Lautréamont, Subject to Interpretation by Andrea S. Thomas (review)

This is a serious, profound, elegant, and erudite revisitation of Lautréamont’s reception, from the rediscovery by young Belgian fin-de-siècle poets through to Tel quel and John Cage at the following fin de siècle — a full century, then, of readings, misreadings, détournements, and more or less brutal appropriations by many of the major literary movements and avant-garde figures over several generations. Andrea S. Thomas knows her subject to the minutest detail, and she travels through a century of contradictory interpretations with impressive control, a detached (occasionally ironic) tone, and firmly coined pronouncements. What makes her essay truly new is the atypical angle she adopts to examine her targets’ behaviour and motives. The emphasis is put in each case on the symbolic (and sometimes material) interests found in Lautréamont by individuals and the groups involved in pushing their own version of the myth. We better understand what went on among the Jeune Belgique group when they first discovered Maldoror: an internal dialectics, personal trajectories, and vital contacts with the Parisian scene all influenced that inaugural phase of Lautréamont’s afterlife. A similar truth emerges from Thomas’s examination of Genonceaux’s 1890 edition, with its manipulations and partial truths. We then reach the twentieth century and the golden age of the Chants and Poésies, made freshly available in numerous editions (most of them imperfect, sometimes deliberately so). Thomas’s chapter ‘Investing in Lautréamont, 1920’ is among the best and most original of the book as it points to the controlling interest of editors struggling to survive in the avant-garde power game that aroused all kinds of passions, mostly but not always symbolic. André Breton, with his unbearable will to power, and the Surrealists in general, with all their infighting and fractious quarrels, are shown here in the crude light that Thomas projects on to their dealings. However sincere their admiration of Lautréamont might have been, the more murky motives are here exposed in telling fashion. Even though Gallimard and Pléiade might have had different interests than Breton and his rivals, it is true that the work of Pierre-Olivier Walzer (Paris: Gallimard, 1970) raises many questions, perfectly summarized in this book. (The same could be said about the 2009 Pléiade edition by Jean-Luc Steinmetz, which also provoked much controversy among ducassiens.) As to the Tel quel period, with Sollers and Kristeva at the forefront, being much closer to our own, there is less to learn from Thomas’s rereading, but it is still an excellent account that will be useful to newcomers to the field. The final chapter, dedicated to a composition by John Cage that was never performed, forms a perfectly original and appropriate conclusion to the essay. The elusive Isidore Ducasse and the even more elusive Maldoror are shown in their unapproachable essence: at the core of the myth is a formidable and radiating absence.