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PARTISAN REVIEW
cessors as it was to drive his disciples. In all the literature of revolt
few books succeed in destroying so well as
M aldoror.
If
it were only
superficially shocking, cheaply sensational, it could be easily dis–
missed.
It
is certainly these things among others. But as a whole it
is a profoundly unsettling book. From its symphonic opening sentence
which warns off the innocent or casual reader, it follows the strategy
of outrage: the outrage of morality, which is Lautn!amont's peculiar
comedy; the outrage of nature, which is his peculiar violence; the
outrage of language, which is his peculiar rhetoric. A blend of
comedy, violence and rhetoric produces that bitter savor which only
a few, wrote Lautreamont, can taste without danger.
II
Les Chants de M aldoror
dramatize the existence of a hero
who is nominally committed to evil and whose record of assault and
murder provides the narrative pretext for most of its episodes. In the
phantasmagorical universe of which he is the center, Maldoror is
hostile to virtually everything: in his Machiavellian ravages of the
innocent few and the brutalized many among his fellow men he is
only a little less implacable than
in
his feud with an extraordinarily
disagreeable and anthropomorphic God. Some of the most sensa–
tional episodes which describe the forms of Maldoror's sadism are
repellent and disgusting; they contain passages which one does not
willingly reread. But Maldoror's sadism, and even the sadism of
these extreme episodes, is at least partly redeemed by a psycho–
logical denseness about him, a queer paradoxical ambivalence which
qualifies even the most brutal and forthright of his acts.
The first paradox in Maldoror's psychology is his moral con–
sciousness. All the events of his universe are charged with profound
ethical significance for him, and he seems to respond almost entirely
to ethical motives-to disgust for the brutality of God and man on
the one hand, to remorse for his own brutality on the other. His
sexual aggressions often seem motivated less by physical impulse
than by a fanatic will of almost Puritanical sternness and earnestness.
It is a kind of moral indignation, a perverted Calvinism, which turns
Maldoror away from God and man and drives him to seek the sin
which is absolutely unprovoked and hideous, the sin which is the
perfect crime.
