536
PARTISAN REVIEW
such a way as to blend the mechanism of legend with the mechanism
of a dream. The walk which begins as a stroll through an exhilarating
and odorant Moorish landscape modulates with brilliant detail to a
furtive, exhausting and nocturnal trek across a mystifying wilderness.
The landscape changes, light falls from the sky, joy yields to terror
with the frightening swiftness and illogic of dream progression.
This audacity of illogical juxtaposition is marked throughout
the book. The magical phenomena which do violence to physical laws
also do violence to each other from page to page, and similarly the
atmosphere and decor of the action vary qualitatively. The decors
are drawn alike from the common daylit streets of Paris and from
the most Dantesque phantasmagorical scenery of pure imagination.
The effect of Lautreamont's heterogeneity is something like the effect
of a surrealist film: the distance shot of a recognizable landscape
may give way to a focus on a mystifying detail, or conversely in–
terest in the close-up may delay the irrelevant backdrop from loom–
ing out of the vagueness. What holds all this material together is the
formal stylization which Lautreamont imposes on it, a stylization
which is the product of a very individual and cohesive sensibility.
It is impossible to read even the most sophomoric pages of
A1aldoror
without recognizing the distinctive imagination behind them.
Within this stylization the most unnerving violence has to be as–
similated-the copulation with a shark, the penknife rape of a little
girl, the flagellation of a man hung by his hair. As I have admitted,
some of this violence functions in the book only to shock and to
disgust. But in other cases, and particularly in certain episodes of
the latter half of the book, the violence is realized without shock, so
that it finds an integrity and integration in Lautreamont's grotesque
but coherent universe. In these episodes the stylization imposed by
the poet's vision seems to demand violence and to contain it natural–
ly. I am thinking of the Kafkaesque story, among others, in which a
man is metamorphosed by a sorceress into a beetle. In this episode
and others like it there is so little an attempt at the obvious facile
scandale
that some passages make heavy reading; the style becomes
plodding and ponderous, in imitation of the weight of time itself
in this universe. When such an assimilation of violence to stylization
is achieved, we have the right, I think, to be impressed; the artistic
control which Lautreamont wins on occasion over his material–
repellent, incongruous and extravagant as it is-is the kind of victory
