Tag Archives: Surrealism

The four avatars of Hassan Blasim

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REFUGEE: A man leaves, embarks on a journey, endures inhumane difficulties in search of a humane haven. There is a war going on where he comes from; it’s not safe even to walk to the vegetable souk. Abducted by one armed group, an ambulance driver he knows is forced to make a fake confession on video for the benefit of satellite news channels, then sold to another armed group—and so on. The wit prevents surrealism from devolving into the absurd. The narrative intensity recalls Albert Camus’s L’Etranger, the humour Dario Fo. For months or years the ambulance driver makes conflicting statements, impersonating every kind of fighter, serving opposite sides of the conflict—until he is released with a sac of severed heads like the one he had in the ambulance when they first stopped him. Meanwhile cars are exploding, gunmen terrorise whole neighbourhoods, houses are shelled without warning. But the man who leaves is driven by something deeper than the criteria listed on refugee-status application forms in Scandinavia. He senses that, where he lives—and not because of suicide bombers or torture—he has been robbed of something key, deprived of a self he might have had, his life denied meaning. It may be that this man is a sincere intellectual critical of his country’s backwardness. Having survived the brainwash, the Cause no longer convinces him. Nor does Identity, Imperialism, Orientalism and other defecations of history’s Arab-Muslim posterior. He feels the weight of his own absurdity. But it equally may be that this is a man of Religion or of the Regime, a dork or a douche bag that thrives on duress, seeing trouble only when his material life cracks under absurdities he has never acknowledged. He too wants out now. He wants to go places or, having been places, to go somewhere. As the ambulance driver tells the psychiatrist at the asylum to which immigration has sent him, pleadingly: he wants to sleep. And so, a refugee in Hassan Blasim’s short stories might be one of 35 illegal immigrants abandoned to the pitch-black interior of their Berlin-bound truck after the driver flees without bothering to unbar the door, only to be ravaged by a werewolf from among them. Yet he might also be a soldier who has never left Iraq: someone who is a refugee neither subjectively nor objectively but by virtue of being in the army under Saddam. It doesn’t even matter whether he knows he is a refugee. In “The Virgin and the Soldier”, the hero survives by cutting three fingers off the hand of the seamstress with whom he is trapped in a storage room—with tailor shears. They both work in a military clothing factory, and they go to that room because it is their only possible meeting place. They are deep in their illicit embrace when they realise they’ve been locked in, with a pile of uniform rejects for a mattress. Now it’s been three days without food or water and the soldier must have something to eat. In the end he never deflowers his seamstress.

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WRITER: So refugees are people who, confined and deprived, end up devouring each other; they may even turn into wolves for the purpose. This is how Blasim redefines the word. Like every seriously strong metaphor, cannibalism is classic stuff, as profound as it is unoriginal. Only a true writer can get away with using it so effortlessly. A writer: someone who in another context is himself a refugee, but whose role just now is to tell a refugee’s tale, or a soldier’s. Or a werewolf’s. Blasim contains everything from Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony” to Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. A writer is so called not because he has a contribution to make to national consciousness, a presence in the media or a role to play in society—most of the time there is in fact no society—but because he remoulds reality into something enjoyable. He redefines words. He also comments on what History he experiences, of course, but only obliquely, without emotion and to inconclusive ends. So a true writer is automatically overshadowed by a fake brand of eponymous creature: “They claim they are builders who will rebuild what the war lay waste to, cultured politicians and economists, doctors, surgeons and interpreters of catastrophes, destroyers of the idols of religion and superstitions.” Not so Khaled Al Hamrani, 57, author of three collections of short stories published at his expense, tenacious bard of his neighbourhood’s totally insignificant souk, and hero of “The Story Souk”. “You can make the woman fishmonger at the market a spaceship lost in the cosmos, or turn aubergines into a lesson in philosophy; the important thing is to observe for a long time, like someone contemplating suicide from a balcony,” Hamrani tells the local newspaper in an interview. “It’s also important to own an unpretentious imagination that is nonetheless sly and dead serious, and to have the soul of a dying ascetic. This souk that I write about is to me a wide ocean, in which I am only a bubble that is undoubtedly there but not clearly visible.” Hamrani dreams of a mysterious set of numbers, he remembers particular horrors of the war. Eventually he tricks the reader into believing that he has died in a bombing at the souk while buying his son new shoes, one of which he holds onto as he breathes his last, when in fact he is making it up. It is Hamrani who has been writing “The Story Souk”, not Blasim. But, to see the world in a blood-washed shoe? A man who has never travelled, who has no interest in leaving his hometown or writing about anything other than its souk, no literary ambition beyond getting his stories down on paper: in his sheer ordinariness Hamrani ironically comes across as History’s witness, someone who realises that it wouldn’t matter if he died. “They mourn the nonexistent readers,” the narrator says of those builders and surgeons, those bastards. “They’ve also found that writers of previous times are the ones who let the readers go, whereas for hundreds of years there’ve been in the country no readers in the broad sense of the word. There’ve been only hungry people, murderers, illiterates, soldiers, villagers, people who pray, people who get lost and wronged people.”

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SOLDIER: A stretch of wall splattered with the brains of a girl. The girl’s head was hit by the wing of a plane that was shot down in Kirkuk. Her body flew up into the sky and reportedly never came down. The kind of ancient image a true writer will bring to his ultra-realistic setting: he parades it like an animated rune. Writers dream and play tricks, bear testimony. But essentially they are persons who contemplate their deaths with equanimity. It’s what soldiers too must do if they are to live out their time before they become refugees or die. Contrary to the wishes of their superiors—Saddams, Qaeda commanders, Guardians of Iran’s Islamic Revolution—soldiers do not want to be in battle. And by the random rules of this book, everyone is a soldier of some kind: an instrument of power, an employee of reality. Everyone is here against their will. That is why, having lived his story, a soldier will apply for refugee status at the immigration offices of literature. In the title story, a madman imagines an alternative history of his town, in which the townspeople engage in full-blown war with the government to prevent the dismantling of a statue of two blond young men who brought the town good fortune long ago. Elsewhere people compete to tell their tales of atrocity through a dedicated radio channel: the more atrocious, the better. An Iraqi in the Netherlands is so determined to shed his past he calls himself Carlos Fuentes and stops speaking Arabic. Despite his astonishing success at becoming a Dutchman in waking life, Fuentes is tormented by nightmares in which he is Iraqi again. A military correspondent receives a series of ingenious novel manuscripts by post. Their writer is a young soldier who, as it turns out, has died in battle. The correspondent publishes the novels in his name, he is rich and famous. Yet the dead man just won’t stop sending him manuscripts, each as brilliant as the next—and he ends up burning himself in the furnace he sets up to get rid of the excess poetry. Still, there are subtler ways to die. “The Corpse Exhibition” is a pep talk to a novice artist of murder. The older agent of the Organisation explains how much he hates the horror-movie sensationalism of traditional methods. In contrast, he gives the example of an agent who turned the flesh and bone of the target into a concrete-like flagpole on a mound, with the fluttering flag made of the target’s skin. The agent completed his art work while the target—himself a failed agent—was conscious. It also transpires that agents are practically unable to ever leave the Organisation once they join, that the work of killing and publicly displaying the corpse is systematically funded and administered, that the Organisation moves from one part of the world to another, staying only for as long as conditions are unstable. Thus the fascist philosophy of lightening the world’s human burden combined with G J Ballard: art is art is macabre, apparently. At the start of the pep talk the agent unsheathes a knife that he keeps holding; by the end he will thrust it in the novice’s gut, saying, “You are trembling.”

