Comte de Lautréamont (Isidore Ducasse)
French Poet
Montevideo, Uruguay
Paris, France
Summary of Comte de Lautréamont (Isidore Ducasse)
Isidore Ducasse, or Comte de Lautréamont as he is equally well known, is a major influence on twentieth century art and literature. He published just two works, Les Chants de Maldoror (The Songs of Maldoror), under the pseudonym, Lautréamont, and Poésies I and II (Poems I and II), under his birth name, Ducasse, before his death aged just 24. These two works, which challenged, amongst other things, societal and religious orthodoxies, would have a profound impact on the Symbolist and Decadent movements, the Surrealists and, specifically in the case of Poésies, the radical Situationist International (SI) group. However, the poet’s two volumes differed markedly in tone. Maldoror was a darkly misanthropic prose poem strewn with incongruous juxtapositions, whereas Poésies amounted to an audacious commentary on literature and poetry that made a virtue of plagiarizing the words of existing authors (some of the stature of Victor Hugo and Edgar Allen Poe). While the incongruous wordplay of Maldoror offered the Surrealists a literary precedent for it pictorial juxtapositions, Poésies, with its collection of more subversive aphorisms and maxims, was of special significance to the SI movement.
Accomplishments
- Lautréamont is best known amongst the Surrealists, for his incongruous and playful “beau … comme” (“beautiful … as”) similes. The most cited of these was his description of “the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella”. Such visions fed directly into the restless Surrealist imagination and its mission to overrule the rational mind.
- The Surrealists placed Lautréamont in the esteemed company of Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud. The poet had been dead for nearly half a century before being effectively canonized by André Breton, who stated in the movement’s manifesto, "with Les Chants de Maldoror Surrealism was born”.
- Ducasse's Poésies had a profound influence on the thinking of Guy Debord, the leader of the Situationists International (SI) movement. Debord praised Ducasse as the "forefather" of “détournement”, the name Debord gave to the practice of appropriating preexisting texts and images as a means of destabilizing their original meaning. Debord promoted this practice as an act of great resistance against bourgeois convention.
- While he remains chiefly associated with twentieth century art and literature, Lautréamont’s influence has been carried into the new millennium by artists including Mike Kelley, Julien Nguyen, and Kye Christensen-Knowles. Through their preference for, respectively, “inappropriate metaphors”, incredulous dream imagery blended with classical epic poetry, and macabre and grotesque hybrid figures, all three have helped keep alive Ducasse’s blasphemous, perverse, and rebelliously humorous legacy.
The Life of Comte de Lautréamont (Isidore Ducasse)
André Breton called Les Chants de Maldoror "the expression of a total revelation which seems to exceed human possibility".
Comte de Lautréamont (Isidore Ducasse) and Important Artists and Artworks
L’Enigme d’Isidore Ducasse (The Enigma of Isidore Ducasse), (1920, remade 1972)
In the first Manifesto of Surrealism (1924), André Breton went so far as to proclaim that "with Les Chants de Maldoror Surrealism was born". For his sculpture, L'Enigme d'Isidore Ducasse, Man Ray wrapped a sewing machine in a horse blanket and secured it with tied string (thereby concealing its identity and transforming it into an enigmatic object). Man Ray made the object with the express purpose of photographing it. That photograph would then appear in Breton's introduction to the manifesto.
Scholar Shane McCorristine points out that any understanding of this work requires familiarity with Maldoror, and particularly its “beau…comme” (“beautiful as”) similes. These comparisons, scattered throughout the text, describe beauty in bizarre, and sometimes unsettling, ways: “He is as beautiful as the retractability of a raptor’s talons; or, indeed, as the uncertainty of muscular movements in wounds of the soft tissues of the posterior cervical region; or rather, as that perpetual rat trap, continually reset by the captured animal, capable of catching rodents indefinitely and functioning even when hidden under straw; and above all, as the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella”. It is this last simile, with its juxtaposition of unrelated objects, that directly inspired Man Ray’s piece.
