This masturbatory and nearly unreadable proto-modern novel is easily the strangest book I've read all year, a sort of expressionist long poem in prosody form, jumping from place to place and scene to scene in a surreal style that deliberately makes little sense. Recommended for literary history geeks only--and even then tentatively.
If you give the author a tremendous amount of rope and patience, you might see here the literary progenitor of authors like Borges and Gabriel Garcia Marquez; at the same time, unfortunately, you'll also see the inspiration for a lot of crappy 20th century absurdist French plays.
Again, you have to give it a lot of rope, but the book also has a certain witty nihilism as Maldoror laughs at life's cruelty even while he partakes of it. We can think of Maldoror as a Satan figure, violating people, harming people, being basically an all around asshole in random, pointlessly cruel ways. It makes clear that evil exists in the world (as if modernity didn't already offer endless proof), and that evil is arbitrary, singling out victims without reason, without purpose.
Somehow, Les Chants de Maldoror sets a sort of Miltonian trap for the reader: here and there you start to have sympathy for Maldoror like the reader of Paradise Lost sympathizes with Satan. Maldoror has all these weird thoughts in his head, he has to get them out, and he's appalled at his own mental creations. He strikes you as somebody not in control of his sanity, not in control at all, and he can't stop spreading suffering and malevolence.
I've carried enough water for this book. Reading it was like reading the evil twin of Virginia Woolf's The Waves, another indirect novel (although Woolf could never come up with anything as ugly as this book), along with the puns of Shakespeare and the gross juvenalia of Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel. However the central idea of the book, basically Satan working against humanity, comes in much healthier nutrimental form in C.S. Lewis's book The Screwtape Letters. Please skip Les Chants de Maldoror and read that instead.
Finally, if you speak some French, it might be interesting for you to read the translator Alexis Lykiard's various notes and footnotes, it's a fun exercise to kind of think through the nature of the puns he describes, as well as the various alternate meanings of certain French words. It's also mildly hilarious to read Lykiard's parenthetical remarks about the poor quality of the two other English translations of this work: every so often Lykiard will insert a snotty, sarcastic comments about how the different translators really blew it with certain phrases or puns: "Here Rodker mistranslates, and Wernham omits" or "Again Rodker mistranslates" or "an odd phrase which Rodker/Wernham respectively (but not respectfully), mangle and omit" or "Rodker and Wernham are two ludicrous to quote here."
[Good Lord don't read any further, it's not worth it.]
Notes:
Chapter 1
* The book starts out with a weird fantasy the author shares it wanting to wound and then drink the blood of a young boy, then followed by a multipage invocation to the ocean ("I hail you, Old Ocean!"), followed by a strange conversation with a gravedigger.
* "If it is sometimes logical to put one's faith in the appearance of phenomena, this first canto ends here. Be not too harsh with one who still only tunes his lyre: it makes so strange a sound!
Chapter 2
* The author begins the second canto unable to write; he complains to God, he blames God for injustices in the world, for harming old people and children (and not him), then he blames God for his own audacity in criticizing God: "Is it not he who supplies me with accusations against himself?" [This is an interesting take on one's personal agency.]
* Various scenes here: scenes of a young boy trying to catch a horse-drawn omnibus which hurdles past him, ignoring him; also a young girl who likely is a prostitute, who lingers around the author; then a young boy sitting on a bench in the Tuileries gardens, approached by grown man; a young hermaphrodite who is tortured, but then displays so much erudition that the torturers let her/him/it go; images of the Creator as a sort of Saturn character, eating humans and crunching the bones, and saying "I have created you, so I have the right to do with you what I will."
* Musings here on lice, and what they would do if they were large, if you've watched them under a microscope relentlessly devouring human flesh, etc.
* Ecstatic musings on the elevated language of mathematics, its conciseness, how comparing mathematics to man simply reveals man's pettiness and mendacity.
* Another grody image here of Maldoror licking the cheek of an angel; the angel's skin turns black and gangrenous, the gangrene spreads all over the angel's body, and then it limps back heavenward with singed wings.
