[In the following essay, Cokal explores the connection between eroticism, violence, and disruption in Bataille's fiction.]

When Georges Bataille died in 1962, he was perhaps best known as a librarian and, along with Denis Hollier, co-founder of the Collège de Sociologie. After his death, however, and thanks in part to the upheavals of 1968, his philosophical writings about death, eroticism, and transgression were rediscovered, and their author gradually assumed a place among a new community of avant-garde literary philosophers. Michel Foucault, Maurice Blanchot, Philippe Sollers, Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, and Jean Baudrillard have all taken pen in hand to appreciate Bataille's philosophical and literary writings.¹ Of particular interest have been the two essays L'Érotisme² and Les Larmes d'Éros,³ in which he expounded controversial theories about the affinity of the erotic and the sacred, sexuality's rupturing effect on continuity of being, and the erotic power of violence (on all of which topics I will elaborate below). His influence on specialists in twentieth-century French literature and eroticism since then has been profound.

Bataille was also a writer of erotic (some would say pornographic) novels and short stories. He used his fiction to portray an often disorienting world in which his philosophy is everyday truth, and in recent years a few scholars have turned their attention to novels such as Le Bleu du ciel⁴ and Histoire de l'œil, and stories such as “Madame Edwarda” and “Le Mort.”⁵ Yet, while there has been much analysis of the philosophical works, specific and detailed readings of many aspects of the fiction are still wanting. Fiction can of course do things that philosophy cannot; it can, for one, create a three-dimensional imaginary world whose geography can be mapped and analyzed. In Bataille's novels and stories, the narrative depictions of buildings, landscapes, and above all human bodies both illuminate his theories of discontinuity and violence and shock and unsettle the reader. Each designated space in his novels and short stories is a kind of wound, an opening in the body of the text, and such ruptures are crucial to the erotic effect of the fiction. His description of space invites the reader to discover pleasure by cutting even deeper into his imaginative world and opening up the symbolic systems, including language, that embed his philosophy within it.

For example, Le Bleu du ciel opens with a dual invocation of space—one type within the body, one type outside it:

Dans un bouge de quartier de Londres, dans un lieu hétéroclite des plus sales, au soussol, Dirty était ivre. Elle l'était au dernier degré, j'étais près d'elle (ma main avait encore un pansement, suite d'une blessure de verre cassé).

(Le Bleu du ciel 17)

This passage marks a progressive narrowing-down of physical space. Bataille and his narrator, Troppmann, move from a nasty region of London, to a dirty place, to a basement, to a wound; space shrinks from the regionally limited to the architecturally enclosed to, finally, what is artificially opened in the body. It is a move typical of Bataille's fiction, in which characters are persistently troubled by the compartmentalization of external space and by the body's separateness, wholeness, and (perhaps paradoxically) apparent permeability. For Bataille, the body is at the same time the ultimate measure of space and itself the space most fully occupied, and most desirably penetrated. It cries out for wounds, just as, in his writing, a fluid narrative line cries out for rupture, for a shocking revelation or event: Le Bleu du ciel, also typically, follows this quick sketch of baseness with equally sordid sexual congress.

In Bataille's corpus, the wound marks the space everyone is dying to get into.⁶ The mutilation and transgression are infinitely enticing, erotic because they shock or even sicken the viewer/reader. Inside the ruptured body or narrative—the ones Bataille and his characters offer to pick apart and examine—we are invited to look for meaning: for individual subjectivity, for philosophical sense. And here again, Bataille offers a shock: like the body, the text may not hold what we expect it to.

THE CRACKING OF DISCONTINUITY

According to L'Érotisme, the intact human body represents a barrier to, and thus a break in, community and communication: “Entre un être et un autre, il y a un abîme, il y a une discontinuité. … Nous sommes, vous et moi, des êtres discontinus” (L'Érotisme 19). Bodies are conceived of as containers for congenitally separate subjects, barriers to an interpenetration that might to some degree alleviate the individual's sense of isolation. Bodies are, moreover, the fundamental barriers, the first demarcators of space that human beings are capable of recognizing; children, for example, locate objects or feelings as either inside or outside of their bodies.

To shatter this discontinuity among individuals and establish community—always posited as a desirable end—the body must be broken up, opened to the possibility of flowing in and out. Hence Bataille's fascination with sexuality and with wounds (and, as a parallel, with excrement and vomit). Sexual intercourse penetrates one body with another and creates a bond, however brief, of community; thus erotic activity yields “un instant de continuité” (L'Érotisme 20).⁷ Perpetually continuous existence is possible only after death, when the body reenters the amorphous pool of deceased souls—souls without bodies, thus without boundaries to communication: “la mort a le sens de la continuité de l'être” (L'Érotisme 19). Wounds, which slice away at the body's physical integrity, can be read as an anticipation of this happy state of collective disembodiment,⁸ but for Troppmann and other denizens of Bataille's fiction they are also much more: torment and pain open up the really desirable spaces of the body.⁹

Just as Bataille says that anything original, any aberrant behavior, is erotic (“Nous parlons d'érotisme toutes les fois qu'un être humain se conduit d'une manière qui présente avec les conduites et les jugements habituels une opposition contrastée,” L'Érotisme 121), so could we say that anything original or aberrant is a wound. Both sex and the wound represent a sort of “suddenly,” a rupture in the day-to-day teleologies which would anticipate isolation, intactness, a consistent enclosure of self.¹⁰ And indeed, Bataille has written of the violence inherent in eroticism; without violence, two bodies would be unable to break their discontinuity (L'Érotisme 113-14). Sex and other violent penetrations also mark life pushed to the extreme,¹¹ an encounter between self and other, inner and outer. But it does not follow that sexual spaces—bodily cavities, most notably the fente, or female parts—are inherently akin to spaces of wounds. Something more is needed to change sexual space into the site of violent rupture, as happens in this passage from the short story “Madame Edwarda”:

Assise, elle maintenait haute une jambe écartée: pour mieux ouvrir la fente, elle achevait de tirer la peau des deux mains. Ainsi les “guenilles” d'Edwarda me regardaient, velues et roses, pleine de vie comme une pieuvre répugnante. …

Enfin, je m'agenouillai, je titubai, et je posai mes lèvres sur la plaie vive.