The artist, and indeed the Surrealists as a group, was/were particularly fascinated by this idea of unexpected combinations and incongruous juxtapositions. By wrapping and obscuring the sewing machine, Man Ray found a way to recreate the tension between recognition and mystery found in Lautréamont’s original descriptions. As Man Ray acknowledged, “Lautréamont gave me the stimulus to do things I was not supposed to do”.
Sewing machine, wool, and string - Tate, London
Untitled (Composition with Skeleton Figure) (1934)
In the early 1930s, Pablo Picasso recommended Dalí to the Swiss publisher Albert Skira who was looking for an artist to provide illustrations for a new edition of Les Chants de Maldoror. Dalí came up with a series of forty-four intaglio prints (where the image is carved into a metal plate) for the book. The Spaniard called his working method "paranoiac-critical", defined by the artist as a “spontaneous method of irrational knowledge”. Dalí elicited associations with Lautréamont’s prose rather than provide literal illustrations of the text. Peter Tush, curator of the Salvador Dalí Museum in Florida referred to the collection as Dalí’s “earliest and most important graphic works”, and singled out Untitled (Composition with Skeleton Figure) as “one of the artist’s finest book illustrations”.
Here Dalí’s composition shows a skeletal figure that contorts into a distorted form set against the backdrop of a barren and inhospitable landscape. The imagery draws from two primary sources: anatomical illustrations from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, prized by Surrealists for their eerie beauty, and Pablo Picasso’s sculptural “bone” drawings and paintings from the late 1920s and early 1930s. Dalí’s figure appears simultaneously rigid and fluid, decaying and mutating in an unnatural way, while sinuous, organic forms contrast with brittle and crumbling bones. These disturbing juxtapositions are perfectly in keeping with the novel’s themes of grotesque and violent transformation. Dalí’s illustrations for Maldoror remain among his most revered graphic works. They have been showcased in major events, including Salvador Dalí’s Stairway to Heaven, a touring exhibition of 140 works, beginning in 2018, that brought together his portfolio of illustrations for Maldoror, and Dante’s, The Divine Comedy (Dalí had supplied illustrations for a 1960 edition of the latter).
Work on paper - National Galleries, Scotland
Œuvres complètes (Comte de Lautréamont, Complete Works) (1938)
Lautréamont’s work had been published as new editions even pre-dating Dalí’s involvement with the Albert Skira edition of 1934. For example, a highly prized English translation, The Lay of Maldoror, by the luxury books speacialists The Casanova Society (established by modernist writer John Rodker two years earlier), was published in 1924. A collection of spectacular macabre monochromatic lithographs (such as disturbing hybrid human and animal creatures) by the French Symbolist Odilon Redon were used posthumously (Redon had died in 1916) to illustrate the Casanova publication. However, there is general consensus amongst collectors that the definitive illustrated collection of Lautréamont/Ducasse’s work is, Comte de Lautréamont, Œuvres complètes (Complete Works), published by Guy Lévis Mano (GLM) in 1938.
André Breton had declared as early as 1918 that Maldoror had had "the effect of an earthquake" on him, and that Lautréamont could take his place on the podium of "absolute Surrealists”. Breton had published excerpts from Poésies, in Littérature journal in 1919, and the following year, he wrote a long article in Nouvelle Revue Française following a new edition of Maldoror by Éditions de la Sirène (with an introduction by the Symbolist poet and novelist Remy de Gourmont). But it was Œuvres complètes (Complete Works) that would provide the benchmark in Surrealist publications. The book, containing Maldoror, Poésies I and II, and selected letters, features an introduction by Breton and original illustrations by 12 artists. The artist rollcall reads like a “who’s who” of the movement: Max Ernst, René Magritte, André Masson, Roberto Matta, Joan Miró, Man Ray, Kurt Seligmann, Yves Tanguy, Wolfgang Paalen, Espinoza, Oscar Domínguez, and Victor Brauner.
