 |
| Hans Bellmer, Illustration for the eye of History (1947) |
"Literature is the key, or nothing" ( Georges Bataille, foreword Literature and Evil ).
There are works in which one enters with a curiosity mixed with apprehension, and sometimes even with the remorse of a morbid curiosity, the feeling - or intent - to break a final limit. Georges Bataille, born of a tumultuous generation, that of Surrealism (which he quickly distanced himself and rejects), is a strange guide. His works range from scholarship and eroticism. But Eros, here is unexpected masks. Love is not easy: the feeling, even, grants the ritual body looked, touched, caressed, bruised in the search for an ecstasy that would be flirting with death. The word "ecstasy", moreover, combines the enjoyment of land to religious enlightenment ...
Read Story of the Eye is an unsettling experience and dangerous. The book was published clandestinely in 1928, under the pseudonym Lord Auch (Battle identities sometimes malicious use, as, later, that of Pierre Angélique for the release of Madame Edwarda 1937). This very short novel borrows amazing ways, focusing on the lives of two teenagers of sixteen, the narrator and Simone, in a quest for the absolute that passes through the experience of body, love and cruelty crime. A book "severe," warns Battle. The eroticism here verges on pornography, obscenity as often exposed in these short chapters, many "scenes" with titles at once simple and enigmatic at the beginning ("The cat's eye," " The cabinet Norman "," A spot of sunshine "...), then more and more explicit (" Eyes of the Dead, "" Simone's Confession and Mass Sir Edmund "...). The pursuit of happiness is doomed to failure. Almost two children, whose ordinary meeting quickly turns into a confrontation sexual united first under the banner of black (the apron Simone) and white (milk in a plate), these objects become pretexts for more games more shameless. Immediately, the sex is accurately named. The first games, however, dare not touch the body, replacing the light touch and caresses. Soon, in the fusion of body, the protagonists feel the need for an external perspective, the mother of the girl, first, that, rather than hinder, the incentive to play more indecent again, then one of Marcela's teenage girlfriend, shy and naively pious "who becomes a witness and unwitting accomplice of these antics. But innocence has no place in this universe, and the girl goes insane at the same time, molten involuntary with the two lovers, she indulges in an unwanted orgasm. This madness becomes sexual frenzy. However, pleasure is an agony, culminating in the suicide of Marcelle.
 |
| Egon Schiele Die Umarmung, 1917 |
Story of the Eye, in fact, constantly reminds us that love and death are inseparable, including the mechanisms of desire and pleasure. The word "death" is present throughout the text to the point of invading. During a wild journey to find Marcelle last time the narrator realizes that his destiny lies between hell and the desire for absolute
"The wind was a little fallen, a part of the sky is starred; I came to the idea that death is the only way out of my erection, and I killed Simone, the universe of our own vision in place of the pure stars, making cold which I think is the term of my debauchery a geometric incandescence (coincidentally, among others, of life and death, of being and nothingness) and perfectly dazzling. "
This fugue also ends on a bicycle by a mock accident, Simone, in her voluptuous race, fell and his companion a moment's thought dead. In a previous chapter, The young man driving a car, overturned "a pretty young cyclist, whose neck was almost torn off by the wheels." This vision of horror in a way symbolizes the love that unites the two characters. Despite the seeming incongruity of this feeling, yet it is invoked when the narrator, in the same pages, he defines his relationship with Simone
"Thus began between us relations love so close and so necessary that we remain hardly a week without seeing us. "
Gold purity is no place, because of the ambiguity of human nature ... It recalls that the mention of Simone
"It is big and beautiful, nothing hopeless in the eyes or in her voice. But she is so hungry that disturbs the sense that the smallest appeal gives her face a character evoking blood, sudden terror, crime, all that endless ruin the happiness and good conscience. "
Pleasure is close to the horror and despair; and the two young people commit themselves on a path that can only lead to the crime.