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SHAPESHIFTER: A soldier, then, is someone who trembles, especially someone who trembles when he’s not supposed to; a soldier is a human being after all. But so, all things considered, is the alien Hassan Blasim (b. 1973), the Iraqi who lives in Finland, an Arab writer first published in translation—logically, when you think about it. Addressing his dead psychiatrist in Helsinki, one character says, “I am unable to write a story, but I am ready to be involved in the issue of literature to one end only: for the dignity of those on the brink of madness.” Quotable lines bob on the dense surf of the story: the psychiatrist’s fatal car accident; plans to include a live camel in the decor of an Iraqi restaurant; the rudimentary sci-fi saga unfolding in the mind of the hero. In “The Bad Habit of Undressing”, a chance conversation with a jobless drunk raises the question of sanity again. “Better to say ‘authentic’ than ‘mad’, for authenticity is talking to others in spite of the nightmare terror and pain.” And the tone of the drunk describing his habit of never wearing clothes in the house turns out to be as authentically desultory as it should be. Miraculously, a wolf appears in the hall of the drunk’s apartment; the man locks himself in the bathroom, but after 48 hours hiding, he decides to open the door and confront the wolf, naked or not. Pouncing on the beast as the beast pounces on him, the man enters an otherworldly darkness. The suggestion is never spelled out that, instead of the wolf being a projection of his, for the duration of that semi-conscious state, the drunk is or becomes the wolf a la Zhuangzi. Shapeshifting, blessing or curse, is the prerogative of both the soldier who becomes a refugee and the writer who recounts the becoming. Is it what happens to Jaafar Al Mtalbi when he turns from the composer of the regime’s official songs to a professional blasphemer who is eventually killed in the most gruesome way. Is it what happens to the narrator of “That Ill-Fated Smile” when he is beaten up by Nazis, having been unable to suppress his meaningless smile all day? Is it what happens to Blasim himself when he writes? “Doctor,” says the Helsinki-based hero of “The Dung Beetle”, “we have observed the planet Duouis Tumla… and are now certain that no one lives on it except the six recorded by the space observation cameras. What is surprising is that they have not crossed the borders of their village on the banks of the Red River. That is a frozen river, but we are still ignorant of the nature of its substance. It looks to us like a river of frozen blood…”

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Hassan Blasim, Majnun sahat al-Huriyya (The Madman of Freedom Square), Amman: Al-Mu’assassa Al-’Arabiyya lid-Dirasat wan-Nashr, 2012; Hassan Blasim’s The Iraqi Christ and The Corpse Exhibition, two acclaimed volumes of short stories translated into English by Jonathan Wright, are published by Comma Press in Manchester, UK and Penguin USA

iPhoneographic images © Youssef Rakha

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Al Ahram Weekly

Sacred genitalia: my graduation essay

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Sacred genitalia: the metaphysical inflections of Bataille’s surrealist voice
(Madame Edwarda, 1941; Story of the Eye, 1928)

Man is more than a creature limited to its genitals. But they, those inavowable parts of him, teach him his secret.

This essay will attempt to identify a specific (if arguably minor) aspect of surrealism, and trace its aesthetic and intellectual resonances in Bataille’s major works. The desire to come in contact with the sacred informed not only Bataille but Artaud, who envisaged in the theatre a potential for realizing it, and (despite ‘ideological’ admonitions and the struggle ‘against those who would maintain surrealism at a purely speculative level and treasonably transfer it onto an artistic and literary plane’, a struggle which, among other things, frequently cast Bataille and Artaud in the role of renegade surrealists) this selfsame yearning for the sacred can be deduced from Breton’s quasi-metaphysical pronouncements throughout the vital period of surrealist activity in France. As early as 1922 Breton was defining surrealism in terms of ‘the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of association’, and twenty years later he still felt obliged to deny the charge of ‘mysticism’. While the sacred remains at best only a sub-stratum of metaphysics (‘most generally’ defined as ‘the philosophical investigation of the nature, constitution, and structure of reality’), it is not difficult nonetheless to recognise a quasi-religious strain running through the surrealist project from its very inception. In Breton’s demand for a ‘monotonous metaphysic’ that ‘never speaks except of the one being, in which God, the soul, and the world come together, of the one which is the deepest essence of all multiplicity’, there is a clear potential for a form of art—a poetics, dramatics or even erotics of the sacred—whose aim it would be to develop new conceptions of the Ultimate and the Absolute, and ways of experiencing their presence. This potential was taken up by both Bataille and Artaud (the latter choosing a dramatics, the former an erotics of the sacred) and leaves its definitive mark in their concern with the negative, the horrifying, the terrible and the obscene (which constitutes an awareness of mortality that we do not encounter with the same intensity in the work of Breton, whose fundamental priority was the marvellous). Artaud himself alludes to the route chosen by Bataille in quest of the same destination when he says that ‘bringing together two impassioned revelations on stage [...] is just as complete, as true, even as decisive as bringing together two bodies in short-lived debauchery’. His Theatre of Cruelty works ‘like the plague, by intoxication, by infection, by analogy, by magic’; it works like war, in the public ‘ferment of great, agitated crowds hurled against one another’; it is a form of ‘soul therapy’ inflicting on an audience the ‘laceration’ and ‘cruelty’ of the sacred, whose essential function is to teach us that ‘[we] are not free and the sky can still fall on our heads’; and its foremost subjects are ‘love, crime, war and madness’. For Bataille, by contrast, it is the very private anguish of ‘little death’ that tells us our secret: that ‘[nudity] is only death, and the most tender kisses have the after-taste of the rat’; the function of philosophy and literature is to forge the age-old link between eroticism and death; and only at the supreme point of convergence where, correspondingly, pleasure and pain resolve their perpetual dialectic in a terrifying excess, do we catch a glimpse of our spiritual predicament. In either case there is a stress on emptiness and negation that somewhat transcends the surrealist imperative of unlimited ‘marvellous subversion’, and explains Breton’s distaste with Bataille’s particular strand of madness, ‘that he reasons like someone with a fly on his nose (i.e. a corpse)’. But Bataille’s literary endeavours remain profoundly surrealist, and the following will undertake to show this in two stages: first, by exploring Bataille’s metaphysics of the sacred (which finds its clearest, most compressed expression in Madame Edwarda); and second, by looking at his aesthetics of eroticism, the kind of pornographic imagination—in Susan Sontag’s words—that aims ‘at disorientation, at psychic dislocation’ (triumphantly exemplified in Story of the Eye).

