'Les Chants de Maldoror' written by the Comte de Lautremont in 1869 and considered to be the first surrealist novel whose protagonist, Maldoror, is an antihero, demagogue and embodiment ultimate evil. Its signature verse is one in which Maldoror manifests himself as an octopus so large as to strangle God, The Creator. As God's screams become more and more high-pitched they begin to leave his mouth as poisonous vipers which fall to the earth.
Thus does the Creator, maintaining an admirable coolness even when confused with the most atrocious sufferings, know how to extract germs from the very bosoms of earth's inhabitants. How astonished he was to see Maldoror, changed into an octopus, clamp either monstrous tentacles about his body : any one of these strong thongs could have easily spanned the circumference of a planet.
'Well this time I present myself in man's defence ; I, the contemner of all the virtues; I, whom the Creator has been unable to forget since the glorious day when, casting off their plinth heaven's annal - in which were listed, by some infamous form of skulduggery his power and his eternity - I applied my four hundred suction-cups to the hollow of his armpit and made him emit terrible shrieks... The screams turned into vipers on leaving his mouth, and went to lie in ambush by day and night, in scrub and inside ruined walls.'
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'Maldoror' in-progress ; iPhone documentation. Click for full images... |
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All content strictly © Nick Kushner, 1982 - 2010 | This site contains explicit content
