Maldoror and Poems by Comte de Lautréamont

Consequently, shrinking soul, turn on your heels and go back before penetrating further into such uncharted, perilous wastelands.'Īpart from these opening segments, each chapter is typically an isolated, often surreal episode, which does not seem at first to be directly related to the surrounding material. 'It is not right that everyone should read the pages which follow only a few will be able to savour this bitter fruit with impunity. For example, an early passage warns the reader not to continue: Several of the parts begin with opening chapters in which the narrator directly addresses the reader, taunts the reader, or simply recounts the work thus far. The confusion between narrator and character may also suggest an unreliable narrator. Depending on the context of narrative voice in a given place, the first-person narrator may be taken to be Maldoror himself, or sometimes not. The book's central character is Maldoror, a figure of evil who is sometimes directly involved in a chapter's events, or else revealed to be watching at a distance. Over the course of the narrative, there is often a first-person narrator, although some areas of the work instead employ a third-person narrative. The text often employs very long, unconventional and confusing sentences which, together with the dearth of paragraph breaks, may suggest a stream of consciousness, or automatic writing. With some exceptions, most chapters consist of a single, lengthy paragraph. Maldoror is a modular work primarily divided into six parts, or cantos these parts are further subdivided into a total of sixty chapters, or verses. Maldoror was itself influenced by earlier gothic literature of the period, including Lord Byron's Manfred, and Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer. The work's transgressive, violent, and absurd themes are shared in common with much of Surrealism's output in particular, Louis Aragon, André Breton, Salvador Dalí, Man Ray, and Philippe Soupault were influenced by the work. The work concerns the misanthropic, misotheistic character of Maldoror, a figure of evil who has renounced conventional morality.Īlthough obscure at the time of its initial publication, Maldoror was rediscovered and championed by the Surrealist artists during the early twentieth century.

It was written and published between 18 by the Comte de Lautréamont, the nom de plume of the Uruguayan-born French writer Isidore Lucien Ducasse. Les Chants de Maldoror ( The Songs of Maldoror) is a French poetic novel, or a long prose poem.

Les Chants de Maldoror at French Wikisource

Maldoror and Poems by Comte de Lautréamont