Transgressive French Flummery - Artaud and Bataille
Heliogabalus, or the Crowned Anarchist (1934)
Antonin Artaud
Blue of Noon (1935)
Georges Bataille
Literature and Evil (1957)
Georges Bataille
Bataille, philosopher and 'intellectual', and Artaud, a 'major figure of the French avant-garde' were almost exact contemporaries. I may have more to write about the former in due course but I am afraid that in this review I am somewhat inclined to take my axe to them. Artaud's dramatic text Heliogabalus is certainly a curiosity - one part flummery, one
part insanity and one part genius. It is an account of sorts of the
decadent teenage androgynous Emperor Heliogabalus. Blue of Noon is a minor work that I suspect Bataille did not want published and Literature and Evil is a collection of essays on the margins of French intellectual life in the 1950s.
Not that the average reader (in which category I include myself) will have an earthly idea what Heliogabalus is all about (given the limits of a modern education) until you remember that it is best not read but DECLAIMED loudly in a theatrical manner and that it has to be seen as the last flowering of a forty year cycle of French decadent writing (and part of a much longer cycle of French artistic sensuality). Surrealism, orientalism, obscenity (though not quite as outrageous as the publisher might like us to think) and an incipient fascist mentality which is often only inches from the anarchist sensibility - it's all in there. It helps to know something of the Anatolian cult of self-castration and of Cybele but you can look that up in Wikipedia.
There are insights in the text about extreme anarchy but the book is part of a political-cultural death cult which re-emerges periodically amongst artistic types as a response to the mundane and the modern in many cultures and at many times - it is the type of thing you might write if you were suffering from radical ennui and raging hormones. It is no accident that Artaud's circle included the High Priestess of French sexuality, Anais Nin. We may have something to say about Henry Miller in a later review. The publisher refers to it as the 'most accessible' of Artaud's books - the mind boggles at what the others must be like ...
Not that the average reader (in which category I include myself) will have an earthly idea what Heliogabalus is all about (given the limits of a modern education) until you remember that it is best not read but DECLAIMED loudly in a theatrical manner and that it has to be seen as the last flowering of a forty year cycle of French decadent writing (and part of a much longer cycle of French artistic sensuality). Surrealism, orientalism, obscenity (though not quite as outrageous as the publisher might like us to think) and an incipient fascist mentality which is often only inches from the anarchist sensibility - it's all in there. It helps to know something of the Anatolian cult of self-castration and of Cybele but you can look that up in Wikipedia.
There are insights in the text about extreme anarchy but the book is part of a political-cultural death cult which re-emerges periodically amongst artistic types as a response to the mundane and the modern in many cultures and at many times - it is the type of thing you might write if you were suffering from radical ennui and raging hormones. It is no accident that Artaud's circle included the High Priestess of French sexuality, Anais Nin. We may have something to say about Henry Miller in a later review. The publisher refers to it as the 'most accessible' of Artaud's books - the mind boggles at what the others must be like ...
I have a tendency to choose short books of
relatively low merit by famous authors in preference to their classic
texts. This foible arises in part from a more general distrust of classic texts
as guides to life really lived rather than as guides to cultural tradition and makers of future culture. The marginalia of 'great minds' often brings them down to earth for us and reminds us that little good work comes
without much persistent labour and frequent failure (try Grahame Greene's execrable early novels for examples of that). Persistent refining of work into great art can, however,
sometimes remove the authenticity of feeling that belongs to a
particular age. Minor works (like, say, the hack work of a prominent science fiction writer for Galaxy in the 1950s) may be poor literature but they can be better history.
'Blue Noon' is typical of the sort of work that gets pushed late to the public when other work has brought a man to prominence. The author is both flattered and resigned. Bataille's curt foreward to the 1957 first edition of this 1935 novella tells us as much. Others have prevailed on him to publish the manuscript, he no longer thinks like the late thirty-something man he was then (he has, indeed, 'moved on' as we say now) and he tries to explain that the ham-fisted clumsy style of the work is deliberate (which at least relieves us from the mistake of blaming some hapless translator for its leaden sentences).