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Ahmad Yamani’s New Book: The Ten Commandments of Displacement

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Yamani is far left; Osama El-Dainasouri second from right

When Youssef Rakha asked the Madrid-based poet Ahmad Yamani how his latest book, Amakin Khati’ah (Wrong Places, Cairo: Dar Miret, 2009) came about, the latter sent him a numbered list of observations

1. All the poems of this diwan were written in Spain between 2002 and 2006.

More than other “Nineties” prose poets working in standard Arabic, Ahmad Yamani was accused of hartalah, contemporaneous slang for prattle or drivel. That was when he lived in Talbiyah, the semi-provincial suburb of the Pyramids where he was born in 1970. No one doubted his talent, but even the quasi-Beatniks of Cairo were not ready for the irreverent lack of polish in his first book, Shawari’ al-abyad wal-asswad (The Streets of Black and White, 1995), particularly clear in the long, epoch-making poem whose title translates to Air that stopped in front of the House.

Here at last, romantic and Kafkaesque by turns, was a rage-free Howl of Cairo in the post-Soviet era. The madness went on. By the turn of the millennium Yamani was as well-known as he could be. He was writing, he was working (mostly at cultural magazines), but like many others he was also fed up with life on the margin and disgusted with the social, economic and literary mainstream. One day in 2001, he left the country for good.

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2. I did not show anybody and did not publish a single poem, because my idea was simply to test myself in a new place.

The ambition to start over makes sense despite Yamani’s success: Through a revolution waged in the ghetto – cf. the journals Al-Kitaba Al-Ukhra and Al-Garad – he had been among the few who survived the purges. In time his hartalah-streaked genius, demonstrated in two more books by 2001, looked more like what the revolution was about than almost any other work. The vernacular, the individual, the concrete: these were the basic components of a variegated “movement”, but Yamani seemed to embody them more literally. In a way he grabbed what everyone else was girdling. Hartalah or not, his work was gloriously prosaic.

Apart from tighter technical control of his material and a greater openness to drama and narrative, however, no major developments occurred in Yamani’s next two books (Tahta shajarat al-‘a’ilah, self published, 1998; and Wardat fi ar-ra’ss, Miret, 2001). The gifted strive to surpass themselves. Consciously or not, starting a new life must have seemed the perfect chance to re-enter the void. It took Yamani nearly five years to come back out with something to show for himself; and while he shed some qualities in the process, there were others he retained:

Unlike Yasser Abdel-Latif, for example – another survivor whose own debut, also self-published, emerged simultaneously from the same press as Shawari’ – in Amakin Khati’ah Yamani still does not construct his texts, he releases them. Here as in the previous three books, he avoids sentimentality not through restraint but by reinventing the words and their sense. He makes words say not necessarily what he means (he does not necessarily mean anything), but how he experiences their weight.

For a hard-up young man from the backwaters of Cairo, then, what does it mean to be in a new place – intent on poetic self examination?

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3. My life in the new place was totally different from my life in Egypt, which was surrounded by intellectuals almost for its duration and where friends provided a sense of security.

Only very occasionally in this book does being in a new place mean noticing how foreignness plays out in ideational terms, but in the context of the Nineties the fact that it does at all is remarkable. In “Story of al-Jahidh”, for example (the title is an incidental reference to the great ninth-century author, who was black), the speaker not only describes but also seems to mull over instances of racism – by Nineties standards, an unthinkable concession to “ideology” – the catch-all term for anything which, preceding or external to individual consciousness, could potentially intervene in how it operates, altering or squeezing its contours.

Assess the poem as you will, explicit mention of racism is not something you would expect of Yamani.

Not that it is beyond him to think about such issues, but the Nineties work was conceived partly in reaction to both Sixties engagement and the Adonis (Ali Ahmad Said)-influenced obscurantism of the Seventies: the absurdity of writing about and for abstractions, whether the People, the Nation, or Modernism, Beauty, etc. Any suspicion of the poem championing either cause or concept, however ambiguously, would have been enough for the Tis’iniyyun (or “Ninetiers”) to set up the gallows. And in many ways Yamani was the least susceptible to temptation.

Perhaps out of mere habit, Ninetiers who are otherwise in awe of Amakin Khati’ah still object to the topicality that shows up on its pages. Could topicality nonetheless be one of the ways in which the end of revolution – immigration, in this case – had a liberating effect on the revolutionaries?

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4. This sense of security ended totally in Spain. It was not a question of lack of access to my friends, which I had through e-mail or telephone; it was more about cutting yourself off from that security with awareness, even resolve. Besides, the practicalities of life led me into new interactions. Little by little while working as a guard or a barman, you learn to take off the writer’s plume, which you used to rely on in Egypt and which set you apart as someone special, especially in front of your family. Here it didn’t matter at all whether or not you were a writer.

With Abdel-Latif and a host of young Cairo-based poets from working to lower middle class backgrounds, Yamani had inherited a certain Rimbaud-like angst from a more or less small group of staunchly apolitical existentialists who, though were only slightly older, could claim a connection with the Seventies as well as the Nineties: the Alexandria-based Alaa Khalid, the late Osama El-Dainasouri and the Charles Bukowski-loving founder of Al-Garad, Ahmad Taha, for example. It was a complex legacy with disparate influences – Dada-Surrealism (notably through translations from the French by Bashir El-Sebai), Modernism, a range of vaguely Baudelairian non-Europeans from Nicanor Parra to Orhan Veli – and it reacted to and set itself apart from savants of the Seventies not only in their capacity as Marxist politicals and heroes of the 1977-79 Student Movement but, even more importantly, as the false prophets of a new sensibility.

This is the package Yamani presumably carries along in his suitcase. But in exile or the promised land, in the new place, it must seem less relevant by the minute. Here it does not matter how you feel about prose in contrast to (free) verse as a poetic medium; it does not matter whether you are tired of one zeitgeist dictating opinions and alliances, or whether you might be contributing to the emergence of another; it does not matter to what extent you see a Syrian poet’s programme for Arab modernity as meaningless in practice, or how you assess an increasingly pro-government Egyptian critic’s notion of enlightenment. Only the idea of being and then not being surrounded by “intellectuals”, I suspect, remains crucial:

Until he went to live abroad Yamani, who graduated from Cairo University in 1992, had functioned as part of an amorphous Group of literati (or at least one avant-garde wing thereof): normal enough procedure for a writer with any ambition in Egypt. To those who choose to define themselves in opposition to the status quo – the vast majority, in practice – that Group remains an essential element of literary production. By positioning itself outside or against the cultural (formerly also the political) establishment, since the 1970s at least, from its peripheral position the Group has often exercised greater power than the establishment.

For better or worse the Group is both the motor and the bane of the writer’s life: in the capacity of friends (an almost metaphysical affinity implying interpersonal rights but neither moral consistency nor critical rigour), fellow writers-critics cover up the hopelessness of social (including academic) and professional life, doubling as readers in the process. At the expense of a sense of isolation and instability (arguably conducive to the creative act), the reality of a society that has no need even for genre novels, let alone prose poetry, is neutralised or obscured.

In the new place, I imagine, the package itself begins to look context-specific, limited and limiting, or it takes on previously unsuspected meanings. As the Spanish language gradually lodges itself in the system, unrelated discoveries further complicate the picture. For a while, I imagine, the writer no longer knows how to write.

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5. In my first year I wrote almost nothing. That was 2001. In 2002 I started writing again.