Historian Andrea S. Thomas has noted that the GLM edition excludes Dalí (already a great champion of Lautréamont) on grounds of Breton’s objections to Dalí’s stated support for fascism (Breton debarred him from the movement in 1939). She writes, the GLM edition “testifies to final endorsements of surrealism. It displays within one volume surrealism’s internal polemics, relationship to visual language, possessive appropriation of Lautréamont, and perpetuation of Lautréamont as the forefather of automatic writing and similar techniques in literature”. The specialist European book dealer The Hidden Page called the book “A rare, exemplary cross-pollination of nineteenth-century furor and twentieth-century avant-garde. […] Surrealist contributions act associatively rather than illustratively, a visual counter-chant to the verbal eruptions. The result is a polyphonic reading where canon and experiment meet”.
Guy Lévis Mano (GLM) edition
Illustration 2, Les Chant De Maldoror (1948)
By the time he was commissioned by the Belgian publisher Éditions La Boétieto to illustrate a new edition of Les Chant De Maldoror, René Magritte had built a reputation for creating eccentric and thought-provoking images. Like others in the Surrealist movement, he was given, like Lautréamont before them, to placing ordinary objects in unusual contexts. And like so many associated with the Surrealist movement, Magritte was very well acquainted with Maldoror. The Belgian provided thirteen full-page illustrations for a 1948 edition of the book, one of which, Illustration 2, was a depiction of a fish with human legs, sat on a rock by the sea, as a small ship is tossed about on the waves in the distance. However, unlike Dalí’s "paranoiac-critical" method, in which the Spaniard evoked associations with Lautréamont’s prose, Magritte’s illustration might be read as a more literal illustration of the text.
For Lautréamont, the ocean was - like humanity - a fearsome, unforgiving, and uncontrollable abyss. Timeless and ever true to itself, he compared the ocean less favourably to human beings, whose loyalties, temperament, and mores were in a perpetual state of confusion and conflict. He observed, moreover, that fish – like humans – keep very much to their own kind (species) despite the popular illusion of what he called the "universal human family". Indeed, Magritte’s illustration would seem to fit very much with these misanthropic themes.
This illustration can also be viewed as something of a preparatory outline for a 1953 Magritte painting, now titled Merveilles de la nature (The wonders of nature). The painting depicts two “human fishes”, seemingly petrified in stone, shown petting on rock in front of a passing ship. This time, however, the ship floats on perfectly still waters. There has been uncertainty over the painting’s title, which to confuse matters, had also been titled The Lovers at exhibitions in America in the 1950s. However, when Magritte delivered the painting to its first owners, Chicago-based art collectors and philanthropists Joseph and Jory Shapiro, he told them it was titled Le Chant d'amour (in recognition of his earlier illustration perhaps). When the artist was asked to clarify the original title of the painting for a career retrospective at MoMA in 1965, he claimed that he couldn’t remember what it was called. In any case, Merveilles de la nature offered a rather more optimistic – more romantic – view of human relationships than the earlier illustration.
Lithograph - Éditions "La Boétieto
Weekend (1967)
Guy Debord, leader of the Situationists International (SI) movement, devoted his final thesis in his influential polemic The Society of the Spectacle (1967) to Ducasse. Debord was drawn to Poésies because Ducasse had demonstrated a way to subvert language through the act of plagiarism. Indeed, Debord believed that the radical possibilities of destabilizing others’ “intellectual property” through reappropriation had not been realized prior to Ducasse's intervention. This led Debord to formulate the principle of “détournement” (as co-founder of the Parisian collective, L'Internationale lettriste (Letterist International). He had introduced the concept of détournement in May 1956 when he co-authored (with Gil J. Wolman) "A User's Guide to Détournement", published in the eighth issue of the Belgian surrealist journal Les Lèvres (The Red Lips). The technique of détournement was the practice of reappropriating (plagiarising), existing images and text in an attempt to turn the mass media against itself, a "style of negation" that could stimulate critical thinking amongst an audience.
