We're discoverers who have only a vague idea of the direction we're heading in - Restless writers

Of which I am one, sitting in a library, dithering, restlessly thinking about restlessness, not an activity that leads to repose or, I fear, clear thinking.

That title is from the very end of Roberto Arlt’s Seven Madmen (1929), a novel that is as jittery as they come.  No one in the novel can sit still, although they can be drugged or stunned or clubbed on the head.  Everyone is full of schemes – inventions, secret societies, plans to conquer Argentina with brothels and poison gas (the brothels will finance the poison gas), the usual.  Everyone is more or less nuts, as the title warns, but insanity is insufficient.  Everyone is restless, including, most importantly, the author, who flits about, unwilling to stitch all of his pieces together.

So many of the early proto- or pre-Modernists are preternaturally restless.  I mean something other than energetic.  Honoré de Balzac or Anthony Trollope obviously had reserves of energy that stagger me, but they could plant themselves at their desks and write.  Charles Baudelaire wrote plenty, really, but his restlessness is part of his art.  He must have sat still often enough, but the rest of the time, he’s out in Paris, wandering about, with no purpose other than being there.

The protagonist of Arlt’s Mad Toy (1926) names two personal heroes, the men he wants to be when he grows up: Charles Baudelaire and Rocambole, a fictional bandit and adventurer.  Isidore Ducasse emulated Baudelaire, and in Maldoror (1869) also invokes Rocambole, as a sort of heroic evil-doer.  Arlt can’t have known Ducasse, can he?  Ah, who cares.

I suspect that part of what we find modern in characters like Don Quixote, or Hamlet, or Moll Flanders, is their restlessness, their dissatisfaction with the world as it is, and their psychological need for change.  I wonder how to link the idea to Modernism, though.  It was Dante, after all, in the 14th century, who sent Odysseus off on one final adventure.  Perhaps the difference in the 19th century is the pace of change, the certainty that the world is shifting out from under our feet. 

Arlt is a real Buenos Aires writer, just as Baudelaire and Ducasse were Paris writers. Not that urbanism explains everything.  Who was more of a city writer than Charles Dickens, and who was more energetic?  But his novels generally end with the promise of rest, a new steady state.

All I have done here is wander into Pascal’s insight that “all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber.”*  Pascal got that right.  And now, somehow, I was quiet enough, and still enough, to have written something, and will restlessly move on.  For the next few weeks, healthful and pure books, exclusively.

* p. 48, Modern Library edition, 1941, trans. W. F. Trotter.

We do not have the right to question the Creator on anything whatsoever - the contradictory Isidore Ducasse

Reviewing what I wrote yesterday, a mistake at the best of times, I see I left something out.

A young man writes a book in which he argues with God, accusing him of cruelty.  He includes all sorts of outrageous and shocking things, demonstrating his courage and independence.  Now, this had happened before, and has happened since.  Why, then, do I wonder about what Isidore Ducasse actually means in Les Chants de Maldoror?  Why not: "he means what he says"?

Well, Ducasse says many things:

If one recalls the truth whence all the others flow, God’s absolute goodness and his absolute ignorance of evil, sophisms will collapse of their own accord.  At the same time there shall collapse the rather unpoetic literature which relied upon them.  All literature which debates the eternal axioms is condemned to live only off itself.  It is unjust.  It devours its liver.  The novissima Verba make the snotty third-formers smile haughtily.  We do not have the right to question the Creator on anything whatsoever. (49)

This is from Canto I of Poésies (1870), Ducasse’s second and final book.  Poésies, whatever one might gather from the title, is a collection of aphorisms, many of them plagiarized, and often subtly modified, from Blaise Pascal or one of the other great French aphorists.  (“Plagiarism is necessary.  Progress implies it.” (67))

So we now have the Ducasse of Poésies directly contradicting, and perhaps even condemning, the Ducasse of Maldoror, which, I remind myself, was supposedly authored by the Comte de Lautréamont.  Perhaps in the months between the two books, Ducasse had some sort of conversion experience, but I doubt it.  The real ideas of Ducasse are, I suspect, conceptual rather than philosophical.  The truth lies in combining the two books, perhaps with another book or two that is now, with the early death of Ducasse, purely imaginary.

Penguin Classics helpfully publishes both Ducasse books in one volume, but I am using the admirable translations of Alexis Lykiard, this time from his little edition of Poésies.  The book also includes the letters of Ducasse, some reminiscences by school chums, and, amusingly, Lykiard’s corrections to his translation of Maldoror! Here’s my favorite:

Page 174, line 32: delete crusty

No, this is my favorite:

Page 209, line 1: For fulgorous glow read lantern

The whole grind and saponification of ordinary metaphors.

I wish I knew what that means.  “Saponification” is related to the process of making soap.  Please see page 185 of Alexis Lykiard’s translation of the Maldoror of Isidore Ducasse for the full context.  No, I’ll tell you.