Here, titled “The Two Houses”, is a moving example of how distance can rarify and distill hartalah once the literary self reemerges isolated:

I wake in the same room to find my hand splashing the lake that lurks under the bed, to find the thick wall of my old house with its dusty window where a main wall of this apartment should be. I opened the window and the evening was still there. And my father was in the kitchen, his hand on the light switch and his leg which is missing five centimetres looking longer than the other, I called to him and he did not reply, he only smiled and invited me with gestures of his hand to go on sleeping. ‘The universe is a handkerchief’, they say here. Over there we say ‘Small world’. At night I go to my parents’ house, through the opening I made behind my new house. I stay there an hour or two to check on the family’s medicine, on my parents’ sleep and their breakfast. At dawn I set up my vehicle and go back again.

The sheer lucidity suggests that “loss of security” does clear up a certain amount of non-poetic debris. Throughout Amakin Khati’ah the tone remains as offhand and the references as private (indeed often as murky) as ever, but the poet’s vision of the world and his place in it seems to have brightened or expanded. Suddenly, his work feels more relevant to more people.

So much that in an exquisitely dreamlike poem about a young man immigrating when the horizon at home begins to look like a dead end, “The Big Escape”, poetry comes close to allegory. And without a whiff of the sociopolitical or the “ideologoical”, neither strays very far from the clearly grounded situation it depicts:

They had sentenced me to execution with two of my friends and it was by what they called euthanasia which had already killed a fourth friend of ours. We did not understand very well what they meant by these statements and so they left us free without guards or cells and sentenced us instead to a kind of death they called a mercy killing which is carried out by a middle aged lady who has a benign face and which is painless but is death anyway. I consulted with my mother and my friends a little while before the execution and I decided to escape. They all agreed I should go while my two friends remained to wait for the lady. As soon as I went out after they gave me all the money they had I met with the merciful lady face to face next to my home. Neither of us looked at the other. She avoided me and went off and I went past her and started to run looking over my shoulder in other countries.

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6. When I went back to writing, I wanted to see myself as a poet in isolation from any possible influences. I stopped publishing totally.

For which read, equally, “I stopped having a seat at the cafe in downtown Cairo.” Divested of that position, the writer begins to see his work in the limitless space of what is human as opposed to what is intellectual (or Egyptian), confronting the fact that poetry can only exist in a marginal place far more directly. He might even begin to question the safety that comes of belonging, however tangentially.

In Yamani’s case, I think, that journey has been overwhelmingly positive – partly because the resulting changes meddle with neither content nor style. There is a heightened sense of geography and multiplicity (in the cultural as well as the physical sense); the poet’s inherent, often laugh-out-loud sense of irony responds to a broader range of stimuli; far from the fluid vitality of Shawari’, his modus operandi reflects meticulous reworking of the short piece: a process through which the rawness of the writing nonetheless emerges intact. But here as in older work, subject matter is by and large distorted beyond recognition, language remains informal and corporeal, some sense of hartalah persists.

What is brand new is the vision: the ability to transform one act into another in the impossibly beautiful two-line poem “Tobacco Seller”, for example: “Her hand is on the box, my foot outside the house. Suddenly it grows dark, while she continues rubbing the tobacco on her shiny thigh./She stops a little to move half the tobacco to her other thigh, while I enter the tunnel and start smoking.”

References so private and concealed they are a hair’s breadth away from being meaningless (El-Dainasouri, for example, figures only as “Osama”, without any indication of who he might be) take on the power of electromagnetic signals: an object, a person becomes one of several points around which a field of gravity extends, shaped as much as anything by the distance between Talbiyah and Madrid.

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7. I wrote slowly, with a sort of private enjoyment, without any plan to publish a book and without any concern with whether or not I was writing. It seems I wanted to free myself from Writing itself.

At the most basic level displacement has given Yamani’s prosaicness a fresh subtlety. Transported to a context the writer cannot take for granted, as in “The Funeral”, insights that are personal and elusively formulated enough to come across as enigmatic suddenly look breezy, universal and accessible: “Chimo is not my friend. But he died… and here I am no longer a stranger in these lands.”

In “The Book”, about the illiterate mother of a published author, this sense of writing in isolation from Writing, the slowness of rediscovering an intimate process, turns a more or less obvious homesickness into something far more interesting (in folk belief, the number five affords protection against the evil eye):

How can she not

read what I write

How come she waits by the door

until someone passing

gives her a few words

those strange obscure words

Yet she listens and smiles

as if she was there with me

at five in the morning

as if her hand

relocated some of the words

moved them from the wrong places

moved them and went to sleep

But how can she not

read what her own hands inscribed only yesterday

How come she cannot open the balcony

in the morning

to receive the sun

with a copy of the book in her left hand

that she reads slowly

winking at the neighbours

pointing to her son the wordsmith

waving the book in their faces

five times

while she mutters

strange and obscure words.

But it is not only a matter of context: displaced, the writer cannot take himself for granted; and not only because he can no longer designate himself a plume-wearing intellectual. In this sense the stage Yamani refers to as “loss of security” might be rephrased “loss of identity”. And indeed counterbalancing a new confidence, a kind of facility in Yamani’s poetic persona following his initial season in hell and the transformations it led to – a confidence just as evident in his real-life persona, as I recently found out – there is a sense of dislocation:

While topical notions of identity never go further than a more or less passing, very subtle remark on the “I” as exotic sex partner (in “My Clothes”), the eye of the poet is, to a far greater extent than in the previous books, unhinged and in motion, in search of its ever elusive socket in the his own transmuting face. It does not seem ludicrous to suggest that this is the deeper quest, as desperate as it is doomed, of the globalised soul seeking salvation in post-post-God times.

Like few other books Amakin Khati’ah presents the world as a place defined by a sort of earthly transmigration, people becoming other people through movement in space, vulnerable egos in intercontinental flux. And it is to Yamani’s credit that, unlike many Arab writers, without once resorting to a self-definition that might help him to do so, he communicates a persuasive sense of being in the contemporary world.

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8. The strange thing is that some people saw my not writing as a sign of bankruptcy and decided that what I had already published was the end of my writing career. This made me laugh even as it saddened me. But it was a passing sadness.

Such is the ugly face of the Group or its avant-garde wing, whether or not that has really managed to set itself apart from the Seventies – the subject enacting or being made to enact ridiculously melodramatised glories and downfalls for the benefit of the rest of the crew, turning into Hero, Victim or (in the broadest range of senses, including the literary) Suicide – but however passing the sadness such sickness inspired in Yamani, it is just as well he was made aware of it, the better to appreciate the significance of the new place. Perhaps we would not have known about Yamani if not for the Group; what we should be thankful for is that he has endured in spite of it.

Immigration, as it seems, is remedy enough. The friends remain friends but in a far less proscriptive way. It is possible to relate to the family – part of the hopelessness of the society surrounding an impenetrable circle – in a more open and sympathetic way. It is possible to see the meaning and value of others as others, not equally restricted versions of the self who may also have made the difficult choice of becoming “intellectuals” or of joining the group. A certain amount of open-ended understanding accumulates. The world becomes a handkerchief as well as being small.