Jean-Luc Godard’s preference for détournement dates back to his earliest “apolitical” films as a pioneer of the celebrated French Nouvelle Vague (New Wave) film movement of the late 1950s/early 1960s. However, as the decade progressed, Godard’s films became increasingly hostile towards bourgeois society and Western commodity culture generally. Weekend tells the story of a self-absorbed bourgeois couple, Roland and Corinne, who embark on a road trip to the country house of Corinne’s dying father (with the aim of making sure they will receive their inheritance). Having been stuck in a seemingly endless traffic gridlock (filmed in an infamous seven-minute-plus tracking shot to the incessant cacophony of blaring car horns), the couple abandon their car and continue their road trip on foot. Watching society disintegrate before their eyes, the squabbling couple encounter historical figures such as Emily Brontë and Louis Antoine Léon de Saint-Just (a major figure in the French Revolution who went by the nickname “Archangel of Terror”), while Godard pushes the view that consumerism is the new religion with brand logos like Esso and Simca foregrounded repeatedly. Characters also compare Mozart favourably to pop music, which in Godard’s view, merely underlined the intellectual demise of modern France. As the film reaches its conclusion, Roland and Corinne are held captive by a group of cannibalistic revolutionaries who chant, to the rhythm of a drumbeat, the "Je te salue, vieil océan!" (“I salute you ancient ocean!”) canto from Les Chants de Maldoror.
For all their political and stylistic consistencies, the SIs were not supporters of Godard or his films. In March 1966, they published an essay titled "The Role of Godard" in the journal, Internationale Situationniste. In it, the filmmaker was dismissed as being a "spectacular manufacturer of a superficial, pseudocritical, cooptive art [and] marketable junk”. In fairness to Godard, he had never publicly aligned himself with the movement (and in a later interview even agreed with the SI’s criticism of his films). After Weekend, Godard, in fact, denounced his authorship and embraced a hardline Maoist ideology through his formation of The Dziga Vertov Group (1968–1972) (named after the great Soviet Formalist filmmaker). The collective was committed to making “political films politically" rather than political films for a commercial audience (with the films typically exhibited on university campuses).
Promotional poster
Сover illustration of Les Chants de Maldoror (1971)
Ragnar von Holten’s collage served as the frontispiece for the 1971 Cavefors edition of Les Chants de Maldoror. It belongs to a broader series of Maldoror collages by the Swedish artist and art historian which he completed between the late 1960s and the early 1970s. The composition is in keeping with the surrealist aesthetic of creating strange juxtapositions. The central figure, clad in a formal coat, appears distorted and monstrous, its face replaced by a hybrid of anatomical and entomological (insect-like) elements. Large circular lenses obscure its features, evoking magnification and obfuscation, while beneath it, a fragmented human head and a net-like structure suggest themes of entrapment, metamorphosis, and dissolution. This nightmarish, chimeric being mirrors the figure of Maldoror himself: a character defined by his fluid, shape-shifting identity and violent rejection of conventional human traits.
Von Holten was fascinated with French artist Gustave Moreau, a painter whose fantastical, symbolist imagery resonated with surrealist ideals. This led him to organize a Moreau retrospective at the Louvre in 1960, bringing him into direct contact with the Paris Surrealists. André Breton, who had long championed Moreau — especially during periods when the artist was unfashionable — wrote a preface for von Holten’s book L’Art Fantastique Gustave Moreau, affirming the continuity between Symbolism and Surrealism. This lineage of fantastic and dreamlike art is evident in von Holten’s Maldoror collages, where historical artistic influences merge with the avant-garde techniques of the twentieth century. His use of collage recalls the methods of Max Ernst, particularly in its fragmentation and recombination of scientific illustrations, classical imagery, and unsettling, surreal compositions.