So why bother with the book? Try treating it as a companion piece to Henry Miller's ranting 'The World of Sex' which we will review here some time in the future and we will see two ambitious literary males trying to cope with a world where sex is pushed into the realm of the near-criminal and where both are trying to find a way of expressing their true natures. In this context, it is a social document of sorts, set amongst the bien-pensant prosperous and idle French middle classes of the 1930s who were adopting leftist views without enthusiasm or understanding and sensing the cataclysm to come. Bataille was also part of the Surrealist movement and the book is an uneasy marriage of dream sequence and realism - a brave attempt perhaps but unsatisfactory. And if Bataille is open about its clumsiness as a text, who are we to argue? The number of repetitions of the word 'ridiculous' alone are, well, ridiculous.
The hero is a whining, lacrymose, self-absorbed (apparently once self-harming) rather nasty, sickly, death-obsessed, depressive and mildly sadistic figure without character whose attempts to cope with a wife, a mistress, a mother-in-law, a lover and an odd sort of anti-woman, a political activist, are played out across Europe - London, Paris, Vienna, Catalonia (oh, how we miss Orwell's insights) and the Rhine Valley with a cast of walk on servants, gilded youth, anarchists, communists and young bright-eyed and bushy-tailed Nazis. Not forgetting a dream trip to the Soviet Union. All in under 130 pages!
The women are not much better than our depressed and depressing anti-hero. The wife with two kids left in Brighton and her mother come across as the most sympathetic characters probably because they are so thinly sketched. None are more than creatures of our 'hero's' tale. I may not always be the sharpest card in the deck when it comes to 'literature' but the obscurities and failures to communicate emotion, at least beyond the lachrymose and 'ridiculous', really do pall after a while.
The mistress and the lover are neurotic. The political activist is cold and disturbed in an entirely different way as if a woman (or perhaps a man) who was not lachrymose, suicidal and lying wasted on their beds periodically was bound to become a political fanatic. Everyone is weak and moody. Yawn! At one point we have the two neurotic women separately heading for Barcelona with the political activist in situ and what could have been a diverting comedy of manners or a tragedy of love turns into a rather dreary and sordid shuffling of persons around rooms while a general strike and some shooting goes on outside.
So why keep the book in the library? Because, as I noted above, it is striving to tell us something about the mind of the powerless lost souls of its time despite itself, about the ones who had no ideology and just wanted to live, but were surrounded by fanatics. The sex, by the way, is abrupt, honest in its way and real enough but don't let anyone sell this to you as under the counter pornography - the sex is just a metaphor for despair and rage and little more. Now here's the spoiler because Bataille lets us into the secret of the book in a short exchange at the end: Henri, listen - I know I'm a freak, but I sometimes wish there would be a war ...
This is a book about those who could see the cataclysm coming in the fanaticism of those around them and who just wanted the storm to break to put them out of their misery. To have something happen. Some would have actively sought war through fanaticism, whether that of the militarism of the Right or that of the revolutionism of the Left, each feeding off the other, but the hysteria of the central character represents the real hysteria of the age - a shrill hope that the whole thing just go ahead because the tension was becoming unbearable!
No wonder that in 1957 (and we shall return to that year in the next book below), our fifty-something writer wanted to make it clear that his opinion had changed - the bloodletting proved to be a lot nastier than anyone had envisaged. Sartre was to write 'Nausea' in 1938 and, to be fair to Bataille, in addition to the general air of absurdity, there are moments when, in his observations of three years earlier, he gets close to the imagery of the greater work. Since it is unlikely that Sartre read this manuscript (or did he?), either Bataille fiddled with the manuscript on the quiet later or this sense of 'nausea' (he uses the term) was widespread in European 'liberal' society. It is like the general air of despair amongst our middle classes as they contemplate the possibility that our own society has broken down as a result of the intensifying ideological 'war' between progressives and neo-liberals.
