THE RELEVANCE OF LAUTREAMONT
537
common to the most gifted creative imaginations, to Dante and to
Joyce and not to many others.
IV
The stylization of
M
aldOTOT
is
due in part to the texture of
the language itself. The language imposes itself upon the reader's
consciousness with an insistence typical of poetry rather than prose,
and there can be no doubt that the book as a whole has to be de–
scribed as a prose poem. There are kinds of eccentricities and audaci–
ties which simple prose cannot contain.
I have mentioned above the dense convoluted passages which
mimic scientific jargon. Many of the stylistic liberties in
M
aldoror
seem to take off from this same starting-place-the satire of aca–
demic inflexibility. We know from the testimony of his classmates
that Isidore Ducasse w.as particularly exasperated by the pedantry of
his
lycee
professors, and the satire in
M
aldoror
may well derive from
this biographical source. But in the poem pedantry is blown up to
something more significant than the pettiness of a provincial class–
room; it becomes a pervasive rigidity and clumsiness which obstructs
thought and speech. Stylistically it assumes a kind of preciosity or
periphrasis; thus a request to kneel becomes:
((Inclinez La binariM
de vos rotules vers la terre."
But parallel to this kind of device there
is an excess of specificity which also mimics in its way the language
of SCIence.
L'homme
...
vit dans l'eau, comme l'hippocampe;
a
travers les
couches superieures de l'air, comme l'orfraie; et sous la terre, comme
la taupe, le cloporte et la sublimite du
vermiceau.~
Here
hippocampe
replaces
poisson
and
orfraie
replaces
oiseau.
These
examples may seem mild enough. But they are important to notice
because they show how the full-blown surrealism of other images is
rooted in a parody of logic, an excess of intellectual rigor-in Lautre–
amont's phrase, a
((tension d'esprit."
It is the same excess of logic
which leads Maldoror to widen his mouth with a knife to force a
smile.
4 Man lives in water like the sea-horse; in the upper layers of the at–
mosphere like the osprey; and under the ground like the mole, the woodlouse
and the sublimity of the earthworm.