***

9. I did not even think of publishing the book once it was completed. It was Yasser Abdel-Latif and Mohammad Hashim who drove me to do it.

Mohammad Hashim is the writer who, by founding Dar Miret in 1999, absorbed much of the energy of the Nineties and eventually became better-known as the most accomplished independent publisher in the city (the moon of his success has since waned somewhat). And the easy way to interpret what Yamani has to say about the publication of this book is to think of it as (false) modesty. He is shy about the genius that drives him.

It could also be a sign of despair of ever having a significant readership, reflecting what I feel is a healthy awareness of the position of the contemporary Arab writer in the grander scheme of things. While others go crazy over literary prizes or the prospect of being translated – publication being among the easiest tasks facing a writer in Cairo, it is never enough in itself – here is a glowing talent who, expecting neither fame nor fortune, has little or no drive to publish in the first place. Ambitious he might be, but he is silent. There is dignity in that position: an artisan’s deep respect for his noble handiwork regardless of market demand.

Alternatively, however, the statement could be interpreted as a salutary affirmation of the fact that true writers write foremost for themselves, to work through their own sense of being. In this sense Amakin Khati’ah might be read as a journal of expatriation, an inner chronicle of what it means, for a hard-up young man from the backwaters of Cairo, to live away from home.

It means that he is still hard-up, that he teaches and translates to make a living: probably factors in the development of his approach to language and meaning. It means that he has become an academic (the only career open to an immigrant educated in the humanities?) and that it is an opportunity for him to set up theoretical grounding for the literary form in which he found himself (the prose poem), and to locate his work in a wide historical context. It also means that he can write free from compulsion, free from the need to establish ultimately prohibitive social or existential credentials; maybe it even means that he has something to write about, too.

***

10. With rare intelligence, Mohab Nassr, in a letter to me after reading the manuscript, caught the idea that this was my first book. I feel the same way: the first book in a second life.

It is interesting that, of all those who commented on the manuscript, Yamani should cite Mohab Nassr: the one Nineties poet (of Khaled and El-Dainasouri’s generation) who, largely out of repulsion from the Group, its capacity for ruining lives and its failure to see itself as part of the society surrounding it, actually stopped writing altogether. After settling down as a journalist in Kuwait – he had worked as a school teacher in Alexandria – Nassr has only just returned to writing.

It is interesting because Nassr, not only by no longer writing poetry but by socially distancing himself from the Cairo-centred literary circles, is able to see better than others just how far since Wardat fi ar-ra’ss Yamani has come. It is also interesting because, without discrediting Yamani’s three previous books, Nassr is implying that Yamani did not start writing until he had departed, until he was totally free of his Egyptian-intellectual self.

It is interesting too that the poet joyfully agrees – not with any of the implications, necessarily, but with the fact that he has experienced a literary rebirth – adding only the qualification of this being a second life. It means that when he writes, in “Work”, “Any ghost who appears to me will instantly become my friend”, he knows exactly what he is talking about.

“The Two Houses”, “The Big Escape”, “Tobacco Seller” and “The Book” translations copyright: Youssef Rakha

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Sacred genitalia: undergraduate essay

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Sacred genitalia: the metaphysical inflections of Bataille’s surrealist voice

(Madame Edwarda, 1941; Story of the Eye, 1928)

Man is more than a creature limited to its genitals. But they, those inavowable parts of him, teach him his secret.

This essay will attempt to identify a specific (if arguably minor) aspect of surrealism, and trace its aesthetic and intellectual resonances in Bataille’s major works. The desire to come in contact with the sacred informed not only Bataille but Artaud, who envisaged in the theatre a potential for realizing it, and (despite ‘ideological’ admonitions and the struggle ‘against those who would maintain surrealism at a purely speculative level and treasonably transfer it onto an artistic and literary plane’, a struggle which, among other things, frequently cast Bataille and Artaud in the role of renegade surrealists) this selfsame yearning for the sacred can be deduced from Breton’s  quasi-metaphysical pronouncements throughout the vital period of surrealist activity in France. As early as 1922 Breton was defining surrealism in terms of ‘the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of association’, and twenty years later he still felt  obliged to deny the charge of ‘mysticism’. While the sacred remains at best only a sub-stratum of metaphysics (‘most generally’ defined as ‘the philosophical investigation of the nature, constitution, and structure of reality’), it is not difficult nonetheless to recognise a quasi-religious strain running through the surrealist project from its very inception. In Breton’s demand for a ‘monotonous metaphysic’ that ‘never speaks except of the one being, in which God, the soul, and the world come together, of the one which is the deepest essence of all multiplicity’, there is a clear potential for a form of art—a poetics, dramatics or even erotics of the sacred—whose aim it would be to develop new conceptions of the Ultimate and the Absolute, and ways of experiencing their presence. This potential was taken up by both Bataille and Artaud (the latter choosing a dramatics, the former an erotics of the sacred) and leaves its definitive mark in their concern with the negative, the horrifying, the terrible and the obscene (which constitutes an awareness of mortality that we do not encounter with the same intensity in the work of Breton, whose fundamental priority was the marvellous). Artaud himself alludes to the route chosen by Bataille in quest of the same destination when he says that ‘bringing together two impassioned revelations on stage [...] is just as complete, as true, even as decisive as bringing together two bodies in short-lived debauchery’. His Theatre of Cruelty works ‘like the plague, by intoxication, by infection, by analogy, by magic’; it works like war, in the public ‘ferment of great, agitated crowds hurled against one another’; it is a form of ‘soul therapy’ inflicting on an audience the ‘laceration’ and ‘cruelty’ of the sacred, whose essential function is to teach us that ‘[we] are not free and the sky can still fall on our heads’; and its foremost subjects are ‘love, crime, war and madness’. For Bataille, by contrast, it is the very private anguish of ‘little death’ that tells us our secret: that ‘[nudity] is only death, and the most tender kisses have the after-taste of the rat’; the function of philosophy and literature is to forge the age-old link between eroticism and death; and only at the supreme point of convergence where, correspondingly, pleasure and pain resolve their perpetual dialectic in a terrifying excess, do we catch a glimpse of our spiritual predicament. In either case there is a stress on emptiness and negation that somewhat transcends the surrealist imperative of unlimited ‘marvellous subversion’, and explains Breton’s distaste with Bataille’s particular strand of madness, ‘that he reasons like someone with a fly on his nose (i.e. a corpse)’. But Bataille’s literary endeavours remain profoundly surrealist, and the following will undertake to show this in two stages: first, by exploring Bataille’s metaphysics of the sacred (which finds its clearest, most compressed expression in Madame Edwarda); and second, by looking at his aesthetics of eroticism, the kind of pornographic imagination—in Susan Sontag’s words—that aims ‘at disorientation, at psychic dislocation’ (triumphantly exemplified in Story of the Eye).