(“Edwarda” 34)

When the “fente” is merely displayed, it is “pleine de vie,” full of life, a pink and hairy octopus. At this point, it is not really a sexual space; it is merely an opening in Edwarda's body. Once it becomes eroticized, the object of the reluctant narrator's cunnilingus, the fente is called a living wound, “wound” being a common euphemism for the cunt in both French and English. Its passage into the erotic renders it almost literally a wound: erotic intent translates—re-creates—the space, much as a knife would. Or perhaps more precisely, it is the discourse of the wound that eroticizes the fente—if the narrator were unable to reimagine the cunt as a site of violence, injury, and rupture, he might not be able to consummate his lust for Edwarda later. The wound creates the opportunity for penetration, allows the narrator to focus and thus define his erotic desires.

As the paragraphs about Edwarda's fente indicate, sexual openings are not terribly appealing in and of themselves; something has to happen to make them desirable. In a similar passage in Histoire de l'œil, in which the narrator contemplates Simone's spread legs, the cunt is a fetid place given to eruptions and disaster:

D'ailleurs les régions marécageuses du cul—auxquelles ne ressemblent que les jours de crue et d'orage ou les émanations suffocantes des volcans, qu'avec quelque chose d'un désastre—ces régions désespérantes que Simone, dans un abandon qui ne présageait que des violences, me laissait regarder comme en hypnose, n'étaient plus désormais que l'empire souterrain d'une Marcelle suppliciée dans sa prison et devenue la proie des cauchemars.

(Histoire 107)

As a Dantesque “région désespérante” and “empire souterrain,” the cunt imprisons and demolishes its visitors; if it does not suffocate them by enclosure, it does so with its noxious eruptions. This fente conveys the narrator to a level of horror deeper than that of the hospital/prison to which Marcelle is consigned, and where she is in turn tormented by nightmares. (The storminess of the cunt here, of course, anticipates the storm Simone and the narrator run through after an unsuccessful attempt to make contact with Marcelle in her asylum/prison.) Eventually he will come to desire that very cunt—but only after a few significant brushes with death and other ruptures that, again, give sharp definition to desire.

The much-anticipated mutual deflowering of Simone and narrator in Histoire de l'œil passes in the blink of an eye: “nous nous étendîmes par terre et je la baisai à côté du cadavre. Simone était vierge et cela nous fit mal, mais nous étions contents justement d'avoir mal” (Histoire 138). Immediately, Simone stands up and looks at the corpse, demonstrating that mere sex is just a passage from one meaningless point in space to another, pleasurable only in the extent to which its painfulness indicates violence. Again, something needs to happen—to break—in order to spark interest, to render the experience truly erotic.

A wound can be the answer to both problems: making space erotic and making sex interesting. The cut on Troppmann's hand, for example, seems in part to enable his congress with Dirty. More significantly, Simone and her lover consummate their relationship upon seeing Marcelle, the object of their mutual erotic fascination, lying dead and mutilated. Intercourse becomes possible only after an encounter that proves the body has an inside, an inside opened by violence; looking through that wound defines that inside as erotic space—and thus makes the sexual parts wounds as well. So the story and the sex reach their climax when our lovers' bodies join not just next to a cadaver but on top of a body they have mutilated, torn, and killed for themselves, in the church of that most famous lover, Don Juan.

For Bataille and those who have followed him, wounds open up an additional type of space: what Maurice Blanchot has called “l'espace littéraire,”¹² the imaginary territory in which literature is created. Wounds are indeed a form of writing on the generally presumed nonimaginary space of the body; whether still fresh or cured into scar tissue, they afford a glimpse into a particular body's history. “Seeing” the wound on Troppmann's hand prompts him to narrate how it got there; Edwarda's “living wound” leads to a description of her fente's sexual use. Peter Brooks has suggested that “scenarios of desire” prepare the body to be written on,¹³ in Bataille, the writing is not just literary, it is also physical—and that writing in fact reflects back upon the desire, recreating it as well. Brooks calls nudity “the final integer of meaning” (34); wounds take us inside that final integer, making us look for meaning within meaning—meaning that is both marked on and inherent within the body. Bataille, accordingly, prepares his characters for writing by stripping them naked: hence the repeated insistence on Edwarda's nudity (e.g., “je me levai et suivis Madame Edwarda dont la nudité traversa la salle” [35]), particularly as it moves through space, and from one enclosing space to another. The story in fact opens with the narrator's desire to take his clothes off, or to take off the clothes of the girls he desires (“Edwarda” 31). In Histoire de l'œil, too, the characters are constantly laying themselves and each other bare and then inflicting major or minor harm: during the orgy scene, at the mental hospital, outside on their bikes, in the pig sty, in Don Juan's church, etc. These characters are ready to be written on and about: they are ready for wounds. So, too, as we shall see, is the author himself.

THE BUILDING OF SPACE

Bataille's fictions construct three types of space around and within the body: purely architectural (buildings, etc.), corporeal (the openings we are born with, part of the body's natural structure), and architecturally corporeal (those openings people make themselves, either deliberately or by chance). He occasionally invokes vast and apparently unstructured space, as with the many references to the sky in Le Bleu du ciel and “Madame Edwarda”—but even this space can be compartmentalized and turned into an agent of enclosure: though Madame Edwarda's night sky is seemingly endless and “vide” (“Edwarda” 44), in the daylight the horizon is “rétréci” and every object and face becomes a means of tightening the vise around the narrator (“Edwarda” 48).

