538
PARTISAN REVIEW
The result of the stylistic illogicality is to destroy the metaphor
itself. The Romantic irony which questions the seriousness of the
whole book, page by page, is turned back on the language to ques–
tion
it.
If
a character is described as beautiful, as
beau,
we are regu–
larly given an imagistic equivalent,
beau comme
...
Beautiful as
what?
« ••.
beau comme la rencontre fortuite sur une table de dis–
section d'une machine
a
coudre et d'un parapluie."
Such an image
already points straight to surrealism. The
beau commes
appear more
and more frequently toward the end of the book and become ritual–
istic; they are frequently piled one upon another with a kind of
lavish virtuosity. Ultimately they constitute an attempt to realize
an absolute ugliness just as Maldoror's aggressions attempt to realize
the perfect crime.
The
beau commes
imply, as I have said, the destruction of the
metaphor and of all figurative language. It
is
easy to see why. There
is
a balance in any metaphor between the logical and illogical, be–
tween the properties of tenor and vehicle which coincide and those
which do not. In
M aldoror
the non-coincident properties dwindle to
near zero. Lautreamont's game
is
to keep the elements in this second
class as tiny as possible without allowing them to disappear. When
he succeeds he
is
very good. But there are many instances in which
he chooses to fail, instances where the coincident elements disappear
and the non-coincident or illogical elements assume an autonomy
which is to all practical purposes absolute.
If
you ask what these
figures are doing in the text, you can only conclude that they con–
stitute a kind of literary criticism, a destructive commentary on the
rest of poetry.
But to conclude with this would do injustice to the brilliance
of logical compression which the apparent illogic of
M aldoror's
style occasionally attains. This brilliance merits a last example. Stand–
ing by the sea one evening, Maldoror hales a strange creature in the
water-half man, half fish. The monster relates to Maldoror the
instances of human cruelty which have driven him, a normal human
being, to flee society and to live in the sea where his physiological
transformation has taken place. Before he begins his recital he pauses
an instant to summon his recollections. Lautreamont describes this
pause as follows:
L'ampliibie n'osa pas trop s'avancer jusqu'au rivage; mais des
qu'il se fut assure que sa voix pawenait assez distinctement jusqu'
a
mon
