MALDOROR 5:5 – PERFIDIOUS SNARE

Balladeer’s Blog resumes its examination of the macabre 1868 French language work The Songs of Maldoror.

PERFIDIOUS SNARE

Maldoror, our supernatural protagonist, begins this stanza by expressing his support and admiration for gay men. Modern readers often hilariously misinterpret this as some sort of advanced and enlightened advocacy on the part of the author Isidore Ducasse. Unfortunately that is not the case.

Maldoror makes it clear that he considers what gay men do to be sinful and perverse, which is why he approves of it and participates in pederasty himself. He gives gay men his dark blessing and sings the praises of kissing various portions of his gay lovers’ anatomies. He proceeds with rapturous accounts of spreading the legs of other men and attaching his mouth to “the insignia of their modesty.”  

In his usual demented way Maldoror gets distracted from his subject and begins offering advice to gay men on how to properly clean their genital areas. From there he regains his focus and expresses regret that the universe is not one mammoth anus.

He longs to enter that “cosmic anus” from behind and would thus have stripped from the universe all its secrets. (Remember – Maldoror is insane so this bizarre metaphor doesn’t have to make sense.) Pursuing this odd line of thought he states that if he anally raped the universe his semen would find an ocean of truth in which to be emptied.

After indulging in a sodomy metaphor so heavy-handed even Aleister Crowley would have said “Dude, you’re overdoing it” Maldoror moves on to the subject of what kind of men he prefers as lovers. None should be older than 15 he insists. He mentions that he hates women, though we’ve seen him have plenty of interaction with them in previous stanzas.

He reminds the reader of the eldritch juices that his mouth secretes – the juices that make his breath fatal to mortals. He invites a man to put their mouth on his in a kiss and suck out those juices. Maldoror contemplates his usual diet of eating brains and drinking blood but reminds us that he is NOT a vampire. (Which is news to those Goths who revere Maldoror as the ultimate vampire.) 

Maldoror longs to meet all the readers of this book and invites all of them to embrace him. Returning to the subject of his taste in males our vile narrator says he prefers schoolboys and the pale, helpless orphans who get used as child labor in factories. He mentions one man who rejected Maldoror’s advances. He killed him and tossed his body down a well.

Next Maldoror claims the sight of his massive cock excites jealousy and desire in men who see it. Once a shoeshine boy that Maldoror exposed himself to tried to castrate him with a knife and had to be dealt with. He further states that he cleans himself more than is necessary because if he didn’t his natural aroma would drive men wild with desire and he would be pursued by throngs of them. (I pictured the Can’t Buy Me Love part of A Hard Day’s Night but with gay men as Maldoror’s pursuers. But I’m kind of weird.) 

Maldoror goes on to say that he considers his manly charms to be “the perfidious snare” by which he entraps the powerful men of the world, whom he implies are all secretly gay. Getting sophomorically grotesque again he claims the taste of his semen makes men who suck his cock mad with urges to do it again and again. (Sort of gives new meaning to the standard megalomaniacal rant about wanting mankind to be “on its knees before me.”) 

Just as Helen of Troy precipitated the Trojan War, Maldoror foresees a day when he himself will be a potent enough lure to unleash a great war. The desire that the world’s most powerful men feel for Maldoror will supposedly trigger a monumental conflict between two armies of three hundred thousand men EACH. He pictures moonlight illuminating a battlefield full of dead bodies and looks forward to a day when all humanity is wiped out in a war over him.  

This contradicts his previous prophetic claim that at some future point he will personally defeat all the armies of mankind in a cataclysmic battle at Denderah in Egypt. But Maldoror contradicting himself is nothing new.

In closing, Maldoror hints that God himself was the one who introduced him to gay sex long ago on a cold winter’s night. +++ 

I WILL BE EXAMINING ADDITIONAL SECTIONS VERY SOON. CHECK BACK ONCE OR TWICE A WEEK FOR NEW INSTALLMENTS.

FOR PART ONE CLICK HERE:  https://glitternight.com/2015/02/28/maldoror-a-neglected-masterpiece-of-surreal-horror/

FOR OTHER PARTS OF MALDOROR CLICK HERE: https://glitternight.com/category/maldoror/

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