Each apparent opening in structure also encloses: windows lead into a prison, the vagina holds the penis inside, and eventually, the wound structures and seems to hold meaning within itself. Nudity—the invitation to writing and wounding, the final integer of endless possibility—is usually displayed indoors; wounds are opened when the bodies are inscribed within confining architectural space. Thus even as Madame Edwarda, the ultimate “être ouvert” whom Bataille associates with divinity (“Edwarda” 20), roams the streets of Paris and calls herself DIEU, she gravitates around the massive pillars of the Porte Saint-Denis, next to which she appears like a “trou” (“Edwarda” 41). She is simultaneously a blank space to be written on, an empty space to be filled, and a creature who moves within the architecturally defined space of Paris (and of the story itself).

The short story “Le Mort” is constructed along a careful trajectory designed to enclose its protagonist, Marie. An emptiness opens in her when her lover, Edouard, dies: “Lorsque Edouard retomba mort, un vide se fit en elle.”¹⁴ Bataille guides the narrative toward both filling that emptiness in her and shutting her, with her emptiness, inside closed rooms and her own dead body—which final enclosure, paradoxically, renders her a part of continuous space. Marie abandons Edouard's cadaver and looks for an inn, within the walls of which she enjoys cunnilingus, orgasm, pissing, fellatio, intercourse, vomiting, and voiding her bowels—all forms of filling and emptying her body, making it participate in a scatological continuum and defining the boundaries of her physical being (food, for example, needs to go into her body in order to pass out of it in a different form). Once emptied of all effluvia, she returns home with her grotesque new lover, the dwarf count—and kills herself. The circularity of structure here encloses Marie's sexual escapades within death. Death is the ultimate rupture—the interruption of a teleology that would anticipate a long life, therefore a wound to individual existence—and thus, paradoxically, the ultimate opening. Within the story, too, Marie's death appears to be just one event in a chain of such simultaneous openings and closings; there is some suggestion at the end that her demise will inspire the dwarf to embark on his own sexual odyssey. Thus death in this story both opens and limits potential, desire, and the space through which it is possible to move.

Marcelle in Histoire de l'œil is a creature of architectural enclosures, both trapped by and created by them—created, that is, as a sexual being. Until she locks herself in the wardrobe to masturbate during the early orgy scene, she has virtually no sexual desires of her own; once there, her erotic fascination for the narrator and his companion intensifies. As Marcelle climaxes, Simone “frottait ses fesses à l'armoire” (Histoire 99), thus consummating their relationship through the prophylactic wardrobe—which represents the ultimate in bodily discontinuity. “La triste Marcelle” then floods her self-sought prison with urine and bursts into tears, and it is a good half hour before anyone thinks of letting her out; by then Simone is asleep and smiling, fingers buried in her “fourrure” (100). Marcelle has indeed made a noxious swamp of her hole, a swamp Simone enjoys by suggestion. Marcelle's enclosure enables the expression of desire for her and for others, thus both shutting her in and changing that limited space, that rupture of containment, into a window of opportunity.

Marcelle's enclosure and consequently her magnetism increase when her family consign her to a local asylum. Simone and the narrator pay their friend a visit, and the novel dwells on both her captivity and its threshold—the prison window that becomes an erotic site:

Il sembla qu'un invisible monstre arrachait Marcelle au barreau que tenait fortement sa main gauche. … Il ne resta devant nous qu'une fenêtre vide, trou rectangulaire perçant la nuit noire, ouvrant à nos yeux las un jour sur un monde composé avec la foudre et l'aurore.

(Histoire 115)

The hole that the window cuts is set up as a site of penetration; only by crossing it can the young lovers gain access to and mastery of their erotic icon. But penetration is not so easy. The barreau is Marcelle's bourreau: it torments her by keeping her enclosed. This is one space into which the narrator and Simone do not enter; when the narrator finally cuts the bars, it is to pull Marcelle outside to him. Thus, although the asylum can be violated, it is simultaneously unviolable; it can be opened but not entered, architecturally figured but essentially not understood. If it is a swamp, the lovers want not to get trapped there but to enjoy the eruptions they can coax out of it—they want to open it, not be closed in by it. In the “swamp” passage, too, Marcelle's cunt is equated with her prison itself—it may be an unknowable, unpleasant spot, described with imagery perhaps reminiscent of medieval dungeons, but it is also something outside her; though it is itself a site of power, it does not empower its owner. Like the window—a hole that pierces the night, actively opening up the day—it is an aggressive, automutilating space.

IMPENETRABLE INTERIORS: MEANING AND EMOTION

In all of Bataille's work, including Histoire de l'œil, characters move in and out of wardrobes, rooms, and bodies—but the reader stays outside. We see only what comes out (for example, Marcelle and her urine), and even if we follow a character into a room we do not know what that room looks like. As Gaston Bachelard suggests in his classic work The Poetics of Space, wardrobes and other compartmentalized furniture make a model for secrecy; it is through looking at such structures that we come to conceptualize the secret.¹⁵ For “secret” we might substitute the term “erotic” or “wound”—for a secret is another sort of “suddenly,” a break with the expected trajectory, a cut that can change a story. Marcelle's wardrobe and prison allow us to conceive of her as a secret—erotic, woundable—being; they increase her eroticism, even create it. The rupture of compartmentalized space thus does the same work as the wound that breaks into the body: it transforms the site into an erotic one, a wound, a place in which something unexpected might happen.

Bataille sets himself apart from other writers of the literary erotic by refusing to contemplate the dimensions and textures of the body's sexual spaces. Even as he displays, opens, and probes his characters' bodies, he suppresses sensuous description, neglecting what Anaïs Nin calls “the shadowy folds of … sexual secrets.”¹⁶ He never shows his readers what it might feel like to be the occupier or possessor of certain openings in the body. In a story about three women, Nin describes sexual opening from within and without:

… now [Elena] inserted her finger into the tight little aperture. There she could feel every contraction caused by Leila's kisses, as if she were touching the wall against which Leila moved her tongue. Bijou, withdrawing from the tongue that searched her, moved into a finger which gave her joy.

(Nin 141-42)

But for Bataille, the spaces inside the body eternally resist our knowledge. Sexual space is forever a “suddenly,” a swamp of secrets that can be described through metaphors but never subjected to close scrutiny from inside. If it could be described, it would not really be a rupture; thus the rupture becomes another closed body, something we might like to penetrate but cannot.

