Surrealism starts here, in the slender output of the French poet Comte de Lautréamont, as one Isidore-Lucien Ducasse called himself. Nearly fifty years after his mysterious death in 1870 at the age of twenty-four—“no further information,” states the death certificate—the celebration of Ducasse’s work began. André Breton, Salvador Dalí, and Antonin Artaud thought it pointed the way to the future, never mind that it owed a lot to the past, especially Dante (see p. 11).
Here, as with William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin’s cut-up method, collisions of unlikely images create a friction of unexpected meanings. Ducasse’s most frequently quoted line—“As beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table”—anticipates the imagist opening of T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” as well as the lyrics to Bowie songs such as “Watch That Man,” where bleeding bodies on a screen are juxtaposed with a lemon in a bag playing the Tiger Rag.
A sequence of prose poems organized into six cantos, Les Chants de Maldoror is not for the fainthearted. In fact, its antihero embodies everything that would have terrified (and enthralled) Bowie in his days of cocaine psychosis. For Maldoror is part devil, part alien—and wholly evil. A cave-dwelling shape-shifter with a single eye in his furrowed green forehead, he presides with a leer over the entirety of human suffering. Oh, and he loves torturing young boys:
One should let one’s nails grow for a fortnight. O, how sweet it is to drag brutally from his bed a child with no hair on his upper lip and with wide open eyes, make as if to touch his forehead gently with one’s hand and run one’s fingers through his beautiful hair. Then suddenly, when he is least expecting it, to dig one’s long nails into his soft breast, making sure, though, that one does not kill him; for if he died, one would not later be able to contemplate his agonies. Then one drinks his blood as one licks his wounds; and during this time, which ought to last for eternity, the child weeps.
The concentration of emetic, Bosch-like images is overwhelming. The poem is strongly reminiscent of the sequence in The Man Who Sold the World’s “The Width of a Circle,” in which the protagonist is raped by a devilish, swollen-tongued monster. It may also have fed into 1.Outside’s vague narrative about the art-ritual murder of Baby Grace Blue.