‘God, if he knew…’

Bataille’s conception of an ultimate reality resembles Taoism in that ‘this reality must not be subject to the limitations of any of the individual entities within it’; whereas the modes of our being are invariably described by concepts (or, as the Tao te ching would have it, ‘names’) the non-being of the Ultimate is both nameless and immutable; ‘strictly speaking, nothing can be said about the Tao at all’. It must therefore be described in negative terms, and designates—first and foremost—a form of emptiness. This emptiness is further identified with ‘the lowly’ (arguably including the obscene) and ‘the female’ (i.e. the lover/vagina, the mother/womb, and the earth itself); it is equivalent for Bataille to the God of Western theism. (Interestingly, Artaud too attempted to apply Taoist principles—fullness/emptiness, male/female/neuter—to actors’ exercises.) ‘Being is also, doubtless,’ Bataille says in the preface to Madame Edwarda, ‘subject to certain other limits: were this not so, we should not be able to speak (I too speak [of non-being, i.e. of the ultimate reality, the sacred], but as I speak I do not forget that not only will speech escape me, but that it is escaping me now).’ The sexual act ‘whereby being—existence—is bestowed upon us is an unbearable surpassing of being, an act no less unbearable than dying’; and only in those two modes of being can we experience non-being; truth itself will signify nothing if we do not, through debauchery and death, ‘see that which exceeds sight’s possibilities, [think] that which exceeds thought’s possibilities’. Thus eroticism, like death, comes to open ‘directly upon a certain vista of anguish’ where ‘joy is the same thing as suffering, the same thing as dying, as death’; and this anguish alone is ‘sovereign absolute’, because it contains the resolution of the two extremes of consciousness, which are also the only two ways of experiencing God (a word that we ‘cannot without impunity incorporate into our speech’, since it ‘surpasses words’), and the two limits of all knowledge (or, as Bataille preferred—again in agreement with Taoism—non-knowledge or non-savior). This conception of the Ultimate, incidentally, was shared by Henry Miller, although the latter did not identify it with God. ‘What is unmentionable,’ he wrote, ‘is pure fuck and pure cunt [...] What holds the world together [is] sexual intercourse. But fuck, the real thing, cunt, the real thing, seems to contain some unidentified element which is far more dangerous than nitroglycerine.’

Madame Edwarda (the story of a prostitute who, after exposing her well-worn vagina and declaring herself to be God, gradually reveals her divinity to the narrator)  is itself a concrete depiction of this abstract line of thought. Here God is presented symbolically as a form of vaginal emptiness, the narrator feeling in Edwarda’s presence ‘unhappy and [...] painfully forsaken, as one is when in the presence of GOD.’ With her, he apprehends ‘the vulgar ritual of “the lady going up” with the man who wants her in tow [as] nothing short of an hallucinating solemnity’; and before she dresses in a black domino and slips out of the whorehouse and he follows, their lovemaking is described in terms of a straining wide open ‘to welcome “the emptiness of heaven”’. The narrator feels Edwarda possessed by ‘the delirious joy of being naked’; and soon afterwards, under an ark in the night darkness, she is ‘entirely black, simply there, as distressing as a hole’. Only when he sees that she is ‘mindless: rapt, absent’, does he know ‘that She had not lied, that She was GOD.’ Consistently, the narrative itself subsides into ‘madness’ and ‘meaninglessness’ as the sacred, that which surpasses words, takes over (when Edwarda, having finally overcome an unearthly spasmodic fit, ‘mount[s] and straddl[es]’ the taxi driver). The narrator lapses back into the abstract, telling us that ‘living self is there just in order [...] “not to know”’, and that ‘God, if he knew [meaning, presumably, if he were to be known or described in the vocabulary of being] would be a swine’. The rest, we are told, is ‘irony, long, weary, waiting for death’. In this way Edwarda comes to embody the tragic truth not only about God but also epistemology and metaphysics; and Bataille, in a few pages, offers us the distillation of his ‘religious (but anti-Christian, essentially Nietzschean)’ quest. Hence Yukio Mishima’s description of the novella as a demonstration of ‘the manifestation of God to man, [which is] at the same time a work that is extreme in its obscenity’, and a paradoxical ‘verbalization of a great silence called God’. (It would be beyond the scope of this essay to discuss My Mother, but it is worth noting here that it can be seen as a Bildungsroman version of Madame Edwarda, less intense and more ‘psychological’, in which the womb rather than the vagina comes to embody the ultimate reality.)

Although it gave rise to Sartre’s criticism of Bataille as a ‘new mystic’ and ‘a seeker after God’, this desire to understand the sacred can also be seen as an attempt at healing the split ‘between savoir [the hermeneutic] and jouissance [the erotic/pornographic] by pursuing simultaneously the knowledge of eroticism and the eroticisation of knowledge’, largely parallel to the general surrealist project of uniting the conscious with the unconscious—man with God, flesh with spirit—and faithful in essence to the surrealist rejection of all ‘Greco/Roman, Christian/bourgeois, Cartesian/positivist heritage.’ On the literary level, Madame Edwarda is surrealist in that it draws ‘a vivid, harsh, shocking and immediate connection between metaphysics and the human flesh’, and sustains ‘an anti-psychological delineation, anti-realism [and] a perception of the universe hidden behind all of these’, much like what Artaud envisaged in his ‘total theatre’, that superior communion of cruelty whose features include ‘an awful lyricism’. Bataille’s ultimate goal is precisely the ‘point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imaginary, the communicable and the incommunicable [...] cease to be perceived as contradictions.’ His writing, however, unlike much surrealism, has given rise to two important criticisms, which can be seen in the wider contexts of the feminist and literary critiques of pornography. First, Bataille’s ‘conflation of sex and death’ is thought to be a mere extension of male—‘phalocratic’—supremacy, the fundamental conditions of which are hatred and violence. ‘Some classy men,’ writes Andrea Dworkin, ‘mean to suggest that [...] man fucks with a certain, tragic knowledge of death’ and ‘[Bataille], a classy guy, likens what he calls “eroticism” to dissolution and death’. It is implicit in her claim that men, deprived of the capacity to give birth and thus regenerate, can only realise themselves in the desperation and despair of death, of which the violence and hatred inflicted on women by patriarchy are but one example. Second, George Steiner’s suggestion that ‘the de-humanization of the individual in pornography [resembles] the making naked and anonymous of the individual in [the concentration camp]’, seems particularly relevant to Bataille’s fictional world, since in Bataille ‘the knowledge of physical mortality and frailty [...] places us in a state of complete vulnerability which also exists prior to humiliation, torture and sacrifice’. While the first question remains open to debate, the second brings us to the last point I want to make in connection with Bataille’s ‘religion’, namely that, notwithstanding its totalitarian potential (which Mishima’s admiration perhaps testifies to), it would be misleading to view this metaphysics of the sacred in isolation from the rest of Bataille’s intellectual pursuits.

