Balladeer’s Blog resumes its examination of the macabre 1868 French language work The Songs of Maldoror.
THE MARRIAGE OF PROVERBS AND METAPHORS
Maldoror’s excursion into madness this time around put me in mind of William Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell, hence the title I assigned to this 2nd stanza of the 4th Canto. Some critics contend that this section is set near Dendera in Egypt, where Maldoror’s wanderings had taken him in the previous stanza.
The author Isidore Ducasse pulls us into a bizarre realm of unreality – or maybe hyper-reality – with his vile main character. The Tower of Proverbs and the Tower of Metaphors catch Maldoror’s attention as he negotiates his way through an other-worldly valley in which literal reality blends with symbolic reality. At times in this section Ducasse comes close to anticipating the Stream of Consciousness writing pioneered by John Dos Passos and refined by James Joyce. Continue reading
Balladeer's Blog 