Collage, tusch - Moderna Museet, Stockholm
Profoundeurs Vertes (Green Depths) (2006)
Profondeurs Vertes (Green Depths) is a three-channel video installation that the late American artist Mike Kelley was commissioned to create for the Louvre Museum in Paris in 2006. Kelley’s installation sees him adopt the idea of détournement through his reworking of American history painter John Singleton Copley’s Watson and the Shark (1777) (a painting that captivated him as a boy). Copley’s painting was based on real events in which a fourteen-year-old boy is caught in a fight for his life against a shark in Havana Harbor. (The boy, Brook Watson, by now a successful merchant, survived the attack and commissioned Copley to create a painting of the event twenty-five years later.) Painted by Kelley, The Crotch Shot focused on a detail from the original painting that shows an oarsman peering through a standing sailor’s legs during the attempted rescue of Watson.
In a 2007 interview, Kelley acknowledged Ducasse/Lautréamont’s influence through the American’s own preference for “inappropriate metaphors” and abrupt, “nonsensical shifts” that he used to maintain an uneasy sense of narrative flow. Art critic Gabriella Pounds, who referred to Kelley as the “contemporary fomenter of hot chaos”, described how with Green Depths the artist had blended “Ducasse’s blasphemy, perversion and dark humour” with noxious-green projections [of Copley’s painting] against the backdrop of a voiceover of Maldoror’s aquatic romance”. She added that “Ducasse’s bestiary seems to whip around Kelley’s oeuvre, snarling. Kelley’s hermaphrodite drawing, Chrome Goddess (2006), seemingly gestures to the only soul Maldoror admires: a sleepy hermaphrodite in the Tuileries, described as ‘a body splitting in two’”. Pounds concludes with the observation that contemporary artist, Julien Nguyen and Kye Christensen-Knowles, had both produced paintings that “invoke Ducasse’s ghost, illustrating his mythological beasts in textures of melting chrome”.
Mixed media installation with video projections, sound - Museé du Louvré, Paris
Biography of Comte de Lautréamont (Isidore Ducasse)
Childhood
Isidore-Lucien Ducasse was born on April 4, 1846, in Montevideo, Uruguay. He was the only child of François Ducasse, a chancellor at the French consulate, and Jacquette-Françoise Davezac, a woman about whom little is known beyond her Gascon heritage. City records show that he was baptized on November 16, 1847, in Montevideo Cathedral, and that, soon after, his mother died, possibly a victim of one of the yellow fever, cholera, and influenza epidemics that swept through the city.
Uruguay had gained independence from the Empire of Brazil and the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata (Argentina as it is today) following the signing of the treaty of Montevideo in 1828. However, a ferocious civil war, known as the Guerra Grande (Great War), raged between different political factions between 1839 and 1851. Montevideo had been a besieged military stronghold during the war but when hostilities ended, it emerged as a burgeoning cosmopolitan port city that attracted many French, Italian, and Spanish visitors. An emerging artistic and intellectual environment flourished, driven largely by these European influences. In this milieu, Lautréamont grew up speaking French, Spanish, and English, and his father’s diplomatic status brought him access to imported European books, newspapers, and intellectual correspondences.
Early Training and Work
In October 1859 François Ducasse sent his 13-year-old son to France. He was enrolled as a boarding student at the Imperial Lycée in Tarbes where he received training in French education and technology. He formed a close, and possibly romantic, relationship with fellow border Georges Dazet, the son of his guardian. In 1863, having committed himself to the life of a poet, he moved to the Lycée Louis-Barthou in Pau where he studied rhetoric and philosophy. After completing his secondary education, Ducasse returned to Montevideo. Commenting on his only return to his first home, the Argentinian philosopher Miguel Ángel Virasoro wrote “[Ducasse] did not leave the testimony of even the most conventional confidant, as if he had been a visitor from another world, concealed among humans with the appearance of a body, who disappeared into empty space without leaving a trace”.
In late 1867, Ducasse returned to Paris where he enrolled at the École Polytechnique but abandoned his studies within a year. Thanks to a regular allowance from his father Ducasse was able to devote himself entirely to his writing. The publisher and writer Léon Genonceaux described Ducasse as a “tall, dark, young man, beardless, mercurial, meticulous, and industrious” who wrote exclusively at nighttime. According to Genonceaux, Ducasse would sit at his piano, “passionately declaiming his verses while striking the keys, shaping his poetry through both rhythm and sound”. Settling in the intellectual heart of Paris, Ducasse took up residence in a hotel on Rue Notre-Dame-des-Victoires. Here he worked intensively on the first canto of Les Chants de Maldoror. There is some speculation that he may have begun this work before his trip to Montevideo and continued working on it during his ocean voyages from and to France.
