Les Chants de Maldoror and their author are even more mysterious than Rimbaud and his poems. Very little is known. Jean-Jacques Lefrère has still been able to put together a thick biography (Isidore Ducasse - auteur des 'Chants de Maldoror, par le comte de Lautréamont', Fayard, 1998, 690p). His style, by moments, is very unpleasant ("le monsieur venu habiter la capitale"), with irritating easy punning. It is unfair to blame him for waiting until page 487 to ask: "Ducasse était-il homosexuel?". At least the question is there. Its frankness, though, masks a disappointing discussion.
Jean-Luc Steinmetz, in his recent excellent edition of Lautréamont in La Pléiade (Oeuvres complères, Lautréamont, Gallimard, 2009, 796p), does a better job.
The first half of the volume is dedicated to the complete works of Isidore Ducasse, the Montevideo-born author who published Les Chants under the name le comte de Lautréamont and died at 24 in Paris in 1870. In addition to Les Chants the works include Poésies I and Poésies II, as well as a few letters.
The second part of the volume, Lectures de Lautréamont, is a selection of the most significant papers published on Lautréamont since a brief review, signed Épistémon, appeared in the short-lived journal La Jeunesse in 1868, to an interview with Philippe Sollers in 1997. It is amazing that nowhere in these texts is discussed, even obliquely, the homosexual content of Les Chants. Yet, the references are clear and ubiquitous:
Steinmetz's short introduction and extensive notes shed a comprehensive light on what he describes as "une obsession, qui pour une part, semble avoir motivé l'écriture":
Isidore Ducasse was familiar with the places where homosexuals cruised in Paris:
And he had, clearly, read some of the medical books that began, by mid century, to be published on the topic of "pederasty and sodomy", in particular Ambroise Tardieu's Étude médico-légale sur les attentats aux moeurs (1857):
Bruno Guitard wrote, several years ago, an excellent paper decrypting Les Chants de Maldoror as a love song, love between boys (Tendresse de Lautréamont, revue Europe, août-septembre 1987, nº 700-701, 68-77). The paper, which is cited by Steinmetz, argues, convincingly that homosexuality is Les Chants's generator (it would have deserved to be included in Lectures de Lautréamont...). So, as Guitard,
2009.12.06
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