
66
René Magritte, Magritte/Torczyner: Letters Between Friends (New York: Harry N.
Abrams, 1994), 110. For W.T.J. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and
Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 89, the subject
matter is an “ensemble of relations between media,” however “relations” are not
limited to similarity.
67
Magritte, Magritte/Torczyner: Letters, 110. See Renee Riese Hubert, Surrealism
and the Book (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), for another
interpretation of the surrealist illustrated editions, including an analysis of Magritte’s
illustrations of Les Chants. I chose not to examine this edition partly because of the
conventional style of its illustrations and partly because Magritte himself considered
the edition a mistake.
Figure 4.8 René Magritte, Où est-il passé ce

premier chant de Maldoror, depuis que sa
bouche, pleine des feuilles de la belladone…
© 2013 C. Herscovici, London / Artists Rights
Society (ARS), New York
The images described here demonstrate that the 1938 GLM

edition not only paid tribute to the poet who best exemplified Breton’s
purely internal model, but also promoted the surrealists one last time
before their 1938 International Surrealist Exhibition and before the
eventual rupture of the group caused by the war. Together with Dalí’s
edition, the GLM edition also elucidates Lautréamont’s function as a
commodity during the surrealist period. On the one hand, the
surrealists were iconoclasts, relying on the concept of the surrealist
image to undermine and negate traditional illustrated books. On the
other hand, Lautréamont’s reliance on what the surrealists considered
a purely internal model provided them a rationale and gave purpose to
the surrealist quest for freedom of expression.
Though the surrealists may have commercialized Lautréamont,
they also inaugurated his status as a cult icon. These illustrated
editions testify to the ways in which one poem can ignite an array of
visual interpretations, from the traditional to the truffé or the
opportunistic. The illustrated edition reveals aspects of the artist and
editor’s motives and social milieu. But it can also reveal aspects of the
poet and the poem, proving by way of an image that a baobab can be a
pillar, column, tower, two massive, elevated forms, or something else
altogether, depending on how one sees it.
III
POST-STRUCTURALISM
Chapter Five
Lautréamont in the
Bibliothèque de la Pléiade
The 1970 Bibliothèque de la Pléiade edition of works by Isidore

Ducasse marked the unlikely entrance of this outlaw poet into the
halls of the French literary Pantheon. Two decades later, when a
fellow poète maudit, the Marquis de Sade, received the same honor,
Roger Shattuck pondered the Pléiade’s power to wash away depravity:
“Is it possible that the India paper, limp leather binding, and scholarly
apparatus of the Pléiade edition can transform Sade into an author to
be read along with Dickens, Balzac, and Melville with pleasure and
profit by our own children?”1 If the same question is put to
Lautréamont, the answer is yes. Scholarly apparatus, taking the form
of both literary and textual criticism, has served to reshape
Lautréamont from outsider to immortel. Gallimard’s new Pléiade
edition of Lautréamont’s complete works (2009) attests to the changes
in cultural acceptance of this and other outsider authors since 1970.
Editors, critics, writers, and artists—not to mention time—have all
shaped Lautréamont’s path to canonization in the Pléiade collection.
If there are many strange aspects to the story of Lautréamont’s
canonization in 1970, perhaps the most remarkable is that it calls to
mind one of the poet’s own characters, the unfortunate Mervyn, in the
closing sequence of Les Chants de Maldoror. This exaggerated,
topographically precise melodrama sets Paris as the scene for the
super anti-hero Maldoror’s ultimate crime against God. Maldoror
plots to seduce the sixteen-year-old Mervyn whose beauty, thanks to
the surrealists, is now legendary: “beau…comme la rencontre fortuite
sur une table de dissection d’une machine à coudre et d’un parapluie!”
[fair…as the chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing
machine and an umbrella!]2 Mervyn’s innocence has marked him as a
target for Maldoror, so Maldoror plans to torture him to death. Before
1
Roger Shattuck, Forbidden Knowledge (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 255.
2
OC, 227 [Mal, 193].
he reaches his goal, however, Maldoror must overcome several

obstacles, described in short chapters fueled with constant action,
suspenseful allusions, and heroic scenes grafted off the popular novel
genre. The reader learns of triumphs over pachyderm and crustacean
avatars of God, a cowardly accomplice in the shape of a wooden
beam, and Mervyn’s own parents. Finally, from atop the Vendôme
column, Maldoror lassoes and flings Mervyn all the way across the
Seine to the dome of the Pantheon—burial ground for the illustrious—
where his body is rumored to swing in the wind, warning children of a
similar fate.
At the centenary of his death in 1970, Lautréamont, like Mervyn,
was lassoed to, or rather into, the Pantheon, though by more scholarly
means. Lautréamont had always resisted easy classification: his
sadistic themes, small corpus, lack of manuscript, and generic
ambiguity prevented access into the French literary canon.
Furthermore, and perhaps owing to these difficulties, Lautréamont had
by now been assigned mythical status, making him open to
appropriation by surrealism and other avant-garde movements. Over
the course of the twentieth century, however, Lautréamont’s
transgression had evolved into a classic, as evidenced by this leather-
bound volume, edited and annotated by the Swiss critic Pierre-Olivier
Walzer in the same year, 1970, that Les Lettres françaises declared
“L’Année Lautréamont.”3 One reviewer of the edition, René Lacôte,
applauded Walzer’s efforts as “indispensable” for research as well as
pleasure-reading:
Il s’agit ici, comme dans beaucoup d’ouvrages de la collection,

d’une somme critique qui fait la synthèse des recherches, et donne
des textes établis avec toutes les garanties souhaitables. Le
Lautréamont de la Pléiade, qui réunit toutes les informations et
tous les documents connus, a toutes les chances de rester pour le
texte l’édition définitive.
[As is the case with many works in this collection, the volume
summarizes all research, and offers a text established with every
assurance desirable. The Pléiade Lautréamont, which provides all
3
“L’Année Lautréamont,” Les Lettres françaises 1328 (1970): 2.
Lautréamont in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade 171
known information and documentation, has every chance of

remaining the definitive edition.]4
A closer look at this 1970 Pléiade edition, however, reveals such

claims of a definitive text to be somewhat dubious. For one thing, the
edition of Lautréamont was bound with the collected works of another
nineteenth-century poet: Germain Nouveau. Walzer himself fails to
clarify this curious pairing, though others have explained the decision
in light of Lautréamont and Nouveau’s common influence on the
surrealists, an affiliation with Rimbaud, or an early retirement from
poetry. To this, one might also add posthumous success and alleged
mental illness.5 A second issue that troubles Walzer’s 1970 “definitive
text” is the use of secondary sources. Walzer, who produced this
volume with unusual speed for the Pléiade in the same year that he
edited another Pléiade volume coupling Tristan Corbière and Charles
Cros, cites one of his chief critical sources as Pierre Capretz’s 1950
doctoral dissertation, Quelques sources de Lautréamont, a typewritten,
unduplicated thesis which is nearly impossible to locate today.6 Most
importantly, there is the question of Walzer’s own editorial practices,
which sought to improve Lautréamont’s writing with arguable results.
Many of these practices were then repeated in the 2009 Pléiade
edition.
Although the Pléiade is today considered an esteemed national
symbol, it was not conceived that way in 1931. Other collections,
beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century, played the role
of textual torchbearers of national pride. First, in 1847 Pierre Jannet
launched a collection of pre-classic French works in order to vaunt a
rich national literary history. This collection, called the Bibliothèque
elzevirienne, continued until the end of the nineteenth century.
Hachette’s Les Grands Ecrivains de la France collection, established
in 1867 under the direction of Adolphe Régnier, focused primarily on
illustrious seventeenth-century French writers—classics in two senses
4
René Lacôte, “Lautréamont, Germain Nouveau,” Les Lettres françaises 1339
(1970): 8.
5
With Steinmetz’s recent 2009 Pléiade edition which entirely features Lautréamont, it
is unclear what will happen to Nouveau’s place in the Pléiade collection.
6
Capretz is now famous for his French language textbook, French in Action. Peter
Nesselroth, author of Lautréamont’s Imagery (Geneva: Droz, 1969), kindly mailed me
a copy of Capretz’s thesis, which had been given to him by Jean-Pierre Lassalle.
of the word. In 1909, the collection branched off to accommodate

eighteenth- and nineteenth-century authors, directed by Gustave
Lanson.7 According to Claude Pichois, who revised Y.-G. Dantec’s
Pléiade edition of Baudelaire, the Grands Écrivains de la France
series was essentially overshadowed by the end of the First World
War by two other collections performing a similar function: La
Société des textes français modernes, founded in 1905, and Textes
littéraires français, created by Eugénie Droz.8 Lastly, since 1893,
Classiques Garnier published editions of classics that were close to
today’s definition of scholarly editions.
The editors of these collections were for the most part trained
according to scientific standards developed by Karl Lachmann (1793-
1851), a German classical philologist whose ideas continue to influ-
ence modern textual criticism. Since Lachmann’s ideas were imported
to France by Gaston Paris, editors have aimed to systematically reduce
subjectivity in their editions. Editorial subjectivity had previously
been a common approach to editing; in some cases, an editor would
copy a text, taking out the parts that did not conform to his tastes.
After Lachmann, editorial practice was considered a rigorous
scholarly activity. Lachmann’s method relied on genealogical “tree”
models showing the relation between all extant manuscripts (stemma
codicum). His goal for objectivity was later pursued by editorial
scholars of vernacular texts into the twentieth century, some of whom
modified the tree approach to a “best-text” approach. This method
entailed a choice of one documentary text to reproduce directly,
except for obvious errors, which were emended. In France, this “best-
text” approach was famously championed by the medieval scholar
Joseph Bédier (1864-1938), who was skeptical of Lachmann’s
genealogical method. The “best-text” approach dominated the first
half of the twentieth century. “Best” was generally considered the last
text published during the author’s lifetime because it was understood
that the author had at that time given his last approval. In response to
the intrinsic contradiction of “best-text” approach (critical but with
non-critical goals), a new approach encouraged subjective, yet
informed, judgment. This approach, famously developed by the
7
See Odile and Henri-Jean Martin, “Le Monde des éditeurs.”
8
Claude Pichois, “La Tradition française de l’édition critique,” Romanic Review 86
(1995): 575.
English Shakespeare scholar W.W. Greg (1875-1959), applied critical

judgment to all variants of a “copy-text,” or the text closest to the
author’s manuscript.
While specific approaches to editing had varied since Lachmann,
most editors after him assumed that the text they were aiming to
reconstruct was the one that the author intended. Scholarly editors
considered their task historical, since the editor by definition
reproduces documents from the past. It was understood that critical
judgment was imperative to the editorial task, but the degree of
subjectivity involved was constantly disputed and varied according to
the situation or author. Moreover, the aim for the most objective text
possible was not limited to medieval, classical and Renaissance
works; modern works likewise raised new sets of questions. Many of
these questions influence literary criticism and editorial practice
especially after the nineteen-fifties. Thus, evolving critical approaches
coincide with the development of the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade as
well as with a changing concept of the author’s function. The
questions around modern authors can be generalized in two
categories: abundance of authorial material on the one hand and
deliberate authorial obscurity on the other. Problems raised by these
questions overlap for textual and literary critics alike.
Modern authors’ textual material is now frequently preserved,
particularly since the mid-twentieth century. This conservation may be
due in part to a post-World War concern for document preservation,
sacralization of the writer since the nineteenth century, copyright
inconsistencies throughout the nineteenth century which allowed for
various editions of the same work, or the simple fact that modern
authors are by definition more recent and therefore less subject to loss
of materials over time. Editors since the nineteen-fifties have a
plethora of documents, manuscripts, proofs, and versions to consider
in the texts they choose to present, especially for nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century authors. For editions of many modern authors,
abundance of textual material prevents a single best-text or copy-text.
The matter of authorial intention could be contested, in other words,
because there are many more documents to choose from that reflect
the author’s intentions at various stages of production. The choice of
the author’s intention, as influenced by editors who wanted to market
the volume, for example, versus the author’s uninfluenced intention
became a central issue in the establishment of texts throughout the
twentieth century. Lautréamont’s editor must take this matter into

account, although little extant material can prove which decisions
were influenced and which were uninfluenced by editors.
The second textual challenge posed to twentieth-century editors
is an intentional difficulty cultivated by some modern authors. Many
authors, that is, favored opacity over clarity in their writing. Obscurity
poses countless challenges to the editor who uses his critical judgment
to produce a clear text. French authors who had garnered scholarly
editions were generally considered academic and thus more likely
favored a classical, traditional, and clear style, one that should be
emulated by students. These modern classic authors (e.g. George
Sand, Honoré de Balzac, and Alexandre Dumas père) were agreed
upon as morally sound, meriting a scholarly edition edited by academ-
ics. Lautréamont would not be considered among even the disputed
classics of the time (e.g. Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Mallarmé).9
Difficult writers with an opaque style, on the other hand, call into
question the editor’s traditional job of detecting and correcting errors,
because often these errors are deliberate constructions.
Unlike the collections like the Bibliothèque elzevirienne and
Classiques Garnier, the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade was not conceived
of as academic or scholarly. It has only been considered a prestigious
path to the academic pantheon since the nineteen-fifties, two decades
after it began, most likely due to the evolving intersection of literary
criticism and university scholarship.10 Today when a work is deemed a
classic, it merits the Pléiade’s elegant form: printed on Bible paper
and bound in leather. Ironically, this Bible paper (made with cigarette
paper) and leather binding, now respectively appraised as a sign of
physical canonization and of luxury, was the same format used at the
9
On the fin-de-siècle polemic over the “grands écrivains de la France” see Antoine
Compagnon, La Troisième République des lettres, de Flaubert à Proust (Paris: Seuil,
1983), especially part one, “Gustave Lanson, l’homme et l’œuvre.” On the history of
scholarly editing in France, see Bernard Cerquiglini, Éloge de la variante: histoire
critique de la philologie (Paris: Seuil, 1989).
10
On the history of the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, see Joëlle Gleize and Philippe
Roussin, La Bibliothèque de la Pléiade: Travail éditorial et valeur littéraire (Paris:
Ed. des archives contemporaines, 2009); Alice Kaplan and Philippe Roussin, “A
Changing Idea of Literature: The Bibliothèque de la Pléiade,” Yale French Studies 89
(1996): 237-62; and Francis J. Carmody, “Les Cahiers de la Pléiade,” The French
Review 26 (1952): 21-31.
collection’s conception primarily as a means to transmit texts in a

durable, portable form. By combining the complete works in a single
volume, readers could procure in one book what they would previ-
ously have had to purchase in many. The volumes were slim, free of
verbose introductions, long chronologies, and cumbersome notes.
Authors meriting a Pléiade edition followed no national standard. In
fact, the Pléiade collection was conceived by an independent editor
from Azerbaijan, Jacques Schiffren, who first published Russian texts
in French translation. With his colleagues, Boris Schloezer and
Charles du Bos, the Éditions de la Pléiade group soon published
Russian and international autobiographical works and each volume
was introduced by a contemporary French writer.11 Until the
Occupation, with André Gide’s help, the Pléiade worked under the
auspices of the Nouvelle Revue française and published a range of
authors and genres. As the minister of culture André Malraux de-
scribed it, the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade was a “musée imaginaire”
[imaginary museum] where books “dialogued” with one another on
the shelf.12
Publication slowed significantly during the war, but did not
completely stop.13 After the war ended, Gallimard asked Jean Paulhan,
who had directed the collection since 1940 when Schiffren had fled to
the United States, to revamp the collection, thereby summoning the
sumptuous image of today: “des éditions de référence des plus grandes
œuvres du patrimoine littéraire et philosophique français et étranger,
imprimées sur papier bible et reliées sous couverture pleine peau
dorée à l’or fin” [reference editions of the greatest works of our
French and foreign literary and philosophical heritage; printed on
Bible paper, leather-bound and gilded].14 Pléiade readers who bought
volumes printed during the war were promised a real leather cover to
replace the synthetic ones used in wartime shortage. Otherwise, the
11
Kaplan and Roussin, “A Changing Idea,” 238.
12
Cited in Hugues Pradier, “D’une Pléiade à l’autre,” Revue Flaubert 2 (2002): 2, url:
http://flaubert.univ-rouen.fr/revue/revue2/prad.pdf., referring to Malraux’s chapter,
“La Secte,” in L’Homme précaire et la littérature (Paris: Gallimard, 1977).
13
According to Kaplan and Roussin, “A Changing Idea,” 250, the collection stopped
for lack of paper during the spring of 1943. According to the Pléiade catalogue, La
Fontaine was the last author published in 1943. The Pléiade resumed publication in
1945 with Mallarmé.
14
As boasted by the Gallimard Web site.
leather binding and paper quality were soon described as luxurious as

well as durable, and prices naturally went up.
Pierre Buge, director from 1966-1987, was primarily responsible
for what is termed “le tournant” of the Pléiade, initiating a
replacement of the old editions with new, elaborate, academic ones.
Buge came from directing the Garnier Classiques and was director
during Lautréamont’s entry into the collection. According to the
Pléiade’s current director, Hugues Pradier, the shift is not nearly as
severe as critics often make it out to be. He argues that since its
conception, the collection has in fact evolved from the same premise
and has not drastically changed.15 Because the new editions physically
replace the old ones, it appears as though critics refer to two separate
Pléiades, one popular and one academic; in fact, as the loving
nickname “le Rolls-Royce de l’édition” illustrates, the volumes are all
of high quality, luxurious, and iconic.
Gallimard’s overhaul of the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade in the
nineteen-sixties can thus be considered a methodological one: a shift
from popular classics to academic classics, not so much in the authors
selected, but rather in the approach to editing them. The renovation
may in part explain why Baudelaire’s Œuvres complètes as the first
Pléiade volume in 1931 did not rouse as great a stir as Sade’s Œuvres
Complètes in 1995 or Georges Bataille’s in 2004. Moreover,
Baudelaire’s Œuvres complètes, as well as many other authors’
complete works, received a new “authoritative,” “definitive” edition in
the fifties. Every Pléiade author retains a number given at the time of
publication (Baudelaire is always number one, Poe is always number
two), but Pléiade policy requires that each new edition entirely replace
the one that came before it, keeping only a partial record of previous
editions in the catalogue. In this way, new editions update old editions
as they expunge them, catering to the needs of a changing public of
readers and scholars. If the “text” of any author in the Pléiade
collection is to be discussed, one must ask, “which text?” because the
text changes according to the period in which the work is edited.
Along with the physical reconstruction of the collection, the
Bibliothèque de la Pléiade witnessed an identity renovation and
became a national symbol. While the Pléiade narrowed in scope from
15
Pradier, “D’une Pléiade,” 1.
popular favorites of literature and philosophy to œuvres complètes of

