THE RELEVANCE OF LAUTREAMONT
529
This might have been written of Lautreamont; it is only necessary
to add that Lautreamont's "few or slender experiences" were prob–
ably composed in large part by the reading of Romantic literature–
in particular Poe, Byron, Baudelaire, the Gothic novelists, and their
imitators. It does not seem coincidental that Lautreamont, like the
Tourneur surmised by Eliot, was young; his youthful intensity ap–
pears to have ridden his talent and his misanthropy to produce
a book whose virtues, whatever its faults, might have been unattain–
able by a maturer man.
It is precisely because he was young that Lautreamont's voraci–
ous reading of the Romantics influenced him as strongly as it did.
His relationship to the Romantic movement has tended to be blurred
in France by the emphasis on his relationship to Surrealism, and
yet
M aldoror
points backward as well as forward. Many passages
seem at first reading uninspired reworkings of hackneyed Romantic
material. But even in these passages the tone betrays itself with a
pomposity or absurdity that turns the Romantic ardor into bathos.
At this stage one concludes that the whole book is an enormous
piece of Romantic irony. But this conclusion is not really accurate
either. The truth might be better stated by saying that
M aldoror
assumes the full responsibility for attitudes which many romantics
only play at; it pushes Romantic ideas and Romantic poses to their
extremes. Sometimes it pushes them into absurdity, sometimes into
ugliness, sometimes into a kind of splendor. It pushes Romantic
irony to
its
extreme, to the point that the seriousness of a situation
is always jeopardized without being destroyed. Ultimately the ques–
tion of a given passage's seriousness is unanswerable.
In this sense
M aldoror
is rather a book about Romantic litera–
ture than a book about "life," and as such it is an extremely il–
luminating study. It may be that you could understand Byron better
by reading
M aldoror,
where his name is never mentioned, than by
reading any number of
critic~l
or biographical analyses. On a
conscious level Lautreamont may have read Byron superficially and
imperceptively, but as a writer he produced a searching anatomy of
Byron's role and his poetry.
Perhaps because of this integrity, this fidelity to the responsi–
bilities of Romanticism, Lautreamont succeeded in realizing the de–
structive impulse which had driven and misdriven his literary prede-