There is a bit more description of actual wounds, openings not normally found in the body and thus perhaps of more active interest to this author. And wounds are fascinating; in the climactic scene of Histoire de l'œil, Simone

eut envie de voir son œuvre et m'écarta pour se lever. Elle remonta cul nu sur le cadavre nu. Elle examina le visage, épongea la sueur du front. … Il arrivait ceci d'étrange: posée sur l'œil du mort, la mouche se déplaçait doucement sur le globe vitreux. … Je la vis [Simone] plongée dans un abîme de pensées.

(Histoire 166)

A “suddenly” (“ceci d'étrange”) opens a space (“un abîme de pensées”) that in turn inspires mutilation; later we will see the blood spurt when the cadaver's eye is removed, feel the “excessive douceur” (Histoire 167) of the severed eye caressing Simone's body.

But there is so much more that Bataille could have done with that wound. He could have shown us the bristle of severed optic stalks, the blue-black cords of exposed veins. In Le Bleu du ciel, too, he could have described the delicate lips of the cut in Troppmann's hand, the beads of blood welling up from it. He chose not to—he keeps his wounds hidden, bandaged in a blankness of language. It seems that, as far as language is concerned, there is no interior to the body, no interior to architectural space. And there are a few possible explanations: either bodies are so separate from each other that even when they are penetrated they are unknowable—or language as he sees it has no interior, no meaning.

“Ce livre a son secret,” the narrator of “Madame Edwarda” declares inside parentheses; “je dois le taire: il est plus loin que tous les mots” (“Edwarda” 49). Books are one more form of enclosure; they contain words, which hold meanings and secrets; but some secrets lie beyond words.¹⁷ Bachelard writes that although every word does “an honest job in our everyday language,” philosophical and theoretical concepts are lifeless thinking because they are organized, compartmentalized; all the individuality and freshness of thought is removed once an idea has been institutionalized and given an official name, such as “metaphor” (75). By dividing mental space, then, conceptualization kills language—much as Bataille “kills” Marcelle by locking her in a wardrobe and then in an institution, showing her inability to break away from what other people are making of her and her body. It might appear that by formalizing his own admittedly original (if perhaps fanciful) ideas about sexuality and the human mind in his philosophical works and fiction, Bataille is killing language itself; when every bizarre escapade and thoughtful explanation serves only to illuminate a formally developed idea (as, for example, about love as a sacrifice, or eroticism as the breaking of boundaries), the life and vigor—the very meaning—of language seems to empty out of it. And this is not a type of death in which endless direct communication can take place: it is the more popularly conceived line between the quick and the still, which cannot be crossed.

One way to burst free of compartmentalizing language suggests itself: by showing the emotion buried within the word. Emotion is originary meaning; it is the value that attaches to objects and bodies, transcending their physical dimensions. Writers such as Françoise Duvignaud argue that mutilation inspires terror because it turns the human body into an object (12)—but even at their most unsavory, vivid moments, Bataille's fictions perhaps inspire more laughter than shudders, and he is widely considered to have written in order to excite reactions, not prescribe behavior. We have to ask what sort of feeling—what kind of transcendent meaning—Bataille intends his readers to glean from all these enclosures, openings, and woundings, and whether it is possible for a reader to penetrate deeply enough to find out. Desires themselves are insufficient here; the impulse to penetrate a body, for example, does not necessarily involve emotion or complex motivation—it could just be the work of the id, an animal instinct. We have to turn to emotions such as romantic love to examine the possibility of opening up a new sort of space (and to Bataille, a new sort of wound) that transcends the body. Does love (or, as in Le Bleu du ciel, political fervor) open enclosed and secret spaces onto one another? Is emotion what lies at the heart of the wound?

In a consideration of eroticism, thoughts naturally turn to love—which Bataille himself saw as a type of wound. In L'Érotisme, he writes that to love means to live in fear; the lover fears that the object will die. Violence and tenderness, disorder and careful regard, balance each other as love pushes the one who feels it to aggressive heights of desire:

La violence de l'amour mène à la tendresse, qui est la forme durable de l'amour, mais elle introduit dans la recherche des cœurs ce même élément de désordre, cette même soif de défaillance et ce même arrière-goût de mort que nous trouvons dans la recherche des corps. Essentiellement, l'amour élève le goût d'un être pour un autre à ce degré de tension où la privation éventuelle de la possession de l'autre—ou la perte de son amour—n'est pas ressentie moins durement qu'une menace de mort. … l'amour n'est pas le désir de perdre, mais celui de vivre dans la peur de sa perte possible, l'être aimé maintenant l'amant au bord de la défaillance.

(L'Érotisme 267)

Fear that the beloved body and mind will be removed from what has been established as one's limited sphere of knowledge implies that that sphere has opened to include another consciousness. Love (virtually the only emotion Bataille discusses explicitly) can thus be understood as a rupture—perhaps an unpleasant one—that opens up the possibility for continuity through sex. Thus it would seem that love, which is the wound itself, cannot be what is hidden inside the wound.

Love, then, breaks the barriers between bodies (and, perhaps, minds). But love destroys the writing on those bodies. At the end of “Madame Edwarda,” the narrator refers to the prostitute as “mon cœur,” then suddenly asks himself if he should go on cavorting with Edwarda, living and, finally, writing. His consideration takes place within parentheses—a form of scriptorial enclosure that places writing at the interior of life, love, and sex:

(Continuer? je le voulais mais je m'en moque. L'intérêt n'est pas là. Je dis ce qui m'oppresse au moment d'écrire: tout serait-il absurde? ou y aurait-il un sens? … Le récit, le continuerai-je?)

