Why So Serious?

 The literary origins of the Batman franchise's perennially favorite villain are often attributed to an 1869 Victor Hugo novel (or, more specifically, its 1928 film adaptation). But is it possible The Joker's true prototype is to be found in another French literary work ("novel" is not the right word) that partially appeared in the same year as Hugo's—namely, that notorious nineteenth century forerunner of Surrealism, the Chants de Maldoror? 

Here, after all, in one of the prose epic's early scenes, the eponymous antihero gives himself the same iconic scars that mark the Joker's visage (the ones the latter threatens to inflict on then-Senator Patrick Leahy, in a memorable scene in The Dark Knight). Maldoror also provides an explanation for this act of self-mutilation worthy of any Batman villain: he found himself incapable of smiling or laughter, he tells us, and so he carved a perpetual grin into his face in order to imitate the signs of mirth that he saw on the faces of a humanity that remained to him otherwise inaccessible and incomprehensible. 

What's odd is that, for all this inability to laugh—so gruesomely described—Maldoror will become the subject of a great work of unexpected humor. 

Of course, the Chants de Maldoror—one of only two surviving works attributed to its mysterious author, the Comte de Lautréamont (real name: Isidore Lucien Ducasse), who died at the age of only twenty-four and left no fully authenticated photograph of his face behind—seems at first to be anything but a humorous work. It seems rather to be inspired by the most extreme type of 19th century Gothic shocker, with depictions of violence and sadism that seem to presage the descriptions of the crimes of Gilles de Rais in Huysmans's later Decadent novel, The Damned. 

As the novel (let's just settle on that improper term for convenience's sake) piles excess upon excess, however, what began as horror gradually dissipates into dark comedy. (There's a reason André Breton featured some of Lautréamont's most outré passages in his Anthology of Black Humor.) The novel plumbs, with apparent earnestness, the deepest abysses of 19th century blasphemy—depicting the Creator of the universe as a tyrant of supreme cruelty. But by the time we see this same deity spreadeagled on the side of the road after a bout of drunken carousing, later in the novel, or we hear a monologue delivered by one of the god's divine hairs, because it has been left behind mistakenly in an earthly brothel, which the godhead had just visited on his night off—we begin to crack the smile that Maldoror claimed not to be able to form. 

It must be said, though, that the author—or possibly Maldoror as narrator (it is not always possible to tell them apart)—disclaims any comic intention whatsoever in his novel. There must be no laughing here, he warns. ("[W]hat our mind's tendency to farce takes for a wretched attempt at wit is simply, in the author's own mind, an important truth, solemnly proclaimed!" (Paul Knight translation throughout.) Yet, one cannot help but feel that Lautréamont/Ducasse protests too much. Maldoror's tongue is somewhere lodged in his self-mutilated cheek, even as he tells us with assurance: "I cannot laugh." 

How else to explain those astonishing strokes of wit and humor that appear with increasing frequency in the novel's later songs? Maldoror is a masterpiece of literary self-awareness, if it is nothing else, and the author's outstandingly improbable metaphors (this work is clearly one that would survive in a post-AI regime of the sort I foretold the other week, in which the only human works still worth creating are those that are the least statistically-guessable), as well as his reflections on the practice of metaphor, show plainly that the creator of the novel is laughing up his sleeve, even as he angrily dares the reader not to give way to mirth. 

Then there is the author's brilliantly effective ongoing dialogue with the reader—foreseeing his reactions and arguing against them. Lautréamont/Ducasse admits that the reader may have been appalled by the violent scenes in the earlier songs—but he also demands to know truly whether they did not at least make us sit up and pay attention. "Let the reader not be angry with me," he protests, at the opening of the fifth song, "if my prose does not have the good fortune to appeal to him. You will agree that my ideas are at least singular." 

By contrast, in the later songs, where the sentences get longer, the metaphors more convoluted, and the lore more technical, the reader's mind may start to wander. And the author anticipates this reaction perfectly well, and calls us to account for our hypocrisy in paying more attention to the parts we claimed to morally reject. Seldom have I felt more completely caught red-handed by an author than when Lautréamont suddenly accuses the reader—still in the first episode of the fifth song—of napping at the switch. "[T]he instinctive revulsion you felt at the first pages has noticeable slackened," he writes, "in inverse ratio to the attentiveness of your reading," and by god—he's got us there!

These strange moments of self-awareness are ultimately what save this bizarre work from being an exercise merely in the most extreme forms of Gothic or Byronic literature—a sort of reductio and outer logical limit of the furthest excesses of nineteenth century sensationalism—and elevates it instead into a forerunner of modern and postmodern literary self-consciousness—and more than that, quite simply a work of great charm. (And this is not even to mention the novel's other unexpected qualities: its random paean to the joys of mathematics; its surprising mastery of natural history and ornithology). What began as an unrelievedly gloomy and pessimistic work has become full of strange and unexpected delight. 

The first few bats and spiders one encounters in a story may give one a shiver, that is to say; a single act of violence may make one queasy. But by the time one is in the presence, through Lautréamont's hands, of an army of half-man-half-louses that devour the whole Earth, or a band of militant flying octopuses, or a female shark that is willing to mate with the story's antihero in the midst of a seaborne tempest, one is enjoying oneself on an entirely different level. This is such outré weirdness that it has become impossible to take it seriously enough to be offended or chilled. All of which reminds me to ask—where is the anime adaptation of Maldoror the world plainly needs?