Balladeer’s Blog resumes its examination of the macabre 1868 French language work The Songs of Maldoror.
FOUR SOULS ERASED FROM THE BOOK OF LIFE
Maldoror, our supernatural protagonist, encounters four men whose lives were all ruined by the same seductive sorceress. The first man has been transformed into a horse-sized dung beetle and rolls along the mangled corpse of the sorceress the way such beetles usually roll clods of dung.
Our narrator follows this oddity at a distance and eventually the huge dung-beetle encounters a man with the head of a pelican. (No, it’s not Jay Leno, who used to be described as “the pelican-headed comedian” early in his standup career.) The two bizarre creatures stand and converse in heated tones for a time and it slowly becomes clear to Maldoror what caused their mutual hostility and their current physical condition. Continue reading
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