(“Edwarda” 52-53)

His search for meaning in life leads to his search for meaning in art; and he emerges from the parentheses with “J'ai fini.” There is no meaning inside, just debasement and, finally, the emptiness of death: “Le reste est ironie, longue attente de la mort. …” And so his story ends. Deciding to love Edwarda has driven him to desperation and to anticipation of death; and it has killed his writing, for once he calls Edwarda his “heart,” he has uncovered a secret too powerful and too frightening to describe. He joins the continuity represented by death both bodily and literary—his words melt into the continuum of silence. This scene, then, might explain in part why Bataille's writing suppresses description of all sorts of interior; it resists the meaning, the secret, enclosed there, preferring instead to construct a fiction of exteriors. Writing must necessarily rejoice in the wound but not in its content, not in what makes the wound; or it becomes silence.

SUBJECTIVITY AND LITERARY SPACE

The search for meaning might further lead us to consider the establishment of subjectivity—part of what Bataille refers to as “la vie intérieure,” spiritually discontinuous being—which itself is an imagined entity. The wound, the “suddenly,” offers a site for building a subject: the secret it contains is often the self of the author or narrator, out of which his careful avoidance of interiors springs. This point might seem counterintuitive; subjectivity is usually presumed to exist in the body itself—a body unbroken, unmarked by and disengaged from aberrant behavior; when we say a character has a “self,” we usually mean self-possession, the hallmarks of which are steady, rational behavior, a sense of wholeness.

Not so with Bataille. Here the body contains nothing until it is prepared for violence—until something has happened or will happen to it. The intact body, as we have seen, is just space; when it is to be broken, violated, plundered, it becomes a “plaie vive” and an object of interest. As an interruption in ordinary teleology, wounds offer a chance to stop, reflect, and reconstitute the self, thus opening up new space for subjectivity. (Blanchot suggests as much in an aphoristic section of The Writing of the Disaster: “The crack: a fissure which would be constitutive of the self, or would reconstitute itself as the self, but not as a cracked self.”)¹⁸ Wounds galvanize characters into action; wounds make people choose what they want, and in defining desires they define selves.

Thus Troppmann's wound establishes him as character and prompts him to reflect on his history, telling us who he is and how he defines his consciousness. The first self on which the wound opens is a blank, an empty head: after he reopens the cut in his hand, he jumps forward in time to a quasi-stream-of-consciousness rant about the imminence of his death and the idiocy of his happiness at the time he is writing:

Je le sais.

Je mourrai dans des conditions déshonorantes.

Je jouis aujourd'hui d'être un objet d'horreur, de dégoût, pour le seul être auquel je suis lié.

Ce que je veux: ce qui peut survenir de plus mauvais à un homme qui en rie.

La tête vide où “je” suis est devenue si peureuse, si avide, que la mort seule pourrait la satisfaire.

(Le Bleu du ciel 31)

He begins with “I know,” perhaps an echo of the Cartesian “cogito ergo sum,” an evocation of the power of reason—though, as the narrative grinds on, it becomes clear that he has very little rational control of himself.¹⁹ In fact, he says his head is empty, and he puts “je” in quotation marks, thereby calling the very existence—or at least the sincerity—of his “I” into question. He calls himself an object of horror and disgust—an object, so perhaps not quite a subject; then he defines his desire, which is a masochistic impulse toward the most unpleasant trials imaginable. And this suffering, as he tells us with “jouis” (a word meaning not only “rejoice” but also “climax sexually”) and on the next page, makes him happy: “JE TRIOMPHE!” (32). Though Troppmann's head is empty—just a blank space, an absence—it is also a wound, which gives occasion to this musing: full of writing, full of sex, full of self.

What follows next is the lengthy account of his past adventures in politics and sex, in which we see how Troppmann came to be this emptied-out subject. Troppmann is the fictional author of this story; and like any author, he is contained within the work whose boundaries he himself has set.²⁰ Wounds will come to play a significant role again, as when (depressed over his inability to make decisions and take political action) he stabs himself with a pen:

Un soir, à la lumière du gaz, j'avais levé mon pupitre devant moi. Personne ne pouvait me voir. J'avais saisi mon porte-plume, le tenant, dans le poing droit fermé, comme un couteau, je me donnai de grands coups de plume d'acier sur le dos de la main gauche et sur l'avant-bras. Pour voir … Pour voir, et encore: Je voulais m'endurcir contre la douleur. Je m'étais fait un certain nombre de blessures sales, moins rouges que noirâtres (à cause de l'encre). Ces petites blessures avaient la forme d'un croissant, qui avait en coupe la forme de la plume.

(Le Bleu du ciel 148-49)

The response to bodily stasis is self-mutilation; these punctures will be what finally get him out of the house and into the street—they define him as an active person.

There is an obvious circularity here, as once again Troppmann's hand is wounded (and with reference to dirtiness/Dirty); but now the relationship to writing is much more pronounced. What could write is wounded by a writing instrument; and it is wounded in writing, in the marks that make up his book. Thus Bataille and Troppmann open up not just the body but also literary space, the space in which literature can take place and be written.

Kristeva has written that for Bataille “Language is only a support for ruptures. It serves in order that the blank spots, the breaks in meaning be inscribed” (241).²¹ Carolyn Dean argues further that many postmodernists represent writing and reading as forms of a cut, and that most often the cut is fairly final: decapitation or castration. Civilization, she says (that is, reading and writing) thus cannot be established without wounding, creating a hole that she equates with absence (42). Though I have argued that an absence is not exactly the same thing as a wound for Bataille, there is a sense in which Dean's claim holds true even in my terms. Troppmann writes in order to become meaningless, to become an absence. His empty head can be read as a decapitation; and when he stabs himself with his pen, his wounding helps impel him toward writing on paper. Then, as he expects his wounding to make him immune to pain, he writes violently on himself in order to empty himself of feeling, both physical and mental. If feeling represents a sort of meaning, he wants none of it—he will become a meaningless subject, an absence instead of a wound. And yet a self is born inside that absence, and it comes to tell a story that (for all its avowed meaninglessness) is full of meaning: the construction of an empty personality.