* Maldoror watches a ship founder and wreck in a storm offshore; he imagines and gloats at the suffering of the men, gasping for air for a few seconds more of life; he then sees a young sailor actually swimming to shore injured, a lone survivor; Maldoror shoots him from a cliff. He can't permit him to live. ("I owed it to myself to keep my promise: the last hour had tolled for all, none should escape it."). The scene gets even weirder when Maldoror launches himself into the ocean just as sharks begin eating some of the other survivors from the shipwreck; he waits until the sharks have eaten all the men, then kills the male shark and then has sex with the female shark. Some bizarre, weird-ass shit here.
Chapter 3
* The narrator and his friend/lover Mario gallop on horseback. Now the perspective switches to a crone ("Children drive the crone off with volleys of stones as if she were a crow.") who had a daughter by the grace of God, but then Maldoror raped and killed the girl (this scene is way grosser than I'm describing it).
* A dragon and an eagle fight, the latter is Maldoror, the eagle wins, plucking out the heart of the dragon.
* Next another discontinuous scene of the Creator lying drunk on the ground. The animals walk by and mock him and complain to him: "A passing ass kicks him on the temple, saying: "Take that! What did I do to you that you should give me such long ears?"
* Another absolutely weird scene: a man leaves a brothel, a prostitute goes out to wash up in a bucket, she's attacked by chickens, pecking at her vagina, then a long flaxen pole starts moving around the room they were in, it is a gigantic hair, mournful at being left behind by his master. The hair ultimately forgives his master for leaving him.
Chapter 4
* Various musings here of nature of the battle between humanity and the narrator ("the combat will be noble"); on the best way to kill a fly (crush them between thumb and forefinger); on the philosopher who died of laughter seeing a donkey eating figs (this is a reference to the stoic philosopher Chrysippus); musings on the nature of poetry and the role of the poet ("He fears nothing unless it be himself!"); and then another gnarly story of a wife and mother who tied up a man by his hair and arms and whipped him with whips when he refused his mother's demands to sleep with him.
* The narrator then describes his body as a filthy, leprous, paralyzed carcass, peopled by various animals ranging from toads to a viper that "has devoured my prick and taken its place" and a crab that guards the entrance of his anus.
* The narrator is turned into a hog, apparently by his Creator, he learns to enjoy this new form, and then is converted back into a man again much to his sorrow; perhaps there's a metaphor here of Jesus casting demons from a man into a herd of swine.
* Now he assumes the form of an amphibious being swimming across the ocean, while peasants observe him gape-mouthed. A discussion with this being of how he was the less beautiful of a pair of twins who ran away from home, was tortured, and then went into the sea with a sort of retinue of fish that look after him and accompany him.
* Finally, Maldoror recalls earlier in his life when he was 15 years old, he had a friend, Falmer, who he scalped and then dashed against a tree.
* This chapter/canto is the most undirected and makes the least sense so far. And that's saying a lot.
Chapter 5
* This chapter/canto starts out with the author speaking directly to the reader, lots of fourth wall breaking, poetically evoking flock of starlings, asking the reader to "pay no attention to the bizarre way in which I sing each of these stanzas." This chapter also is very rich in puns (at least the translator managed to map many of them into English); the narrator recommends the reader a diet of feasting on your mother's arms along with other ingredients; then he sees a dung beetle, talking about it while intermixing a separate story of an old Skipper who discovered his wife had had someone else's son.
* Discussion of insomnia and never sleeping, then moving on to calling out to pederasts, and then calling through the pages of the book to young readers. Next the narrator moves on to a scene of a funeral procession, it's the death of a young child, the author muses about the pointlessness of life, his inability to explain it, describes a deep feeling of "unjust indifference" (if there can be such a thing?).
* Maldoror appears again--either that or the perspective changes and the author now is referring to him in the third person.
* Now the author lies in bed, awaiting a tarantula that crawls on to him in the night. "He hopes that this very night... will see the last performance of the immense suction; for his only prayer would be for the torturer to have done with his life: death--and he will be content." The spider reminds him of two crimes he committed: one where he attempted to murder a friend of his while swimming; then the perspective changes and the narrator becomes the victim here stabbed by his lover.
Chapter 6
* This chapter starts out with a meta-preface where the author tells the reader what he's going to do. "Today I am going to fabricate a little novel of thirty pages." "Activating" three characters, the Creator, man and myself, by "tricks of fiction."
* The author then begins to talk about himself rejoining society, tracked by the police, but with his astounding cleverness and ability to take on disguise (and even assume animal forms) he avoids them.