great authors, the salient change from prewar to postwar editions was
the critical apparatus of each new edition. Starting in the nineteen-
fifties and -sixties, teams of editors replaced single editors. They
began to research manuscripts and extensively document variants
within the text. La critique génétique began to develop in France at
this time as a means to interpret works based on textual variation in
manuscript drafts, notes, and writerly traces. Rather than a type of
textual criticism, however, which analyzes the relationship between
existing texts of a work, genetic criticism is a branch of literary
criticism, whose purpose is to study and explain meaning in literature
by way of the author’s writing process. Put another way, textual
criticism privileges the final text, whereas genetic criticism privileges
the writing process. At that time structuralism in literature began to
expand as another branch of literary criticism, focusing on internal
structures within literary language; it was greatly influenced by the
rise of structural anthropology and human sciences in universities. In
sum, the new approach to establishing and explaining literature was a
medium to match the message: the modern idea that literature was
self-conscious demanded a technique for evaluating, explaining, and
establishing a text that could reveal this self-consciousness.
Alice Kaplan and Philippe Roussin note that the postwar em-
phasis on critical scholarly reference editions was designed to favor
the growing market of readers in universities. Lengthy introductions,
chronologies, and critical apparatuses as well as exhaustive notes and
variants replaced the previously concise ones. The Pléiade was now a
reference edition. New editions became scholarly because rather than
well-known writers, it was scholars who applied informed judgment
and collated surviving texts to establish the most accurate text. Kaplan
and Roussin explain that with all this material, “the œuvre is no longer
sufficient unto itself, no longer capable, as before, of speaking for
itself with the artist’s guarantee of a contemporary writer’s affinity:
the editor must speak along with it.”16 Still, for textual scholars, the
Pléiade editions are still only “semi-critical,” a kind of scholarly
edition which also caters to readers uninterested in drudging through
an elaborate critical apparatus.
16
Kaplan and Roussin, “A Changing Idea,” 258.
The editor’s critical judgment, which assays texts by their

relation to other texts to establish meaning, is nowhere more apparent
than in the notes, variants, and introductions of these postwar
scholarly Pléiade editions. If one compares earlier Pléiade editions
with later ones, editorial traces are prevalent in both, but the later ones
elaborate text description and writing processes, favoring technical
notes over the more impressionistic ones from earlier editions. In the
1954 Pléiade edition of Rimbaud, for example, the editors revised
their 1946 edition to create one text from a comparison of several texts
of “L’Enfance,” based on Rimbaud’s autograph manuscripts. In the
1972 edition, the new editor Antoine Adam adds another layer. He
describes the autograph on the manuscript in full: “…Les cinq parties
sont d’une même écriture, entièrement de celle d’Après le Déluge.
Elle est grande et large. L’encre est restée noire” [These five parts
have the same hand-writing, entirely that of Après le Déligue. It is big
and broad. The ink remains black].17
It is unsurprising that genetic and structuralist literary criticism
correspond with textual criticism throughout the nineteen-sixties and -
seventies in this new approach which favored “text” over the intan-
gibility of a work. Text was seen as structured and material, whereas a
work was seen as conceptual, perpetuated by an authoritarian
academic establishment. Because the new editions reconstructed so
much of an author’s materials, and because so many materials were
preserved and available for reconstruction, the definition of work and
text—and paradoxically, the supremacy of the author—naturally
expanded. As literary critics attempted to articulate the concept of text
and divest themselves of tyrannical author-centric interpretation, the
author’s traces became increasingly valuable metaphorically and
literally. Although literary and textual critics seemed to share in their
material approach, they meanwhile entered into a polemic over the
role of the author and critic, the definition of text and work, as well as
academic and scientific discourse.
Since the nineteen-sixties, and influenced by the rise in struc-
turalism, explanations of Maldoror have considered Lautréamont’s
excess in content and style as “literary,” and indeed as the defining
17
Arthur Rimbaud, Œuvres complètes, eds. Jules Mouquet and A. Rolland de
Renéville (Paris: Gallimard, 1954), 725; Arthur Rimbaud, Œuvres complètes, ed.
Antoine Adam (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), 980.
feature of his poem. In so doing, obscure and lewd passages alike are
explained by the references they make to other literary works as well
as to poetic language in general. At that time, the definition and
function of literature entered a debate that would persist throughout
the postwar period, reflected in titles such as Blanchot’s “Comment la
littérature est-elle possible?” (1943), Jean-Paul Sartre’s Qu’est-ce que
la littérature (1946), and Barthes’s Le Degré zéro de l’écriture (1953).
Barthes anticipated that “the text” would be the new object of study
for literary critics. It is historically fitting, then, that in 1967 Marcelin
Pleynet, managing editor of the journal Tel Quel, saw that the writing
itself was the only solution to reading Lautréamont, arguing that the
Chants de Maldoror thwarted every attempt at interpretation. All
criticism of Maldoror has failed, Pleynet claims in Lautréamont par
lui-même, so interpretation must concentrate on the text alone; critics
are not capable of making the poem say what it does not itself say. His
rationale: “Les Chants de Maldoror ainsi se dérobent à toute
entreprise qui ne les considère pas d’abord dans la matérialité même
première-dernière, seule preuve enfin de leur existence (pour nous),
leur écriture” [Les Chants de Maldoror shirk every effort that does not
consider the poem’s materiality itself, the only real proof of its
existence (for us), its writing].18
Like Pleynet, post-structuralist critics evaluated transgressive
works like Lautréamont’s by a concept they termed “textuality,”
roughly defined as the stylistic weaving of formal codes. At once
avant-garde and scholarly, the notion of textuality, including hyper-,
hypo-, meta-, inter-, para-, trans-, archi- and all other variations,
facilitates access of a work like Lautréamont’s into the literary canon.
What had previously been considered Lautréamont’s stylistic
anomalies became catachreses, his grammatical errors became
agrammaticalities, and his sadistic themes became celebrations of
limits—all because they can be traced to other literary works or
concepts to which the Chants react. In the Mervyn scene above, for
instance, the lexicon is made up of penitentiary, astral, mineral, and
vegetative words that all point to a basic Baudelairian formula:
nothing is lost spiritually or materially.19 Stoning or lapidating as a
18
19
In his 1990 edition, Steinmetz pointed out other instances in the Chants that repeat
this formula.
form of execution is reinforced by the stone vocabulary, as if the

process of death and Mervyn’s edification take the same stony shape.
Mervyn reaches out for flowers attached to the stone column, but they
are immortelles (a kind of plant whose flowers never die), an ironic
play on words since they are exponentially immortal: by name, by
their material, and by their polyvalence as dead flowers as well as
French Academy members, known as “immortels.”
This material, textual approach to interpreting Lautréamont’s
poetry, as evidenced by critics such as Pleynet, Julia Kristeva, and
Philippe Sollers, is both attractive and problematic, not least because it
is paradoxically more theoretical and figurative than it is material.
Because Ducasse never clarified his intentions for his poetry,
Lautréamont provides an ideal specimen for Pleynet when he argues
that materiality is the greatest interpretable proof of meaning. One
consequence of this material approach is that it views the text itself as
a monolithic, definitive sum. Such an approach is deeply problematic
especially in the case of Lautréamont because every text of
Lautréamont’s work is a reconstruction of another document, and
these documents are all attempts to approximate Lautréamont’s work.
Editors, printers, copy-editors, binders—all these are actors who
participate in this interpretation.
As one of these editors, then, Walzer’s decisions about spelling
standardization, punctuation, and style are far from inconsequential
details. These decisions are all the more crucial given Lautréamont’s
often ungrammatical logorrhea, frequent opacity of meaning, and lack
of clarity and coherence in certain passages of the poem. As stated
earlier, like many of his contemporaries, such as Rimbaud or
Mallarmé, Lautréamont favored obscurity over transparency in his
writing. Although genetic and textual critics deal with such obscurity
within the writing system of Lautréamont’s cultural period, less often
considered are the specific challenges to an editor of Lautréamont’s
works in light of their unusual history. For the prestigious and
scholarly édition de la Pléiade, there is a further concern: which
approach can make Lautréamont’s untraditional work canonical? And
which works are actually his?
Because the earliest available documents of Lautréamont’s work
are not manuscripts but rather documents influenced by editors,
censorship regulations during Ducasse’s lifetime, and marketing
pressures, no editor of Lautréamont can claim to present a text exactly
as Ducasse intended it to be published. Thus when Walzer claims that

his Pléiade edition is the first to index “toutes les variantes, y compris
les variantes de ponctuation” [all variants, including variants in
punctuation] in the Chants de Maldoror, he means those among the
first three published versions of the first Chant.20 Walzer chose for
critical reconstruction and introduced alterations into Albert Lacroix’s
1869 edition because it best reflects the author’s final intention.
Unfortunately, without manuscripts or evidence, one can never be sure
that Lacroix’s edition matched Ducasse’s intended text.
While Walzer’s list of variants from the first three published
versions of the first Chant contributes considerable erudition to
Lautréamont scholarship, his approach was already somewhat
outmoded in 1970. First, he presumes that the last edition published
during the author’s lifetime is the intended text. Second, that the
author’s intended text should also be the desirable one is a traditional
assumption and is no longer entirely viable for readers in 1970. In
other words, Walzer’s approach stands in sharp contrast with the
aesthetic interests of Lautréamont’s most dedicated readers: avant-
garde literary critics who reject the notion of Ducasse’s or any
author’s intention as a fallacy.
Thus, even though the Pléiade edition may have been used as the
reference source for Lautréamont’s poetry throughout the nineteen-
seventies, its editorial approach did not coincide with the values
promoted by contemporary literary critics who used it.21 Until now,
many critics and scholars have cited from Steinmetz’s 1990
Flammarion edition, characterized by its comprehensiveness and
return to historicity. This edition includes facsimiles of the first
version of the Chant premier (Steinmetz clarifies that he did not find it
necessary to reproduce the second version, since few changes were
made); notes which include biographical information rather than
literary sources, as Walzer’s edition had emphasized; and an annotated
bibliography, which consists of “principal editions” of Lautréamont’s
works and an abbreviated, subjective survey of critical works on the
20
Walzer, Œuvres completes, 1970, 43.
21
In addition to the 1970 Pléiade, there were several other editions at the centennial of
Lautréamont’s death, including one released by La Table ronde made up entirely of
facsimiles of the first editions.
“foisonnante critique ducassienne” [abundant Ducasse criticism].22

Instead of correcting or modernizing punctuation and spelling, as most
editors in the past had tried to do, Steinmetz respects the original texts
as historical documents. Likewise, his notes favor “semantic or
sociological realities” of the author’s epoch, rather than focusing on
Lautréamont’s literary sources, which he calls a “rapprochement
hasardeux” [dangerous comparison].23 Steinmetz responds to Walzer’s
edition in its bibliographic entry: “l’apparat critique, abondant,
n’éclaire pas toujours les difficultés du texte” [the critical apparatus,
though abundant, does not always clarify the difficulties of the text].24
Because scholars consider Walzer’s 1970 Pléiade outdated, it has
been replaced with a new Pléiade edition, this time edited by
Steinmetz himself.25 In order to pay homage to the scores of famous
readers who have defined Lautréamont’s posterity, as well as to give
bulk to an otherwise slim volume of complete works, Steinmetz chose
to replace Germain Nouveau’s complete works with a dossier of
commentary on Lautréamont by editors, critics, writers, and authors
who have been influenced by him. In his introduction to the 2009
edition, Steinmetz does not respond to the inadequacies of Walzer’s
1970 edition. He does, however, draw attention once again to the
“anomalies” in Lautréamont’s texts, including “ponctuation insolite,
orthographe erronée, fautes d’accord, etc.” [quirky punctuation,
incorrect spelling, agreement errors, etc.]26 Steinmetz decides to
respect the punctuation of 1869 (unlike Walzer) but to modernize
spelling (like Walzer), allowing Lautréamont to recover some of his
characteristic style. In general, Steinmetz adopts a similar editorial
approach to Walzer’s, except that he is more forthcoming about his
emendations than his predecessor. The text, notes, and apparatus of
Steinmetz’s 1990 Flammarion and 2009 Pléiade editions are
remarkably similar.
As Steinmetz illustrates in both his 1990 and 2009 editions, and
as critics like George Bornstein have shown, one of the most difficult
22
Steinmetz, Œuvres completes, 1990, 469.
23
Ibid., 66.
24
Ibid., 468.
25
This Pléiade edition, first published in 1970, was later augmented with additional
bibliographic references in 1980 and 1988, and then reprinted in 1993.
26
OC, L.
questions for critics of modernist works may be how to deal with

authorially-intended difficulties such as deliberate errors or
punctuation which, while grammatically incorrect, nuance an author’s
poetic language.27 Although modernization of spelling can render a
work more understandable to contemporary readers, by updating the
work, it deliberately alters the author’s intended text. In addition to his
scholarly introduction, notes, chronology, and bibliography, Walzer
“improved” Lautréamont’s writing in many places. He fixed poor
grammar and, in his words, “obvious” mistakes with words that he
considered to be correct. He does not indicate his emendations for
each case, however, except that he lists in a paragraph the words that
he claims to modernize and standardize. By positioning these spelling
and punctuation changes at the end of the volume, Walzer provides a
clean-reading text, but he actually denies the reader a full
understanding of the text’s history. In so doing, he hides the language
peculiar to Lautréamont’s style.
To take an example, Walzer replaces the word “tâche” from the
1869 “tâche de sang” with the more logical “tache” as in “tache de
sang” or “blood-stain,” an emendation which changes the meaning of
the word, from task to mark.28 Walzer must have recognized that in all
other cases where “sang” or “blood” was used with “tache” in the
1869 text, there was no accent. It is therefore proper judgment to
correct Lautréamont’s error. Since the use of “tâches” could have been
a poetic play on words in another example, “tu effaçais les tâches du
passé,” [you erased the chores/stains of the past] however, every word
should have been accounted for. Walzer corrected it logically, “tu
effaçais les taches du passé,” thereby denying Lautréamont a possibly
intentional mistake.29 To be sure, it is Walzer’s right to use his best
judgment in ambiguous cases like this, but by concealing his
emendations, he does not allow the reader to see where his text strays
from its source texts. In poetry, even an “accidental” (like
punctuation) can be considered substantive, in that it can sometimes
change the meaning of the word, and thus the meaning of a line.
Likewise, on the same page, Walzer silently amends “aujourd’hui il
27
See Bornstein, George, ed., Representing Modernist Texts: Editing as
Interpretation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991).
28
Walzer, Œuvres completes, 1970, 231.
29
Ibid., 214.
rêvasse encore plus de coutume” [today he daydreams more than

usual] to “aujourd’hui il rêvasse encore plus que de coutume.” Finally,
on the same page of text, “polychrômes” is updated to “polychromes.”
In another important instance, Walzer domesticates
Lautréamont’s now famous creative use of plagiarism by suppressing
it. He emends not only Lautréamont’s text, but also the text from
which Lautréamont is plagiarizing. As a result, readers are none the
wiser and Lautréamont’s plagiarism is denied its full significance.
Walzer indicates that he has removed hyphens from cases of
superlative absolute, such as “très-long,” or “très-fort,” a shifting
usage which was still customary during Ducasse’s lifetime.
Lautréamont’s usage is not systematic in the 1869 text, however, and
so readers should consider the possibility that Ducasse hyphenated
strategically. Yet Walzer systematically removes hyphens, even in
passages that were taken nearly word for word without credit from Dr.
Chenu’s 1854 Encyclopédie d’histoire naturelle. Chenu’s entry about
a certain type of pelican maintains the hyphen in all cases of the
superlative absolute:
Bec très-long, large, convexe, en voûte, à arête marquée,

onguiculée, renflée et très-crochue à son extrémité; bords
dentelés, droits; mandibule inférieure à branches séparées jusque
auprès de la pointe, et l’intervalle rempli par une membrane.
[very-long, broad, convex, vaulted beak with pronounced,

unguiculate, inflated bridge very-hooked at its tip; toothed,
straight edges; branches of lower mandible separate almost to the
end, and the gap filled with a membrane.]30
In the 1869 version of Maldoror, Lautréamont maintains these

original hyphens when copying Dr. Chenu’s entry. In removing all of
Lautréamont’s hyphens and correcting the author’s spelling, Walzer
rectifies Lautréamont’s poetic theft:
Je recherchais vaguement, dans les replis de ma mémoire, dans

quelle contrée torride ou glacée, j’avais déjà remarqué ce bec très
long, large, convexe, en voûte, à arête marquée, onguiculée,
renflée et très crochue à son extrémité; ces bords dentelés, droits;
30
Jean-Charles Chenu, Encyclopédie d’histoire naturelle, 22 vols. (Paris: Marescq et
co., 1851-61), 6: 262.
cette mandibule inférieure, à branches séparées jusqu’auprès de la

pointe; cet intervalle rempli par une peau membraneuse;
[I delved dimly amid my memory’s meanderings: in what torrid or

icy region had I already observed that very long, broad, convex,
vaulted beak with pronounced, unguiculate, inflated bridge
hooked at its tip; those toothed, straight edges; the branches of that
lower mandible separate almost to the end and the gap filled with
a membraneous skin;]31
This is not to say, however, that Walzer is not aware of Lautréamont’s

deliberate pilfering. Rather, the editor includes the plagiarized
passages from the encyclopedia (with original hyphens) in an endnote.
In the body of the text, however, he undoes what Lautréamont’s
narrator has done, which is to recollect—and to reconstitute in textual
terms—something he had seen before, that is, a passage he had read
before and thus could then produce an internal, unattributed citation.
The narrator cites without giving credit, but one would expect that the
editor, when he credits the citation, would also faithfully punctuate the
plagiarized passage. Instead, Walzer revises the work’s history to
serve his editorial goal of clarity and coherence. These covert
emendations to grammar and spelling reveal an implicit judgment of
authorial intention: they suggest that Lautréamont did not have a
perfect command of the French language. On the other hand, they also
reveal an explicit stance on the French language, upheld by the
Académie française and maintained by editorial tradition. Examples of
orthographic augmentation abound, effects of which blind the reader
to the historical facts of the actual 1869 edition. Walzer’s text is
therefore not “évidemment celui des Chants de Maldoror de 1869” as
he claims, but rather an improvement on it. It can be argued, as
Richard Trachsler writes, that all editions improve as they deteriorate
with respect to the original: “usually we gain in comfort what we lose
in precision.”32 It would otherwise suffice to edit a photographical
reproduction of Lacroix’s 1869 text. In the case of Lautréamont,
however, these efforts at normativity end by denying the cultural
instance of Lautréamont’s work, and thereby alter its meaning.
31
Walzer, Œuvres completes, 1970, 191; OC, 193-4 [Mal, 163]. My emphasis added.
32
Richard Trachsler, “How to Do Things with Manuscripts: From Humanist Practice
to Recent Textual Criticism,” Textual Cultures 1 (2006): 11.
In addition to these enhancements, Walzer caters to the growing

