The dossier is indeed overwhelming.

A beast that by the elementary exercise of its vitality spills blood and sows death—you remember that historically it was in the form of this fierce archetype that capitalist society first revealed itself to the best minds and consciences.

Since then the animal has become anemic, it is losing its hair, its hide is no longer glossy, but the ferocity has remained, barely mixed with sadism. It is easy to blame it on Hitler. On Rosenberg. On Jünger and the others. On the SS.

But what about this: "Everything in this world reeks of crime: the newspaper, the wall, the countenance of man."

Baudelaire said that, before Hitler was born!

Which proves that the evil has a deeper source.

And Isidore Ducasse, Comte de Lautréamont!¹¹

In this connection, it is high time to dissipate the atmosphere of scandal that has been created around the Chants de Maldoror.

Monstrosity? Literary meteorite? Delirium of a sick imagination? Come, now! How convenient it is!

The truth is that Lautréamont had only to look the iron man forged by capitalist society squarely in the eye to perceive the monster, the everyday monster, his hero.

No one denies the veracity of Balzac.

But wait a moment: take Vautrin, let him be just back from the tropics, give him the wings of the archangel and the shivers of malaria, let him be accompanied through the streets of Paris by an escort of Uruguayan vampires and carnivorous ants, and you will have Maldoror.¹²

The setting is changed, but it is the same world, the same man, hard, inflexible, unscrupulous, fond, if ever a man was, of "the flesh of other men."

To digress for a moment within my digression, I believe that the day will come when, with all the elements gathered together, all the sources analyzed, all the circumstances of the work elucidated, it will be possible to give the Chants de Maldoror a materialistic and historical interpretation which will bring to light an altogether unrecognized aspect of this frenzied epic, its implacable denunciation of a very particular form of society, as it could not escape the sharpest eyes around the year 1865.

Before that, of course, we will have had to clear away the occultist and metaphysical commentaries that obscure the path; to re-establish the importance of certain neglected stanzas—for example, that strangest passage of all, the one concerning the mine of lice, in which we will consent to see nothing more or less than the denunciation of the evil power of gold and the hoarding up of money; to restore to its true place the admirable episode of the omnibus, and be willing to find in it very simply what is there, to wit, the scarcely allegorical picture of a society in which the privileged, comfortably seated, refuse to move closer together so as to make room for the new arrival. And—be it said in passing—who welcomes the child who has been callously rejected? The people! Represented here by the ragpicker. Baudelaire's ragpicker:

Paying no need to the spies of the cops, his thralls,

He pours his heart out in stupendous schemes.

He takes great oaths and dictates sublime laws,

Casts down the wicked, aids the victims' cause.¹³

Then it will be understood, will it not, that the enemy whom Lautréamont has made the enemy, the cannibalistic, brain-devouring "Creator," the sadist perched on "a throne made of human excrement and gold," the hypocrite, the debauchee, the idler who "eats the bread of others" and who from time to time is found dead drunk, "drunk as a bedbug that has swallowed three barrels of blood during the night," it will be understood that it is not beyond the clouds that one must look for that creator, but that we are more likely to find him in Desfossés's business directory and on some comfortable executive board!

But let that be.

The moralists can do nothing about it.

Whether one likes it or not, the bourgeoisie, as a class, is condemned to take responsibility for all the barbarism of history, the tortures of the Middle Ages and the Inquisition, warmongering and the appeal to the raison d'État, racism and slavery, in short everything against which it protested in unforgettable terms at the time when, as the attacking class, it was the incarnation of human progress.

The moralists can do nothing about it. There is a law of progressive dehumanization in accordance with which henceforth on the agenda of the bourgeoisie there is—there can be—nothing but violence, corruption, and barbarism.

I almost forgot hatred, lying, conceit.

I almost forgot M. Roger Caillois.¹⁴

Well then: M. Caillois, who from time immemorial has been given the mission to teach a lax and slipshodage rigorous thought and dignified style, M. Caillois, therefore, has just been moved to mighty wrath.

Why?

Because of the great betrayal of Western ethnography which, with a deplorable deterioration of its sense of responsibility, has been using all its ingenuity of late to cast doubt upon the overall superiority of Western civilization over the exotic civilizations.

Now at last M. Caillois takes the field.

Europe has this capacity for raising up heroicsaviors at the most critical moments.

It is unpardonable on our part not to remember M. Massis, who, around 1927, embarked on a crusade for the defense of the West.

Wewant to make sure that a better fate is in store for M. Caillois, who, in order to defend the same sacred cause, transforms his pen into a good Toledo dagger.

What did M. Massis say? "He deplored the fact that "the destiny of Western civilization, and indeed the destiny of man," were now threatened; that an attempt was being made on all sides "to appeal to our anxieties, to challenge the claims made for our culture, to call into question the most essential part of what we possess," and he swore to make war upon these "disastrous prophets."

M. Caillois identifies the enemy no differently. It is those "European intellectuals" who for the last fifty years, "because of exceptionally sharp disappointment and bitterness," have relentlessly "repudiated the various ideals of their culture," and who by so doing maintain, "especially in Europe, a tenacious malaise."

