Compte-rendu paru dans la revue Nineteenth French Studies (extraits)
Saliou, Kevin. Le Réseau de Lautréamont: itinéraire et stratégies d’Isidore Ducasse. Classiques Garnier, coll. Études romantiques et dix-neuviémistes, 2021, pp. 318, ISBN 978-2-406-11512-0
In Le Réseau de Lautréamont: itinéraire et stratégies d’Isidore Ducasse, Kevin Saliou tells the story of a failure and an eventual success. Isidore Ducasse (1846–70), better known by his nom de plume Comte de Lautréamont, was born to French parents in Uruguay before moving to Paris to pursue a literary career. Despite his best efforts, he failed to make a name for himself, dying in obscurity at only twenty-four amidst the Siege of Paris. Many years after his death, he finally gained recognition for his strange and macabre Chants de Maldoror. This bizarre and beguiling work, coupled with a lack of information about the author’s short life, has engendered a host of legends about Lautréamont as a mysterious, possibly insane poète maudit.
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Overall, Saliou’s work offers a compelling narrative of how Ducasse tried, failed, and finally managed to circulate his work. He corrects the myth of Lautréamont as a crazed recluse, situating him instead in a specific time and place. This book is a welcome addition to Lautréamont scholarship, particularly for its blend of sociology and literary history. Indeed, Saliou’s meta-reflections on his methods will be useful to many scholars. The blurred boundary between an author and his persona could have been further teased apart, given that the distinction between Ducasse and Lautréamont (which Saliou uses interchangeably) is central to his discussion of the real author versus the myths surrounding him. Lastly, if Saliou’s goal is in part to “cartographier” Ducasse’s “trajectoire d’écrivain en construction” (8), then perhaps actual maps of the city—that compare Ducasse’s locales with those of his editors, other interlocutors, or even places frequented by the gay community detailed in chapter two, for example—may have further supported the book’s goal of understanding Ducasse’s life and literary strategies in Paris. Le Réseau de Lautréamont nevertheless remains an impressive and valuable study for scholars interested in Lautréamont, nineteenth-century publishing practices and literary circles, and literary history. Not only does Saliou fill in many lacunae about Ducasse’s life and times, but he also showcases the rich possibilities of interdisciplinary literary studies.