population of academic readers of Lautréamont’s poetry by numbering
the stanzas which, in the 1869 edition, were separated by short,
centered lines. In total, 60 stanzas make up the whole poem, although
this figure has been notoriously miscalculated in numerous editions up
to 1970.33 In order to avoid this oft-repeated mistake, Walzer states
that he will enumerate stanzas in brackets. His rationale is double:
numeration remedies previous miscalculation and permits scholarly
readers to refer to a particular passage by number.
Although demarcation may help those who use the Pléiade as a
reference edition and wish to cite a particular passage, it undermines a
generic change introduced by the narrator himself in the sixth Chant.
As mentioned above in the description of Maldoror in his pursuit of
Mervyn, Lautréamont changes the poetic prose from his first five
Chants to introduce a self-analyzing critique of the roman feuilleton, a
popular genre among his contemporaries.34 The narrator here
denounces his prior stanzas as sophomoric, and favors the novel
genre, declaring that the “ficelles” [strings] of the novel form will
render his story more believable, giving it a “puissance moins
abstraite” [less abstract power], the effect of which will be “très-
poétique” (sic) [very poetic].35 In this way, he reminds readers that
they are reading fiction, decorated by literary artifice to make it seem
real. By replacing the short, centered lines and adding his own
bracketed stanzas, Walzer reworks the narrator’s new novelistic style
back to poetry. If the sixth Chant is meant to be a commentary of the
novel genre, then its generic demarcations should remain as evidence
of the author’s choice. Walzer’s demarcation is repeated by Steinmetz
in the 2009 Pléiade edition.
Finally, an important feature of Walzer’s scholarly edition is his
notes. In the absence of a manuscript and of biographical material,
Walzer relies on literary sources to situate Lautréamont’s work in the
context of other works of literature. Intertexts can serve the editor as
well as the literary critic because, by comparing Lautréamont’s work
33
Grubbs, “The Division into Strophes,” 154-57.
34
Critics have often suggested that the un-French name “Mervyn,” like many other
characters and ideas from the Chants, are influenced by Walter Scott novels.
35
Walzer, Œuvres completes, 1970, 219. Walzer (or someone else) neglected to
remove this hyphen of superlative absolute.
with others, Walzer can establish a reasoned conjecture on the text he

decides to present. The characteristic feature of Maldoror is that it
invites interpretation as readily as it defies it; for this reason, critics
refer to Maldoror’s sources as a “mirage.” Reading becomes asso-
ciating, but the associations are constructed in such a way as to
undermine this very act of association. “Tout texte se construit comme
mosaïque de citations, tout texte est absorption et transformation d’un
autre texte” [Every text is constructed as a mosaic of citations, every
text is the absorption and transformation of another text]; Julia
Kristeva’s famous description of intertextuality from 1967 provides a
structuralist strategy for what had previously caused disagreement
among Lautréamont’s critics.36
Although Walzer employs the terms “allusions” and “sources,”
he does not once explicitly mention the concept of intertextuality, a
concept which in part allowed for Lautréamont’s entry into the canon.
In his 1971 article, “Lautréamont politique,” Pleynet criticized Walzer
for what he viewed as a “trap” of sources. Revealing sources, Pleynet
suggests, defuses the political potential exposed by intertextual
analyses. By simply cataloguing literary sources, Pleynet writes, one
cheapens their subversive and strategic poetic use. He pleads guilty of
the same crime in his 1967 book, Lautréamont par lui-même, but
defends that his oversight owes to the fact that the concept of
intertextuality had not yet been developed. Pleynet further criticizes in
“Lautréamont politique” that Walzer’s Pléiade edition targets a staid
audience as indicated by his remark, “Lecture donc réservée au rond
de cuir de la Bibliothèque nationale et à quelques écrivains” [A
reading thus reserved for the pen-pushers at the Bibliothèque nationale
and a few writers].37 In Pleynet’s words, only literary “phagocytes”
celebrated the centenary of Lautréamont’s death with enthusiasm. In
spite of his suspicions, Pleynet still cited from Walzer’s edition on
numerous occasions just as Kristeva later did extensively in her
Révolution du langage poétique. Therefore both the text and textuality
of Lautréamont’s poetry, which these post-structuralist critics purport
to interpret, depend first on Walzer’s interpretation.
36
Julia Kristeva, “Bakhtine, le mot, le dialogue et le roman,” Critique 239 (1967):
440-441.
37
Marcelin Pleynet, “Lautréamont politique,” Tel Quel 45 (1971): 24.
Rather than call attention to Pleynet and Kristeva, and their

respective influence on Lautréamont scholarship, Walzer classifies
Lautréamont, situates him in a genealogy of great writers up to 1970,
most of whom had already received a Pléiade volume of their own.
When possible, Walzer refers to other Pléiade editions: André Gide’s
Journal, for example, published in 1939. By displaying Lautréamont’s
influence on critics over the 100 years since his death, Walzer portrays
a prolific, classic grand écrivain, rather than the maudit, the status
with which Lautréamont had become famous. In so doing, Walzer
ceremoniously lays Lautréamont to rest among other great writers of
the Pantheon. Steinmetz achieves the same effect in his 2009 edition
by including for posterity a century’s worth of Lautréamont’s most
important readers.
Like Lautréamont, the Pléiade collection evolved over the course
of the twentieth century. Both editorial evolution and the academic
audience that Lautréamont’s work began to attract made
Lautréamont’s 1970 entry into the Pléiade possible. Nevertheless,
Lautréamont’s publishing history reveals that a “definitive edition” of
his complete works is nothing short of a paradox.
A classic depends on who is reading it, when, and in what ways.
During the twentieth century, Lautréamont evolved from the
subversive poet who mesmerized the surrealists, to the academic,
extreme romantic who can now be assigned for homework. Material
elements of the text can determine this image or at least augment it.
As literary critics, we must therefore recognize the extent to which our
interpretations can change according to which text we have before us.
The refashioned Lautréamont that emerged from Walzer’s 1970
edition may have lost some of the literary deviance that characterizes
his style. At the same time, especially with Steinmetz’s restorative
2009 edition, Lautréamont’s inclusion in the Pléiade collection
demonstrates the extent to which deviation itself has become the
norm.
Chapter Six
Lautréamont Reincarnated
In particular important circumstances the

clansman seeks to emphasize his kinship
with the totem by making himself resemble
it externally, by dressing in the skin of the
animal, by incising a picture of the totem
upon his own body, and so on.
— Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo
Lautréamont, c’est moi [Lautréamont is me].

— Philippe Sollers, “L’Auguste Comte”
In his 1967 essay, “La Science de Lautréamont,” Philippe Sollers,

founder of and spokesperson for the avant-garde review Tel Quel,
claims that Lautréamont was less a subject of interrogation for the
surrealists than he was a pretext for “inflation verbale” [verbal
inflation]1 Although Sollers credits André Breton for writing that
Lautréamont’s poetry is the bedrock of modern literature, a “machine
puissante qui remplace avantageusement les anciennes manières de
penser” [a powerful machine which favorably replaces old ways of
thinking], he insists that the surrealist approach to Lautréamont was
too metaphysical.2 The surrealists may have recognized Lautréamont
as a machine, but Sollers maintains they neglected to study how this
machine works.
While Maldoror’s sewing machine and umbrella on a dissection
table image logically suits the surrealist poetic ideal, the Poésies’ “La
poésie doit être faite par tous. Non par un” [Poetry must be made by
all. Not by one] corresponds better to Tel Quel’s theoretical and
political strategy. “Tel Quel” refers to both the journal and a group of
avant-garde writers who contributed to it from its conception in 1960
to the last issue in 1983, when L’Infini replaced it. Founded by the
1
Sollers, Logiques, 250. On Tel Quel and surrealism, see Patrick ffrench, “Tel Quel
and Surrealism: A Re-evaluation. Has the avant-garde become a theory?” Romanic
Review 88 (1997): 189-196.
2
Ibid.
Éditions de Seuil in order to compete with other Parisian publishing

houses, Tel Quel contributed to an overhaul of criticism and
literature.3 Although Seuil did not intend for the journal to shock the
bourgeoisie, Sollers and his colleagues led it in a radical direction
intending to transform the way people read. To the Telqueliens, sur-
realist notions of subconscious expression in poetry restricted
language to a single representational function. Lautréamont’s
shocking imagery may liberate metaphors by comparing the
unexpected, Tel Quel suggests, but what the surrealists overlooked
was the power of the mechanics of language itself. Language, as Tel
Quel sees it, is not simply a tool to mediate content, but rather an
object in itself, a science to be studied as such. For each group,
Ducasse’s biography plays a different role: for the surrealists, Ducasse
was a poetic mystery; for the Telqueliens, this mystery is at once
necessary and inconsequential in their trans-historical vision of
literature. Ducasse’s place in history is significant insofar as it directly
affects each group’s theory. To Tel Quel, however, biographical
explanations of Lautréamont’s work are irrelevant to a global
comprehension of it.
The result of Tel Quel’s view of Lautréamont as a contemporary
is that the group takes his influence to another level. In order to
identify fully with what they consider revolutionary in his writing, the
Telqueliens adopt Lautréamont’s discourse, becoming him as they
analyze him. An immediate example of this post-structuralist feature
of imitation is reflected in Tel Quel’s neglect in referencing citations.
In his quotation from Breton above, for instance, Sollers does not indi-
cate when or where Breton actually wrote that Lautréamont’s poetry
was a “machine puissante.”4 Just as Lautréamont famously pilfered
from other works without citing them, the Telqueliens filch citations
3
On the history of Tel Quel, see Patrick ffrench, The Time in Theory: A History of Tel
Quel (1960-1983) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995); Niilo Kauppi, The Making of an
Avant Garde: Tel Quel (New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1994); and Danielle Marx-
Scouras, The Cultural Politics of Tel Quel: Literature and the Left in the Wake of
Engagement (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1996); Philippe Forest, De
Tel Quel à l’Infini: Nouveaux essais (Nantes: Editions Cécile Defaut, 2006) and
Histoire de Tel Quel 1960-1982 (Paris: Seuil, 1995). On Le Seuil, see Jean Lacouture,
Paul Flamand, éditeur. La grande aventure des éditions du Seuil (Paris: Les Arènes,
2010).
4
Breton, in Les Pas Perdus, Œuvres compètes, 1: 234.
Lautréamont Reincarnated 191
regularly, cutting and pasting in order to create. Taken out of context,

given emphasis, or used sardonically, Sollers’s prolific quotation
marks exemplify his vision of writing as one long citation. He
articulates this vision later in the same essay on Lautréamont:
L’action de l’écriture est donc celle d’une mise entre guillemets

généralisée de la langue. Par rapport au texte, en lui, la langue
devient entièrement citationnelle. L’écriture se cite elle-même en
se dédoublant, elle cite son histoire, ses productions, sa continuité
cachée avec toutes les langues.
[The action of writing is therefore that of a generalized bracketing

of language. In relation to the text, within it, language becomes
entirely citational. Writing cites itself as it divides; it cites its own
history, its productions, its hidden continuity with all languages.]5
The effect, according to Sollers, is negative in that all words are

reduced to their materiality, their relation to other words, and their
“intertextuality.”
Earlier in his essay, Sollers proposes that one must practice
Lautréamont’s language in order to explain it. This act is, Sollers
declares, “comparable à l’invention d’une langue inédite qu’il est
d’abord nécessaire d’apprendre pour en parler” [comparable to the
invention of an unknown language that must first be learned before
one can speak about it].6 Accordingly, Sollers’s essay becomes almost
a pastiche of Lautréamont’s style. Because Lautréamont’s works defy
traditional analysis, Tel Quel seems to suggest, they must be ap-
proached by a non-traditional means of criticism, one that embraces
non-linearity, multiplicity, and disguise. Grounded in a Derridean
meta-language and a Barthesian liberation of structuralist discourse,
the Telqueliens embody Lautréamont in his own terms.
In this way, Tel Quel’s “textual” approach can be considered the
definition of post-structuralism, as defined by Barthes in 1967:
Le prolongement logique du structuralisme ne peut être que de

rejoindre la littérature non plus comme ‘objet’ d’analyse, mais
5
Sollers, Logiques, 258. The translation is from Philip Barnard with David Hayman,
Writing and the Experience of Limits (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983),
141.
6
Ibid., 251 [Writing and the Experience of Limits, 135].
comme activité d’écriture, d’abolir la distinction, issue de la

logique, qui fait de l’œuvre un langage-objet et de la science un
métalangage, et de risquer ainsi le privilège illusoire attaché par la
science à la propriété d’un langage esclave.
[Structuralism’s logical extension can only be to join literature no

longer as “object” of analysis but as activity of writing, to abolish
the distinction, born of logic, which makes the work into a
language-object and science into a meta-language, and thereby to
risk the illusory privilege attached by science to the ownership of
a slave language.]7
Barthes here, a decade before his famous proclamation at the Collège

de France that language is fascist, illustrates that to use language
strictly as a means of representation binds a person to the shackles of
language and the tyranny of syntax. Post-structuralism, on the other
hand, liberates language to refer to itself. If all poetic writing is about
writing, then writing about poetic writing should be about writing, too.
Only in this way can the institutional bindings of language be shaken
off.
Post-structuralism is revolutionary because its objective is to
change the institutional approach to poetic language. The Telqueliens
radically appropriated the definition, however, bringing about the
revolution with an attitude that often appears “terrorist” rather than
liberating. If Tel Quel’s theoretical language seems difficult, it is
because the pseudo-scientific, mathematical discourse that they adopt
is at once the tool and the topic of their pursuit.
This tactic of mimicking Lautréamont’s own discourse,
announced by Sollers in 1967, characterizes Tel Quel’s writings on
Lautréamont, especially from 1967 to 1971. It is a strategy adopted
primarily by three principal Telqueliens: Philippe Sollers, Marcelin
Pleynet, and Julia Kristeva. One of the features of this approach is an
emphasis on science, reflected in titles such as “La Science de
Lautréamont” and developed in essays like Kristeva’s “Pour une
sémiologie des paragrammes.” Another feature is the view of syntax
as something to be broken down, as Ducasse does in his Poésies. In
7
Roland Barthes, “De la science à la littérature” in Œuvres complètes, 2:1266-7. The
article originally appeared in the Times Literary Supplement September 28, 1967. The
translation is from Richard Howard, The Rustle of Language (New York: Hill and
Wang, 1986), 7.
the Tel Quel vision of syntax, language fuses with politics: it becomes
at once the subject and the method of the essays. Finally, a third
feature is the concept of a sujet en procès [subject in process/on trial]
discussed by Pleynet in his Lautréamont par lui-même and other
essays, and developed extensively by Kristeva in her Révolution du
langage poétique. Unlike the surrealists’ metaphorical approach to
Lautréamont, Tel Quel’s approach is metonymical. Their interest is
not in the images Ducasse creates with words but rather what these
words stand for. Accordingly, they argue, poetic language can
ultimately be seen as the subject of Ducasse’s poetry whereas evil
cannot. To follow suit, Tel Quel writers employ both linguistic and
critical codes in their articles, valorizing yet negating these codes at
the same time.
Since traditional methods of explication are representational,
post-structuralist writing instead aims to break down critical language
to the degree that it self-destructs—not in order to reproduce but to
produce. In other words, by appropriating what they see as
Lautréamont’s poetic function, which is to take language and strip it
of its traditional role, Tel Quel in turn does the same to Lautréamont’s
poetry. Broken down, Lautréamont’s collected works are reduced to
mere particles. Individual words are taken out of their normal context
and given new meaning. Paradoxically, however, Tel Quel’s espousal
of negative productivity risks failure because it burdens rather than
frees the reader. A revolution cannot succeed if it causes more
detractors than adherents.
The idea of “l’écriture textuelle” also risks introducing a
limitation on the notion of “text.” A new concept created from an old
word, text is no longer understood to mean simply an author’s words,
rather than any commentary or notes made upon those words by
someone other than the author. Lautréamont’s work exemplifies a
kind of revolutionary literature that Tel Quel terms “texte-limite.”
Defined by Barthes as literature that defies classic rules of readability,
the texte-limite requires an alternative method of analysis in order to
be understood. Yet even with a new approach, the texte-limite cannot
be reduced because, as Barthes writes, “c’est précisément un texte où
le signifié…est expulsé vraiment à l’infini, et où demeure simplement
un réseau extrêmement proliférant de signifiants” [It’s precisely a text
in which the signified…is truly expelled into infinity, and in which an
extremely plentiful network of signifiers simply remains].8 Barthes’s

use of “texte” here is understood as a theoretical idea.
As discussed in the last chapter, the term “texte” in 1970 was
emerging from the tangible to the conceptual. Appropriated from
linguistics to mean a unit of “connected discourse whose function is
communicative and which forms the object of analysis and de-
scription,” “texte” for French literary criticism in the nineteen-sixties
and -seventies was used to describe a certain functioning of language.9
Barthes had argued that texts are abstract or based in language,
whereas works are concrete and can be touched. Post-structuralists
treat the text as an object of the present rather than of the past.
Both notions—that texts are conceptual and that they are situated
in the present—flatly reject traditional textual scholarship and
philology. Traditionally, texts are material and works are abstract,
insofar as the medium of a literary work is language, and the vehicle
for communicating this abstract medium is the text.10 Literary critics
may or may not be interested in texts as connections to the past, but if
these critics make historical connections among texts, they then rely
on texts as historical objects.11 Furthermore, all texts are critical to
varying degrees, since those who construct them employ judgment to
recreate the text of a work. Unlike the plastic arts, whose medium is
concrete, the medium of literature is abstract. Thus, while post-
structuralism calls for a re-evaluation of text as a concept situated in
the present, this new definition of text as “productivité” fails to
consider the text in its entirety.12 By altering the composition of
Lautréamont’s words, Tel Quel makes Lautréamont’s “text” as
malleable literally as it is figuratively.
In post-structuralist analyses of Lautréamont, a conceptual
definition of text as trans-historical productivity does not take into
8
Barthes, Œuvres complètes, 3:644. Originally appeared in an interview with André
Bourin, “Critique et autocritique” Les Nouvelles littéraires, March 5, 1970.
9
Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “text.”
10
The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, s.v. “Textual Criticism.” ed.
Roland Greene and Stephen Cushman (2012): 1426-9.
11
“Textual Criticism” 1273-1276.
12
In the Dictionnaire encyclopédique des sciences du langage, ed. Oswald Ducrot
and Tzvetan Todorov (Paris: Seuil, 1972), “texte” was evolving to the degree that the
word required a supplementary definition in an appendix, where “le texte y est défini
essentiellement comme productivité,” 443.
account that someone other than Lautréamont (or Ducasse) has always
produced the text of Lautréamont’s work. The Tel Quel group’s
production is a nihilistic one, since in this case producing means first
reducing. Every member of the group refers explicitly to Lautréamont
as a central emblem of the texte-limite; the “illisibilité” of his poetry
reverberates in Tel Quel’s strategy of nihilism.
Sollers’s Science
In December 1967, a year after André Breton’s death, a group of

