Berk Çelik

2019281075

AKE 3020

Doç. Dr. Yeşim Başarır

Songs of Maldoror and Its Modernist Features

As an opposition to all the traditional accepted forms of arts, Modernism stands out
against industrial society, urbanization, and bourgeois values and Victorianism. Being a
recent movement, modernism is a sequel of romanticism due to contrary against monotony,
traditional literary structures. That’s why it has an experimental narrative in a sense of
stream of consciousness, alienization, and multiple perspectives, which are the most
significant features of modernist literature. One of the most important artists in this era is
Comte de Lautremont with his Songs of Maldoror.

Songs of Maldoror is an outstanding book owing to the description of evil. As

compared to Victorian era, goodness is not at forefront anymore and the evil point of view is
started to be described on this era by this book. Aestheticizing the evil and reflecting the
society in a critical manner, this book has an anti-nomian and anti-humanistic attitude with
absurd themes of surrealism, which is the most extreme point in Modernism. Apart from
moral values, this book is defined as a poetic novel or prose poem demolishing the
traditional accepted ideas of poetry and novel. Also, it has an unreliable narrator which feels
the reader that there is another person speaking besides main character, Maldoror. Using
stream of consciousness and having a shifting time to time and place to place are other
characteristics of the modernist era and they are the features that hardens for us to realize
who is speaking at most.

On the other hand, the main character is a confessional character without any filter
of his words, and he doesn’t have any concern of admiration. That’s why he uses a
transgressive violence to humans to reflect his hate for them by demolishing social values
with his subversive ideas such as claiming that there is no god. In addition, it can be said he is
a lucifer-like character when this quote is examined: “I will give you the light you need.”
Despite having no belief in God and no idea about God, he is looking upon humanity due to
their believes and underestimates humanity.

In Sum, having some qualities mentioned above and having an unusual main
character compared to other literary movements, Songs of Maldoror is a unique example of
avant garde example.