George Bataille's L'Histoire de l'Oeil Author(s): Alberto Moravia, John Satriano, Madame Edwarda Source: The Threepenny Review,

No. 41 (Spring, 1990), p. 19 Published by: Threepenny Review Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4383866 Accessed: 17/07/2009 03:42
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BOOKS

de L'Histoire l'Oeil GeorgeBataille's

Alberto Moravia

E ROTICISMSEEMSto be a form
of knowledge which, as soon as it lays reality bare, destroys it. In other words, one can understand reality by means of eroticism, but at the price of the complete and irreparable destruction of reality itself. In this sense the erotic experience is related to the mystic experience: both are without return,the bridges are destroyed, the real world is lost forever. Another character that the mystic and erotic experiences share is that they both have need of excess; measure, which is a distinctive feature of scientific knowledge, is as unknown to the one as it is to the other. This excess, naturally, leads to death. But in the mystic experience this is the death of the self; in the erotic experience, the death of the other. Perhapsthis explains the apparently suicidal character of the erotic experience. I say "apparently"because suicide and homicide are names the world gives to certain excesses, while in reality mysticism and eroticism project a man outside the world. Which is to say, obviously, that what eroticism and mysticism have in common is the devaluation of the world, and that one can be a saint either in the religious sense or in the erotic sense. Furthermore, it is well known that the two experiences were connected and indistinguishable in primitive religions; separating and opposing them was the work of Christianity, which refuses, condemns, and removes eroticism. But be careful: even though it be in the negative and diabolical sense, eroticism is an indispensable element of every cognitive operation of Christianity as well. In any case, eroticism reveals itself as an instrument of knowledge, especially because it is never a natural occurrence or, better, it is never exclusively a natural occurrence: it begins to exist at the cultural level. Once again, however, it is necessary to point out that, if it is accompanied by consciousness, the erotic moment, in culture, cannot help but be destructive; and if it is unconscious it is not erotic. On the other hand, the relationship between eroticism and culture can be articulated like this: at the origin of eroticism is the unconscious; gradually, as culture develops, the recognition and recovery of eroticism take place at the same measured pace. Indeed, with only slight exaggeration, we could maintain straight out that culture is nothing else but the progressive discovery and definition of original and unconscious eroticism. The end of culture is, logically, completed consciousness of eroticism and its total recovery.At this point, the explanation is equivalent to destruction and conscious annihilation. Basically, then, the form of consciousness characteristic of eroticism deals with one

thing and one thing only: eroticism. It is forced to know itself and, in the effort this requires, it manifests itself. Thus cultures spring from suppression, ignorance, and unconsciousnessof the erotic; and they develop and die according to a discovery which is both progress and destruction at the same time. We have said that what eroticism has in common with asceticism is the devaluation of the world. A secondary but significant proof that this statement is true can be recognized in the brevity of erotic books. These books are of cheap quality most of the time; more rarely, they have a literary value; but, whether beautiful or ugly, what they have in common is the specific character of brevity. Obsessed by his own subject and at the same time determined to isolate it and confer a character of totality to it, the erotic writer usually exhausts all the possible combinations of sexual congress in a few dozen pages. Incest, bestiality, homosexuality, necrophilia, heterosexuality, and so on and so forth are separated from the social, psychological, historical, and moral contexts to which, in reality,they are inextricably linked. In other words, everythingwhich is not sexual is passed over in silence as if it did not exist. Sexual congress, like Attila the Hun, leaves not a single blade of grass where it passes; it creates a desert around itself and calls this desert reality.The operation that accomplishes this can be calculated and have an ulterior motive, as in so-called pornographic books; or, on the other hand, it can be spontaneous and have no ulterior motive, as in books that are strictly erotic; but, in either case, it revealsthe corrosive power of eroticism and the destruction to which it subjects the cultural fabric. The erotic writer does not concern himself with anything except eroticism, inasmuch as concerning himself with eroticism means, precisely and above all, suppressing everything which is not erotic. And this is the case not so much because eroticism benefits thereby (indeed, in some ways certain erotic passages in conventional novels where everything is dealt with are more erotic than the same passages in novels where only eroticism is dealt with), as because eroticism, once it has taken up its dominant theme, doesn't know what to do with reality. More real than the real, it paradoxically reveals itself, almost immediately, as pure and simple negation of reality. Thus it happens that the characters of erotic books have no professions, no family relations, no social connections; or, better, all these things are reduced to mere shells, almost as if to emphasize the process of emptying that is characteristic of eroticism. And while it is true that eroticism has need of values in

order to profane them, it is no less true that this profanation ceases to be such the very moment it takes place, on account of the excessive nature of eroticism. In short, everything in eroticism leads to crime. I mean crime as one of the two great refusals of the world; the other one being the religious refusal in the extreme meaning of the term, that is to say, in its mystic moment. Eroticism and mysticism refuse the world of values by annulling them in ecstasy. But religious ecstasy leads to the holocaust of one's own self, erotic ecstasy to the holocaust of the other. Here one returns to the idea of crime which is indivisible from eroticism and which in the ancient religions, by means of rite and sacrifice, lost its character of transgression, becoming in its turn a religious act. The lover wants to bite, devour, murder,destroy his beloved, in an impossible effort of communication and identification. In religion this cannibalism becomes ritualized, mediated, transformed into symbolical representation.