Ducasse was a frequent visitor of local libraries where he immersed himself in Romantic literature, scientific treatises, and encyclopaedia. He was a great admirer of the American writer and poet Edgar Allan Poe, whose stories introduced him to psychological horror and the macabre, and a literary preoccupation with death, decay, and the grotesque. The influence of English Romanticism, particularly Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron, is also evident in his fascination with rebellious, tormented figures and existential defiance. Works by John Milton and Charles Baudelaire reinforced his interest in beauty and decay. Ducasse’s extensive literary influences were further shaped by French neoclassical drama, particularly the works of Jean Racine and Pierre Corneille, and their mastery of moral and psychological tension. Ducasse’s old school friend, Paul Lespès, later recalled that his writing exhibited “a certain eccentricity” that was characterized “by an excessive use of adjectives and an overwhelming fixation on images of gruesome death. The prose is shaped”, he continued, “by vivid and violent imagery, sudden shifts in mood, and dream-like images”.
Mature Period
In the autumn of 1868, Ducasse sent a letter to the great French Romantic author,Victor Hugo, with two copies of his first canto (an excerpt of a longer poem) and asked for his advice in getting his work published. There is no record that Hugo ever acknowledged Ducasse’s request, but, undeterred, he self-published the first canto anonymously, and at his own expense. The thirty-two-page booklet, titled, Chant premier, par, was recognized by the few who had read it as a daring and transgressive meditation on pain and cruelty. One critic even commented that it read like a "sustained sick joke". In January 1869, a revised version appeared in the Bordeaux anthology, Parfums de l'Âme (Perfumes of the Soul). It marked the first time Ducasse adopted the pseudonym Comte de Lautréamont. There are different theories as to why he chose this name but the most plausible explanation is that he took it from the blasphemous anti-hero in Eugène Sue's 1837 controversial gothic novel, Latréaumont.
By late 1869, Lautréamont had completed all six cantos of Les Chants de Maldoror, and the Brussels-based publisher Albert Lacroix (who had also published Sue) agreed to print the full volume. However, fearing potential legal repercussions for blasphemy and obscenity, Lacroix withdrew his offer to distribute the book. Lautréamont then appealed to Auguste Poulet Malassis, the publisher of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal (1857), requesting that copies of his book be distributed to critics. Anticipating, perhaps, that his words might cause offence, he asked that the book be distributed with the message that he might be willing to modify certain passages in future editions. That potential concession notwithstanding, he defended the work in the following terms: “I have written of evil as Mickiewickz, Byron, Milton, Southey, A. de Musset, Baudelaire and others have all done. Naturally I drew register a little exaggerated, in order to create something new in the sense of a sublime literature that sings of despair [but] only in order to oppress the reader and make him desire the good as the remedy”. Poulet Malassis publicized the book’s upcoming release in his literary magazine, Quarterly Review of Publications Banned in France and Printed Abroad. However, the work received little critical attention. The only notable mention came from the Bulletin du Bibliophile et du Bibliothécaire in May 1870, which dismissed the work as nothing more than a “bibliographic curiosity”.
Maldoror features complex, unconventional sentences that often blur narrative clarity. The voice of Maldoror shifts between first and third person, with the enigmatic central figure of evil, whose name derives from French “mal d’aurore” (“dawn’s evil”), sometimes directly involved in events and at other times observing them from a distance. Throughout the work, the narrator frequently addresses the reader directly, often taunting or warning them about what lies ahead. For example, in Chapter I he writes: “It is not right that everyone should read the pages which follow; only a few will be able to savour this bitter fruit with impunity. Consequently, shrinking soul, turn on your heels and go back before penetrating further into such uncharted, perilous wastelands”.