There is another reason to keep the book in the library - a few moments of brilliant clarity. Small sections - most notably at the very beginning and at the very end - give us short prose poems of desperate depravity that are filmic in quality. Antonin Artaud's equally hysterical Heliogabalus gives us another point of comparison. Artaud and Bataille in this respect are two thin wedges linking us to the past and the future respectively. Artaud writes as the last of the decadents and chooses an anti-modernist chaotic stance seeking to revel in the horrors to come and seeking comfort in insanity and paganism. Bataille writes as a confused Catholic-modernist and proto-existentialist avant la lettre periodically seeking immolation and death (albeit as a pose) as the tide of chaos created by competing rigid alternate conceptions of order rises.
Artaud is working in the context of dionysiac theatre and Bataille thinks like a post war film maker before his time. The presiding philosophers are a forgotten Nietzche and, despite a Catholic faith that is not present in this book, a Sartre yet to be discovered. The point here is that the marginalia of literature often conspires to give us a better picture of the stresses of society than the great works. Artaud, Bataille (and Miller) are all, in their different ways, responding to a damaged failing bourgeois society that had repressed sexual passion and ecstasy.
'Blue Noon' is typical of the sort of work that gets pushed late to the public when other work has brought a man to prominence. The author is both flattered and resigned. Bataille's curt foreward to the 1957 first edition of this 1935 novella tells us as much. Others have prevailed on him to publish the manuscript, he no longer thinks like the late thirty-something man he was then (he has, indeed, 'moved on' as we say now) and he tries to explain that the ham-fisted clumsy style of the work is deliberate (which at least relieves us from the mistake of blaming some hapless translator for its leaden sentences).
So why bother with the book? Try treating it as a companion piece to Henry Miller's ranting 'The World of Sex' which we will review here some time in the future and we will see two ambitious literary males trying to cope with a world where sex is pushed into the realm of the near-criminal and where both are trying to find a way of expressing their true natures. In this context, it is a social document of sorts, set amongst the bien-pensant prosperous and idle French middle classes of the 1930s who were adopting leftist views without enthusiasm or understanding and sensing the cataclysm to come. Bataille was also part of the Surrealist movement and the book is an uneasy marriage of dream sequence and realism - a brave attempt perhaps but unsatisfactory. And if Bataille is open about its clumsiness as a text, who are we to argue? The number of repetitions of the word 'ridiculous' alone are, well, ridiculous.
The hero is a whining, lacrymose, self-absorbed (apparently once self-harming) rather nasty, sickly, death-obsessed, depressive and mildly sadistic figure without character whose attempts to cope with a wife, a mistress, a mother-in-law, a lover and an odd sort of anti-woman, a political activist, are played out across Europe - London, Paris, Vienna, Catalonia (oh, how we miss Orwell's insights) and the Rhine Valley with a cast of walk on servants, gilded youth, anarchists, communists and young bright-eyed and bushy-tailed Nazis. Not forgetting a dream trip to the Soviet Union. All in under 130 pages!
The women are not much better than our depressed and depressing anti-hero. The wife with two kids left in Brighton and her mother come across as the most sympathetic characters probably because they are so thinly sketched. None are more than creatures of our 'hero's' tale. I may not always be the sharpest card in the deck when it comes to 'literature' but the obscurities and failures to communicate emotion, at least beyond the lachrymose and 'ridiculous', really do pall after a while.
The mistress and the lover are neurotic. The political activist is cold and disturbed in an entirely different way as if a woman (or perhaps a man) who was not lachrymose, suicidal and lying wasted on their beds periodically was bound to become a political fanatic. Everyone is weak and moody. Yawn! At one point we have the two neurotic women separately heading for Barcelona with the political activist in situ and what could have been a diverting comedy of manners or a tragedy of love turns into a rather dreary and sordid shuffling of persons around rooms while a general strike and some shooting goes on outside.