As it is with the character, so let it be with the author: like Troppmann, Bataille mutilates himself—in this case, the incorporeal body somewhere beyond the text—and he does it in a most telling way: by using pseudonyms. Bataille himself called noms de plume “the transgression of all language” (qtd in Dean 57); Dean argues that pseudonymity is the sign of a “subjectivity in flux,” a subjectivity mutilated, elusive, and yet ever-present. These multiple pseudonyms/wounds are actually a characteristic of Bataille's fictional style, a characteristic that composes his authorial persona, his own sort of subjectivity. A pseudonym can also represent a historical slippage, a temporal wound that allows another person to slide into and fill a cut in authorial persona with meaning. Troppmann, for example, was the name of a criminal decapitated in 1870, and Bataille occasionally signed it to his fictions, in addition to using it for his wounding/writing character. Lord Auch, another pseudonym, means “Lord Also”—suggesting perhaps the multiplicity of personalities within this author, any one of which could spring forth from a cut in his writing hand. Thus, like the character Troppmann, if Bataille stabs his authorial self and hides his identity, he may seem to be emptying his self of meaning—but the names and personae he substitutes in his own place are of course meaning, and they show that something is happening inside the wound.

Dean seems to equate Bataille's sense of subjectivity with criminal activity (an equation to which few critics would take exception); the cut is associated with crime, she writes, and criminal subjectivity is an emptiness arising from a series of failures to identify the real with the ideal: crime always marks the slippage of subjectivity into an open rift of madness (Dean 56). It would seem, then, that every writer (including the critic) is a criminal, confusing reality with his or her own imaginings; at the very least, we are all con artists, trying to confuse other people. With our restless eyes and minds we prey on empty heads, emptying our own in turn, so we can construct some kind of prison for meaning—into which, of course, we will never enter fully.

EMPTY HEAD AND STUFFED EYE

Bataille's wounds to literary space might prompt the question, Is there an interior to language?—is “suddenly,” the rupture, all we will get? Or is there some sort of transcendent sense held within the space of the story? Every work indeed contains some sort of message within its literary space. Meaning is an ephemeral, apparently spiritual essence that can well up within in any container; subjectivity, for example, is one kind of content. And meaning has to be contained: we might discuss “the meaning of” or “in,” but never “the meaning around.” As Bachelard suggests, through meaning language itself participates in the dialectic of enclosure and release: “Through meaning it encloses, while through poetic expression, it opens up” (222; emphasis in the original). There may be no such thing as an empty head.

And yet Bataille quite frequently tries to construct his text as just such an empty—or decapitated—head; many of his fictions are mutilated, fragmented, interrupted by lengthy ellipses and blank spaces. Ellipses and fragmentation represent textual wounds, writing's interruption; white space is death, the absence of writing. All are “suddenlys,” ruptures that make the body (of the novel) more interesting, more ready for engagement, by breaking apart readerly expectations of a whole, continuous text. The layout of “Le Mort,” for example, embodies a constant struggle between white space and space marked by writing—much as the presence of two dead bodies will define the beginning and end of the story. No segment of this text is long enough to fill a page by itself, and all are printed so as to run flush with the bottom of the page, where they are followed by captions that sum up plot movement. On top, empty white space presses down on the text, seeming to push it toward the caption—toward the simplified text, the crystallization of meaning. Death and terse summary squeeze the actual story, the slow and delicious savoring of Marie's exploits, between them. This layout suggests that the text itself is something that stands between death (white space) and meaning (the caption). If we return to the original definition of the Bataillean erotic as something that breaks with tradition and the norm, then we might say that the text—regardless perhaps of what is written there—becomes itself a physically erotic site.

“Madame Edwarda” is marked both with blank spaces and with ellipses that go on for many lines at a stretch. The first such ellipsis follows the narrator's payment to the deputy madame and his departure, with Edwarda, from the whores' room. He makes this observation about the other prostitutes' indifference to their leavetaking: “la mort elle-même était de la fête, en ceci que la nudité du bordel appelle le couteau du boucher” (“Edwarda” 35). After this evocation of nudity—blankness, the final integer—and the butcher's knife—an instrument that wounds—there are nine lines of ellipsis; these are followed by a page and a half of white space, then almost three more full lines of ellipsis. Wounds surround the space of death, and emptiness is the meaning that wells up here.

When the text resumes, we see there has been a break in the action; the characters now stand in a room lined with mirrors. This scene contains a double mise en abyme. The first paragraph notes that “au plus léger mouvement, nos cœurs rompus s'ouvraient au vide où nous perdait l'infinité de nos reflets” (“Edwarda” 38). Here the elliptical textual wound, containing death, ruptures the characters' hearts and opens them up to a void, in which they lose themselves while looking at their own reflections. Even as the characters experience the loss of self through too much reflection, the text reflects back on its own rupture, through “rompus” and “vide.” Edwarda and her client move on to sexual intercourse, propelled forward by their multiplied views of their own discontinuous bodies, the dizziness of that multiplication—and, narratologically, by the wound in the text that invites a parallel, sexually violent rupture. After all, the narrator has never seen a prettier girl, nor one “plus nue”—Edwarda is primed for wounding, and for writing.

The same sort of rupture appears—though to a much lesser extent—in Le Bleu du ciel. As Monsieur Melou compares political activists to a farmer working in his fields before a hailstorm, a farmer waiting, arms up, for lightning to kill him, he is interrupted by several lines of ellipsis (Bleu 89). Allan Stoekl calls these ellipses “rows of dots that represent a textual violence,” and he points out that they echo the violence by which “Men spring from plowed rows, like crops, and the storm cuts them down. Words spring from rows of type and are cut down in the process of citation.”²² Thus the mutilation to language again mirrors harm done to bodies. Just as importantly, this rupture—the only one in the book—occurs in a passage that dwells on the hands and arms of the man talking. Monsieur Melou's eyes are “perdus dans la contemplation de ses maigres doigts”; before his words are interrupted, he “ouvrit d'interminables bras et, tristement, il les éleva”; having delivered his speech, “Il laissa, sur ces mots, tomber ses propres bras” (Bleu 88-89). The mutilation to his speech (which is after all about political consciousness and the consciousnesses of political people) is equivalent to that which Troppmann works on his own hand and arm as he stabs them with the pen; by echoing body parts here, Bataille hints that the scene with the pen actually might be the meaning hidden in this textual rupture. He thus nests wounds within the book, making it a Chinese box of forever unfolding meaning.