loyal surrealists drafted a tract entitled “beau comme Beau Comme.”
In it, they rancorously defended themselves and the late Breton
against Sollers’s charge of verbal inflation. To the contrary, they say,
the surrealists had indeed investigated the Lautréamont “machine” as
a machine: they were the first to analyze the dialectic between the
Chants and the Poésies, to examine the poetic implications of
Ducasse’s plagiarism, and to evaluate the importance of works like
Blanchot’s Lautréamont et Sade. They also emphasize the instances in
which Sollers’s thesis (that everything in Lautréamont’s text is
“scriptural” and destructive) trumps even the most absurd surrealist
conclusions. Lautréamont’s obscurity serves the Telquelien strategy,
the surrealists claim, whose “seul dessein était de permettre la
destruction de tous les textes, au profit du ‘texte paragrammatique’ de
l’équipe de Tel Quel” [sole purpose was to permit the destruction of
all texts in favor of the ‘paragrammatic text’ of the Tel Quel team].13
Since the surrealists do not clarify what they mean by “texte
paragrammatique,” the expression can be best understood as a
sarcastic reference to what they consider Tel Quel’s own verbal
inflation. Indeed, when Julia Kristeva invented this post-structuralist
jargon, “texte paragrammatique,” meaning roughly that poetic
language is a dynamic, non-linear network, she pointed to
Lautréamont as a prime example of it. At the conclusion of their
tirade, the surrealists refer to the following passage from Ducasse’s
Poésies II used by Sollers to defend his “new science”: “La science
que j’entreprends est une science distincte de la poésie. Je ne chante
13
Philippe Audouin et al., “beau comme BEAU COMME,” December 15, 1967 in
Losfeld and Pierre, Tracts surréalistes, 2: 271.
pas cette dernière. Je tâche de découvrir sa source” [The science I

undertake is a science distinct from poetry. I do not sing of the latter. I
strive to discover its source.]14 On this point, the remaining surrealists
and Sollers differ. Although both take Ducasse’s passage out of
context, Sollers also changes the words. He takes the whole Poésies II
out of its original context completely, weaving segments in the form
of citations into his own argument. Supplementing Ducasse’s words
with emphatic italics, additional ellipses, parenthetical asides, and
even complete word alterations or removal of phrases, Sollers mimics
the disruption in Ducasse’s original work. Textually, he mirrors what
he claims the Poésies do, which is level the hierarchy of philosophy,
science, and poetry. For example, in the passage above quoted by the
surrealists, Sollers alters Ducasse’s words to illustrate what he calls an
“effraction.” Ducasse’s maxim is:
La science que j’entreprends est une science distincte de la poésie.

Je ne chante pas cette dernière. Je m’efforce de découvrir sa
source. À travers le gouvernail qui dirige toute pensée poétique,
les professeurs de billard distingueront le développement des
thèses sentimentales.
[The science I undertake is a science distinct from poetry. I do not

sing of the latter. I strive to discover its source. Through the
rudder that steers all poetic though, billiards professors will
discern the evolution of sentimental theses.]15
Sollers picks the maxim apart, changes the original wording “Je
m’efforce” to “Je tâche,” and cuts and pastes the parts that fit into the
verbal texture of his essay.
Sollers’s behavior can be explained by the misnomer that is
Poésies II. For Tel Quel and Sollers in particular, this misnomer is a
fortunate and meaningful one. Ever since Gourmont discovered
Ducasse’s Poésies I and II in the Bibliothèque nationale in 1890, these
two slim volumes have defied interpretation. Their first critic, Valéry
14
Sollers, Logiques, 296 [Mal, 246].
15
This is the text in every published volume of the Poésies. See OC, 289 [Mal, 246],
as well as the surrealist edition, Georges Goldfayn and Gérard Legrand, eds. (Paris:
Éditions Le Terrain Vague, 1960), 173. The then most recent and most available
volume of the Poésies, Goldfayn’s edition is most likely the one from which Sollers
was citing, although Sollers never cites his sources.
Larbaud, considered the Poésies a humorous “éloge de l’ordre” [praise

of order], but was stupefied by their apparent disparity with the
Chants de Maldoror.16 Larbaud concluded that in spite of possible
explanations for the lack of coherence between Ducasse’s two known
works, the final message is that they are simply not intended for
everyone to understand. Seventy-five years later, Sollers echoes a
similar opinion: “On peut considérer comme prouvé que ce livre de
logique pure est secrètement fait pour six ou sept (maximum)
individus par siècle” [We can consider it proven that this book of pure
logic is secretly made for six or seven (max) individuals per
century].17 Neither volume of Poésies can be classified neatly.
Ducasse’s subversive inversions of classic maxims, their alleged
incongruity with respect to the Chants de Maldoror, as well as this
post-structuralist concept of “illisibilité,” or illegibility, all influence
the way Tel Quel reads the Poésies.
Sollers views the “éloge de l’ordre” as a negation of traditional
order. He demonstrates his argument by pointing out several places in
which Ducasse mentions logic and poetry and, as Sollers sees it, ranks
them on the same level of importance. Then, he imitates the same
procedure of “retournement” by breaking Ducasse’s words from
complete phrases to pieces. This imitative procedure is one of two
methods embraced by Sollers to talk about Ducasse. The other method
is through diagrams. For the Telqueliens, diagrams in the form of
scientific figures are like images for the surrealists because, while they
are outside of language, they both point to and undermine language’s
limits.
In the final pages of Sollers’s essay, for example, he presents a
schematic rendition of Lautréamont’s negative procedure of
“becoming” Ducasse: the Chants de Maldoror work toward a climax
of poetic representation only to subvert it with the “‘profondeur’
rétroactive” [retroactive “depth”] of the Poésies:18
16
Valery Larbaud, “Les ‘Poésies,’” 151.
17
Cited in Lefrère, Isidore Ducasse, 526.
18
Sollers, “La Science de Lautréamont,” Critique, 832 [Writing and the Experience of
Limits, 178].
1 2 3 4 5 6
→ → → → → → 1
─────
2
─────
3
─────
4
─────
5
─────
6
─────
Figure 6.1 Philippe Sollers, graph from “La Science de Lautréamont”
This diagram graphically represents metaphor, and it appears

ridiculous. Sollers insists that the “text” is a system of productive
“signs” that have no other descriptive function than to point to
themselves. Nevertheless, the terminology and graphic symbols such
as quotation marks and italics to describe his schema are descriptive
and metaphorical:
Le texte s’inscrit maintenant en colonnes dont les parties

‘blanches’ sont remplies par les portées des Poésies: ce qui n’est
pas dit est écrit. Savoir ce que ‘dit’ le texte—et c’est là l’effet de
connaissance de l’écriture—c’est en fait pratiquer l’espace qui lui
est comme numériquement lié.
[The text is now inscribed in columns whose “blank” sections are

filled by the Poems’ staves: that which is not spoken is written. To
know what the text “says”—and this is the effect of an awareness
of writing—is in fact to open up the space to which it is as though
numerically linked.]19
With the use of punctuation here, for reasons that are either entirely
ironic or perhaps symptomatic of the limits of his own critical
19
Sollers, Logiques, 300 [Writing and the Experience of Limits, 179].
“écriture,” Sollers at once represents his drawing and highlights its

impotency. And with the simile, “comme numériquement,” Sollers
reiterates with the tools of language the efforts these tools make to
represent. Reminiscent of the surrealist images that adorn verbal
metaphors, the Tel Quel image serves to schematically or algebraically
show a particular understanding of Lautréamont’s poetry.
Another instance of Tel Quel’s use of diagrams to remedy the
descriptive limitations of language is in Kristeva’s 1967 essay, “Pour
une sémiologie des paragrammes.”20 This essay serves as one of
several preliminary sketches for her 1974 book, La Révolution du
langage poétique, in which her literary theories are applied to
Mallarmé’s and Lautréamont’s poetry. Though Kristeva later
abandons mathematical theorems to describe Lautréamont’s poetic
function, the early use of expressions and formulas serves a similar
purpose to Sollers’s above: to illustrate Lautréamont’s self-
referentiality. Kristeva begins this essay by stipulating why literary
semiotics, or the science of signs, corrects the faults of structuralism.
These faults, she writes, are structuralism’s “statisme” and
“nonhistorisme,” respectively referring to Barthes and Greimas.
Semiology, on the other hand, is a medium for the message, a
“formalisme isomorphe à la productivité littéraire se pensant elle-
même” [formalism that is isomorphic to literary productivity as it
thinks of itself].21 Two methodologies justify her semiological
approach to literature: mathematics (or, rather, meta-mathematics) and
generative linguistics, such as grammar and semantics. As in Sollers’s
hierarchical leveling of language, Kristeva insists that the linguistic
code is non-hierarchical and, for this reason, poetic language must not
be considered a discrete code, divided from ordinary language. Poetic
language is rather a part of the whole, with no difference but its
productive function. Math, Kristeva explains, is an artificial language,
free from the confines of language itself and thus an ideal way to
analyze writing:
par la liberté de leurs signes, [les mathématiques et les

métamathématiques] échappent de plus en plus aux contraintes
d’une logique élaborée à partir de la phrase indoeuropéenne sujet-
20
Julia Kristeva, “Pour une sémiologie des paragrammes,” Tel Quel 29 (1967): 53-75.
21
Ibid., 53.
prédicat et par conséquent s’adaptent mieux à la description du

fonctionnement poétique du langage.
[through the freedom of their signs, mathematics and meta-

mathematics escape more and more from the constraints of a
reasoning derived from the Indoeuropean subject/predicate
sentence and, as a result, are better adapted to describing the
poetic workings of language.]22
So when, in her essay, Kristeva comes to Lautréamont, who

emblematizes “le langage poétique comme infinité” [poetic language
as infinity], she illustrates her first point with this mathematical
expression:23
φ (x1 …xn)
At first glance, the expression seems to have little to do with the

French language, but it serves to point out language’s symbolic
function; it demonstrates that mathematical symbols, like language,
are an illusion. Even as Sollers, Pleynet, and Kristeva discuss the
“hieroglyphic” character of Lautréamont’s work, they also appropriate
it.24 It is a visual metaphor, in other words, to draw attention to the
artifice of language, but without using ordinary language to do so.
Kristeva’s use of algebra is itself isomorphic to poetic language,
because she takes the equation and destroys its normal mathematical
function. As she sees it, language is law and poetic language abides by
the law, but also calls attention to it, and thus subverts it. For this
reason, Kristeva defines poetic language as an inseparable co-
existence between law and the destruction of the law. The product of
this perpetual dialectic is literature.
Lautréamont, Kristeva writes, constantly battles the co-existence
of law and destruction by writing. The outcome of his battle is infinite
potential for all readers, including Lautréamont himself. The
possibilities of interpreting Lautréamont are infinite; as such, his
poetry is considered exemplary as a limit-text, defined above by
Barthes as a text in which the “signifieds” explode infinitely from a
22
Ibid.
23
Ibid., 56.
24
seemingly simple network of “signifiers.” The exaggerated effect of

Lautréamont’s poetry is a result of his saturation or abundance in very
particular words. Often, technical vocabulary or “lexical particular-
ization” as Michael Rifffaterre calls it, comes across as the narrator’s
way of reminding the reader that what he or she is reading is nothing
more than artifice.25
Maldoror’s famous “hymne aux mathématiques,” in canto II, 10,
for instance, demonstrates the connection between hieroglyphs and
language and serves as a springboard for Tel Quel’s argument.
Maldoror sings this encomium to math in the first person. With
evident reverence, the narrator begins to personify mathematics as
celestial goddesses who appear to him, their blessed son. Because of
math’s age and incontestability, it is considered more powerful than
God. Math is order and severity and, as such, it becomes Maldoror’s
sidearm in his quest against the Creator. The genius of math is that it
humbles those who attempt to explain it in words or in diagrams,
reducing them to their vulgar humanity:
Aux époques antiques et dans les temps modernes, plus d’une

grande imagination humaine vit son génie, épouvanté, à la
contemplation de vos figures symboliques tracées sur le papier
brûlant, comme autant de signes mystérieux, vivants d’une haleine
latente, que ne comprend pas le vulgaire profane et qui n’étaient
que la révélation éclatante d’axiomes et d’hyéroglyphes éternels,
qui ont existé avant l’univers et qui se maintiendront après lui.
[In bygone days as in modern times, more than one great mind
saw its genius awe-stricken on contemplating your symbolic
figures traced upon fiery paper and living with a latent breath like
so many mysterious signs not understood by the vulgar and
profane, signs merely the brilliant revelation of eternal axioms and
hieroglyphics pre-existent to the universe, and which will outlast
it.]26
25
One example of this effect can be found in the final scene of Les Chants de
Maldoror, discussed in Chapter 5 above.
26
OC, 102-3 [Mal, 84]. In the 1970 Pléiade edition, Walzer’s modernization of the
word “hyéroglyphes” into “hieroglyphes” strips the word of its likely relation to a
passage from Chênedollé’s Journal from 1808: “La poésie est un hyéroglyphe
perpetual!” See below.
Nothing here is deliberately opaque; math is considered a wonder to

humans, misunderstood by ordinary people and venerated by the
learned.27 The confusion here, however, occurs when the “grande
imagination humaine,” or great mind, begins to question math’s forms
of representation. Math as a celestial concept is without words.
Axioms and images are hieroglyphic artifices to explain math, but
they are as mysterious as that which they purport to describe. When
Maldoror explicitly refers to the work of Pythagoras, the Egyptian
pyramids, and René Descartes, they are all mortal instants,
“découvertes quotidiennes, dans vos mines de diamant” [daily
discoveries in your diamond-mines] in the immortal existence of
math.28 Yet when he refers implicitly to great logicians of the past, he
contorts their theorems as he does in the Poésies.
Lautréamont juxtaposes cold numbers and diagrams with writing
terminology, yet he also personifies mathematics: “La fin des siècles
verra encore, debout sur les ruines des temps, vos chiffres
cabalistiques, vos équations laconiques et vos lignes sculpturales
siéger à la droite vengeresse du Tout-Puissant…” [The end of time
will see—still erect on the ruins of the ages—your cabalistic numbers,
laconic equations, and sculptural lines enthroned on the avenging right
hand of the Almighty…]29 Math is portrayed as even greater than
writing and capable of erasing human folly from mortals. In another
line, punctuation becomes a pun when Lautréamont transforms the
question mark into a geographical metaphor:
Elle se demande, penchée vers le précipice d’un point

interrogation fatal, comment se fait-il que les mathématiques
contiennent tant d’imposante grandeur et tant de vérité
incontestable, tandis que, si elle les compare à l’homme, elle ne
trouve en ce dernier que faux orgueil et mensonge.
[On the precipice-brink of a fatal question mark, the mind

wonders how mathematics happen to contain so much
commanding importance and so much incontestable truth, while
27
Steinmetz refers to Horace’s “Odi profanum vulgus” (Odes III, 1) or “I hate the
vulgar rabble” in note 4 (OC, 634).
28
Ibid., 105 [86].
29
Ibid., 104 [85].
comparison between mathematics and man only uncovers the

latter’s false pride and mendacity.]30
In this way, math and symbols become Maldoror’s textual weapons

against man and God for the remainder of the Chants.
In passages where Maldoror’s strength is greatest, celestial helix
structures, stone-cold architecture, cones, ellipses, and lines are all-
powerful, both figuratively and textually. When Maldoror commits his
ultimate crime, for example, in the final chapter of the last canto,
abundant technical terminology assists in his poetic destruction. He
begins the chapter:
Pour construire mécaniquement la cervelle d’un conte somnifère,

il ne suffit pas de disséquer des bêtises et abrutir puissamment à
doses renouvelées l’intelligence du lecteur, de manière à rendre
ses facultés paralytiques pour le reste de sa vie, par la loi
infaillible de la fatigue; il faut, en outre, avec du bon fluide
magnétique, le mettre ingénieusement dans l’impossibilité
somnambulique de se mouvoir, en le forçant à obscurcir ses yeux
contre son naturel par la fixité des vôtres.
[To construct mechanically the brain of a somniferous tale, it is

not enough to dissect nonsense and mightily stupefy the reader’s
intelligence with renewed doses, so as to paralyse his faculties for
the rest of his life by the infallible law of fatigue; one must,
besides, with good mesmeric fluid, make it somnambulistically
impossible for him to move, against his nature forcing his eyes to
cloud over at your own fixed stare.]31
The narrator immediately clarifies what he is talking about, not in

order to be understood, but to develop his own thought. What he
means is that he will employ every poetic tool of artifice to remind the
reader that the story he is telling is fiction. Thus, he exploits all
technical terms in the service of description. By drowning his
language in descriptive details, he strips his words of their credibility.
Ducasse’s penchant for math and logic has been interpreted as
nostalgia for a favorite subject in school, reflecting the biographical
myth of Ducasse’s mathematical aptitude and plans to attend
polytechnic school in Paris, where he chose instead to write poetry.
30
Ibid., 103 [84].
31
Ibid., 250 [214].
Tel Quel views this kind of biographical interpretation as a

