ON PORNOGRAPHY
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autobiographical sources of his narratives, he appended to
Hisloire
de l'Oeil
some memories of his own outrageously terrible childhood.
(One memory: his blind, syphilitic, insane father trying unsuccess–
fully to urinate.) Time has neutralized these memories, he explains;
after many years, they have largely lost their power over him and
"can only come to life again, deformed, hardly recognizable, having
in the course of this deformation, taken on an obscene meaning."
Thus, for BataiIle, "the obscene" simultaneously revives what is most
painful and scores a victory over that pain. And of necessity, he must
deal with the extremity of the erotic experience. Human beings, he
says in the essay part of
Madame Edwarda,
live only through "ex–
cess." And pleasure depends on "perspective," or giving oneself to a
state of "open being," open to death as well as to joy. Most people,
Bataille notes, try to outwit their own feelings; they want to
be
receptive to pleasure but keep "horror" at a distance. That's foolish,
he argues, since horror reinforces "attraction" and excites desire.
What the extremity of the erotic experience means for BataiIle
is its subterranean connection with death. It's not that BataiIle litters
his narratives with corpses. (For instance, only one person dies in
the terrifying
Histoire de l'Oeil;
and the book ends with the three
central characters, having debauched their way through France and
Spain, acquiring a yacht at Gibraltar to pursue their infamies else–
where.) What BataiIle does is more effective. He invests each action
with a weight, a disturbing gravity, that feels authentically "mortal."
Yet despite the obvious differences of scale and finesse of execu–
tion, there are some resemblances between the conceptions of Sade
and Bataille. For instance, Sade, like Bataille, was not so much a
sensualist as someone with an intellectual project: to explore the
scope of transgression. And he shares with Bataille the same ultimate
identification of sex and death. But Sade could never have written
what BataiIle did: "The truth of eroticism is tragic." People often
die in Sade's books. But these deaths never seem real. They're no
more convincing than those mutilations inflicted during the evening's
orgies from which the victims recover completely the next morning
following the use of a wondrous salve. One is continually caught up
short by Sade's bad faith about death. (Of course, many pornographic
books which are much less interesting and accomplished than those
of Sade share this bad faith.)
Indeed, one might speculate that the fatiguing repetitiveness of