Unlike Artaud, Bataille for the most part never abandoned communism, and his desire to understand the sacred did not interrupt his historical militancy. ‘Communist workers,’ he wrote, ‘are in bourgeois eyes just as gross and filthy as the bare and hairy sexual organs: sooner or later this will result in a scandalous eruption in which the noble a-sexual heads of the bourgeoisie will be sliced off.’ It is hardly surprising, nonetheless, that two of the main charges levelled at Bataille by French intellectuals—Stalinism and fascism—take their cue from the totalitarian potential of his thought. Contre-Attaque (Bataille’s revolutionary communist group of 1935 and its journal of the same name) proposed to use fascist weapons against fascism; in the face of an increasingly powerful and widespread fascist threat in the inter-war period, Bataille suggested surfascism (a word ‘intended to bear the same relation to fascism as surrealism bore to realism’) with the inevitable  consequences of misunderstanding that perpetuated the final break with Breton. ‘There is no doubt,’ he would write much later, ‘that the bourgeois world as it exists constitutes a provocation to violence and that, in that world, the exterior forms of violence hold a fascination.’ But after Contre-Attaque, it becomes clear ‘that this fascination can lead to the worst’. In the end Bataille ‘dissolved Contre-Attaque precisely because he was aware of the misunderstanding which this ambition to defeat Fascism on its own terms could give rise.’ Moreover, as ‘emotive intellectual’ (in a spirit of defiance against Sartre’s call for ‘responsible’ historical ‘engagement’) Bataille wanted to ‘wrest Nietzsche from the grip of the Nazis’; he was taken by ‘the possibilities of a world without God [...] The appeal to danger, to adventure, to war—the joy of chaos—worked for him as a stimulant, and an entire aesthetics of pathos seems to have arisen from it.’ Here too these qualities of mind (particularly in combination with Bataille’s emphasis on the role of ‘non-productive expenditure’ in political economy) seem to embody a philosophically articulated version of the general surrealist attempt to unite Marx with Freud. When ‘in Bataille, Nietzsche meets Hegel’, a unique thesis-antithesis-synthesis arises out of his Nietzschean jouissance (the will to expend), which in its partial agreement with the Marquis de Sade’s philosophy is re-enacted directly in the realm of the flesh: ‘sexual behaviour is opposed to everyday behaviour as expenditure is to saving’; ‘our only true happiness is to spend vainly, and we always want to be sure of the uselessness of our expenditure’; but since ‘affection cannot change the fundamental role played by death’, we can only sadistically deny ‘the value of others’ and must therefore extinguish both ourselves and our victims in the excessive happiness-expenditure that is eroticism. This particular brand of sacrifice, moreover, ‘is distinguished from others [including Sade’s] in that he who executes the rite is affected by the sacrifice himself; he succumbs to it and loses himself along with his victim.’ The unifying theme and objective of these apparently widely seperated intellectual strands is the idea of a ‘sovereign existence’, a state in which humanity would not be subject to ideological limitations (the Revolution, comparable—at the individual level—to sexual revolt, and also associated with the experience of God, since it constitutes a liberation from the limitations and predeterminations of the human predicament): ‘I do not distinguish between freedom and sexual freedom,’ Bataille writes, ‘because depraved sexuality is the only kind produced independently of conscious ideological determinations, the only one that results from a free play of bodies and images, impossible to justify rationally’. Since a full discussion of Bataille’s philosophy would be beyond the scope of this essay, at this stage I will rest content with suggesting that to dismiss Bataille as simply a totalitarian pornographer, or to accuse him of intellectual inconsistency, would be as unjust and presumptuous as Georg Lukacs’s contention that Nietzsche was a mere ‘forerunner of Nazism’.

The internal revolution

An alternative cue for interpreting Bataille is available in Sontag’s suggestion that pornography (in the sense of something other than ‘a psychological phenomenon’ and/or ‘an item in social history’) provides Bataille with a ‘modality or convention’ in which to function as artist and thinker. First, ‘Sade’s system’, (which Bataille thought ‘simply the most consistent and extravagant form of sexual activity’) ensures that Bataille’s narratives ‘qualify as pornographic texts insofar as their theme is an all-engrossing sexual quest that annihilates every consideration of persons extraneous to their roles in the sexual dramaturgy’; it also necessitates that these narratives (as complexes dealing with ‘that specific and sharpest inflection of the theme of lust, “the obscene”’) dramaturgically resolve themselves in death, whether or not the books are littered with corpses. The limitations imposed on a narrative by just such a ‘system’ (e.g. that it is inevitably episodic, that it ‘lacks the beginning-middle-and-end form’, that it does not deal with human relations) are arguably a challenge to the author—if he or she is to make something interesting out of them. Second, Roland Barthes’s structuralist analysis reveals that in Story of the Eye Bataille does not so much write a novel (‘something that might happen, all things considered’) as exercise his poetic imagination (‘something that could never happen [except] in the shadowy or burning realm of fantasy’). The elements of the narrative are neither real nor probable, but virtual; and the book, in effect, tells the story of an object passing ‘from image to image [...] the cycle of avatars that it passes through, far removed from its original being, down the path of a particular imagination that distorts but never drops it.’ Another challenge, then, is to advance and interchange the terms of two central series of images: the Eye/the Sun (which is ‘the matrix of a run of objects’, e.g. eggs, balls etc.) and liquid/light (which constitutes ‘a second chain’, e.g. tears, milk etc.) Out of the interaction of the two challenges—both of which Bataille meets with admirable literary power—the narrative reduces to ‘a form, the restrictive character of which is as stimulating as the old rules of meter and tragedy’. Since ‘the terms of the image can be taken only from two finite series’, the Eye and liquid, it is up to Bataille to displace that image in as many ways as the erotic episodes and the ideas underlying them require. On the one hand Bataille must relate absolutely everything in the text to his two overriding philosophical concerns (sex and death). On the other hand, he must subordinate human relations and language to a predefined poetic locus of images. Both tasks must be accomplished simultaneously and, particularly in Story of the Eye, with extreme economy of means—the rules Bataille has to observe, on reflection, are pretty stringent indeed, but the aesthetic discipline pays off.

In a pornographic text where the episodes lack structure, where everything must be subordinated to the mindless pursuit of sexual pleasure (and pain), the poetic limitation not only provides unity but also gives the obscene a particular tone. The text becomes ‘revolting in both senses of the word’: besides the obscenity that qualifies it as pornographic, there is also ‘the law of the Surrealist image’, ‘the more remote and right the relations between the two realities, the more powerful will be the image’. The metaphysical dimension, moreover, invests ‘each action with a weight, a disturbing gravity, that feels authentically “mortal”’, and the otherwise unrelated episodes acquire a particularly unsettling momentum. Alternatively one could say that the erotic/obscene aspect of the work adds ‘a savage lyricism’ (comparable to Artaud’s ‘awful lyricism’ above), ‘a capacity to shock’, a ‘continual oscillation between extremes’, to an already formulated surrealist composition, where the arbitrary dislocation of objects maintains a solid forward movement by virtue of its unified theme. In either case, the twofold technical restriction results in incredible inventiveness (a far cry from Steiner’s treadmill, and a masturbatory dance indeed), thus allowing Bataille, in effect, to set up ‘the parameters within which the project of surrealist pornography may be validated.’ The Eye-as-protagonist achieves precisely what Breton called ‘a breath of fresh air’: it denies the existence of the outer world and undertakes ‘a [radical enough] revision of moral values’, it throws ‘disorder into this order of words’, murders ‘the obvious aspect of things’, and ‘searches for the new beauty, “the beauty envisaged exclusively for passionate ends”.’ Against the stifling ‘capitalism of the sexual’, Bataille’s ‘play of metaphor and metonymy’ thus achieves ‘a counter-division of objects, usages, meanings, spaces, and properties that is eroticism itself’; through ‘psychic dislocation’—beauty that is compulsive or not at all—Bataille transgresses the sexual, ‘which is not, of course, the same thing as sublimating it’. When, in his tribute to Luis Bunuel, Carlos Feuntes invokes ‘Lautreamont’s famous juxtaposition of an umbrella and a sewing machine on an operating table’, his words apply with startling exactness to Story of the Eye. Objects in Bunuel’s cinema, he says, ‘cease to behave normally and instead reveal their true beauty in an unsuspected encounter; they cease to be invisible and interchangeable and become, instead, the dazzling trophies of the masochist, the fetishist, the sadist.’

