Bataille - My Mother, Madame Edwarda, the Dead Man

I have recently read two extremely fine novels, and I must write about them here since the vivid after-effect of reading them felt incomparable to that of anything else.

They were called Madame Edwarda and My Mother, from a book entitled Divinus Deus by Georges Bataille. In the past, Japanese readers of Bataille have been afflicted by bad translations. This time, however, the translation by Kosaku Ikuta has clearly come out better.

The writers I pay most attention to in modern Western literature are Georges Bataille, Pierre Klossowski, and Witold Gombrowicz. This is because in their work there can be found a vivid, harsh, shocking and immediate connection between metaphysics and the human flesh that forms a direct link between the 18th and 20th centuries, by-passing the 19th. These works reveal an anti-psychological delineation, anti-realism, erotic intellectualism, straightforward symbolism, and a perception of the universe hidden behind all of these, as well as many other common characteristics.

Batailles Madame Edwarda is a novel that demonstrates the manifestation of God to man, and is at the same time a work that is extreme in its obscenity. The narrator pays for Madame Edwarda, a prostitute who calls herself God, at the whorehouse The Mirrors. He then follows Edwarda when she wanders out, wearing a black domino covering her face and naked body, witnesses her sudden fit and helps her into a taxi where he sees a manifestation of the true God in Edwarda who sits on top of, and copulates with, the taxi driver.

When read together with My Mother, it will be noticed that the image of the mother overlaps with that of Edwarda, and with it a vision of defilement, of incest which violates the sanctity of the Sacred Mother. But, in these works, the Sacred Mother does not suffer passively as a victim of trespass; she herself spurs others on and forces them into an experience, filled with terror, repulsion and ecstasy, which leads them to witness God.

However, my aim here is not to develop a theory on Bataille. I have too many things that I would like to say about Bataille in this limited space.

What is certain, nevertheless, is that, being aware that the sacred quality hidden in the experience of eroticism is something impossible for language to reach (this is also due to the impossibility of re-experiencing anything through language), Bataille still expresses it in words. It is the verbalization of a silence called God, and it is also certain that a novelists greatest ambition could not lie anywhere else but here. A woman was chosen to represent the God, who appears in the novel through the essential unity of the spirit and the flesh embodied in woman, and the recognition that the mother (thought to represent the highest virtue in woman) and the whore (thought to represent the dirtiest) both originate from the very same part of that flesh: you may recall the words of Baudelaire who called God a representative of whores.

It is an impossible task to appreciate Bataille in a business-like manner with these intellectual interpretations, but in order to read this novel (especially its translated text!) it is necessary to suppose that only the part that managed to break through the limits of language is left.

In the preface, Bataille says: If there is nothing that surpasses our powers and our understanding, if we do not acknowledge something greater than ourselves, greater than we are