It is this malaise, this anxiety, which M. Caillois, for his part, means to put to an end.¹⁵

And indeed, no personagesince the Englishman of the Victorian age has ever surveyed history with a conscience more serene and less clouded with doubt.

His doctrine? It has the virtue of simplicity.

That the West inventedscience. That the West alone knows how to think; that at the borders of the Western world there begins the shadowy realm of primitive thinking, which, dominated by the notion of participation, incapable of logic, is the very model of faulty thinking.

At this point one gives a start. One reminds M. Caillois that the famous law of participation invented by Lévy-Bruhl was repudiated by Lévy-Bruhl himself; that in the evening of his life he proclaimed to the world that he had been wrong in "trying to define a characteristic, that was peculiar to the primitive mentality so far as logic was concerned"; that, on the contrary, he had become convinced that "these minds do not differ from ours at all from the point of view of logic. . . . Therefore, [that they] cannot tolerate a formal contradiction any more than we can. . . . Therefore, [that they] reject as we do, by a kind of mental reflex, that which is logically impossible."¹⁶

A waste of time! M. Caillois considers the rectification to be null and void. For M. Caillois, the true Lévy-Bruhl can only be the Lévy-Bruhl who says that primitive man talks raving nonsense.

Of course, there remain a few small facts that resist this doctrine. To wit, the invention of arithmetic and geometry by the Egyptians. To wit, the discovery of astronomy by the Assyrians. To wit, the birth of chemistry among the Arabs. To wit, the appearance of rationalism in Islam at a time when Western thought had a furiously pre-logical cast to it. But M. Caillois soon puts these impertinent details in their place, since it is a strict principle that "a discovery which does not fit into a whole" is, precisely, only a detail, that is to say, a negligible nothing.

As you can imagine, once off to such a good start, M. Caillois doesn't stop half way.

Having annexed science, he's going to claim ethics too.

Just think of it! M. Caillois has never eaten anyone! M. Caillois has never dreamed of finishing off an invalid! It has never occurred to M. Caillois to shorten the days of his aged parents! Well, there you have it, the superiority of the West: "That discipline of life which tries to ensure that the human person is sufficiently respected so that it is not considered normal to eliminate the old and the infirm."

The conclusion is inescapable: compared to the cannibals, the dismemberers, and other lesser breeds, Europe and the West are the incarnation of respect for human dignity.

But let us move on, and quickly, lest our thoughts wander to Algiers, Morocco, and other places where, as I write these very words, so many valiant sons of the West, in the semi-darkness of dungeons, are lavishing upon their inferior African brothers, with such tireless attention, those authentic marks of respect for human dignity which are called, in technical terms, "electricity," "the bathtub," and "the bottleneck."

Let us press on: M. Caillois has not yet reached the end of his list of outstanding achievements. After scientific superiority and moral superiority comes religious superiority.

Here, M. Caillois is careful not to let himself be deceived by the empty prestige of the Orient. Asia, mother of gods, perhaps. Anyway, Europe, mistress of rites. And see how wonderful it is: on the one hand—outside of Europe—ceremonies of the voodoo type, with all their "ludicrous masquerade, their collective frenzy, their wild alcoholism, their crude exploitation of a naïve fervor," and on the other hand—in Europe—those authentic values which Chateaubriand was already celebrating in his Génie du christianisme: "The dogmas and mysteries of the Catholic religion, its liturgy, the symbolism of its sculptors and the glory of the plainsong."

Lastly, a final cause for satisfaction:

Gobineau said: "The only history is white." M. Caillois, in turn, observes: "The only ethnography is white." It is the West that studies the ethnography of the others, not the others who study the ethnography of the West.

A cause for the greatest jubilation, is it not?

And the museums of which M. Caillois is so proud, not for one minute does it cross his mind that, all things considered, it would have been better not to have needed them; that Europe would have done better to tolerate the non-European civilizations at its side, leaving them alive, dynamic and prosperous, whole and not mutilated; that it would have been better to let them develop and fulfill themselves than to present for our admiration, duly labelled, their dead and scattered parts; that anyway, the museum by itself is nothing; that it means nothing, that it can say nothing, when smug self-satisfaction rots the eyes, when a secret contempt for others withers the heart, when racism, admitted or not, dries up sympathy; that it means nothing if its only purpose is to feed the delights of vanity; that after all, the honest contemporary of Saint Louis, who fought Islam but respected it, had a better chance of knowing it than do our contemporaries (even if they have a smattering of ethnographic literature), who despise it.

No, in the scales of knowledge all the museums in the world will never weigh so much as one spark of human sympathy.

And what is the conclusion of all that?

Let us be fair; M. Caillois is moderate.