So why keep the book in the library? Because, as I noted above, it is striving to tell us something about the mind of the powerless lost souls of its time despite itself, about the ones who had no ideology and just wanted to live, but were surrounded by fanatics. The sex, by the way, is abrupt, honest in its way and real enough but don't let anyone sell this to you as under the counter pornography - the sex is just a metaphor for despair and rage and little more. Now here's the spoiler because Bataille lets us into the secret of the book in a short exchange at the end: Henri, listen - I know I'm a freak, but I sometimes wish there would be a war ...
This is a book about those who could see the cataclysm coming in the fanaticism of those around them and who just wanted the storm to break to put them out of their misery. To have something happen. Some would have actively sought war through fanaticism, whether that of the militarism of the Right or that of the revolutionism of the Left, each feeding off the other, but the hysteria of the central character represents the real hysteria of the age - a shrill hope that the whole thing just go ahead because the tension was becoming unbearable!
No wonder that in 1957 (and we shall return to that year in the next book below), our fifty-something writer wanted to make it clear that his opinion had changed - the bloodletting proved to be a lot nastier than anyone had envisaged. Sartre was to write 'Nausea' in 1938 and, to be fair to Bataille, in addition to the general air of absurdity, there are moments when, in his observations of three years earlier, he gets close to the imagery of the greater work. Since it is unlikely that Sartre read this manuscript (or did he?), either Bataille fiddled with the manuscript on the quiet later or this sense of 'nausea' (he uses the term) was widespread in European 'liberal' society. It is like the general air of despair amongst our middle classes as they contemplate the possibility that our own society has broken down as a result of the intensifying ideological 'war' between progressives and neo-liberals.
There is another reason to keep the book in the library - a few moments of brilliant clarity. Small sections - most notably at the very beginning and at the very end - give us short prose poems of desperate depravity that are filmic in quality. Antonin Artaud's equally hysterical Heliogabalus gives us another point of comparison. Artaud and Bataille in this respect are two thin wedges linking us to the past and the future respectively. Artaud writes as the last of the decadents and chooses an anti-modernist chaotic stance seeking to revel in the horrors to come and seeking comfort in insanity and paganism. Bataille writes as a confused Catholic-modernist and proto-existentialist avant la lettre periodically seeking immolation and death (albeit as a pose) as the tide of chaos created by competing rigid alternate conceptions of order rises.
Artaud is working in the context of dionysiac theatre and Bataille thinks like a post war film maker before his time. The presiding philosophers are a forgotten Nietzche and, despite a Catholic faith that is not present in this book, a Sartre yet to be discovered. The point here is that the marginalia of literature often conspires to give us a better picture of the stresses of society than the great works. Artaud, Bataille (and Miller) are all, in their different ways, responding to a damaged failing bourgeois society that had repressed sexual passion and ecstasy.
These failures of culture were seeing this
repression (we may come to Reich later in our reviews) displaced into ideologies that competed to show off their
ability to engage in violence for 'rational' ends. Things are much
better now or they were until the tensions of the crash of 2008, of 2016 and now of all-out economic war between the Washington-owned 'West' and Sino-Russia threaten to start the cycle all over again. The beast of psychic repression (perhaps not so much sexual as then but we often deny to ourselves that our alleged liberation is really very superficial and unsatisfying) still lurks around our
politics, waiting to return if it were but to be let it in.
So this unattactive self-indulgent short book has its small uses but reserve it for a day when you really have nothing much else to do. And, by the way, do not bother with the equally obscure and portentous 1982 introduction by Ken Hollings - life is short: you do not need to waste precious moments of your life trying to make sense of it.
So this unattactive self-indulgent short book has its small uses but reserve it for a day when you really have nothing much else to do. And, by the way, do not bother with the equally obscure and portentous 1982 introduction by Ken Hollings - life is short: you do not need to waste precious moments of your life trying to make sense of it.
On balance, I am going to have to class Evil and Literature, Bataille's 1957 collection of eight essays on significant literary figures as
rather dreadful. Not that there are not occasional insights but the
essays are largely obscurantist attempts to engage with the fashionable
theories of the age and not much more. Sartre hangs like a pall
over the book, notably in the essays on Baudelaire and Genet. Bataille
plays with Christian notions, Marxism, existentialism, contemporary
anthropology and whatever is to hand to say not a great deal - or rather
to write a great deal that seems to say little.