DE L'OEIL by Georges Bataille, besides being a little masterpiece of avant-garde literature, is a good example of a novel kept short and to essentials by the devouring flame of eroticism. But even though it is short, after the fashion of books said to be pornographic-that is, short because it is reduced to a few variations on the single theme of sex-it is perhaps not so much an erotic book as it is a book in which religious inquietude is transferred into a story of sexual fixation. The thing that tips us off to the religious character of the book is its narrative curve, which, starting with an analogy that is fundamentally obsessive (the resemblance between the egg and the testicle and between the testicle and the eye), becomes charged with tension and significance, to explode finally in the desecrating scene of the conclusion, in which the analogical obsession is resolved in a kind of black mass of the sadistic type. We have said sadistic; and, in truth, Histoire de l'Oeil is a book which curiously brings to mind Bataille's line of descent from the Divine Marquis. The style, which is lucid and delirious at the same time, the theatrically romantic and tempestuous scenery, the alternations of convulsive action and conceptual illumination, especially the precise utilization of the surroundings, the characters and the rites of religion, everything in this novel reminds one of the author of Justine. Bataille, furthermore, does not hide the fact; rather, he enjoys highlighting it with the eighteenth-century conventions of the narrative scheme, of the touristy and mundane backgrounds, of the frivolous and careless conclusion. But De Sade is a rationalistic and enlightened ideologue, who describes and exhibits in order to demonstrate, make plain, discuss, deny; Bataille, on the other hand, is a decadent irrationalist whose descriptions and exhibitions have the self-sufficiency and disinterestedness of poetry. Where De Sade presents us with examples, in depth, Bataille instead furnishes us with symbols. Thus the sense of De Sade is extremely clear even if at bottom his inspiration is obscure; whereas, in Bataille, inspiration has all the clarity of a consummated cultural awareness, but the sense JISTOIRE

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remains ambiguous and doubtful. What did Bataille want to say with the strange, upsetting image of the eye, which, inserted into Simone's vagina, looks out as if between two eye-lids and, at the same time, cries warm tears of urine? That eye which was torn out of the socket of a young Spanish priest who was martyredand strangledin the course of a black mass? That blue, pure, and ingenuous eye, which resembles the eye of the beloved Marcelle, dead by suicide at the end of an orgy? It will probably suffice to remember that the eye means vision, perception, learning, consciousness, taking into account that the image, of the purest Surrealistic stamp, has its own significance and transcends it. Could it be he is saying that the eye, an organ of the brain which always wants to know and understand, transferred from the cavity of the eye to that of the female sex organ, indicates an analogous transfer of the cognitive faculties of the mind to the instincts, from rationality to eroticism, from the spirit to the body? It's difficult to say; indeed, practically any hypothesis is legitimate. Nevertheless, one has to note that the eye as symbol of knowledge and allseeingness is common to every religion. On the plain of Katmandu, in Nepal, birthplace of Buddha, the enormous eye painted on the stupa looks out at us from above the woods and fields with the same obsessive fixity with which, in the pages of Bataille, we feel ourselves spied at, from between the legs of the cruel and extravagant Simone, by the eye of the dead man. But about the fundamentallyreligious character of eroticism, of his eroticism, .it is better to let Bataille speak himself. In the preface to Madame Edwarda, he writes: "At the further end of this pathetic meditation-which, with a cry, undoes itself, unravelling to drown in self-repudiation, for it is unbearable to its own self-we rediscoverGod. That is the meaning, that is the enormity of this insensate-this mad-book: a book which leads God upon the stage, God in the plenitude of His attributes; and this God, for all that, is what? A public whore, in no way different from any other public whore. But what mysticism could not say (at the moment it began to pronounce its message, it entered itentered its trance), eroticism does say: God is nothing if He is not, in every sense, the surpassingof God: in the sense of common everyday being, in the sense of dread, horror and impurity, and finally, in the sense of nothing...We cannot with impunity incorporate the very word into our speech which surpasses words, the word God; directly we do so, this word, surpassing itself, explodes past its defining, restricting limits. That which this word is, stops nowhere, is checked by nothing, it is everything and, everywhere, is impossible to overtake anywhere. And he who so much as suspects this instantly falls silent. Or, looking for a way out, and realizing he seals himself all the more inextricably into the impasse, he searches within himself for that which, capable of annihilating him, renders him similar to God, similar to nothing."O 1969 (Translated from the Italianby John Satriano, with MadameEdwarda passage quoted Wainhouse's translation the fromAustryn of French.)

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