THE RELEVANCE OF LAUTREAMONT
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In his awareness of innocence, in his protest against authority
and in the solitude of his individualism, Maldoror embodies most of
the tenets of Romantic morality. The influence of the Satan of
Milton, whom we know Lautreamont to have read, and probably
of Mary Shelley's monster in
Frankenstein,
which he would seem to
have read from internal evidence, played roles in the conception of
Maldoror, but by far his most direct ancestor was the Byronic hero
as typified by Lara, Cain, Manfred and the Corsair. Lautreamont
mentions each of these characters at various points in the
Poisies,
and in
M aldoror
he borrowed feelings and attitudes they all em–
body-the nervous fatigue, the sense of isolation, the thirst for the
superhuman with its concomitant frustration. Byron had written in
Lara:
Too high for common selfishness, he could
At times resign his own for others' good,
But not in pity, not because he ought,
But in some strange perversity of thought,
That sway'd him onward with a secret pride
To do what few or none would do beside;
And this same impulse would, in tempting time,
Mislead his spirit eijuaUy to crime;
So much he soar'd beyond, or sunk beneath
The men with whom he felt condemn'd to breathe,
A nd long'd by good or ill to separate
Himself from all who shar'd his mortal state.
This becomes in Lautreamont:
Belas! qu'est-ce done que le bien et le mal? Est-ce une meme
chose par laqueUe nous temoignons avec rage notre impuissance, et la
passion d'atteindre
a
l'infini par les moyens meme les plus insenses?
Maldoror's insensate rage for cruelty and suffering is a kind of
misdirected aspiration for the infinite.
The urge "by good or ill to separate himself" from those who
share his mortal state underlies most of Maldoror's behavior. The
very fact of his humanity is in doubt throughout the book; some–
times he would seem to belong to the class of sinister, demonic, in–
vulnerable personages who people Romantic literature from Maturin's