Story itself is contained within a very particular space in Histoire de l'œil. This is the story of the eye—the story about the eye, the story of eyes in general, the story contained within the eye. That story narrates (among many events) the narrator's sexual awakening, Marcelle's containment and death, and the religious/sexual sacrifice in the church of Don Juan. But the space of only one eye—the narrator's eye, which alone has witnessed all these events—contains the space of the entire novel. And just as Bataille never really lets us into a closed room, or into the sexual openings of his characters' bodies, so too are we finally kept out of the space within which the narrative is contained; we never get inside the eye itself, into its cornea, blood vessels, and retina. Though Simone rubs the priest's eye over her body, she and the narrator feel only the eye's exterior: “La caresse de l'œil sur la peau est d'une excessive douceur” (Histoire 167). With all the eggs and testicles (ersatz eyes) that Simone plays with, and finally this one itself, we never penetrate the orbs that stare, weep, close in climax. We do not know what it is like to be—to exist, to play—inside the story. In the final paragraphs, Simone puts this eye into her vagina, by which action the narrator is horrified for the first time:

Me levant, j'écartai les cuisses de Simone: elle gisait étendue sur le côté; je me trouvai alors en face de ce que—j'imagine—j'attendais depuis toujours—comme une guillotine attend la tête à trancher. Mes yeux, me semblait-il, étaient érectiles à force d'horreur; je vis, dans le [sic] vulve velue de Simone, l'œil bleu pâle de Marcelle me regarder en pleurant des larmes d'urine.

(Histoire 168)

We find some old friends here: the hairy vulva, the ghost of Marcelle, the urinous tears. But the horror is new, and so is the treatment of the narrator's eyes themselves: they are erectile with horror, sexualized by it. Through simile, he appears empowered in a different way as well: he waits like a guillotine. The guillotine waits for a victim, and he has waited to see Marcelle's eye in Simone's cunt.²³ But what appears as his new victim is not just Marcelle (she is old hat by now); it is also the story itself, contained in the eye. This eye belongs to two victims at once: as Marcelle's, it represents the opening point of the story, and as the priest's, it contains the end. Although it at first pops out of Simone's vulva, the narrator is able to hold it in place with a thick stream of ejaculate. And it is now that the eye is transformed; thus the combined sexual/erotic space, never fully penetrated and described, supplements the eye as the space of fiction and of the impossible (Marcelle, after all, remains dead).

The presence of the eye in Simone's body changes every body in the room: the two men disguise themselves with beards, Simone with a hat. It changes the space of the story: they all leave town and take to a yacht. It changes literary space: the novel ends. The eye—the story itself—thus represents the final wound, the one that re-forms bodies, consciousnesses, and narrative. In the overlap between priest and Marcelle, with its ability to inspire horror, it takes on a weird life of its own—but it is still a dead eye, an eye that cannot see to fully describe Simone's internal space.²⁴ If the narrator's far-seeing eye is the story's site of power, this eye shows power rendered powerless; shown, essentially, to be empty itself.

So, then, is fiction a dead body? A body that is, like Troppmann's ideal, immune to pain—and thus, by extrapolation, to feeling and to meaning? Besnier claims that Bataille wants to “porter la mort … dans les mots eux-mêmes, atteindre le plein silence en quoi consiste la ‘vérité de la mort’” (153). It would seem that, if he is correct, to write or speak at all means to be dead.

Elaine Scarry has written convincingly that pain and imaginative activity, such as writing, represent the two opposite boundaries of human existence. Pain is the absence of language, the inability of the mind to concentrate on anything but the body that suffers; to exercise the imagination, on the other hand, means to forget the body, forget reality, and dwell in a made-up world. Every other part of human experience falls somewhere in between the two.²⁵ For Bataille as for Troppmann, the absence of pain seems to mean death; if we follow Scarry's paradigm here, death would fit neatly into the “imagination” slot, positioning itself as pain's opposite. And indeed, in death sensation ceases.

Finally, the living wound is less appealing than the dead one; the eye at the end of Histoire de l'œil is awful because it seems to be living inside Simone's body. Alive, a wound indicates something has to happen, a character has to take action; dead, it means compulsion has finished, and it is up to the character who sees it to decide whether to act or not. It is significant for this discussion that the narrator of “Madame Edwarda” insists on the aliveness of Edwarda's fente. Even when he sexualizes it into a wound, it is a “plaie vive”—a place in which something must happen, perhaps more repellent than usual because of its obvious life. We could read this moment as one more instance of a Bataillean predilection for death; but it appears to be more than that. This narrator is reluctant to engage sexually with the hairy orifice, in contrast to Simone and her narrator-lover, who become sexually aroused looking at wounds in dead bodies. So this may be the meaning contained within the tight, discontinuous space of Histoire de l'œil, as opposed to the vast and continuous spaces of the sky: once a thing is dead—or at least sealed off in its enclosure—whether or not to engage with it becomes a matter of free will. To those who enjoy exercising their self-constructed subjectivities, there may be something to be said for discontinuity.

In Bataille, the only possible cure for what ails a writer (which, again and again, seems to be his own discontinuity—and perhaps L'Érotisme and other works were written in order to purge him of that sense) is death—death of the text, death of the authorial self. The wound wants to become a complete absence; it wants to die, to produce blankness, a nudity in which nothing further can be expected to happen. Dean claims that “Writing … is the simulation of a forever ineluctable cure, structured by the inexplicable violence of an automutilation that wounds in order to heal in the same way as reason … must perpetually destroy itself in order to make any sense” (59); thus even the textual ruptures and “suddenlys” that enable storytelling are actually yearning toward death. Hence Troppmann's fervent desire for death in the early ranting passage (“la mort seule peut la satisfaire”); and hence, too, the drive toward death in all of Bataille's fiction. Death, as we have noted, means rejoining a continuity of human souls—a silence that is nonetheless the highest form of communication. Nothing needs to be said, because everything is understood. The ultimate wound means the ultimate interpenetration—and ultimate, unending eroticism.

