Lautreamont Nomad

by Mark Polizzotti

Isidore Ducasse, the self-styled Comte de Lautreamont (1846-1870), born of French parents in Montevideo, moved to Paris in 1859 and published the earliest installments of his legendary prose poem, The Cantos of Maldoror, in 1868. The complete text of this book and of the mysterious Poesies were published after Lautreamonts premature, mysterious death in a hotel on Rue du Faubourg-Montmartre. The influence of his work on modern French poetry, and in particular on the origins of Surrealism, were profound, and have been celebrated by figures as diverse as Andre Breton, Valery Larbaud, and Henry Miller. Lautreamont remains the prophet of liberated poetry. A forerunner of Surrealism and psychoanalysis, his brief opus allows us to glimpse the mind of a tormented and imperfect writer, possessed by genius, who, influenced by the gothic, macabre visions of Milton, Byron, Poe, and Mathurin, fashioned a sublime nightmare. As Mark Polizzotti convincingly demonstates, the a! im of this nightmare was nothing less than to force an entry into the dawn of total consciousness. But reader just as we begin to make sense of Maldorors startling imagery, to entrap Lautreamont into a system of meaning, the enigma is renewed by the apparent about-face of the Poesies, a series of aphorisms that revisit and correct the great French moral philosophers. In Lautreamont Nomad , Polizzotti provides English-speaking readers with the ideal introduction to the works of Isidore Ducasse. He explores the life, ideas, themes, and style of this writer of miraculous prose and renders him accessible to the general reader. In these pages, we begin to glimpse the heart of this most solitary and mysterious of writers, one whose power and opacity remain intact more than a century after his death.

80 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1994

About the author

Mark Polizzotti has translated more than fifty books, including works by Patrick Modiano, Gustave Flaubert, Raymond Roussel, Marguerite Duras, and Paul Virilio. Publisher and Editor-in-Chief at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he is also the author of Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton and other books. He currently directs the publications program at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Reviews

[Eddie Watkins · Rating 3 out of 5]

Physically lovely little book that includes the only photo of the long-legged mystery man, but great chunks of it read too much like a grad thesis with a too-small sampling of sources - an undigested meal of she-shark with spider gravy.

But I liked Ducasse as "writing machine" and the analysis of the triumvirate of identities involved in the writing and the writing's ultimate erasure of identity, and esp liked the emphasis on writing as intensity

"For the lucidity so coveted by Lautreamont is not one of analysis, but of intensity, a lucidity that often stands analysis on its ear."

which is more than likely from Deleuze though, or Nietzsche through Deleuze. Anyway, logic can rim Maldoror's dark celestial anus.

[Tosh]

i want to read this book! Who has it in their collection?