The Environment of Aggression in Les Chants de Maldoror

The Environment of Aggression in Les Chants de Maldoror Robert E. Ziegler Montana College of Mineral Science and Technology In Lautréamont the appeal for change, the advocacy of revolt, is articulated through certain images, images of upheaval and of flux on a most elemental level. This aesthetic of aggression is manifested in part in the bestiary imagery described by Bachelard.1 But an important aspect of the text that has received less critical attention is the imagery dealing with aggression originating in the environment itself. This involves such things as the composition and density of certain bodies, the motion of bodies in space and the conditions that determine how these bodies move. In order to understand more clearly the twin forces of metamorphosis and mutability that are operating in Les Chants, one might see the text as illustrating the application of asystematically destabilizingforce that Maldoror brings to bear on his adversary: man. Indeed, the purpose of Maldoror's behavior is to undermine man's feeling of belonging, the place he feels he occupies on the physical, biological, and moral planes of his existence. To this end, Maldoror makes allies not only of the vermin, predators, and monsters that men shun, but of the atmosphere as well: the water and the air. The goal of Maldoror's attacks is the obliteration, the dissolution of people's sense of self, the confusion of the rational distinctions that they make between themselves and what they fear. Throughout Les Chants, therefore, Lautréamont seems repeatedly to rejectany view ofthe world and itscreatures based on conventional taxonomy, on fixed and inflexible categories of life forms. Man, for example, is never recognized as superior to beast because of his intelligence, but is shown to be weaker. More than anything else, human beings are characterized by their separateness; the function of their intelligence merely allows them to behold more clearly their isolation from one another. The state of divorce and aloneness to which man is relegated is customarily 1. Gaston Bachelard, Lautréamont, 7th ed. (1939; rpt. Paris: José Corti, 1974), pp. 26-59. 174ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW evoked in Maldoror by images of dryness, while his efforts to rise above this state are conveyed through descriptions ofa submersion in a liquid medium. The choice he is faced with, then, is either to submit to his plight by steeping himself in his sense of shared oppression or to break out of his shell of passivity and hopelessness and to direct his aggression against the world outside him. This sense of isolation, conveyed through images of aridity and insularity, is experienced differently by Maldoror than by man. On the one hand, because he is cut off from the fluid medium, the "pool," in which others enjoy a sense of environmental and ontological security, Maldoror is threatened with spiritual dehydration. On the other hand, because they are blind to their actual condition, men have a sense of conformistic belonging, like fish in their schools. But they are still out of their element, still stranded in hostile surroundings where they are subject to aggression by better adapted animals or by God. Thus, instead of believing that God sacrificed Himself so that men might live, Maldoror beholds in a vision God sacrificing men to perpetuate His own sadistic pleasure. God is shown seizing hold of men as they come to the surface of a sea, not of water but of blood, and crushing theirheads and devouring their bodies. Theillusion of man's adaptation to his environment is pointed out here as he is forced to make the choice between rising up and risking death at the hands of his Creator or of suffocating to death in the blood of his fellows. Initially, the dryness ofseparation is overcome by a flowing together of men in the suffering to which they are all subjected. Their inability to resign themselves to oppression is organically determined, their emergence from this ocean of gore "occasionnée par le besoin de respirer un autre milieu; car, enfin, ces hommes n'étaient pas des poissons!" (p. 122).2 Yet in the passage immediately following, Lautréamont qualifies men as "[a]mphibies . . . [qui] nageaient entre deux eaux" (p. 122...