Comte de Lautréamont with the pseudonym,Isidore Lucien Ducasse was born 4 April 1846 and died 24 November 1870, an Uruguayan-born French poet.
Ducasse was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, to François Ducasse, a French consular officer and his wife, Jacquette-Célestine Davezac
. Very little is known about Isidore's childhood, except that he was baptized on 16 November 1847, in the cathedral of Montevideo and that his mother died soon afterwards, probably due to an epidemic. During 1851, as a five-year-old, he experienced the end of the eight-year siege of Montevideo in the Argentine-Uruguayan war. Ducasse was brought up to speak three languages: French, Spanish and English.
During October 1859, at the age of thirteen, Isidore was sent to high school in France by his father. He was trained in French education and technology at the Imperial Lycée in Tarbes. During 1863 he enrolled in the Lycée Louis Barthou in Pau, where he attended classes in rhetoric and philosophy (under and uppergreat). He excelled at arithmetic and drawing and showed extravagance in his thinking and style. Isidore was a reader of Edgar Allan Poe and particularly favored Percy Bysshe Shelley and Byron, as well as Adam Mickiewicz, Milton, Robert Southey, Alfred de Musset, and Baudelaire. During school he was fascinated by Racine and Corneille, and by the scene of the blinding in Sophocles' Oedipus the King. According to his schoolmate, Paul Lespès, he performed obvious folly "by self-indulgent use of adjectives and an accumulation of terrible death images" in an essay. After graduation he lived in Tarbes, where he started a friendship with Georges Dazet, the son of his guardian, and decided to become a writer.
Death
During spring 1869, Ducasse frequently changed his address, from Rue du Faubourg Montmartre 32 to Rue Vivienne 15, then back to Rue Faubourg Montmartre, where he lodged in a hotel at number 7. While still awaiting the distribution of his book, Ducasse worked on a new text, a follow-up to his "phenomenological description of evil", in which he wanted to sing of good. The two works would form a whole, a dichotomy of good and evil. The work, however, remained a fragment.
During April and June, 1870, Ducasse published the first two installments of what was obviously meant to be the preface to the planned "chants of the good" in two small brochures, Poésies I and II. This time he published by his real name, discarding his pseudonym. He differentiated the two parts of his work with the terms philosophy and poetry, announced that the beginning of a struggle against evil was the reversal of his other work:
I replace melancholy by courage, doubt by certainty, despair by hope, malice by good, complaints by duty, scepticism by faith, sophisms by cool equanimity and pride by modesty.
At the same time Ducasse took texts by famous authors and cleverly inverted, corrected and openly plagiarized for Poésies:
Plagiarism is necessary. It is implied in the idea of progress. It clasps the author's sentence tight, uses his expressions, eliminates a false idea, replaces it with the right idea.
Les Chants de Maldoror
Main article: Les Chants de Maldoror
Les Chants de Maldoror is based on a character called Maldoror, a figure of unrelenting evil who has forsaken God and mankind. The book combines a violent narrative with vivid and often surrealistic imagery.
The critic Alex De Jonge writes, "Lautreamont forces his readers to stop taking their world for granted. He shatters the complacent acceptance of the reality proposed by their cultural traditions and make them see that reality for what it is: an unreal nightmare all the more hair-raising because the sleeper believes he is awake." (De Jonge, p. 1)
There is a wealth of Lautréamont criticism, interpretation and analysis in French (including an esteemed biography by Jean-Jacques Lefrère), but little in English.
Lautréamont's writing has many bizarre scenes, vivid imagery and drastic shifts in tone and style. There is much "black humor"; De Jonge argues that Maldoror reads like "a sustained sick joke." (De Jonge, p. 55)
The Works Lautreamont
Les Chants de Maldoror - Chant premier, par ***, Imprimerie Balitout, Questroy et Cie, Paris, August 1868 (1st canto, published anonymously)
Les Chants de Maldoror - Chant premier, par Comte de Lautréamont, in: "Parfums de l'Ame" (Anthology, edited by Evariste Carrance), Bordeaux 1869 (1st canto, published under the pseudonym Comte de Lautréamont)
Les Chants de Maldoror, A. Lacroix, Verboeckhoven et Cie, Brussels 1869 (first complete edition, not delivered to the booksellers)
Poésies I, Librairie Gabrie, Balitout, Questroy et Cie, Paris 1870
Poésies II, Librairie Gabrie, Balitout, Questroy et Cie, Paris 1870
Les Chants de Maldoror, Typ. De E. Wittmann, Paris and Brussels 1874 (1869's complete edition, with new cover)
Les Chants de Maldoror, preface by Léon Genonceaux, with a letter by Lautréamont, Ed. Léon Genonceaux, 1890 (new edition)
Les Chants de Maldoror. with 65 illustrations by Frans De Geetere, Ed. Henri Blanchetièr, Paris 1927
Les Chants de Maldoror. with 42 illustrations by Salvador Dalí; Albert Skira Editeur, Paris 1934
Œuvres Complètes. with a preface by André Breton und illustrations by Victor Brauner, Óscar Domínguez, Max Ernst, Espinoza, René Magritte, André Masson, Joan Miró, Roberto Matta, Wolfgang Paalen, Man Ray, Kurt Seligmann and Yves Tanguy, G.L.M. (Guy Levis Mano), Paris 1938
Maldoror, with 27 illustrations by Jacques Houplain, Societe de Francs-Bibliophiles, Paris 1947
Les Chants de Maldoror. with 77 illustrations by René Magritte; Editions De "La Boetie", Brussels 1948
Œuvres complètes. Fac-similés des éditions originales. La Table Ronde, Paris 1970 (facsimiles of the original editions)
Œuvres complètes, based on the edition of 1938, with all historical prefaces by Léon Genonceaux (Édition Genouceaux, Paris 1890), Rémy de Gourmont (Édition de la Sirène, Paris 1921), Edmond Jaloux (Edition Librairie José Corti, Paris, April 1938), Philippe Soupault (Edition Charlot, Paris, 1946) Julien Gracq (La Jeune Parque, Paris 1947), Roger Caillois (Edition Librairie José Corti 1947), Maurice Blanchot (Édition du Club Français du Livre, Paris 1949), Edition Librairie José Corti, Paris .
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