suppositional trap. For Tel Quel, math must rather be seen as tool, as a
human-constructed artifice like language, only, in this case, infallible.
In Tel Quel’s critiques of language’s function, math thus takes on the
value ascribed to it by Lautréamont.
Pleynet, for instance, in his 1967 Lautréamont par lui-même,
concludes with a discussion of “La Nouvelle Science” which, he says,
is a science of reading and writing, but not one of literature.
Literature—as well as the whole concept of Seuil’s “Ecrivains de
toujours” series launched in 1951, to which Pleynet’s book belongs—
subscribes to a bourgeois tradition.32 Tel Quel’s purpose, on the other
hand, is to reorient tradition toward the atypical. Pleynet’s title is
admittedly paradoxical: “…paradoxale la place où nous situons
Lautréamont dans cette collection d’‘écrivains de toujours,’
d’‘écrivains par eux-mêmes,’ d’‘écrivains,’ quand il se réclame de
l’anonymat, de l’absence, du plagiat” [the place that we give to
Lautréamont in this collections of ‘writers forever,’ ‘writers by
themselves,’ ‘writers’ is paradoxical, since he claims to adhere to
anonymity, to absence, to plagiarism].33 Lautréamont’s famous work
is authored by a pseudonym, while his lesser-known work is authored
by the enigmatic Ducasse. Pleynet fervently condemned the elevation
of authorship that the “Écrivains de toujours” collection commanded,
and therefore subverted it. After a discussion of the “traps” inherent to
any investigation of biography or sources of Lautréamont, Pleynet
goes on to challenge the entire stylistic imperative of Seuil’s
collection, conforming to the rules even as he breaks them.
The “Écrivains de toujours” collection maintains an exceptionally
precise structure. First, the cover template, an author “par lui-même”
written by another author, remains the same from volume to volume,
which often confuses bibliographers. The cover also bears an image of
the author. Because there is no image of Ducasse, any cover breaks
convention. In Pleynet’s version, however, the cover is also
misleading, since “Lautréamont par lui-même” by Marcelin Pleynet, is
accompanied by an enlarged image of the same facsimile stamp
manipulated by Genonceaux for his 1890 edition (fig 2.2).
32
On the history of the collection “Écrivains de toujours” see Vincent Debaene, “La
Collection ‘Écrivains de toujours’ (1951-1981),” Fabula, October 27, 2005.
33
The cover’s authorial confusion highlights two factors that

determine the contents of Pleynet’s book. First, Lautréamont par lui-
même in many respects doubles as Pleynet par lui-même, as reader.
Second, the stamp’s ironic text, “ID,” which replaces the traditional
cover image, illustrates Pleynet’s argument, and indeed Tel Quel’s
general approach to Lautréamont: it is all about “écriture.” The
“Écrivains de toujours” collection also requires a 192-page spread of
material, both biographical and expository. What Ducasse’s biography
lacks, Pleynet replaces with Telquelien images: a photo of Karl Marx,
Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche, as well as sketches of Mallarmé by Pablo
Picasso, Dante by Masson, and many other images described in the
Chants or taken from other illustrated editions. Similar to the sur-
realist 1938 GLM edition, Lautréamont par lui-même is “truffled,” but
in a manner dear to post-structuralists. Rather than as precursors, these
figures are contemporaries in Tel Quel’s trans-historical concept of
language. If all precursors are contemporaries, it makes no difference
whether Ducasse read Mallarmé, Marx, or Freud; cutting and pasting
citations means simply to borrow from kindred spirits. Pleynet
acknowledges that his essay comes unpredictably among other
volumes in the “Écrivains de toujours” collection. This acknowledge-
ment does not stop him, however, from abiding by many of its rules
even as he deliberately breaks them.
Political Pleynet
In 1971, Pleynet had the occasion to comment on his 1967

Lautréamont par lui-même, at a time when what he called “l’inflation
éditoriale,” or abundant criticism on Lautréamont at the centenary of
his death, distracted scholars from actual analysis of the text. In his
article, “Lautréamont politique,” Pleynet criticizes his earlier volume
for falling into traps that he had simultaneously scorned. Pleynet
admits that his aim in Lautréamont par lui-même was to free
Lautréamont from the surrealist “réligiosité” on the one hand and “la
poussiéreuse histoire de la littérature” [old-fashioned literary history]
on the other.34 He fell into a religiosity of his own, however: a rigid
formalism. His excuse: in order to be completely free from the trap of
34
Pleynet, “Lautréamont Politique,” 31.
sources, he would have first needed Kristeva’s “decisive” discovery of

the concept of intertextuality, a concept that was not articulated until
after publication of Pleynet’s book.
The function of intertextuality is to link all literature by textual
interaction. In order to demonstrate this notion of infinitely related
texts, Pleynet opens a long citation from Kristeva’s Recherches pour
une sémanalyse, without closing it. He weaves her argument into his
own by appropriating her words, forcing them to refer to the subject at
hand. Pleynet’s conclusion within this long citation is therefore ironic:
“‘Cette ouverture vers ce qui engendre le sens trouve un agent efficace
non seulement dans les complexes signifiants, mais aussi dans le
‘prélèvement,’ c’est-à-dire dans la citation sans indication d’origine’”
[This opening towards that which creates meaning finds an effective
agent not only in meaningful complexes, but also in ‘sampling,’ or
citing without indicating the origin].35 Pleynet purports to show the
function of Lautréamont’s intertexts but, as he does so, he practices
the very concept of intertextuality in his essay. He neither explicitly
indicates the origin of Kristeva’s passage nor does he complete the
citation with a closing quotation mark. In the same coyly cited
passage, Pleynet refers (via Kristeva) to another example of symbolic
logic. This type of textual manipulation is precisely what Pleynet
would suggest is Lautréamont’s textual strategy: to point out the
function of language by constantly referring to it with words.
In Tel Quel’s mission, poetic revolution surpasses political
revolution. While both draw on the same weapon (language) to
change social conventions, the political revolution uses language as a
form of communication, whereas the poetic one uses language
symbolically. Breaking down language means breaking down social
conventions at their seams. As a result of the close correlation
between poetic and political revolutions, much of the Telquelien
discourse on textuality takes on political overtones and borrows first
Marxist, then Maoist, terminology.
Pleynet, for example, explicitly parallels Lautréamont and Lenin
in “Lautréamont politique.” Here, he investigates the link between
revolution and contradiction to argue that they are both vital
components of progress. In an analogous structure, Pleynet
35
Ibid., 32.
demonstrates two ways in which progress entails contradiction. First,

he says that Lautréamont’s innovation is to transgress literary
conventions on their own terms. Second, Tel Quel’s innovation is to
revise the surrealist understanding of Lautréamont on surrealism’s
own terms, continually referring to surrealism in order to transgress it.
For this reason, Pleynet opens his essay with a derisive reference to a
surrealist, Philippe Soupault, and his whimsical depiction of Isidore
Ducasse as a Communard. Pleynet contends that the textual operation
in Lautréamont is similar to the political operation in Marxism. In
several paragraphs, Pleynet stretches from surrealism to post-
structuralism to Marxism and finally to Maoism in order to
demonstrate a universal “loi de passage” [transitive law].36 Pleynet
equates Lenin’s revolutionary thought and Ducasse’s “opération
globale” [global operation] while he brings up his own contradiction
in Lautréamont par lui-même.37 Just as Marx turned Hegelian
dialectics on its head to fix it, so does Tel Quel turn surrealism’s
idealist, metaphysical vision of Lautréamont on its head, also to
correct it. This concept, which can be defined as perversion with an
eye toward progress, is what Tel Quel reads as revolutionary in
Lautréamont. As they attempt to rescue Lautréamont from the
surrealist stronghold, Tel Quel also imitates his technique.
Using language steeped in Marxist terminology, Pleynet depicts
Lautréamont’s progression through surrealism as a necessary basis for
Tel Quel’s theory of revolutionary literature. Poetic revolution means
that literature must refer to itself; it must redefine what came before it,
and it must change the way we read. Elsewhere, in an unsigned
opening essay to Théorie de l’Ensemble, Tel Quel’s 1968 manifesto-
like collection of articles, Lautréamont plays a causal role in Tel
Quel’s revolutionary vision. Structural linguistics, formalism, and
surrealism all influence Tel Quel’s revolution but figures that precede
them, like Lautréamont, Mallarmé, Marx, and Freud, carry greater
weight because: “un remaniement de base se fait toujours, non sur le
coup qui précède immédiatement celui de la refonte, mais sur le coup
qui précède ce coup” [a fundamental overhaul is always performed,
not at the moment of time immediately preceding the reworking, but
36
Ibid., 29.
37
Ibid.
at the moment preceding this moment].38 Tel Quel’s concept of

productivity relies on old foundations to create new ones. As such, it
also destroys the original.
For Tel Quel, historical materialism involves movement or
progress via contradiction. Pleynet, citing Sollers’s article when he
quotes Lenin, writes that the common denominator in Lautréamont’s
“global operation” and Lenin’s “revolutionary thought” is the notion
of movement.39 Evoking Mao’s famous essay, Pleynet demonstrates
that movement or progress is contradiction, and contradiction is
existence. Referring to Mao via Lenin via Marx via Hegel and the
surrealists (and with Sollers’s article at hand) Pleynet’s intertextual
parade embodies progress as it describes it. For this reason, Ducasse’s
dictum, “Le plagiat est nécessaire. Le progrès l’implique” [Plagiarism
is necessary. Progress implies it] becomes a guiding axiom of
revolutionary literature.40
One crime against convention that is especially dear to Pleynet is
Lautréamont’s name and his signature. Pleynet reiterates that Ducasse
created his pseudonym based on Eugène Sue’s novel Latréaumont.
Ducasse’s pseudonym is itself a citation, Pleynet writes, summing up
Ducasse’s name game thus:
Le caractère citationnel (citation du roman de Sue) et

transformationnel (LatréaUmont/LaUtréamont) de l’activité de
l’écrivain est inscrit en tête pensante du livre, c’est dans cette
transformation que l’écrivain se reconnaît, et qu’on le veuille ou
non elle est incontestablement le témoignage d’un travail sur le
signifiant, travail qui prend en considération, en charge ses
implications littéraires et en constitue l’histoire. (Notons par la
même occasion que c’est le U de DuCASSE qui fait l’objet de
l’opération LatréaUmont/LaUtréamont.)
[The citational (citation of Sue’s novel) and transformational

(LatréaUmont/LaUtréamont) character of the writer’s work is the
basis of the book; it’s through this transformation that the writer
recognizes himself and, whether you like it or not, it is unques-
tionable evidence of a work about signifiers, a work which takes
into consideration and takes charge of its literary implications,
38
Philippe Sollers, ed., Théorie de l’ensemble (Paris: Seuil, 1968), 8.
39
Pleynet, “Lautréamont politique,” 29.
40
OC, 283 [Mal, 240].
telling their story. (Note also that it’s the U in DuCASSE that is
the object of the operation LatréaUmont/LaUtréamont.)]41
Although Lautréamont never credited Eugène Sue for lending his

name, Pleynet sees the appropriation of Sue’s novel as an effort to
transform both the concept of the novel and the roman feuilleton
genre, as a significant entry point into Lautréamont’s chef d’œuvre.
Pleynet does not consider the possibility that Ducasse may not have
been responsible for creating the pseudonym. Perhaps he aims to
illustrate that reading and writing are hierarchically equivalent. From
its very cover page, as Pleynet sees it, Lautréamont’s work delib-
erately transgresses literary convention.
Embedded in social conventions of literature are laws of syntax.
In order for the poetic revolution to be complete, according to Tel
Quel, these laws must be transgressed, too. Thus, in ways similar to
those used to demonstrate Lautréamont’s generic and intertextual
transgressions, Tel Quel shows that Lautréamont’s literary overhaul of
syntactical conventions is political. Syntax is, by definition, law.
Lautréamont transforms syntactical order at every opportunity. In
many instances, Lautréamont’s transgression of written syntax
suggests an aural quality to his poetry. Commas, for example, rather
than separate clauses, indicate Lautréamont’s symbolic pauses.
Graphically, his commas lend rhythm and melody to his words. In a
similar manner, Sollers develops his essay with a plethora of textual
accessories, ranging from commas to dashes, italics, parentheses,
quotations, and ellipses. Pleynet uses textual accessories in his essays,
as well, as seen in the citation above, but his changes create an almost
pictorial effect. Kristeva, for her part, sprinkles her essays with
scientific symbols that can only be read silently. These accessories
transform the definition of criticism from one of explanation to one of
deliberate obfuscation, “illisible” in Tel Quel’s own terms, and
unacceptable for a bourgeois reader. Sollers, in opening and closing
“La Science de Lautréamont,” comments on Lautréamont’s deliberate
unintelligibility, and borrows Kristeva’s expression of a “réseau
ondoyant et négatif” [undulating and negative network] to describe
Lautréamont’s strategy.42 This “rippling and negative network” that
41
Pleynet, “Lautréamont politique,” 32-33.
42
Tel Quel describes belongs as much to Lautréamont as it does to Tel

Quel’s collective transgression.
Kristeva in Process
One final instance of Tel Quel’s imitation of Lautréamont is both

linguistic and psychoanalytical, and involves what Julia Kristeva
considered a speaking “subject in process.” Kristeva primarily
develops the idea in her 1974 published thesis, La Révolution du
langage poétique. This book, which synthesizes many of Kristeva’s
theories since her arrival in Paris in 1965, is divided into three parts,
all devoted to the theory of a heterogeneous “sujet en procès.” With a
double meaning of the French expression “en procès,” as both on trial
and in progress, Kristeva theorizes that language cannot be limited to
communication. Rather, the signifying process in language is the
result of a constant exchange between what she calls the “semiotic”
and the “symbolic” processes. The first part of her book focuses on
the differentiation and development of these two notions. Not to be
confused with semiotics or la sémiotique, which is the science of
signs, “le sémiotique” refers to a state outside of language, one linked
to infantile emotional impulses. The symbolic process, on the other
hand, indicates the mathematical, structured, syntactical function of
language. From these two principal terms stem several related
concepts that support her theory. The continuous interaction of pre-
linguistic or inter-linguistic impulses (the semiotic) and conventions
or law (the symbolic) is the subject’s condition, says Kristeva, and it is
one most explicitly realized by literature.
Kristeva contends that the “sujet en procès,” or subject as active
participant in the semiotic/symbolic dialectic, first became evident in
fin de siècle France with Mallarmé and Lautréamont. They
transformed poetic language, she writes, and what has come in their
footsteps is modern literature (especially by figures like James Joyce
and Georges Bataille). Entrenched in the transformation of poetic
language are negation, contradiction, and rejection of conventions.
These same conventions, however, belong to the subject as his or her
tools. Armed with Marx’s concept of history, Freud’s notion of death
drive, Georges Bataille’s ideas of revolt and negativity, Jacques
Lacan, and many scholars in linguistics and psychoanalysis, Kristeva
surmises that the subject’s work is never complete. It is an active
process of destruction, and also of transformation, whose final goal is

to create.
In the second part of her book, then, Kristeva applies her theory
to four primary “texts”: Mallarmé’s Prose pour des Esseintes and Un
coup de dés, Lautréamont/Ducasse’s Chants de Maldoror and
Poésies.43 The third part situates Lautréamont and Mallarmé in a
historical context, less to present their biographies than to politicize
the likelihood of such a poetic transformation: “le procès de la
signifiance trouve sa réalisation radicale lors des révolutions et des
périodes historiques de grands troubles où se brise la continuité de
l’ordre établi dans tous les domaines qu’il s’est donnés” [the process
of meaning finds its radical realization during periods of revolution
and tumult, when the continuity of the established order, in all its
domains, is ruptured].44 This explanation comes under the
characteristically sly heading, “Une dis-position du procès” [A dis-
position of the process], meaning that Kristeva applies “disposition” in
order to undo it. In other words, Kristeva’s objective is negative,
similar to the poetic negativity of which, she argues, Lautréamont and
Mallarmé are emblems.
The principal way that Kristeva imitates her own theory on
Lautréamont is through her concept of “transformation.” As she
explains that Lautréamont’s textual strategy is about transformation
(the outcome of the semiotic/symbolic dialectical process described in
the first part of her book) she also transforms the conditions on which
her argument is based. In other words, Kristeva begins with linguistic,
psychoanalytic, literary, and political models but, as she develops her
argument, these models appear to dissolve. When she discusses
Lautréamont’s strategy of making meaning, Kristeva focuses on the
concept of transposition: from Lautréamont to Ducasse, from the
Chants (narration) to the Poésies (law), and from semiotic domination
(Chants) to symbolic domination (Poésies). As Kristeva sees it, the
mysterious passage from Maldoror’s epic battle to Ducasse’s reversals
43
Numerous reviews of Kristeva’s book have been written since its publication and
translation. See, in particular, Peter Nesselroth, “Poetic Language and the
Revolution,” L’Esprit créateur 162 (1976): 149-160 and Michel Beaujour, “À Propos
de l’écart dans La Révolution du langage poétique de Julia Kristeva,” Romanic
Review 66 (1975): 214-233.
44
Kristeva, La Révolution, 361.
of famous romantics and classical thinkers can be explained by this

concept of transformation. In his review of Kristeva’s work, Michel
Beaujour suggests that university professors have traditionally
misunderstood the avant-garde because it deliberately develops a
foreign language to provoke the institution.45 Kristeva, on the other
hand, appropriates the language of the “inside” to dismantle it from
within. By applying the semiotic/symbolic interactive model herself,
she also transforms linguistic and psychoanalytic discourse.
According to Kristeva, Ducasse’s transformation is infinite. In
addition to those mentioned above, the process developed in the
Poésies of transforming famous maxims is itself a transposition.
Kristeva’s chapter, “Le Contexte présupposé,” focuses on this aspect
of Ducasse’s transposition. Yet it is equally dedicated to a trans-
position of the term “presupposition” from the linguistic definition to
one that can include poetry. Referring to several contemporary
linguists, Kristeva expands the notion of “presupposition” from an
implicit assumption that both speaker and addressee understand the
concept of intertextuality. She sees presupposition as a law to be
accepted or rejected: “Tout le corpus précédant le texte agit donc
comme une présupposition généralisée ayant valeur juridique: il est
une loi qui s’exerce par le fait même de sa formulation, puisque ce
qu’elle commande c’est l’intervention textuelle elle-même” [The
whole corpus preceding the text thus acts as a generalized
presupposition having legal force: it is a law enacted by the actual
event of its formulation, since what it controls is textual intervention
itself].46 When Ducasse revises the famous maxims of Pascal,
Vauvenargues and La Rochefoucauld, he enters into a dialogue with
them. Thus, every “text,” according to Kristeva, is in continual dia-
logue with a presupposed one. The result is literature: “Pour devenir
lui-même un présupposé, le texte se pose en s’appropriant ce qu’il
présuppose” [In order to become a presupposition itself, the text sets
itself by appropriating what it presupposes].47 Herself entering into
dialogue with linguistic presuppositions and then departing from
them, Kristeva thereby establishes her text as a presupposition-in-
progress.
45
Beaujour, “À Propos de l’écart,” 214.
46
47
Ibid., 339.
This mimicking effect becomes apparent again in Kristeva’s