The commodore is reading a travel book to Mervyn, a student.  He, the commodore, wants his children to “learn to perfect the pattern of your style and to be alive to an author’s least intentions.”  But Mervyn is beyond learning, “finding it no longer possible to follow the reasoned development of sentences going through the whole grind and saponification of obligatory metaphors.”

What were this author’s least intentions?  So far this week, I have been calling the author the Comte de Lautréamont, but that was a pseudonym, apparently a character from a Eugéne Sue novel.  Isidore Ducasse was not a count but a punk kid, twenty-two or twenty-three while writing the self-published Les Chants de Maldoror.  He wrote one more pamphlet, Poésies (1870), also self-published, which I’ll to say something about tomorrow.  Then, poor fellow, he died during the Siege of Paris, of some combination, presumably, of malnutrition and disease.  Careful record-keeping was not the highest priority during the Siege.  His works were mentioned exactly once in a newspaper and then vanishd before their freakish rediscovery by a Surrealist.

So I don’t know what he intended.  Canto 3 contains an extended section in which the narrator, visiting a brothel, peeks into a room to see a giant ambulatory hair.  The hair tells its story.  Ducasse uses a refrain again, making the “poem” in the prose poem explicit:

And I wondered who his master might be! And I glued my eye to the grating still more eagerly!

The hair is disgusted by his owner.  He describes (tamely, for this book) his master’s coupling with a prostitute, all pain and degradation and membranes and armpits.  His master takes flight “with the wings which he had hitherto hidden under his emerald robe” (105).  I, the reader, had already expected something like this, so I was not too surprised when God himself returns to recover his lost hair.

This scene is about eleven pages long, so substantial, and varied, and plenty crazy.  I was eager enough, early on, to dismiss Ducasse as crazy, but the scene – most of Maldoror – is simply too written, too packed with unsaponified, non-obligatory metaphor.  There was a writer at work here.  What he would have given us without Baudelaire’s hard-fought innovations, I cannot guess, but Ducasse was truly receptive and conceptually pure, ready to move forward, whether or not he had a single reader.  Forward to – where?  I know, I know.  Meaning, I don’t know.

Children drive the crone off with volleys of stones as if she were a crow

Le Comte de Lautréamont’s literary Satanism was old hat by 1868, when the first canto of Les Chants de Maldoror was published as a pamphlet.  The fifteenth century poet and thief François Villon comes first, followed by a marvelous parade of hedonists and heathens, many of them absolutely central to French literature, like Rabelais and Voltaire, and some, like the Marquis de Sade and Nicholas Restif de la Bretonne writing in the margins.

I mentioned in the comments yesterday that I found only one piece of Maldoror genuinely horrible, the long scene in Canto Three in which a mother tells us about the murder of her eight year old daughter.  The story also involves bestiality and vivisection.  It’s pretty rough.  Warning to those who want to be warned (about the book, no this post, where the worst is behind us).  Sensibilities will vary.

My understanding, which I do not want to confirm firsthand, is that Sade’s books are filled with shocking (or “shocking”) business of this sort, and here I suspect that Lautréamont is indulging in a Sadean scene.  Arthur Machen wanted to vaguely suggest evil.  Lautréamont goes ahead and shows it, convincingly, within the limits of prose fiction.  Meaning, it’s a terrible scene, and not necessarily much of a piece of writing, but it has a function in the book – Maldoror is not simply decadent, but evil – and is, after all, made up.

And even in this scene, Lautréamont builds in a lot of distance.  It begins rather differently:

Here comes the madwoman, dancing, while she dimly remembers something. Children drive the crone off with volleys of stones as if she were a crow. She brandishes a stick and looks like chasing them, then sets off again on her way. She has left a shoe behind and of this she remains unaware. (90-1)

The line about the children is soon repeated, word for word.  She drops a scroll.  An “unknown person” reads it later, locked in his room.  That’s where the murderous story appears, a story within a story in this text made of texts.  The reader, who may be the murderer, or may have dreamed or imagined the crime, burns the scroll.  And then, for the third time, “Children drive the crone off with volleys of stones as if she were a crow” (95).

The refrain is a reminder that Maldoror is in part a prose poem.  I doubt any of this would exist without the example of Charles Baudelaire, whose Paris Spleen had appeared by 1862, more or less.  “Let’s Beat Up the Poor!” Baudelaire cries, clubbing a beggar with a tree branch.  How seriously is one meant to take this? Lautréamont is working the same vein, whatever it is.  And, as I leaf through Paris Spleen, I am reminded that nothing Lautréamont wrote is as disturbing as the Baudelaire “poem” “The Rope.”  Not to me.

Yesterday, I was bibliographically negligent.  All quotations from Maldoror, translated by Alexis Lykiard, Allison & Busby, 1970.  In a footnote, Lykiard tells me that the crow up above should really be a blackbird (merle), “my one and only liberty with the text” (208).