Thus, finally, Bataille's writing is a perpetual citation of the meaning that underlies his own name (“battle”). It is a struggle between meaning and emptiness, vastness and compartmentalization, continuity and rupture. The wound, which both anticipates death and holds it back, is never empty; something is always happening there, and by its very status as a rupture it celebrates the potential suggested by (even contained within) discontinuity, even as it hides its own aching desire for blankness.

Notes

1. Essays on Bataille by a number of these scholars appear in Fred Botting and Scott Wilson, ed., Bataille: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998).

2. Georges Bataille, L'Érotisme (Paris: Minuit, 1957).

3. Georges Bataille, Les Larmes d'Éros (Paris: Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1961).

4. Georges Bataille, Le Bleu du ciel (Paris: Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1957).

5. Georges Bataille, Madame Edwarda, Le Mort, Histoire de l'œil (Paris: Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1967).

6. Susan Rubin Suleiman summarizes: “The characteristic feeling accompanying transgression is one of intense pleasure (at the exceeding of boundaries) and of intense anguish (at the full realization of the force of those boundaries).” “Transgression and the Avant-Garde,” in On Bataille: Critical Essays, ed. Leslie-Anne Boldt-Irons (Albany: State U of New York P, 1995) 317.

7. It should be noted that here and elsewhere Bataille excludes reproduction from the erotic; eroticism is surplus, what is excluded from the propagation necessary for species survival. Continuity of being and continuity of species are mutually exclusive.

8. Françoise Duvignaud has written that many cultures mark the flesh of their adolescents with wounds in order to witness the continuity of the community—to declare the community is part of history and has a future together. See Le Corps de l'effroi (Paris: Le Sycomore, 1981) 13.

9. Though Mark Seltzer makes little reference to Bataille, this notion seems closely related to Seltzer's idea of wound culture: “In wound culture, the very notion of sociality is bound to the excitations of the torn and opened body, the torn and exposed individual, as public spectacle” (Seltzer 253); we could substitute “eroticism” for “sociality” and delete “public” (though the wound seems all the more erotic when it is so displayed). See Mark Seltzer, Serial Killers: Death and Life in America's Wound Culture (New York: Routledge 1998).

10. This concept of the “suddenly” parallels Bakhtin's notion of the adventure chronotope in the novel, “a logic of random disjunctions in time.” Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: U Texas P, 1981) 92. Bataille's suddenness is also related to notions of the game, as discussed by Jean-Michel Besnier: “Le jeu est ce qui nous dégage de la téléologie qui subordonne l'avenir au passé.” “Bataille: le système (de l')impossible,” Esprit 2 (Feb 1980): 151.

11. The first line of the introduction to L'Érotisme reads, “De l'érotisme, il est possible de dire qu'il est l'approbation de la vie jusque dans la mort” (17).

12. See Maurice Blanchot, L'Espace littéraire (Paris: Gallimard, 1955).

13. Peter Brooks, Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993) 47.

14. This story is unpaginated; it can be found in the same volume as “Madame Edwarda” and L'Histoire de l'œil 57-86.

15. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon P, 1964) 47.

16. Anaïs Nin, “Elena,” Delta of Venus (New York: Bantam, 1977) 141.

17. Kristeva has in fact written, “One will say that Bataille's books are not language but rather eroticism, jouissance, sacrifice, expenditure; but that at the same time, jouissance, sacrifice, do not exist without the unary authority of the subject and language.” See Julia Kristeva, “Bataille, Experience and Practice,” in On Bataille: Critical Essays 248.

18. Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1986) 78.

19. Similarly, in a study of Bataille and Lacan, Carolyn Dean writes that the cut is where reason can no longer be sure of its own rationality; as selfhood composes itself within the cut, it opposes itself to Cartesian notions of the triumph of reason as the constituting force. See Carolyn Dean, “Law and Sacrifice: Bataille, Lacan, and the Critique of the Subject,” Representations 13 (Winter 1986): 43.

20. In L'Espace littéraire, Blanchot makes a similar point, adding that work domesticates even what is exterior to it, by silencing the world outside (46-47). The author's voice is the only sound that can be heard inside his or her text.

21. For many critics, Bataille's writing itself is a continuous wound or rupture to language. For example, Sarah Wilson writes that he is “breaking the straitjacket of language and of form … to reach out to the world of inner experience.” Sarah Wilson, “Fêting the Wound,” in Bataille: Writing the Sacred, ed. Carolyn Bailey Gill (New York: Routledge 1995) 187. Laurens ten Kate describes Bataille's fiction as “une enveloppe maladroite, un espace inadéquat pour l'expérience: il doit tout le temps être interrompu, commenté, complété et de nouveau esquivé.” “Paroles de contrainte, paroles de contagion,” CRIN 25 (1992): 28.

22. Allan Stoekl, Politics, Writing, Mutilation: The Cases of Bataille, Blanchot, Roussel, Leiris, and Ponge (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1985) 15.

23. For a discussion of Marcelle as haunter of the novel, see Vicki Kirsch, “Ghost-Ridden Authors/Ghost-Written Texts: Female Phantoms in Two Works by André Breton and Georges Bataille,” Paroles Gélées 5 (1987): 37-53.

24. There is one more way in which this novel is mutilated—though not by Bataille himself. He wrote a preface to Histoire de l'œil, an outline of a sequel, and a piece called “Réminiscences,” which discusses the putatively autobiographical elements of the book. Though he apparently intended all of them to be included in contemporary editions, many publishing houses leave off one or another of them. 10/18, for example, has omitted the preface.

25. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain (New York: Oxford UP, 1985). See especially p. 165.