Having established the superiority of the West in all fields, and having thus re-established a wholesome and extremely valuable hierarchy, M. Caillois gives immediate proof of this superiority by concluding that no one should be exterminated. With him the Negroes are sure that they will not be lynched; the Jews, that they will not feed new bonfires. There is just one thing: it is important for it to be clearly understood that the Negroes, Jews, and Australians owe this tolerance not to their respective merits, but to the magnanimity of M. Caillois; not to the dictates of science, which can offer only ephemeral truths, but to a decree of M. Caillois's conscience, which can only be absolute; that this tolerance has no conditions, no guarantees, unless it be M. Caillois's sense of his duty to himself.

Perhaps science will one day declare that the backward cultures and retarded peoples which constitute so many dead weights and impedimenta on humanity's path must be cleared away, but we are assured that at the critical moment the conscience of M. Caillois, transformed on the spot from a clear conscience into a noble conscience, will arrest the executioner's arm and pronounce the salvus sis.

To which we are indebted for the following juicy note:

For me, the question of the equality of races, peoples, or cultures has meaning only if we are talking about an equality in law, not an equality in fact. In the same way, men who are blind, maimed, sick, feeble-minded, ignorant, or poor (one could hardly be nicer to the non-Occidentals) are not respectively equal, in the material sense of the word, to those who are strong, clear-sighted, whole, healthy, intelligent, cultured, or rich. The latter have greater capacities which, by the way, do not give them more rights but only more duties. . . . Similarly, whether for biological or historical reasons, there exist at present differences in level, power, and value among the various cultures. These differences entail an inequality in fact. They in no way justify an inequality of rights in favor of the so-called superior peoples, as racism would have it. Rather, they confer upon them additional tasks and an increased responsibility.

Additional tasks? What are they, if not the tasks of ruling the world?

Increased responsibility? What is it, if not responsibility for the world?

And Caillois-Atlas charitably plants his feet firmly in the dust and once again raises to his sturdy shoulders the inevitable white man's burden.

The reader must excuse me for having talked about M. Caillois at such length. It is not that I overestimate to any degree whatever the intrinsic value of his "philosophy"—the reader will have been able to judge how seriously one should take a thinker who, while claiming to be dedicated to rigorous logic, sacrifices so willingly to prejudice and wallows so voluptuously in clichés. But his views are worth special attention because they are significant.

Significant of what?

Of the state of mind of thousands upon thousands of Europeans or, to be very precise, of the state of mind of the Western petty bourgeoisie.

Significant of what?

Of this: that at the very time when it most often mouths the word, the West has never been further from being able to live a true humanism—a humanism made to the measure of the world.

Notes

11. Isidore Ducasse—the title Comte de Lautréamont is a pen name—was a precursor of surrealism who, unknown during his brief lifetime (1846-1870) had great influence on a later generation of poets. He is remembered for a single extraordinary work, the Chants de Maldoror, a kind of epic poem in prose whose satanic hero is in violent rebellion against God and society. The disconnected episodes through which Maldoror passes are a series of fantastic visions, occasionally mystic and lyrical, more often grotesque, macabre and erotic, filled with sadism and vampirism. The work as a whole has the intensity of a nightmare and seems almost to spring directly from the author's subconscious. Guy Wernham's English translation (1944) is still available. (Trans.) ↩
12. Vautrin, who appears in Le Père Goriot (1834) and other novels, is the arch-villain of Balzac's Comédie humaine. A master criminal living under the guise of a former tradesman, he is corrupt, unscrupulous and single-minded in his pursuit of fortune. With cynical insight into capitalist society, Vautrin sees himself as no more immoral than the respectable bourgeois of his time. (Trans.) ↩
13. From “Le Vin des chiffonniers" in Les Fleurs du mal, as translated by C. F. Maclntyre. (Trans.) ↩
14. See Roger Caillois, "Illusions à rebours," Nouvelle Revue Française, December and January 1955↩
15. It is significant that at the very time when M. Caillois was launching his crusade, a Belgian colonialist review inspired by the government (Europe-Afrique, no. 6, January 1955), was making an absolutely identical attack on ethnography: "Formerly, the colonizer's fundamental conception of his relationship to the colonized man was that of a civilized man to a savage. Thus colonization rested on a hierarchy, crude no doubt, but firm and clear." It is this hierarchical relationship that the author of the article, a certain M. Piron, accuses ethnography of destroying. Like M. Caillois, he blames Michel Leiris and Claude Lévi-Strauss. He reproaches the former for having written, in his pamphlet La Question raciale devant la science moderne: "It is childish to try to set up a hierarchy of culture." The latter for having attacked "false evolutionism," because it "tries to suppress the diversity of cultures, by considering them as stages in a single development which, starting from the same point, should make them converge toward the same goal." Mircea Eliade comes in for special treatment for having dared to write the following: "The European no longer has natives before him, but interlocutors. It is well to know how to begin the dialogue; it is indispensable to recognize that there no longer exists a solution of continuity between the so-called primitive or backward world and the modern Western world." Lastly, it is for excessive egalitarianism, for once, that American thinkers are taken to task—Otto Klineberg, professor of psychology at Columbia University, having declared: "It is a fundamental error to consider the other cultures as inferior to our own simply because they are different." Decidedly, M. Caillois is in good company.↩
16. Les Carnets de Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, Presses Universitaires de France, 1949.↩