Reading Order
Les Chants de Maldoror Reading Order
Les Chants de Maldoror (The Songs of Maldoror, 1868–1869) by the Comte de Lautréamont (Isidore Ducasse, 1846–1870) is one of the most extraordinary texts in French literature — six long prose poems of violent, hallucinatory, ecstatically cruel verse in which the protagonist Maldoror battles God and humanity in a series of increasingly extreme acts of violence and metamorphosis. Lautréamont died at 24, having published only Maldoror and the short Poésies (which recants everything in Maldoror); his work was almost completely unknown until the Surrealists discovered and canonized him in the 1920s. Breton's Manifesto names Lautréamont as the most important precursor; his famous comparison of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table became the defining image of the Surrealist aesthetic of incongruous juxtaposition. Les Chants de Maldoror is the direct ancestor of Surrealist automatic writing — the violence, the sudden metamorphoses, the address to the reader, the God who is defeated but not dismissed.
Where to start
Read Chant I first — it establishes Maldoror's character and the formal peculiarities (the long prose periods, the sudden metamorphoses, the addresses to the reader) that define the work. Chants II–IV are the most extreme and hallucinatory. Chant V is more formally controlled. Chant VI is the most novelistic — it includes a sustained narrative. Reading in order is essential; each Chant builds on the last.
Complete Les Chants de Maldoror Book List
- 1Buy
Les Chants de Maldoror
Comte de Lautréamont·1869·Start here — read in order, Chant by Chant; the cumulative violence and metamorphosis is the point - 2Buy
Poésies
Comte de Lautréamont·1870·The brief late recantation — read immediately after Maldoror; the reversal is as strange as the original - 3Buy
Manifeste du surréalisme
André Breton·1924·Breton names Lautréamont as the key precursor; read after Maldoror to see exactly what the Surrealists found there - 4Buy
Les Champs magnétiques
André Breton and Philippe Soupault·1920·The first automatic writing experiment — the direct descendant of Maldoror's prose; the genealogy is exact - 5Buy
Œuvres complètes
Comte de Lautréamont·1869·The complete works — both Maldoror and the Poésies; get the Garnier-Flammarion edition in French or the New Directions complete in English
Les Chants de Maldoror — Frequently Asked Questions
Who was Lautréamont?
Isidore-Lucien Ducasse was born in Montevideo in 1846 to French parents, sent to school in France, and died in Paris in 1870 at 24, leaving only two published works: Les Chants de Maldoror (1869) and the brief Poésies (1870). Almost nothing is known about his life — no letters survive, no photographs are certain, and the few contemporaries who mentioned him said almost nothing informative. The pseudonym 'Comte de Lautréamont' was probably taken from the protagonist of Eugène Sue's 1838 novel Latréaumont; the 'Comte' is a self-awarded title. His work was almost unknown at his death and remained so until the Surrealists discovered and canonized him in the 1920s.
What is the famous sewing machine and umbrella comparison?
In Chant VI of Maldoror, Lautréamont describes a chance encounter as 'beautiful as the chance meeting of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table' — a phrase that became, for André Breton and the Surrealists, the defining statement of the aesthetic of incongruous juxtaposition. The image is beautiful not despite its strangeness but because of it; the collision of incompatible objects in an unexpected place produces an electric effect that Breton called 'convulsive beauty.' The phrase is probably the single most quoted sentence in twentieth-century French literary criticism.
What are the Poésies?
The Poésies (1870), published a few months after Maldoror, is a short collection of fragments that appears to recant everything in Maldoror — replacing Maldoror's celebration of evil with conventional moral statements, many of them plagiarized from Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, and Vauvenargues with the moral reversed. Whether the recantation is sincere, ironic, or both is debated; Breton argued that it was itself an example of the 'détournement' (diversion) of bourgeois moral discourse, and that reading the two texts together gives the full Lautréamont. The Poésies is strange in a completely different way from Maldoror.
Why did the Surrealists canonize Lautréamont?
The Surrealists found in Maldoror exactly what they were looking for — a text that seemed to be produced by the unconscious rather than rational control, full of violent and incongruous imagery, in which conventional morality was systematically destroyed and the sovereignty of desire over reason was asserted. The long prose periods, the sudden metamorphoses, the addresses to the reader, and above all the famous sewing machine and umbrella comparison all seemed to anticipate the automatic writing aesthetic that Breton and Soupault had independently arrived at in Les Champs magnétiques (1919). Maldoror was, for the Surrealists, proof that their method was not invented but discovered — that the unconscious had always produced texts like this.
What English translations of Maldoror are available?
The standard scholarly English translation is Alexis Lykiard's (Thomas Y. Crowell, 1972; reprinted by Allison & Busby and others). Guy Wernham's earlier translation (New Directions, 1965) is also reliable and widely available. Both are complete translations of both Maldoror and the Poésies. The Lykiard is generally considered more accurate to the French; the Wernham is slightly more idiomatic. New Directions has kept the work in print consistently, making it the most accessible current edition.
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