The problem is with his starting point - the assumption, without any attempt at serious definition, that the notions of Good and Evil are more than rhetorical gestures. The claim that literature is evil by its very nature is actually arguable but it needs far more consideration of terms than his. The essays are variable and suggest the self indulgence of someone on the fringes of French intellectual life trying to shout out to his peers that he is present and that he can be judged by his ability to 'intellectualise' like the best of them.
The essays do, as I note, have insights but then descend into obscurantism. His creative and worthwhile theory of economics (wrong-headed but stimulating), based (in effect) on the potlach where excess or luxury has its role, gets its exposition in passing but only in passing. The essay on Kafka is mostly rather good. His thesis on the consonance of literature and evil is best articulated, yet not yet articulated fully, in dealing with Emily Bronte. He usefully helps introduce William Blake to a French audience with some acute insights. So there are good things to say - just!
But the sections on Baudelaire, Michelet, Sade Proust and Genet are speaking to local, almost provincial in time and place, literary disputes and concerns. It is Bataille's lack of clarity when clarity is possible that I find most problematic - but then I am an Anglo-Saxon so what do I know. No doubt the essays might have been amusing and even insightful to a Rive Gauche-aspirant in the late 1950s but they do not inspire now if only because Bataille never allows you to see the wood of his argument for the trees of games-playing wordiness.
This negative review it is not intended to criticise Bataille for more than this book. He falls into that category of people - Alesteir Crowley is another - who may not be great systematic thinkers but who tap into a zeitgeist and become great provocateurs and so changers of cultural norms. But I do feel that the nearly four hours of my life spent on this book was not the most productive. As you get older, patience begins to start to run out. Indeed, I almost gave up after the third essay because its obscurity and intellectual narcissism was almost beyond endurance. I am glad (I think) that I did not give up. Only by reading the whole was I able to get a sense of just how useless a culture of intellectualism could become. Still, there were a few insights and half the Kafka essay was actually enjoyable.
The problem is with his starting point - the assumption, without any attempt at serious definition, that the notions of Good and Evil are more than rhetorical gestures. The claim that literature is evil by its very nature is actually arguable but it needs far more consideration of terms than his. The essays are variable and suggest the self indulgence of someone on the fringes of French intellectual life trying to shout out to his peers that he is present and that he can be judged by his ability to 'intellectualise' like the best of them.
The essays do, as I note, have insights but then descend into obscurantism. His creative and worthwhile theory of economics (wrong-headed but stimulating), based (in effect) on the potlach where excess or luxury has its role, gets its exposition in passing but only in passing. The essay on Kafka is mostly rather good. His thesis on the consonance of literature and evil is best articulated, yet not yet articulated fully, in dealing with Emily Bronte. He usefully helps introduce William Blake to a French audience with some acute insights. So there are good things to say - just!
But the sections on Baudelaire, Michelet, Sade Proust and Genet are speaking to local, almost provincial in time and place, literary disputes and concerns. It is Bataille's lack of clarity when clarity is possible that I find most problematic - but then I am an Anglo-Saxon so what do I know. No doubt the essays might have been amusing and even insightful to a Rive Gauche-aspirant in the late 1950s but they do not inspire now if only because Bataille never allows you to see the wood of his argument for the trees of games-playing wordiness.
This negative review it is not intended to criticise Bataille for more than this book. He falls into that category of people - Alesteir Crowley is another - who may not be great systematic thinkers but who tap into a zeitgeist and become great provocateurs and so changers of cultural norms. But I do feel that the nearly four hours of my life spent on this book was not the most productive. As you get older, patience begins to start to run out. Indeed, I almost gave up after the third essay because its obscurity and intellectual narcissism was almost beyond endurance. I am glad (I think) that I did not give up. Only by reading the whole was I able to get a sense of just how useless a culture of intellectualism could become. Still, there were a few insights and half the Kafka essay was actually enjoyable.