Lautréamont became quickly resigned to the fact that Maldoror would not garner the critical and commercial interest he had hoped for. Undeterred, he published two booklets, Poésies I and Poésies II (Poems I and II), between April and June 1870 under his real name. These works feature maxims and aphorisms that articulate aesthetic reflections on existing literature and poetry. Ducasse wantonly plagiarized existing texts, cleverly inverting, or altering, them to align with his own philosophical perspectives. Among the figures he plagiarized include the Greek tragedians, Poe, Baudelaire, and Hugo. Departing from the dark themes of Maldoror, he said of Poésies: “I replace melancholy with courage, doubt with certainty, despair with hope, malice with good, complaints with duty, skepticism with faith, sophisms with cool equanimity and pride with modesty”. However, scholar Steven Winspur argues that this shift in tone should not be viewed as a simple reversal of Maldoror but more a continuation of its ethical project albeit through a different method. Rather than “upturning” Romanticism, he writes, Ducasse “extends its logic to reveal its contradictions, ultimately leading to a reconfiguration of literature’s engagement with ethical concerns”.
Death
In July 1870, Napoleon III declared war on Prussia and, following his capture, Paris came under siege in September. Sanitary conditions deteriorated at alarming speed. According to the owner of the hotel where he was staying, Ducasse fell ill with a severe fever. By November, he succumbed to an unspecified illness, dying at the age of just twenty-four. His death certificate declares, “no further information”. Given city-wide fears of contagion, Ducasse was buried the next day in a provisional grave at the Cimetière du Nord (now the Montmartre Cemetery). His body was moved to another grave in 1871. A plaque at the site of his death features a quote from Maldoror: "Who is opening the door of my funeral chamber? I had said no one was to enter. Whoever you are, go away”.
The Legacy of Comte de Lautréamont (Isidore Ducasse)
Despite the fact he could put his name(s) to just two publications, Isidore Ducasse/Comte de Lautréamont would become one of the most enigmatic and influential figures in modern art and literature. All but ignored in his short lifetime, his irrational and subversive prose would bring him posthumous kudos amongst many avant-garde artists and writers. Under the pseudonym Comte de Lautréamont, he published Les Chants de Maldoror, a prose poem that influenced twentieth-century writers and poets including Symbolists Joris-Karl Huysmans, Alfred Jarry, and Remy de Gourmont, and Surrealists Louis Aragon and Philippe Soupault. The impact of Maldoror was even more pronounced within the visual arts. André Breton, the leader of the Surrealist movement, praised Maldoror for its radical imagination and dreamlike logic with the likes of Man Ray, Salvador Dalí, and René Magritte all taking inspiration from its hallucinatory descriptions, black humor, and unsettling juxtapositions. Philosopher and anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon summed up Maldoror when he wrote that the poet had embraced “beauty and ugliness, the agreeable and the unpleasant [revealing] a knowledge of ourselves, [and of] our virtues, our vices, our ridiculousness”.
Having reverted to his birthname, Ducasse followed Maldoror with Poésies (parts I and II were published all but simultaneously). Through Poésies he promoted the scandalous idea that blatant plagiarism was a legitimate act of literary piracy that could be used as weapon of subversion. (Breton even suggested that plagiarism was a “necessary” feature of Surrealist art.) Later, Guy Debord, leader of the 1960’s Situationist International (SI) group, introduced the concept of détournement which he adapted directly from Poésies and which he championed as a cornerstone of social progress. For members of SI (and, indeed, others outside the movement such as Nouvelle Vague filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard), the practice of re-appropriating sourced images and texts was a method of stirring anti-capitalist/anti-bourgeois agitation. In the view of French artist Antonin Artaud, Ducasse was “neither madman nor visionary, but a genius who never ceased for as long as he lived to see with perfect lucidity”. Contemporary artists including Mike Kelley, Julien Nguyen, and Kye Christensen-Knowles have continued to draw on his writings for influence.