This notion of objects misbehaving is central to the objectified transmigration of images that forms the poetic substance of Story of the Eye. From the beginning of the narrative, it is the central poetic image that holds the key to the logic with which events unfold. The Eye is displaced from the saucer of milk (the cat’s eye) which triggers off  virtual tears (milk, semen, urine and, from the second chapter on, egg-yolk), to Marcelle’s—horrified, sobbing and then dead—eyes, to the eggs for which Simone develops a mania, to Granero’s eye and the bull’s testicle, to the priest’s eye which, placed ‘in Simone’s hairy vagina’ becomes ‘the wan blue eye of Marcelle, gazing at me through tears of urine’, the ‘cycle of avatars’ finally coming full circle. It is this that explains the arbitrary, mysterious (pornographically fantastical) development of relations and actions in the course of the narrative. The narrator and Simone, for example, refrain from copulating in the absence of Marcelle; no satisfying rationale is offered for their behaviour. But the irrationality is justified when we realise that Simone’s loss of virginity marks a further development in the Eye’s story: the object must be transferred from Marcelle’s living eyes (through Simone’s illness, during which many of the central associations are made explicit for the first time, linking the whole book with Bunuel’s Chien Andalou, e.g., ‘Upon my asking what the word urinate reminded her of, she replied: terminate, the eyes, with a razor, something red, the sun. An egg? A calf’s eye’, etc.) to the open eyes of the dead woman. The antique (significantly, bridal) wardrobe establishes the connection between the Eye of horror (Marcelle alive) and the Eye of death (Marcelle having hanged herself), and the ‘strange swish of water’ that alerts the narrator to Marcelle’s pissing in the wardrobe is similarly metamorphosed (through Simone’s pissing on the eyes of the dead woman) into a ‘urinary liquification of the sky’ that marks the penultimate stop on the Eye’s relentless journey (the bull’s testicle, with which Simone masturbates, reaching orgasm at the same moment as the bullfighter’s eye is displaced from its socket). The Eye’s story, moreover (aside from the ‘arbitrary but surrealistically logical associations’ it sustains), is governed, through the pornographic convention, by Bataille’s philosophy: Simone’s loss of virginity in the presence of the corpse establishes the connection between eroticism and mortality; similarly, Sir Edmund’s ‘mass’ (while at the same time revealing the extent of Bataille’s revolt against traditional Christian theism) extends the same connection to the sacred (the eucharistic hosts becoming Christ’s sperm, the wine Christ’s urine, etc.).

As with Madame Edwarda,  there are hints throughout the text that symbolically reveal its underlying preoccupations, breaks through the autonomous operation of the words which penetrate the poetic substance of a modernist composition, revealing Bataille’s consciousness directly. After Marcelle’s suicide, Simone becomes sombre with the absolute knowledge she has attained (the ‘knowledge of eroticism’ we have spoken of in connection with Madame Edwarda above); she too looks ‘as if she belonged to something other than the terrestrial world’; ‘or, if she was still attached to this world, it was purely by way of orgasms, which were rare but incomparably more violent’. Similarly, the narrator remarks (in the course of his own metaphysical ‘education’) that ‘death was the sole outcome of my erection, and if Simone and I were killed, then the universe of our unbearable personal vision was certain to be replaced by the stars, [to exist] in a cold state, without human delays or detours’. Even the Milky Way appears to him  as a ‘strange breach of astral sperm and heavenly urine [across] the open crack [of] the sky’. ‘The universe seems decent,’ he tells us, only ‘because decent people have gelded eyes. That is why they fear lewdness.’ In this way the issue is revealed to be ‘a struggle between two ways of seeing’, one of which is ‘only achieved by splitting eyeballs, desiring the impossible [e.g. to know God], desiring all that for moral, political or economic reasons has been [...] deprived of time, place, name or reflection in our societies.’ Like Bunuel in Un Chien Andalou (which was produced, incidentally, in the same year as Story of the Eye was published), Bataille picks on the organ of (rationalist) perception, slitting not only the priest’s eye in Seville but also the Eye/Sun of the Enlightenment, the Eye of Cartesian positivism/rationalism and the Eye of bourgeois Christianity. And like Bunuel, he ‘never [doubts] that the internal revolution, the profound liberator of poetic energy in every individual, is inseparable from an objective [communist] transformation of reality’.

We are now in a position to summarize the main lines of argument concerning Bataille’s erotics of the sacred, considered as a special application of surrealism. The notion of an art form that seeks to present and embody the experience of God is not exclusive to Bataille among the surrealists (Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty is another such art form); interestingly, it is also present (albeit in a latent form) in Breton’s intellectual decrees, especially in what he says about the metaphysical (i.e., his thoughts concerning the bearing that conceptions of what reality means might have upon surrealist creativity).  Bataille’s pursuit of the sacred should also be seen in the wider context of his intellectual achievement (including his fascination with ‘the weapons of fascism’, but not with fascism itself, his consistent revolutionary commitment, Nietschean jouissance , Sadean dialectics, and epistemology of non-savoir). Viewed in this light, Bataille’s pursuit of the sacred reveals itself to be surrealist in essence, constituting a profound but idiosyncratic attempt at ‘marvellous subversion’. He is also, nonetheless, deeply (even obsessively) aware of mortality and death. Transferred to the realm of the aesthetic, his erotics becomes a startlingly effective instrument, producing (in combination with other surrealist devices, as well as the more general ‘pornographic conventions’) such powerful and enduring works as Story of the Eye.  His life’s work is the best answer to Susan Sontag’s call for an erotics, rather than a hermeneutics, of art (an art and a criticism that would perceive reality—activity and creativity—directly through the senses, rather than through a system of textual interpretation), and thus what he has to say to us is immediately relevant—he speaks directly in answer to the central questions about art and literature,  often inviting a radical revision of the way we define these very terms. Bataille certainly presents us with a vision of darkness, but unlike the dehumanizing (commercialist or totalitarian) darkness envisaged by George Steiner in his attack on pornography, Bataille’s darkness ‘is neither static nor immutable: it is the fiercest expression of conflict’ within ourselves. Perhaps we are best referred to Bataille himself for a final recapitulation of the subjects discussed in this essay:

If thought and its expression have become his main area of activity, this has not been without repeated attempts, within the limits of his means, at experiences lacking in apparent coherence, but whose very incoherence signifies an effort to comprehend the totality of possibility, or, to put it more precisely, to reject, untiringly, any possibility exclusive of others. Bataille’s inspiration is that of a sovereign existence, free of all limitations of interest.

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