Jean-Jacques Lefrère and Michel Pierssens, coordinators of the Association of Friends of Lautréamont, had contacts all over the world. Thus, with Yojiro Ishi and the late Idehiro Tachibana (whom I had known since my first official trip to Japan in 1982), they were able to organize this remarkable colloquium, strongly supported by the Japanese Lautréamont enthusiasts. The proceedings, published promptly, reflect both its range and sustained quality. As for my own contribution, it was based on a systematic survey of occurrences of Isidore Ducasse’s work in Jarry, which, moreover, helped establish the link with the surrealists.

Maldoror Yesterday and Today, Lautréamont: From Romanticism to Modernity

Proceedings of the Sixth International Colloquium on Lautréamont, Tokyo, October 4–6, 2002. Texts edited by Yojiro Ishii and Hidehiro Tachibana. Cahiers Lautréamont: Issues LXIII and LXIV, Du Lérot, publisher. Published with support from the French Embassy in Tokyo, the University of Tokyo, Centre National du Livre (CNL), and the Association of Past, Present and Future Friends of Isidore Ducasse (AAPPFID).

Table of Contents

• Foreword (Yojiro Ishii)
• Ducasse under the Second Empire
  • The False Life of Isidore Ducasse (Jean-Jacques Lefrère).
  • Charles Diguet, or the Shadow of a Hair (Jean-Pierre Lassale).
  • Isidore Ducasse as Reader (Éric Wallbecq).
  • Ducasse as Anti-Napoleonic? Throughout Mervyn's Journey in Chant VI (Naruhiko Teramoto).
  • The Moral Confidences of Isidore Ducasse (Jean-Pierre Goldenstein).
  • Lautréamont and Gabriel Tarde (Hasumi Nishikawa).
  • Parisian Editions of the Chants and Poésies, from La Sirène to Guy-Levis Mano (Jean-Louis Debauve).
  • On an Allusion to La Caprenède (Thérèse Lassalle).
  • Lautréamont, Painter and Sculptor (Liliane Durand-Dessert).
  • Baudelaire–Ducasse: Aspects of an Intermittent and Ambivalent Referentiality (Steve Murphy).
  • Lautréamont, Rimbaud: Palinody or Delay (Yoshikazu Nakaji).
  • Jarryan Intertextuality: Jarry and Lautréamont (Henri Béhar).
• Various Aspects of Modernity
  • Lautréamont and the Logic of Digression (Scott Carpenter).
  • How Young Isidore Ducasse Experienced the Yellow Fever Epidemic in Montevideo, 1857 (Jacques-André Duprey).
  • Dissociation, Suggestion, Attention: Les Chants de Maldoror and the Reconfiguration of the Modern Subject (Jean-Christophe Valtat).
  • This Monster of Modernity: The Figure of the Monster in Les Chants de Maldoror (Philip Hadlock).
  • The Enigma of Isidore Ducasse (Peter Nesselroth).
  • The Status of God in Nerval and Lautréamont (Hisashi Mizuno).
  • Parallel Receptions: Corbière and Lautréamont (Patrick Besnier).
  • The Case of Kunio Tsukamoto, Avant-Garde Poet (Tadayoshi Takizawa).
  • Poetic Hybridity and Perverse Modernity: Lautréamont at the Risk of Impurity (Olivier Sécardin).
  • The Comte de Lautréamont: Metaphor of Latin American Modernity (Herbert Benítez Pezzolano).
  • The “Four Points of the Horizon” of Lautréamont. Approaching the Theme of the Horizon in the Chants in the Light of Michaux (Qiang Dong).
  • Lautréamont and Henri Michaux in Modern Poetics (Byung-Joon Cho).
• Poetics of Lautréamont
  • The Oceanic Metaphor in Ducasse and Genet (Patrice Bougon).
  • Reception and Refraction of Isidore Ducasse: Pastiches of Les Chants de Maldoror (Alain Chevrier).
  • (Black) Humor and Lautréamont (Misao Harada).
  • "Or Rather": The Ex(p)loded Metaphor (Pascal Durand).
  • The Literary Genre in Modernity: The “Definitive Formula” of Lautréamont (Kazuya Tsukiyama).
  • Lautréamont and Critical Prose (Henri Scepi).
  • "An Old Spider of the Large Species" and Modern Narrative (Hidehiro Tachibana).
  • Isidore Ducasse: Before and After (Michel Pierssens).
  • Assassination in Les Chants de Maldoror (Jean-Luc Steinmetz).
  • The Poetics of Verticality in Lautréamont (Yojiro Ishii).

Download my contribution in PDF

Text included as Chapter IV in: H. Béhar, Lumières sur Maldoror, Classiques Garnier, 2023, pp. 55–65.
Lumières sur Maldoror (classiques-garnier.com)

See also: the blog dedicated to Lautréamont–Maldoror