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/lit/ - Literature

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11831000 No.11831000 [Reply] [Original]

Was Lautreamont actually a Comte?
Did he get acknowleded like he should be?

>> No.11831752

>>11831000

Ducasse was not literally a count, no. It was only a fanciful pen name which he employed in order to birth his transgressive fiction. There was a short story of the period (not his) which was instead titled "latreaumont" or similar, and he slightly tweaked the spelling, creating a self-referential pun (he came from Montevideo) which can be interpreted in a few different ways.

Lautréamont was almost completely forgotten, until the Surrealists picked him up and made him a meme c. 1917. The key player here was Breton, who took the trouble to find pretty-much the only surviving copy of his minor Poésies in the French national library and reprint it in one of his journals, ensuring its survival.

>> No.11831824

>>11831752
thanks, appreciated.

>> No.11831866

>>11831752
BASED

>> No.11831958

>>11831866

For a 19th century figure, born into a well-to-do French family and who lived in Paris at the end of his life, we know remarkably, /unusually/ little about Lautréamont. This is owing largely to his young death. We have his two works, a few letters and other primary documents (a few book reviews), and that's about it. I like to imagine that a few copies of his work just knocked around his old neighborhoods for the next 40+ years, unloved and somehow not trashed, until they were seized upon by Breton et. al. Makes sense.

A blog holds the writings online. You can see the letters, here (French):

http://www.maldoror.org/lettres/index.html

and the minor Poésies is here.

http://www.maldoror.org/poesies/index.html

There is speculation that Ducasse somehow or other ran afoul of the French government of the time, precipitating his death. The period (1870) is very close to the Paris Commune, and a change in govt. now that I check. I don't think Ducasse was a commie, but may have gotten caught up in the violence somehow. You know those frogs. They're always having some commie rioting in the streets every few years or so.

Lautréamont has since become fashionable among French leftists. D&G namedrop him once in each volume of CaS. Debord's Society of the Spectacle plagiarizes a passage /about/ plagiarism, from Poésies. Even the Tarnac Nine refer to him /twice/ one of their long-winded letters (7, 28):

http://notbored.org/bye-bye.pdf

>> No.11831964

>>11831958
*[FUCKING] BASED*

>> No.11832007

>>11831752
>>11831958
I got he was from South America (Montevideo), but when did he get to europe, if at all?

>> No.11832232
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11832232

>>11832007

Ducasse was born to a French diplomat family, who were on assignment in Montevideo, Uruguay. Ducasse's childhood was spent in Montevideo, then he bounced back and forth between there and Paris once or twice during his teenage years for schooling. He ended up in Paris as a young man, where he spent the rest of his life.

When you actually read Maldoror, there is clearly an urban/rural (often on oceanic coastlines) back-and-forth throughout the episodes, which is obviously inspired by Ducasse's time in both cities. In the book's last part, Ducasse starts getting specific, with Parisian street names, quarters, etc. I haven't taken it this far just yet, but using a map of Paris, one could put together a meaningful geography of Ducasse's Paris. I'd be curious to know how close the bookstore in which Soupault discovered Maldoror is to the Latin quarter, national library, pantheon, Ducasse's old address, etc. Should be a pretty small world, all within a few miles of each other I bet.

>> No.11832286

>>11832232
could a poster be more based?