* The narrator follows a young boy, Mervyn home just after his fencing lesson, Maldoror somehow attacks him (we learn how later, right now this is a sort of foreshadowing), then writes him a love letter, telling him to meet him at a certain bridge in the morning.
* Maldoror sits next a crazy man in a park who tells a disjointed story of his family, his three sisters, his father a carpenter, the canary the family had, and the deaths of the canary and the daughters. Maldoror takes him to dinner and puts him up in a hotel, planning to use him for his crime.
* The Creator sends an archangel in the form of a crab to stop Maldoror, the angel even tells him God will receive him like a prodigal son. Maldoror kills him.
* Mervyn meets Maldoror, who seizes him and stuffs him into a sack, then smashes the sack on the parapet of a bridge again and again. He gives the sack to a butcher, saying a mangy dog is in the sack and to kill it, later the butcher discovers Mervyn in the bag. Mervyn escapes, goes home and locks himself in his room.
* "To construct mechanically the brain of a somniferous tale, it is not enough to dissect nonsense and mightily stupefy the reader's intelligence with renewed doses, so as to paralyse his faculties for the rest of his life by the infallible law of fatigue; one must, besides, with good mesmeric fluid, make it somnambulistically impossible for him to move, against his nature forcing his eyes to cloud over at your own fixed stare." [The reader really does feel imprisoned and forced by this book!!]
* Mervyn now walks with his hands tied behind his back, Maldoror ties him by his feet, then flings him from the tower at the Place Vendôme, dashing him to death on the dome of the Panthéon.
Vocab:
Cavatina: an operatic solo simpler and briefer than an aria
Blenching: making a sudden flinching movement out of fear or pain; becoming pale
Carious: decayed (of bones and teeth), having caries
Elytra: sheaths; wings of a beetle
Manitou: among some North American Indian peoples, a good or evil spirit as an object of reverence; "the tribal shaman was responsible for calling upon the manitou at special ceremonies"
Fritillary: a Eurasian plant of the lily family, with hanging bell-like flowers; a butterfly with orange-brown wings that are checkered with black
Simoon: a hot, dry, dust-laden wind blowing in the desert, especially in Arabia, "a desert simoon"
Rugose: wrinkled, corrugated
Fulgurations: flashing like lightning; in medicine: a procedure that uses heat from an electric current to destroy abnormal tissue, such as a tumor or other lesion. It may also be used to control bleeding during surgery or after an injury
Anfractuosity: the quality or state of being anfractuous; a winding channel or course; an intricate path or process (as of the mind)
Maremma: (in Italy) an area of low, marshy land near a seashore
Xiphias: swordfish, also the Greek word for sword
Metacarpus: the group of five bones of the hand between the wrist (carpus) and the fingers
Agrestic: relating to the country; rural or rustic
Palmiped: webfooted
Penetralia: the innermost parts of a building; a secret or hidden place
Rhonchus: medical term for a low-pitched, musical, snoring-like sound heard when listening to the chest with a stethoscope during exhalation
Tumbril: an open cart that tilted backward to empty out its load, in particular one used to convey prisoners to the guillotine during the French Revolution
Infundibuliform: funnel-shaped; having the shape of a funnel
Commissure: the joint between two bones; a band of nerve tissue connecting the hemispheres of the brain or the two sides of the spinal cord
Retractation: retraction, recantation
Atony: a lack of physiological tone, especially in a contractile organ; a lack of energy or muscular weakness; phonetics: a lack of stress accent
Anathemata: Greek for "things set apart" or "special things"
Perron: an outdoor stairway leading up to a building entrance
Saponification: the chemical process of making soaps
Aponeurosis: connects the muscles of the body to other muscles which necessitate help, while the tendons serve as a link between the muscles and the bones
Funambulistic: like a tightrope walker
Interpellatee: one who is interrupted; (in parliamentary systems) to interrupt the order of the day by demanding an explanation from the minister concerned
Icosahedral: a solid figure having twenty faces; the faces of a regular icosahedron are equilateral triangles
Calcareous: containing calcium carbonate; chalky; "calcareous soils"
To Read:
Charles Maturing: Melmoth the Wanderer
Eugène Sue: The Wandering Jew