How astonished he was to see Maldoror, changed into an octopus - the startling Comte de Lautréamont

I received life like a wound, and I have forbidden suicide to heal the scar.  I want the Creator – every hour of his eternity – to contemplate its gaping crevasse.  This is the punishment I inflict on him. (90)

I’m continuing last week’s Satanic theme, where the reader encountered the devil in person in James Hogg’s slippery novel, and heard rumors of the devil in Arthur Machen’s silly story.  I do not believe that the devil gets more than a nod in Les Chants de Maldoror (1869) by Le Comte de Lautréamont, but the novel or prose poem is genuinely Satanic, a sustained, brilliant, insane attack on God.  Not God as a concept, which is taken for granted, but God as an existing being, or perhaps a character.

I am pretty sure that the intellectual content of Maldoror is standard reverse theodicy, or whatever the right term is.  Rather than justify the existence of evil in the face of God’s omnipotence, Lautréamont and his stand-in Maldoror blame God for all evil, and thereby embrace evil as the proper means of worshipping God.  Or of attacking God, which, by Satanic logic, might be the same thing.  By the time he was writing, this was a long French literary tradition.

So the malodorous Maldoror spends his time, just as example, mocking the victims of shipwrecks as they try to reach shore, a form of evil stolen directly from Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820).  Since mocking is insufficiently evil, Maldoror begins shooting the swimmers.  “From this murder I did not receive as much pleasure as one might think” (75), so something more is necessary.  And thus, Maldoror leaps into the sea in order to copulate with a giant female shark:

A pair of sinewy thighs clung to the monster’s viscous skin, close as leeches; and arms and fins entwined about the loved one’s body, surrounded it with love, while throats and breasts soon fused into a glaucous mass reeking of sea-wrack.  In the midst of the tempest that continued raging.  By lightning’s light…  At last I had found someone who resembled me! (77-8)

The book is governed by images of sea creatures (and birds) which culminates in Maldoror transforming into a giant octopus and attempting to consume God himself:

How astonished he was to see Maldoror, changed into an octopus, clamp eight monstrous tentacles about his body: any one of these strong thongs could easily have spanned the circumference of a planet.  Caught off guard, he struggled for several moments against this viscous embrace which was contracting more and more… (82, ellipses in original)

Almost halfway through Les Chants de Maldoror, I should have been prepared, but I, too, was astonished and caught off guard.  Every five or ten pages, I was caught off guard, like the chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella, which is, of course, why I was reading the book in the first place.

Richard of Caravanas de Recuerdos suggested that I spent a month on Lautréamont, but in fear for my soul, health, and sanity, I doubt I’ll write about him for even a week.  I could, though.  Holding a head whose skull I gnawed, I could.

Help, help, it's the Great God Pan! - a glance at Arthur Machen

I’ve been spending too much time reading about the devil.  I was right there with him in The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner and Paradise Lost.  He’s not exactly present in Les Chants du Maldoror by the Comte de Lautréamont, but still – well, that one’s complicated.  Next week.

Then there’s the longish short story “The Great God Pan” (1895) by Arthur Machen.  Experimental brain surgery summons Pan, or the devil, or primal forces, or something.  Pan takes the form of an English woman, albeit an English woman from Argentina, who drives men to despair and suicide by, I guess, unveiling her primal forces.

It [the Great God Pan] was, indeed, an exquisite symbol beneath which men long ago veiled their knowledge of the most awful, most secret forces which lie at the heart of all things; forces before which the souls of men must wither and die and blacken, as their bodies blacken under the electric current.  Such forces cannot be names, cannot be spoken, cannot be imagined except under a veil and symbol, a symbol to the most of us appearing a quaint, poetic fancy, to some a foolish tale. (107)

Now, and this is perhaps because I’ve been reading Lautréamont and Milton and so on, but this seemed pretty thin.  What I mean is, I have been reading stories in which the writers do imagine or describe the secret forces and sickening evils and so on, and describe them plausibly.  A bit earlier in this story, a character tracking the evil devil woman says that his informant “shuddered and grew sick in telling me of the nameless infamies which were laid to her charge.”  I could only, think, try me.  I can handle it.  I bet I’ve heard worse.  I bet I just read worse in Les Chants de Maldoror.  I know I did.

So this is a typical horror story trick, not actually telling us what’s so horrifying but just letting us sort of see the shadow of the horror.  H. P. Lovecraft perfected the technique, perhaps through the repetition of weird names and books of forgotten lore and such.  Or perhaps he was just a better writer than Machen.  As an example, Machen has this strange tic of insisting that his characters say goodbye or good night to each other at the end of scenes.  Dead words; drove me nuts.  Still, this story is a must for readers in search of Lovecraft Before Lovecraft, and it was a curious sexist variation on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886).

I read “The Great God Pan” in Arthur Machen, Tales of Horror and the Supernatural, The Richards Press, 1949.  If you tell me there are better stories in this book, I’ll believe you, and if you say there aren’t, I’ll believe that, too.

I read this story for the Welsh Reading Challenge, so that’s that.  Thanks to The Kool-Aid Mom for sparking my curiosity.