George Bataille: The History of the Eye

[Cyril Tourneur]

The human being is this night, this empty nothing, that contains everything in its simplicity--an unending wealth of many representation, images, of which none belongs to him--or which are not present. This night, this interior of nature, that exists here--pure self--in phantasmagorical representations, is night all around it, in which here shoots a bloody head--there another white ghastly apparition, suddenly here before it, and just so disappears. One catches sight of this night when one looks human beings in the eye--into a night that becomes awful.

--G. W. F. Hegel, "Jenaer Realphilosophie"

To just give a short meta analysis of this story which is my favorite one of this particular author and of the complete oeuvre of Bataille I can tell the following without going too deep into the plot of this story; here Bataille deforms the emotional and physical forces of sexual pleasure into a fictionalised account of Freudian dimensions that monstrously perverts the 'normal' view of sex held by most 'enlightened' members of educated societies. In doing so the tale's protagonists appear to inhabit a dreamscape of metaphorical imagery (predominately the shape and texture of the eye), performing sexual acts that are aesthetically antithetical and which cannot be accepted as rational or sexually stimulating. Indeed I feel that Bataille is deliberately challenging the reader's imagination to such an extent that the poetry of the narrative itself becomes a means of transgression that can only exist in the unconscious mind albeit recognisable in dreams. Furthermore the sexual perversions and surreal fetishes of these characters should be seen as a form of madness of anarchic proportions that dismisses recognisable moral constructs and leads to despair and death. I would recommend reading Sontag's excellent essay prior to the tale.

 

[paeng]

I've always wanted to read Bataille in light of Foucault but somehow never found the time. There was only one of his titles in the uni library, but I kept looking for Deleuze's Venus in Furs, which curiously is listed in the catalog but has never been found.

 

[Cyril Tourneur]

You should read the complete run; you know de Sade, Baudelaire, Mirbeau...or even Le Fanu (Green Tea). The main characters in all these stories are female libertines (like the female character in 'THOTE') , especially de Sades' Justine et Juliette where you have a dialectic between Justine and Juliette.
I just read that Bataille knew of Erzsébet Báthory, the infamous Hungarian countess (the female libertine was always a counterpiece of the 'male' vampire) and that she is the archetype of all these women (except of de Sade who didn't know of her)

 

[paeng]

Thanks! I remember reading Le Fanu once. I think there's a Dover edition available locally. I also discussed Baudelaire's Flowers of Evil when we read Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray and watched the film version starring Hurd Hatfield, and only because George Sanders' character, Lord Henry Wotton, is reading the poem (and right after a fascinating quotation from the Rubaiyat, which reminds me of William Blake).

I've read only a few selections from the Marquis in two paperbacks but I seem to remember only the libertine ideas. And for some strange reason, I'm often reminded of Peter Weiss' Marat/Sade which I read when I was an undergraduate. I found a second-hand laser disk version of the film and will try to watch it soon.

A friend once offered me a hardcover edition of Sade's complete works translated in English but I did not buy it because it was too expensive and because for some odd reason I can still remember the excerpts from Sade given by Roger Shattuck in Forbidden Knowledge, the one where the little girl is defiled, tortured, and then roasted by the Marquis and his friends.

Finally, can you tell me more about Mirbeau? Is his first name Octave?

 

[Cyril Tourneur]

Exactly, Octave Mirbeau. What' s so interesting about 'Le jardin des supplices' is that it contrasts the beauty and exotic location of a 19th century China with its tortures; for example the culmination takes place in a wonderful orchid garden, which is fed by the body parts of the prisoners and some kind of torturer wails that the high art of torturing is left for the barbaric europeans

 

[paeng]

Interesting! I don't know why, but I am suddenly reminded of Erik Satie, Borges, and Kafka. Perhaps it has to do with some of the images that appear in Mirbeau's work.

As I included his work in my ever-increasing Amazon wish list (US$75 for the hardcover edition!), I found suggested works like Venus in Furs, Deleuze's Masochism, and a book entitled Hell with no author identified.