discussion of Ducasse’s first volume of Poésies. She asserts that
proper names in this volume, such as Chateaubriand, George Sand,
Lamartine, and many more, act as an “indice à un ensemble de
discours que le thème résume. L’annonce du nom propre d’un lieu,
d’un auteur ou du titre d’un ouvrage tient donc lieu de présupposé
entier, de tout un univers de discours” [hint about a set of discourses
that the theme sums up. Announcing the proper name of a place, of an
author, or of the title of a work thus acts as a total presupposition, as a
whole realm of discourse].48 Kristeva, too, begins this chapter with a
linguistic name-dropping, citing J.L. Austin, Oswald Ducrot, and their
specific works. In this way, she first announces the entire discourse of
contemporary linguistics, and then subsequently turns it on its head.
Kristeva’s transposition is not limited to linguistics, however. She
also overhauls psychoanalytic “presuppositions,” as well, especially
when she appropriates, then transforms, Freud’s concept of laughter.
Poetic language is like laughter, says Kristeva, because it is cathartic.
She defines laughter, with the help of Freud and Baudelaire, as the
speaking subject’s semiotic impulses surfacing through the laws of
language: “Le rire est ce qui lève les inhibitions en perçant
l’interdit…pour y introduire la pulsion aggressive, violente, libérante”
[Laughter is what lifts inhibitions by breaking through prohibition…to
introduce the aggressive, violent, liberating drive].49 Laughter,
according to Kristeva, is simultaneously repressive, because the
impulse comes out through language, preserving language’s laws as it
seeks to transgress them. Nevertheless, laughter participates in the
same dialectic as the text does, since laughter brings about change, by
partially rejecting the system: “Le rire utiliserait donc le mécanisme
d’un retournement du procès symbolique sur sa position, pour faire le
‘commentaire’ de son fonctionnement en tant que système” [Laughter
would thus use the mechanism of reversing the symbolic process in its
location, in order to make a ‘commentary’ about its functioning as a
48
Ibid., 341.
49
Ibid., 196. This definition comes from Kristeva’s chapter entitled, “Les Chants de
Maldoror et les Poésies. Rire—cette pratique.” The translation is from Margaret
Waller, Revolution in Poetic Language (New York: Columbia University Press,
1984), 224.
system].50 Laughter cannot occur unless it includes both modalities of

the dialectic: the semiotic and the symbolic. Here, Kristeva equates
Maldoror’s inability to laugh when others do to an imbalance in the
dialectic. If we read the text as laughter, then we cannot understand it
unless we first understand what we are laughing at. Laughter, for
Lautréamont, is a “symptôme de la rupture” [symptom of rupture].51
In laughter, then, as in the text, both pre-linguistic and linguistic
elements are in constant dialogue. Thus Kristeva applies Freud’s
understanding of laughter only to show something linguistic:
Mais ici, dans l’articulation hétérogène du pseudonyme et du nom,

de la fiction et de la loi, où la motilité sémiotique devient formule
et où la formule se dissout dans la négativité qui la produit, il
s’agit de plus que d’un mot d’esprit.
[But here, in the heterogeneous articulation of the pseudonym and

the name—fiction and law—where semiotic motility becomes a
formula and where that formula dissolves within the negativity
that produces it, what is involved is much more than a
witticism.]52
By copying Freud’s definition and subsequently breaking off from it,

Kristeva participates in the same dialectic she envisions.
Kristeva cites nearly every passage from the Chants and the
Poésies that pertain in any way to laughter in order to situate them
within her dialectic. She leaves the impression that the burst of
laughter—the ruptured text—also ruptures Freud’s understanding of
laughter. When, in his article, Beaujour criticizes Kristeva for ignoring
the function of the reader in her theory, he suggests that this may also
be her own repression, her own “semiotic” impulses entering
implicitly into the conventions of linguistics, psychoanalysis, as well
as criticism.53
Finally, although Kristeva insists on the reader’s duty to compare
the editions of classical maxims that Ducasse would have originally
copied when drafting his second volume of Poésies, she transposes the
specific “presuppositions” that she attributes to Ducasse. Simply put,
50
Ibid., 356-7.
51
Ibid., 195.
52
Ibid., 194; Waller, Revolution, 222.
53
Beaujour, “À Propos de l’écart,” 222.
Kristeva claims that Ducasse transformed passages from Pascal and

Vauvenargues which he never actually transformed. When she
discusses certain kinds of transformation which she labels
“indéfinies,” and which are lexical as opposed to syntactic alterations
made to the original maxims, she actually alters the original maxims
by introducing a new lexical error. For instance, she writes that
Ducasse transforms Pascal’s phrase, “…dépositaire du vrai, amas
d’incertitudes, gloire et RÉBUS de l’univers” [depository of truth, a
heap of uncertainty, the glory and rebus of the universe], into “C’est le
dépositaire du vrai, l’amas de certitude, la gloire, non le REBUT de
l’univers” [It’s the depository of truth, a heap of uncertainty, the glory,
not the scrapheap of the universe].54 She attempts to demonstrate with
this transformation that Ducasse replaces “lexemes,” or utterances,
with homonyms or semi-homonyms in order to metonymically
displace Pascal’s meaning. The trouble with such an assertion is that
there is no rebus in Pascal’s original maxim, but rather the same
“scrapheap” as in Ducasse’s maxim. It is therefore Kristeva who
displaces Pascal’s maxim and not Ducasse. She repeats this error in
the next example as well with the result that the function of such
“retournements” applies as much to Kristeva’s piece as it does to
Ducasse’s. Her conclusion, that Ducasse rejects Pascal’s skepticism
and produces “chez le destinataire un effet illocutoire immédiate qui
est précicément l’effet de flou que le pheno-texte s’emploie à
stigmatiser” [for the addressee an immediate illocutionary effect
which is precisely the fuzzy effect that the pheno-text is working on
stigmatizing], is significant: the vague or fuzzy effect is not limited to
Ducasse, but also extends to Kristeva.
When Kristeva writes that a text functions on two levels, one
suspects that she is including her own essay, as demonstrated in the
examples above. She comments:
il s’approprie le discours présupposé en le niant, et ainsi s’affirme

tout en affirmant un contenu positif dans le phéno-texte; en même
temps, il confirme, en quelque sorte, le texte présupposé, mais en
changeant ses jugements négatifs en une négativité sémiotique qui
agit le géno-texte et se montre dans les transformations indéfinies.
54
[it appropriates the presupposed discourse by negating it, and thus

affirms itself while affirming positive content in the pheno-text; at
the same time, it confirms, in a way, the presupposed text, but by
changing its negative judgments into a semiotic negativity that
acts upon the geno-text and appears in undefined
transformations.]55
By appropriating psychoanalytic and linguistic discourse, by negating

or confirming it, Kristeva’s argument takes on the same qualities of a
“text” that she attributes to Lautréamont. The technique of imitation
seen in Kristeva, Pleynet, and Sollers demonstrates that in order to
create, one must first appropriate. This is the poetically revolutionary
quality that the Telqueliens attribute to Ducasse and one that they also
cultivate in their own critical writings. Sollers’s comment,
“Lautréamont, c’est moi” [Lautréamont is me], viewed in light of such
a technique, now takes on an unsettling meaning. By appropriating
Lautréamont for themselves, the Telqueliens partly stigmatize him,
just as they claim that Ducasse partly stigmatized Pascal and the
classic thinkers.
Why this furtive imitation on the part of Tel Quel? On the one
hand, by appropriating and then transforming what they view as
Lautréamont’s poetic revolution, Tel Quel in turn engages in the trans-
historical dialogue that it envisions. On the other hand, by
appropriating various discourses and then turning them on their heads,
the Telqueliens also effect their own change in critical language and
their own critical revolution. Sollers claims the surrealists neglected to
pay attention to the way Lautréamont works, or the way the
“machine” functions as a whole, in favor of a romantic approach. Both
groups agree on Lautréamont as a poetic revolutionary, shattering
tradition as he creates a new one. For the surrealists, Lautréamont was
a muse. For the Telqueliens, however, Lautréamont is a totem, a
guardian spirit of the clan; to celebrate him, they become him.
Through their imitation of Lautréamont, Tel Quel intends for him to
live on infinitely.
55
Ibid., 351.
Conclusion
On November 24, 2006, exactly 136 years after Isidore Ducasse

mysteriously died, I presented a paper at the Eighth International
Colloquium on Lautréamont in Barcelona, organized by the
Association des Amis Passés, Présents et Futurs d’Isidore Ducasse
(AAPPFID). On stage, the chair of our panel made the following
observation: “Even though Ducasse died 136 years ago, he is more
alive today than ever before.”
Yes and no, I thought. Here was an auditorium full of
Lautréamont scholars, who call themselves “Ducassians” to highlight
their focus on historical fact rather than literary fiction, in addition to a
considerable number of students and Ducassophiles. Papers varied in
language (e.g. French, Catalan, Spanish, Portuguese, and English) and
in subject, from Brazilian biographical fiction to Raoul Vaneigem,
Blanchot, and Walter Benjamin. Since 1987, the AAPPFID has held a
biennial colloquium in cities important both to Ducasse’s life and
afterlife: Barcelona, Brussels, Tokyo, Montevideo, Montréal, and Pau.
In short, since Ducasse’s death, Lautréamont’s influence has traveled
the globe.
Then again, with all this scholarly activity, I wondered, what
happened to the avant-garde? Where were the myths and imaginary
portraits of Lautréamont? If Remy de Gourmont, André Breton, or
Marcelin Pleynet could see these suits and power point presentations,
what would they think? Why should we favor fact over fiction,
Ducasse over Lautréamont? Only recently, there had been a hoax in
Belgium, where a thirteen-year-old girl sent a copy of Les Chants de
Maldoror to ten renowned publishing firms to consider for
publication. She had changed the title to Comme un garçon, changed
Maldoror’s name to “Louis,” and changed Lautréamont’s to her own,
Alice Cornet. Two publishing houses did not respond and seven flatly
rejected the work. Albin Michel, Grasset, Seuil, Flammarion, Plon,
Luc Pire, and Luce Wilquin sent blanket rejection letters, citing the
“impératifs spécifiques de nos collections.”1 Only Gallimard
1
Edouard Launet, “Lautréamont laissé à la porte de sept grands éditeurs,” Libération,
March 2, 2005, 28.
recognized the prank. Even professional readers no longer read

Maldoror, and even if they did, they probably would not care for it.
Aside from questions of contemporary tastes, however, this hoax
raises another question of canonicity. From the symbolist, surrealist,
and post-structuralist periods until today, Lautréamont’s evolution can
be best described as a comfortable progression from risqué outcast to
literary classic. A prestigious Pléiade edition of Œuvres complètes,
biennial colloquia, scholarly journals, monographs, and dissertations
all consecrate le comte de Lautréamont as a classic. Many scholars,
regardless of whether they have read his works, recognize
Lautréamont by name. Yet the work is arguably still as marginal today
as it has ever been and Ducasse is still as much of an enigma.
The Catalonian artist Jesús Galdón’s program design for the
Barcelona conference captures this tension nicely (Fig. C.1):
Figure C.1 Jesús Galdón, conference poster

Used by kind permission of Jesús Galdón.
Like most portraits of Lautréamont, this one is also a self-portrait in

the sense that it paints a portrait of our times. The upside-down photo,
Conclusion 219
allegedly of Ducasse, embellished with fuchsia hair and spectacles,

suggests in one image that the contemporary Ducasse can be
considered a juxtaposition of past and present, real and fantastic,
serious and comic. Given that one of the conference’s co-sponsors
was le Groupe de Recherches sur les Écritures Subversives (GRES), a
university-organized group for research of subversive writing, the
picture also indicates that transgression has become not only
acceptable for scholarly endeavors, but utterly mainstreamed.
This evolution of subversion as a positive value is one that I have
attempted to trace in this history of Lautréamont’s posthumous textual
existence. Many of his most famous readers simultaneously
condemned and caused Lautréamont’s popularization. Although his
biographical obscurity may have contributed to divergent interpreta-
tions of his works, Lautréamont’s literary transgression has generally
operated as both the medium and the message for all his readers,
including me. I have argued that readers of Lautréamont since 1869
alter the text as they interpret the work. To demonstrate this, I chose
instances where Lautréamont does something similar in his poetry;
consequently, I altered the work, as well. For the unknown writers at
the Jeune Belgique, Lautréamont’s obscurity was a passport to literary
fame in France. For the surrealists, Lautréamont’s strange prose
represented and legitimized their liberation of the subconscious. For
Tel Quel, Lautréamont’s subversive plagiarism validated post-
structuralist visions of transhistoricity and intertextuality. Lautréamont
changes literature, and literature changes Lautréamont. When Maurice
Blanchot argued in his pivotal Lautréamont et Sade (1949) that
Lautréamont’s work is a work in progress, he was referring not only to
Lautréamont’s poetry, but also to his myth. As a reader and, as
Blanchot sees it, as an active agent in posterity, the critic also refers to
himself, and thus reflects an aesthetic preference for the reader that
continued throughout post-structuralism.2
This co-opted identity raises questions about how much a work
belongs to an author and how much it belongs to readers.
Lautréamont’s text is as open as his work in that the physical shape of
the work—the text—determines its interpretation.3 In 1970, for
2
Blanchot, Lautréamont et Sade, 86.
3
See Umberto Eco, The Open Work, trans. Anna Cancogni (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1989).
instance, the Pléiade editor Pierre-Olivier Walzer altered

Lautréamont’s text to correspond not only to the aesthetic demands of
a “classic,” but also to the intellectual ones. In the 1890 edition, on the
other hand, Léon Genonceaux gave Lautréamont’s subversive content
a subversive form. Another salient example of the way in which the
interpretation can encroach upon the text is José Corti’s’s 1953 edition
of Lautréamont’s Œuvres complètes, which boasts the prefaces from
previous editions by writers and critics as diverse as Léon
Genonceaux (1890), Remy de Gourmont (1920), Edmond Jaloux
(1938), André Breton (1938), Philippe Soupault (1946), Julien Gracq
(1947), Roger Caillois (1947) and Maurice Blanchot (1949). More
recently, the 2009 Pléiade edition features these prefaces in addition to
other “lectures de Lautréamont” [readings of Lautréamont], sug-
gesting that Lautréamont’s readers are a significant part of his
complete works. These editions illustrate that Ducasse’s famous
dictum from the Poésies II, “La poésie doit être faite par tous. Non par
un” [Poetry must be made by all. Not by one], will most likely stand
the test of time in Lautréamont’s afterlife.4 The experimental
American composer and writer John Cage took this dictum literally:
his 1971 interpretation of Les Chants de Maldoror epitomizes
Lautréamont’s legend.
John Cage and the Chants de Maldoror: pulvérisés par l’assistance

même
“To raise language's temperature,” Cage observed in 1970, “we

not only remove syntax: we give each letter undivided attention,
setting it in unique face and size; to read becomes the verb to sing.”5
Initiates of Les Chants de Maldoror know this practice well. For them,
to read means to make noise: from the surrealists’ midnight choruses
of Maldoror in the mental ward, to La Jeune Belgique’s musical
evenings at Café Sésino, to Genonceaux’s lore of the lyrical Ducasse
as a pianist: “un rare symphoniste de la phrase cherchait, en frappant
son clavier, les rhythmes de son orchestration littéraire” [a rare
symphonist of the sentence, was searching, by hitting his keyboard,
4
OC, 288 [Mal, 244].
5
John Cage, M: Writings ’67-’72 (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1972),
107.
Conclusion 221
for the rhythms of his literary orchestration].6 From its very title, Les
Chants de Maldoror entails sound; and prosody, by definition, comes
from words put to song.
Cage took Genonceaux’s metaphor quite literally. In his 1971
piece Les Chants de Maldoror pulvérisés par l’assistance même, Cage
randomly extracts words from Les Chants de Maldoror as raw
material for his music, drafting audience members as musicians.
Today, this pioneering composer is best known for a three-movement
piece composed of 4 minutes and 33 seconds without musical notes.
This 1952 piece, descriptively titled 4’33”, uses silence to demon-
strate the impossibility of silence, allowing environmental and
audience noises to become music. The duration is achieved through
chance means and the incorporation of elements contingent to the
actual performance is what Cage terms “indeterminacy,” a technique
developed across his work, particularly after 1957. Unlike 4’33”,
indeterminacy and chance in his Maldoror piece led not to fame but to
obscurity. A single copy of the score remains in the New York Public
Library for the Performing Arts. The piece was either not performed
or not recorded until ten years later. The John Cage Trust indicated
that the piece was performed on only one occasion: October 23, 1982,
in a birthday celebration for Cage at the Semaines musicales
d’Orléans. It is likely, however, that Cage intended Maldoror’s
improbability.
Furthermore, although Cage often discussed his use of other
authors, such as James Joyce, as literary material for his compositions,
he never mentioned Lautréamont. Yet even in this silence, Cage in
fact participates in a tradition of artistic interpretation that defines
Lautréamont’s afterlife. Historically, this posterity has not just con-
cerned the material text but also the concept of reading Lautréamont,
since readers collectively determine how his work is understood,
misunderstood and even, as Cage would have it, sung. On the one
hand, Ducasse’s own enigmatic life and genre-resistant work
contribute at least in part to this phantasmagoric production. On the
other hand, to borrow Michel Pierssens’s words, the “hallucination
collective,” or collective fantasy, of Lautréamont’s heritage is
essentially a “non-reading”; that is, a compromise between the text in
6
OC, 337 [Mal, 273-4].
its entirety and collectively selected fragments of it.7 Lautréamont’s