 |
| Pablo Picasso, La Corrida |
deaths punctuate their journey of madness. After the tragic suicide of Marcela, the narrator has "loved without crying," they choose another flight that takes them to Spain. They travel with an English plus age, Sir Edmund, a witness and instigator of their debauchery. The choice of this destination Significantly, as the country's image is associated with rituals of love and death. These are embodied perfectly in a show, the bullfight, which refined and ritualized violence operates as a synthesis of their relationship. Here a key scene takes place in the novel: the death of Granero, inspired by a real-number which attended Georges Bataille. Witnessed the accident (Manuel Granero is defeated in the arena by a bull which pierces the eye), it gives this experience a symbolic dimension by using it in the narrative. Sir Edmund Simone is wearing "two balls naked "in the first bull defeated by Granero:
" these glands, the size and shape of an egg, were of pearly whiteness, rosie blood, similar to that of the eyeball ;.
This offering foreshadows the disaster to come, which takes place exactly when Simone is attributes of the beast sex objects. Here again, orgasm coincides with the death
"Granero, overturned, cornered in the balustrade, the balustrade on the horns the fly struck three shots: one of the horns thrust his right eye and head. The clamor appalled arenas coincided with the spasm of Simone. Lifted from the ground, she tottered and fell, the sun blinded him, she was bleeding from the nose. Some men rushed in, seized Granero.
The crowd in the arena was entirely upright. The right eye of the corpse was hanging. "
The eye is thus explicitly associated with these glands ... It is transformed thus organ of pleasure, as the reader senses from the beginning of the text, through mother's involuntary voyeurism, exhibitionism assumed Simone and his companion. "With open eyes of the dead" (Marcelle) remain witnessed the debauchery of the two heroes, his gaze is pure defiled by Simone "[flood] the calm face" of the young suicide. The eyeball is symbolically or directly, present throughout the novel, in eggs that Simone gets into sex, it also gobbles it as if it "[drinking] the eye [Her boyfriend] between his lips, "the farm of a white breast ... But young people are troubled by these symbols they still do not understand and even banish" the word egg "from their vocabulary ;; revelation is offered at the end of the novel only.
Under the eyes of their souls damned Sir Edmund, Simone and her lover come in a church in Seville at the entrance to which is "the tomb of the founder of the church, that is said to have been Don Juan. Repented, it would be buried under the front door, to be trodden under foot of the lower beings. "The story is a troubling result, hallucinating. In the church takes place the last transgression, one that crystallizes the triumph of evil ... The meeting with "a priest blond, still young and beautiful, her cheeks thin and pale eyes of a holy" causes contempt supreme in an orgy in which the priest gives himself almost raped by Simone but taking this crime gladly martyr, and he breathed his last in an enjoyment ultimate sacrilege, since in the ciborium, the body of Christ is desecrated. The eye, at that time, egg becomes the object of desire and pleasure, look that takes place inside the body to look more closely at the mechanisms of enjoyment in devoting a sinister apotheosis symbiosis of body and mind.
 |
| Hans Bellmer, Illustration for History of eye |
"To go after the rapture when we lose in the enjoyment, we must always ask the immediate boundary: it is horror. Not only the pain of others or my own, approaching the moment of horror I will raise, can send me to the slippery state of joy in madness, but it's not a dislike which I can discern the affinity with desire. Not that the horror never to be confused with the attraction, but if it can not inhibit, destroy, reinforces the attraction of horror! "Georges Bataille wrote in the preface to his book he gives, under the tutelage of Hegel. This is about love and death, the latter, whatever happens, always prevails. To retain some of its freedom, human beings must always keep in mind, without fighting, "Death is what is most terrible and maintain the work of death is this which requires the greatest strength. "Simone and the narrator represent sort of the death at work, under the starry sky of Kant - but the moral law, she is still in us? Story of the Eye confronts us with evil that we carry, dark revelation of our inner darkness. Support this reading reveals undoubtedly challenging ourselves, human prey to violent conflict and eternal ...
____________________________________________________________________________
Georges Bataille, Story of the eye , John Jacques Pauvert, 1967
____________________________________________________________________________
0 comments:
Post a Comment