text endures, yet it is continually altered through interpretation which
in turn reflects the changing aesthetic interests of readers.
This idea of non-reading, which can be described as a
confrontation of textual evidence with its interpretation, is
underscored in Cage’s unconventional adaptation of Les Chants de
Maldoror, because it is entirely self-reflexive. It is a palimpsest of
non-reading, both literally and figuratively. Literally, Cage’s score
crosses out lines from Lautréamont’s poem to make a new work that
depends on audience participation. Figuratively, this crossing out
procedure and audience involvement echoes both Lautréamont’s
unconventional style and even his posterity. In other words, in a single
performance piece, Cage collapses Lautréamont’s text with repression
and a concealment of some of its words. First, Cage defaces most of
the first 200 pages from Les Chants de Maldoror. Then, he constructs
a pseudo-democratic voting procedure that requires the audience to
perform and record the piece—or not—based on the results. If they
vote in favor of performance, they still read only fragments from the
actual poem. It is determined yet indeterminate, autocratic yet
democratic, and musical yet non-musical. In short, the piece is
problematic because, like the literary work it attempts to stage, it
resists classification and varies with each performance.
Ducasse’s Chants de Maldoror and Poésies have often been
considered fragmented. Establishing coherence between these two
works has proven challenging since, in Ducasse’s own terms, he
denounces his past by changing his method. His Poésies preach
goodness where Maldoror sings of evil, faith replaces skepticism, and
modesty replaces pride. As a result, some critics have tended to
choose one text in favor of the other. Despite their evident thematic
incongruity, however, other critics have suggested that Ducasse’s two
different strategies achieve the same goal: to redefine literature.8 In
both works, Ducasse employs familiar tropes in order to defamiliarize
them, an aesthetic strategy which Cage in turn imitates. However,
rather than simply reproducing Lautréamont’s work, Cage renders it
7
Pierssens, Lautréamont: Éthique à Maldoror, 11.
8
Pierssens, Lautréamont: Éthique à Maldoror; Guy Debord, Panégyrique I (Paris:
Gérard Lebovici, 1989); and Sollers, Logiques.
Conclusion 223
new by “pulverizing” it, breaking it down to expose its individual

elements.
During this period, Cage’s aesthetic concerns, in both music and
language, consist in shattering syntax, liberating structure, and using
chance and indeterminacy as a means of composition. Systematized
chance operations guide Cage to specific—but random—results. In his
indeterminate pieces, however, Cage designs a framework for
performance so that the results depend less on his control than they do
on performers’ choices. To redefine music, Cage argues first for a
reconsideration of sound. To redefine society, he proposes a reconsid-
eration of language. The internal rhythms, unusual syntax, and
malleability of Lautréamont’s poem itself as well as the collective
fabrication of his history provide an excellent antecedent for such a
redefinition. By pulverizing the poem to its materiality, Cage
transcends grammar and redefines both language and audience.
The score contains one sheet of instructions (Fig. C.2) and 200
parts. Each audience member is given a copy of the instructions and
one part. Each part consists of one page from the first 200 pages of
Les Chants de Maldoror.9 The words on each page are mostly, if not
entirely, defaced: they are legible but crossed out by a thin line. The
words to remain untouched were presumably determined by Cage’s I
Ching software program, a machine that essentially simulates a coin
toss. The I Ching, or Chinese Book of Changes, is a framework for
interpreting order in randomness based on the principles of the
balance of opposites (yin and yang) and the inevitability of change.
All words in Lautréamont’s poem not selected by the program were
then crossed out. Thus, the remaining words on any given page are
stripped of sense because they are stripped of syntax. For example, if
one particpant’s part is the first page of the poem, the first sentence
sounds like: “Plût au ciel que le lecteur, enhardi et devenu trouve, sans
se désorienter, son chemin abrupt et sauvage, à travers les marécages
désolés de ces et moins livre imbiberont son âme comme l’eau le
sucre” [May it please heaven that the reader, emboldened and become
find, without loss of bearings, a wild and abrupt way, across the
desolate of these and less book will lap up his soul as water does
9
The size and variants suggest that it is Soupault’s 1927 Au Sans Pareil edition of
Œuvres complètes.
sugar] (Fig. C.3).10 While the reading process eludes logical syntax,
the performance emphasizes internal rhythms and unpredictability.
Words take on a musical quality.
In 1968, Cage stated that he hoped to “let words exist as [he has]
let sounds exist,” to give each word its own individuality.11 In order to
achieve this individuality, he suggests that grammar must be set free.
Syntax, he argues, is a military arrangement that should be broken
down or pulverized in order to free language from rigidity and
predictability:
As we move away from [syntax], we demilitarize language. This

demilitarization of language is conducted in many ways; a single
language is pulverized; the boundaries between two or more
languages are crossed; elements not strictly linguistic (graphic,
musical) are introduced; etc. Translation becomes, if not
impossible, unnecessary. Nonsense and silence are produced,
familiar to lovers. We begin to actually live together, and the
thought of separating doesn’t enter our minds.12
His observations on the impossibility of translation are curious, since

the Maldoror composition was translated from English to French
(except for the edition and main title) and since the piece is explicitly
designed for a francophone audience of up to 200 persons. It should
not matter what language his audience members speak if Cage aims
solely to organize their noise. This is one inconsistency which
characterizes the piece.
Consistency, however, cannot be expected from either Cage or
Lautréamont, for stylistic unpredictability defines their work. Readers
10
John Cage, Les Chants de Maldoror pulvérisés par l’assistance même (New York:
Henmar Press, Inc., 1971).
11
John Cage and Daniel Charles, For the Birds: John Cage in Conversation with
Daniel Charles (Boston: Marion Boyers Inc., 1981), 151. Interviews began in 1968.
Cage observed here that “the impossibility of language interests me at present.”
12
Cage, M, 2. This was nearly a decade before Barthes famouly pronouced, “[L]a
langue, comme performance de tout langage, n’est ni réactionnaire, ni progressiste;
elle est tout simplement: fasciste; car le fascisme, ce n’est pas d’empêcher de dire,
c’est d’obliger à dire” [But language—the performance of a language system—is
neither reactionary nor progressive; it is quite simply fascist; for fascism does not
prevent speech, it compels speech], in his first lesson at the Collège de France in
1977, Œuvres complètes, 5: 432. The translation is from Richard Howard, A Barthes
Reader (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 461.
Conclusion 225
of Lautréamont frequently question his unusual syntax and staccato

punctuation. “Curious syntactical constructions,” to borrow Alexis
Lykiard’s expression, define the poet’s shocking style.13 In particular,
his spasmodic use of commas provides a peculiar and musical rhythm
to the poem. This rhythm is intentionally “pulverized” by Cage to
emphasize its irregularity. Each word thus becomes individualized.
In this way, the piece does what the main title, “Les Chants de
Maldoror pulvérisés par l’assistance même,” claims. The poem is
broken up by the audience. “Même,” however, is syntactically mis-
placed; it means nothing. In Cage’s manuscript notes, “même” is
originally in parentheses with a question mark “(même?),” indicating
a detail later added to the title. It is significant that he borrows
Duchamp’s famously enigmatic “même” from La Mariée mise à nu
par ses célibataires, même.14 One of Duchamp’s own three musical
pieces from 1912, La Mariée mise à nu par l’assistance, même.
Erratum musical, also played with chance and choices made by
performers. Duchamp once said in one of his provocatively enigmatic
interviews that he used “même” as poetic nonsense, to draw attention
to it as an adverb:
Les mots m’intéressaient. Le rapprochement des mots auxquels

j’ajoutais la virgule et ‘même,’ un adverbe qui n’a aucun sens
puisque ça n’est pas ‘eux-mêmes’ et ne se rapporte ni aux
célibataires, ni à la mariée. C’est donc un adverbe dans la plus
belle démonstration de l’adverbe. Ça n’a aucun sens.
[Words interested me. The bringing together of words to which I

would add a comma and ‘even,’ an adverb which has no meaning
since it’s not ‘themselves’ [eux-mêmes] and refers neither to the
bachelors nor to the married woman. It is thus an adverb in the
most beautiful demonstration of an adverb. It is entirely meaning-
less.]15
Cage’s observations on syntax mirror Duchamp here. Syntactically,

“même” is incorrect and is used for the sake of demonstrating its
13
Mal, 21.
14
In Cage’s manuscript notes, held at the New York Public Library for the
Performing Arts.
15
Marcel Duchamp and Pierre Cabanne, Ingénieur du temps perdu: entretiens avec
Pierre Cabanne (Paris: P. Belfond, 1977), 67-8.
arbitrariness. From another perspective, Cage’s use of “même” is

agrammatical in the Riffaterrean sense that it deviates from normal
usage in order to point to Lautréamont’s style.16 Cage levels the
syntax of the poem one degree further by removing the comma before
“même.” For his purposes of pulverizing syntax, the comma becomes
unnecessary. Each word has the same value.
Likewise, pronouns are seldom consistent in Les Chants de
Maldoror. Maldoror, for instance, is continually in metamorphosis,
here as “je,” there as a “renégat, à la figure fuligineuse” [renegade
with the dusky face], and so on. This duplicity of subjects is often
seen as a kind of pulverization or “alteration.” Julia Kristeva, for ex-
ample, observes an internal rhythm in these multiple transformations:
“‘je’ est un mouvement rythmique, une dynamique ondulatoire” [‘I’ is
a rhythmic movement, a wave-like dynamic].17 Cage’s piece stages
Lautréamont’s rhythmic plurality by actually breaking up the poem
and dividing its parts among an audience. By fragmenting the
performers, Cage thereby imitates subject fragmentation within Les
Chants de Maldoror.
Lautréamont’s stylistic incongruity and fragmentation is not
limited to Maldoror, however. In Cage’s composition, incompati-
bilities from Maldoror and the Poésies confront each other. Cage
doctors Lautréamont’s text and, as a result, he renews it. This aesthetic
is similar to Ducasse’s technique in the Poésies of what Debord called
“détournement,” reusing preexisting maxims to “correct” or subvert
them.18 Cage chooses Lautréamont’s poem as a common object
familiar to its readers but subsumes its meaning under the new title
and defaced text.
Cage not only aimed to “demilitarize” language by breaking
down syntactical order. He was also searching for the famous
Ducassian poetry made by all: “we need a music which no longer
prompts talk for audience participation, for in it the division between
performers and audience no longer exists: a music made by
everyone.”19 In Cage’s mise-en-scène, he furnishes Lautréamont’s
16
Riffaterre develops the concept of agrammaticality in La Production du texte (Paris:
Seuil, 1979).
17
18
Debord, La Société du spectacle.
19
Cage, M, 5-6.
Conclusion 227
poem with what Antonin Artaud envisioned as a vibratory dissociation

of words and their sounds, a theater that would break the boundaries
between public and performer, as it breaks down language, by
exploding or “demilitarizing” syntax. Cage makes a case for
“demilitarized” society, in part by changing the role of people in his
music. Critics of this piece have traditionally discussed this term
“demilitarization” in terms of a political agenda, variously ascribed to
the Chicago riots of 1968, his anarchist themes, or his general
discontent with the French after they had poorly received one of his
events.20 Marc Thorman associates the theme of anarchy with the date
of Ducasse’s death (1870), suggesting that Cage’s staged rebellion is
tied to historical events. It is more likely, however, that the perfor-
mance is related to Lautréamont’s poem itself.
A number of rules in Cage’s indeterminate framework complicate
choices made by performers. While these rules are designed to liberate
the performer, they actually hinder his freedom. First each participant
must thoroughly read the instructions and study his role. Then he must
vote on a series of performance decisions: whether to read or whisper
the text, whether to perform the piece or not, and finally, whether to
record it or not. Since the minority rules, but only in two out of three
of these votes, the procedure is only partly democratic. The audience
members must anticipate their vote contrary to their intuition. Losers
may rebel, but even the type of rebellion is prescribed: rebels must
systematically shout “Lautréamont,” “Chants de Maldoror,” or the
name of their respective chant, “Chant premier,” etc. The piece
necessarily takes place in a conventional performance space, since
rebels are instructed to dance in the aisles or on stage.
In short, the interpretation is unconventional but it is based on a
series of conventions: it is unpredictable, but not chaotic. Direction
comes from a composer and a conductor, two roles which Cage
attempts to obliterate. Also, envisioning music made by many despite
20
William Brooks, “Music and Society,” in The Cambridge Companion to John
Cage, ed. David Nicholls (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); John
Pritchett, The Music of John Cage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993);
and Mark Thorman, “Speech and Text in Compositions by John Cage, 1950-1992”
(PhD diss., CUNY, 2002). One of the few critics of Cage’s piece, Thorman, 151,
suggested the evident connection to Dalí’s “Jeune vierge autosodommisé par sa
proper chasteté” when Dalí’s influence is obviously Duchamp.
a total absence of performance is a paradox. The score offers no

procedure by which to distribute the pages of Les Chants de
Maldoror, nor does it explain the choices made in “erasing” specific
lines from the pre-text. While Cage tends to value “full” words (verbs,
nouns, adverbs, adjectives) over “empty” ones (conjunctions,
pronouns, etc.), “raising the temperature of language,” as Cage hopes,
becomes as simple as crossing out words, so that each word becomes
“full” in performance. In Lautréamont’s poem, even empty words
become full by a radical departure from their context. Divorced from
their syntax, words cannot be graded according to this hierarchy; they
become a poetic union of order and disorder.
Cage claims to have learned the musical possibilities of
fragmented texts in an event where 200 volunteers with untrained
voices rehearsed a piece based on all “musical” words mentioned in
Henry-David Thoreau’s diaries. Cage entitled it Mureau (Music+
Thoreau=Mureau). Rather than make words clear, performers
emphasized individual letters. This event could explain at least some
of the directions in the Maldoror piece. The democratic procedure
also evokes a class Cage taught in which each student selected
through chance operations a separate book to read and interpret:
“College: two hundred people reading the same book. An obvious
mistake. Two hundred people can read two hundred books.”21 Cage’s
premise for the Maldoror piece was to allow two hundred people to
read or misread a single fragmented book. In both Cage’s and
Lautréamont’s work, the text and its performance are mutually
embracing. The composition is permanent: a real and physical text.
The performance, however, is ephemeral, ever-changing according to
each audience.
In relation to other musical interpretations of poetry, Cage’s piece
stands in stark contrast to the work of his mentors. Despite their
experimental form, Arnold Schoenberg’s and Pierre Boulez’s adap-
tations of Albert Giraud’s Pierrot Lunaire (1912) and René Char’s Le
Marteau sans maître (1955) maintain the boundary between the
musician and audience, whereas Cage shatters composition and per-
formance in a single blow. Challenging the hierarchical arrangement
21
Cage, M, 61.
Conclusion 229
of authority and the place of the reader as a creator of the work is put
into question on all levels of this piece.
As readers of Lautréamont, we must continually reassess our own
generative role as well as the creative role of intermediary figures such
as critics or adaptors like Cage in shaping Lautréamont’s posterity. Of
course, it is not Lautréamont who wrote Cage’s piece. Then again, it is
not Cage who wrote Cage’s piece either, since the author, as he would
have it, is the audience itself. Cage thus stages an authorial disap-
pearing act, echoing that of Lautréamont, by shifting the creative
process to his audience, thereby providing us less with a text than with
a blueprint for interpretation. By transcending grammar and allowing
words and audience to make noise, Cage enacts Lautréamont’s poster-
ity. This non-reading of Les Chants de Maldoror, or confrontation of
text with interpretation, epitomizes Lautréamont, laid bare by his
readers, même.
Figure C.2 John Cage, Les Chants de Maldoror pulvérisés par l’assistance même,
directions
© 1971 by Henmar Press Inc. Used by kind permission of C.F. Peters Corporation.
All rights reserved.
Conclusion 231
Figure C.3 John Cage, Les Chants de Maldoror pulvérisés par l’assistance même
© 1971 by Henmar Press Inc. Used by kind permission of C.F. Peters Corporation.
All rights reserved.
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Index
L’Académie française, 180, 185 Baudelaire, Charles, 18-21, 44,

Adam, Antoine, 178 53-54, 60, 62, 71, 75, 80, 83,
Adam, Paul, 71 99, 101, 105, 110-11, 133, 156,
Albin Michel, Les Éditions, 217 161, 172, 174, 176, 213
Alterity of the subject, 13-14 Beau comme, 34, 64, 91, 195
Apollinaire, Guillaume, 117, 123, Beaujour, Michel, 211-12, 214
126-27, 134 Bédier, Joseph, 172
Aragon, Louis, 108-9, 113, 116, Béhar, Henri, 153
119-23, 129, 132, 161 Belgium, 18, 42, 44, 46-47, 53,
Arenberg, Emile van, 49 69-71, 74-75, 78, 217
Aron, Paul, 44-45 Benjamin, Walter, 217
Artaud, Antonin, 227 Berrichon, Paterne, 130
L’Art Moderne, 47, 54 Bertrand, Aloysius, 59-60
L’art pour l’art, 42, 46 Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 11, 13,
Assimilation, 23, 46 22, 73, 82, 94, 134, 169-88,
Association des Amis Passés, 201, 218, 220
Présents et Futurs d’Isidore Bibliothèque elzevirienne, 171,
Ducasse (AAPPFID), 217 174
Au Sans Pareil, 21, 105, 107, 114, Bibliothèque nationale de France,
117, 122, 128-34, 223 107, 125, 187, 196
Austin, J.L., 213 Blake, William, 157-58, 163
Authenticity, 15, 42, 74, 84, 93, Blanchetière, 133
95 Blanchot, Maurice, 13, 15, 106-7,
Authorial intention, 17, 24, 77, 134, 179, 195, 217, 219-20
79, 100, 138-39, 173-74, 180- Bloy, Léon, 21, 26, 42, 51-72, 81,
81, 183, 185 84-86, 90, 93, 97-98
Authorship, 25, 42, 204 La Boétie, Les Éditions de, 164
Automatic writing, 113, 115, 121, Boisaymé, M. du, 91
136, 140 Book crash, 80, 82-83
Bornstein, George, 182-83
Balitout, Questroy et Cie, 18 Boulez, Pierre, 228
Balzac, Honoré de, 169, 174 Brauner, Victor, 153
Barbey d’Aurevilly, Jules Breton, André, 14, 17, 22, 32, 34,
Amédée, 52 41-42, 87, 105, 107-42, 147-
Barthes, Roland, 23, 37, 179, 191- 48, 150-56, 161, 165, 189-90,
94, 199-200, 224 195, 217, 220
Bataille, Georges, 112, 150, 153, Brossier, Félix, 78
161, 176, 210 Brunel, Camille, 37
Brunhoff, Maurice de, 78
Buet, Charles, 47, 52 Darzens, Rodolphe, 55-56, 63, 71

Buge, Pierre, 176 Davezac, Jacquette, 77
Debord, Guy, 69, 222, 226
Cabu (Jean Cabut), 26, 35-37 Decadence, 42, 45, 75
Café Sésino, 45, 220 Décaudin, Michel, 44-45
Cage, John, 23, 220-31 De Haes, Frans, 43, 50, 53, 66,
Caillois, Roger, 134, 220 71, 78, 85
Câmara, Ruy, 38 Deman, Edmond, 75
Camus, Albert, 41 Derain, André, 130
Capretz, Pierre, 171 Derrida, Jacques, 191
Cendrars, Blaise, 66, 105, 126-34 Descartes, René, 202
Censorship, 19, 75, 76-77, 82, 84, Destrée, Jules, 50-51
88, 180 Le Disque vert, 110
Chance, 34, 221, 223, 225, 228 Doctor Chenu, 139, 184
Char, René, 228 Dominguez, Oscar, 153
Charpentier, Georges, 46, 75 Droz, Eugénie, 51, 171-72
Chateaubriand, François-René de, Du Bos, Charles, 175
53, 212 Ducasse, Félix, 132
Classiques Garnier, 172, 174 Ducasse, François, 18
Claudel, Paul, 111 Ducasse, Isidore, comte de
Cliché, 26, 28, 48, 156 Lautréamont, 11-13, 15-20, 25;
Cobain, Kurt, 15 birth certificate, 86, 155; death
Cocteau, Jean, 131 certificate, 15, 25, 155;
Collège de France, 192, 224 fictional portraits, 25-38, 217;
Le comte de Lautréamont, see madness, 26-27, 54, 62-63, 66-
Isidore Ducasse 67, 72, 74, 83, 86, 88, 97, 122;
Corbière, Tristan, 171 youth, 28, 36-37, 86, 88, 96-
Cornet, Alice, 217 98, 112, 124; manuscript, 15,
Corti, José, 30, 134, 150, 220 77, 84, 86, 92-93, 95, 99-100,
Crépieux-Jamin, Jules, 93 170, 180-81, 186; humor, 50,
La critique génétique, 17, 83, 53, 57, 65, 112, 114-16, 119-
177-78, 180 20, 137-39, 196; parody, 48,
Cros, Charles, 171 50, 57-58, 60, 65, 68, 72, 138;
Le culte de la forme, 42, 46 blasphemy, 41, 58, 61, 62, 64;
desire, 61; style, 15, 23, 38, 47,
Dada, 22, 105, 116, 118-21, 154 57, 63, 61, 66-67, 72, 81, 95-
Dalí, Salvador, see also 96, 114-15, 117, 137, 174, 178,
paranoiac-critical method, 22, 180, 182-83, 186, 188, 191,
25, 30-32, 37, 136, 142-54, 222, 225; mathematics, 64, 90-
165, 227 92, 160, 192, 199-203, 210;
Dante, 157, 205 incongruity, 11, 38, 66, 72,
Dantec, Y.-G., 172 118, 123, 159-60, 165, 197,
Darío, Ruben, 28 222, 226; surprise, 13, 67, 164;
Index 247
obscenity, 19, 46, 68; Éditions de la Sirène, see La

“détournements,” 69, 118-20, Sirène
215; politics, 23, 71-72, 76, Eekhoud, Georges, 48
187, 190, 192, 206, 209, 211, Elmekki, Hatim, 36
226; music, 23, 74, 89-90, 220- Éluard, Paul, 109, 115, 119- 121,
28; science, 64, 90-91, 190-92, 132, 153-55, 164
195-96, 203; logic, 64-65, 69, Entretiens politiques et littéraires,
74, 88, 90-92, 139, 142, 146, 71
160, 197, 203, 206, 224; Ernst, Max, 22, 141, 153-54, 159-
contradiction, 34, 41, 113, 61, 164
117-18, 122, 124, 134, 138, Erotic literature, 11, 72, 76, 79,
206-8, 210; God, 11-12, 48, 161
62, 64-65, 80, 157, 169-70, Espinoza, Augustín, 153
201-2; syntax, 192, 209, 220, Étiemble, René, 87-88
223-26, 228 Existentialism, 22, 41
—Works:
Les Chants de Maldoror, 11, Fargue, Léon-Paul, 69, 123
13-14, 16, 19-21, 23-24, 26, Fayt, René, 20, 43, 86
32, 34, 42-45, 47, 49, 51- Fin de siècle, 21, 72, 74, 82, 107,
53, 63, 65-66, 69-71, 73, 123, 174, 210
76-77, 79, 84-86, 89, 96, Flammarion, 156, 181-82, 217
98, 100, 105, 108-9, 116, Flaubert, Gustave, 75, 174-75
119, 127-29, 133, 136, 142, Fort, Paul, 69, 122-23
146, 149, 151-52, 155, 169, Foucault, Michel, 25, 37
179, 201, 213, 217, 220-27, Fouché, Pascal, 107, 128, 130-31,
229-30 134
Poésies, 11-12, 14-15, 20-21, Fraenkel, Theodore, 109
24, 53, 60, 65-69, 72, 105, Freud, Sigmund, 145-48, 189,
107, 109, 113-29, 133, 151, 205, 207, 210, 213-14
155, 189 Frickx, Robert, 43
Correspondence, 18, 24, 74,
84, 92-95 Galdón, Jesús, 218
Duchamp, Marcel, 120, 225, 227 Gallimard, 11, 13, 15, 17, 25, 41,
Ducrot, Oswald, 194, 213 83, 87, 91, 107, 112, 138, 169,
Dufy, Raoul, 128 175-76, 178, 217
Dumas, Alexandre (père), 174 Gautier, Théophile, 20, 79
Genette, Gérard, 74, 79, 102
Echaurren, Roberto Matta, 81, Genonceaux, Léon, 11, 20-21, 26,
153, 156-58 52-57, 65, 69, 70, 73-74, 77-
École Polytechnique, 91 102, 123, 134, 204, 220-21
Écriture, 93, 122, 178-79, 191-93, Gérard, Joseph, 80
198, 205 Gide, André, 121, 130, 134, 175,
Editing profession, 16, 172-76 188
Gilkin, Iwan, 45-46, 49 Jaloux, Edmond, 134, 220

Gille, Valère, 42, 45, 49, 51-52, Jannet, Pierre, 171
70-71, 155, 161 Jarry, Alfred, 52, 69, 81, 117
Giraud, Albert, 46, 228 La Jeune Belgique, 20, 42-52, 69-
GLM, 22, 31, 81, 129, 135-136, 72, 90, 93, 219-220
139, 151-54, 158, 164-65, 205 La Jeune France, 46
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 48 Job, 28
Gogol, Nikolai, 158 Joplin, Janis, 15
Gourmont, Remy de, 25-28, 42- Joyce, James, 210, 221
43, 52, 65-72, 84, 86, 113, 122,
128-29, 196, 217, 220 Kaplan, Alice, 174-75, 177
Gracq, Julien, 134, 220 Kristeva, Julia, 13, 22, 37, 180,
Les Grands Ecrivains de la 187-88, 192, 195, 199-200,
France, 172 206, 209-16, 226
Graphology, 93-94
Grasset, 17, 107, 217 Lacan, Jacques, 146, 210
Greg, W.W., 28, 173 Lachmann, Karl, 172-73
Guillot-Munoz, Alvaro and Lacôte, René, 170-71
Gervasio, 29 Lacroix, Albert, 16, 18, 19-20, 26,
45, 74, 76-78, 84, 100, 129,
Hachette, 171 152, 181, 185
Haraucourt, Edmond, 49 Lacroix, Verboeckhoven et Cie.,
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 18
208 Laffitte, Paul, 128
Hendrix, Jimi, 15 Laforgue, Jules, 29
Hetzel, Pierre-Jules, 75 Lamartine, Alphonse de, 53, 213
Hieroglyphics, 201 Lanson, Gustave, 172, 174
Hilsum, René, 129, 131 Larbaud, Valéry, 123-25, 197
Hitler, Adolf, 151 La Rochefoucauld, François de,
Hoax, 42, 217-18 14, 118, 212
Hugo, Victor, 19, 77, 94 Laughter, 213-14,
Huysmans, Joris-Karl, 21, 47, 50- Lautréamont, see Isidore Ducasse
52, 55, 68, 71, 79, 134 Lefrère, Jean-Jacques, 18, 24, 55-
56, 73-74, 78-82, 88, 90-97,
I Ching, 223 101, 155, 197
Illisibilité, 195, 197 Lemerre, Alphonse, 75
Illustrated books, 140, 152, 165 Lemonnier, Camille, 46
L’Infini, 189-90 Lenin, Vladimir, 151, 206, 208
Intellectual property, 75 Les Lettres françaises, 170-71
Intertextuality, 138, 187, 191, Lévy, Michel, 75
206, 212, 219 Literary criticism, 93, 173-74,
177-78, 194
Jacob, Max, 127, 131
Index 249
Littérature, 46, 66-67, 84, 122, Nietzsche, Friedrich, 205

125, 129, 132 Nord-Sud, 107
Le Livre des Masques, see Remy W.W. Norton, 17
de Gourmant Nouveau, Germain, 22, 87, 171,
Lord Byron, 28, 33, 53 182
Luce Wilquin, Éditions, 217 Nouvelle Revue française, 87,
107, 139, 175
Maeterlinck, Maurice, 43, 71
Magritte, René, 152, 164, 165 Obscenity, 67-68
Mallarmé, Stéphane, 82-83, 99, Ochoa, Enrique, 28-29
136, 174-75, 180, 199, 205, Outrage aux bonnes mœurs, 78
207, 210-11
Malraux, André, 175 Paalen, Wolfgang, 153
Manifeste du surréalisme, 110 Palimpsest, 222
Man Ray, 22, 26, 33-35, 141, 153 Paranoiac-critical method, see
Maoism, 207 also Salvador Dalí, 30-31,
Marx, Karl, 190, 205, 207-8, 210 136, 142, 144, 148-50
Marxism, 207 Paratexts, 83, 101-2
Masson, André, 141, 153, 159, Paris, Gaston, 172
161-63, 205 Parnassianism, 46, 75
Matta, see Roberto Matta Pascal, Blaise, 14, 18-19, 42, 69,
Echaurren 75, 78, 107, 118-21, 128, 212,
Mercure de France, 26, 51, 65- 215-16
66, 69, 71, 76, 86, 107, 113, Pastor, Adolfo, 30, 36-37
139 ‘Pataphysics, 121
Millet, Jean-François, 31, 144, Paulhan, Jean, 175
145 Péladan, Joséphin, 21, 47, 52
Mimesis, 26 La Phalange, 123-24
Minotaure, 53, 150 Philip, Michel, 43
Miró, Joan, 22, 141, 158-59 Pia, Pascal, 18-19, 42, 78
Mockel, Albert, 71 Piaget, Alphonse, 78
Mollier, Jean-Yves, 75-76, 82 Picabia, Francis, 130
Monnier, Édouard, 78 Picasso, Pablo, 205
Montevideo, 29, 86, 217 Pichois, Claude, 172
Morrison, Jim, 15 Pierre-Quint, Léon, 87
Muller, Curt, 53, 85 Pierssens, Michel, 9, 14, 221-22
Musset, Alfred de, 53 Pire, Luc, 217
Plagiarism, 91, 184, 195, 204, 219
Nadeau, Maurice, 36, 154 La Pléiade, see Bibliothèque de la
Naturalism, 46 Pléiade
Naville, Ernest, 155 Pleynet, Marcelin, 15, 22, 23-24,
Naville, Pierre, 135 35-36, 108, 179-80, 187-88,
Nesselroth, Peter, 171, 211 192, 200, 204-9, 216-17
Plon, Éditions, 217 Sade, Marquis de, 13, 32, 79,

La Plume, 52, 56, 63, 70 106-7, 110-11, 169, 176, 195,
Poe, Edgar Allan, 28, 33, 73, 83, 219
93, 99, 101, 110, 141, 176 Saillet, Maurice, 17, 41-43, 52-
Poètes maudits, 44-45, 50, 56, 69, 53, 64-66, 73, 78, 85-86, 101,
72, 74, 169, 188 106, 128, 130-31
Post-structuralism, 66, 191, 194, Sand, George, 174, 213
207, 219 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 179
Poulet-Malassis, Auguste, 20, 43, Schiffren, Jacques, 175
75, 105, 156 Schloezer, Boris, 175
Pradier, Hugues, 175-76 Schoenberg, Arnold, 228
Prefaces, 79, 220 Seligmann, Kurt, 153
Princesse Sapho, 78 La Semaine des Etudiants, 46
Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 76 Semiotics, 199, 210-15
Prud’hon, Pierre-Paul, 163 Seuil, Éditions du, 13-17, 23, 74,
Psychoanalysis, 148, 210, 214 146, 154, 174, 190, 194, 204,
Pythagoras, 202 208, 217, 226
Shattuck, Roger, 169
Rachilde, 65, 78-79 Siege of Paris, 88
Redon, Odilon, 68 La Sirène, Éditions de, 105, 107,
Régnier, Adolphe, 171 126, 128-29
La Révolution surréaliste, 150 Skira, 136, 142-43, 146, 149-52
La Revue blanche, 107 La Société des textes français
La Revue d’aujourd’hui, 55 modernes, 172
Riffaterre, Michael, 68, 138, 163, Sollers, Philippe, 14, 22, 37, 180,
226 189-92, 195-200, 208-9, 216,
Rimbaud, Arthur, 32-33, 36, 42, 222
79, 83, 86-89, 99, 101, 108, Soupault, Philippe, 78, 109, 113-
110-17, 127, 130, 133, 136, 18, 121-22, 129-34, 207, 220,
171, 178, 180 223
Rodenbach, Georges, 46 Steinmetz, Jean-Luc, 11, 13, 156,
Romanticism, 14, 44, 54, 68, 105, 160, 171, 179, 181-82, 186,
124-25 188, 202
Rops, Félicien, 20, 161 Sue, Eugène, 16, 208-9
Roussin, Philippe, 174-75, 177 Surrealism, 135, 141, 154-55,
Rouzet, Georges, 55-56, 84-85 164, 189
Roy, José, 80-81 Le Surréalisme au service de la
Royère, Jean, 123 revolution (SASDLR), 151
Rozez, Jean-Baptiste, 20, 45, 85- Surrealist Manifestoes, see
86 Manifestes du surréalisme
Symbolism, 21-22, 49, 51-52, 68-
69, 105, 122-24
Index 251
Tanguy, Yves, 141, 153

Tel Quel, 14, 16, 22-24, 108, 179,
187, 189, 190-96, 199, 201,
204-10, 216, 219
Texte-limite, 193, 195
Textes littéraires français, 172
Textual criticism, 169, 172, 177-
78
Thibaudet, Albert, 55
Thoreau, Henry-David, 228
Thorman, Marc, 227
Trachsler, Richard, 185
Troubadours, 29
Le Type, 46
Tzara, Tristan, 119-20, 130
Vaché, Jacques, 109, 113, 116-19

Valéry, Paul, 123-24, 196
Vallotton, Félix, 25, 27-30, 36-37
Vaneigem, Raoul, 217
Vanier, Léon, 75
Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers,
marquis de, 14, 118, 212, 215
Verhaeren, Émile, 46, 54, 75
Verlaine, Paul, 44-45, 50, 88-90,
99, 101, 174
Verne, Jules, 75
Vers et Prose, 123
Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Auguste,
52, 79
Waller, Max, 45-46, 52, 213-14

Walzer, Pierre-Olivier, 22, 82, 91,
152, 170-71, 180- 88, 201, 220
Wittmann, Émile, 20, 85
World War I, 107, 109, 172-73
World War II, 41, 152, 173
Zola, Émile, 19, 75, 77

(Faux Titre No. 403) Lautréamont, - Thomas, Andrea S-Lautréamont

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Lautréamont,

Etudes de langue et littérature françaises

Keith Busby, †M.J. Freeman,

AMSTERDAM - NEW YORK, NY 2015

The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of

Chapter 1: Outsiders at the Fin de Siècle 41

Chapter 2: Perish then Publish: Partial Truth in

Chapter 3: Investing in Lautréamont, 1920 105

Chapter 4: The Edition as Exhibition: A Surrealist

Chapter 5: Lautréamont in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade 169

Chapter 6: Lautréamont Reincarnated 189

Conclusion: John Cage and the Chants de Maldoror:

Figure I.1 Felix Vallotton’s Lautréamont 27

Figure I.2 Enrique Ochoa’s Lautréamont 29

Figure I.3 Adolfo Pastor’s Lautréamont 30

Figure I.4 Salvador Dalí’s Lautréamont 31

Figure I.5 Man Ray, L’Énigme d’Isidore Ducasse 33

Figure I.6 Cabu’s Lautréamont 36

Figure 2.1 José Roy, frontispiece 81

Figure 2.2 “facsimile” letter, Genonceaux, 1890 95

Figure 4.1 Salvador Dalí, Canto IV, 2 143

Figure 4.2 Dalí, Canto III, 5 146

Figure 4.3 Dalí, Canto III, 1 150

Figure 4.4 Matta Echaurren, Dieu au bordel… 157

Figure 4.5 Joan Miró, Trois étoiles au lieu d’une

Figure 4.6 Max Ernst, C’est un homme ou une

Figure 4.7 André Masson, Je suis sale. Les poux

Figure 4.8 René Magritte, Où est-il passé ce premier

Figure 6.1 Philippe Sollers, graph from

Figure C.1 Jesús Galdón, conference poster 218

Figure C.2 John Cage, Les Chants de Maldoror

Figure C.3 John Cage, Les Chants de Maldoror

I am indebted to Columbia University and Loyola University

Isidore Ducasse, better known by the pseudonym le comte de

The Chants can be categorized neither as prose poem, nor epic,

Espérant voir promptement, un jour ou l’autre, la consécration de

[Hoping promptly to see, some time or other, the consecration of

impossible for me to do less, despite my goodwill: only later,

Because of the imprecision of its subject pronouns and deictic words,

Ducasse’s generic volte-face as “becoming” is problematic, however,

While the Chants de Maldoror and the Poésies may be inter-

suggested that the pseudonym “le comte de Lautréamont” was

interaction of a reader with a text. In this way, literature is more

drastically hurt the Belgian press if the restriction on freedom of

magazine to several eminent literary personages in Paris, including

appropriation became a tool deployed to depart from symbolism and

French literary canon. Some of these editorial decisions detract from

I do not paint a portrait to look like the

When Félix Vallotton was asked to illustrate Remy de

imaginative poetry and eradication of stylistic conventions,

Figure I.1 Felix Vallotton, Lautréamont

It can be assumed that Vallotton had either read fragments from

Like Job, he might exclaim: ‘My soul is weary of my life; I will

Figure I.2 Enrique Ochoa, Lautréamont

Lautréamont, the author, adding melancholy to the list of

portrait for the 1925 Lautréamont et Laforgue, Adolfo Pastor drafted

Figure I.3 Adolfo Pastor, Lautréamont

Lautréamont’s beardless face and intense expression resemble the

edition of Lautréamont’s Œuvres complètes in 1938, the same year as

Figure I.4 Salvador Dalí, Imaginary Portrait of

This portrait is characteristic of Dalí’s method in that

to systematize the sensation.7 According to Dalí, objects have minimal

Leur possibilité concrète de néologisme s’impose par l’extrême