Bataille Georges - Blue of Noon

It really isnt important how you approach this book. As Bataille says of fiction in general and by extension his own work in particular: How can we linger over books to which their authors have manifestly not been driven? Blue of Noon is a novel that is as driven as a car whose driver has lost control. To read it is to share vicariously in being drunk at the narrative wheel, your foot spasmodically jamming down on the accelerator, while events loom out of the darkness to take on the awful certainty of a disastrous collision.

If you commit yourself to reading Blue of Noon there is no necessity for you to worry about where its all heading because your very assent to the journey means that youre incapable of reading a map. Theres a kind of exhilaration in this and a kind of terror; both of which extreme emotions the author is only too willing to exploit. Yet, much like Troppmann, the disaffected narrator of Blue of Noon, the passage of these awful events, that inexorably lead to a sense of crushing, historical imminence, is none the less accompanied in the reader by a curious sense of immanence. It is as if a cloaca God were to descend to someone who was labouring on the torture throne of constipation, and deliver them a laxative balm.

The scatological trope in this context is not gratuitous. Georges Bataille, born in Billom, Puy-de-Dme, in 1897, was a pivotal figure in those schools of anti-rationalism that did so much to define French culture in the twentieth century. An essayist, a novelist, a philosophical theorist, Bataille threw all of his considerable energies into the rejection of traditional literary structures. He saw the aim of all intellectual, artistic and even religious activity as the transfiguration of the rational individual in an act of ecstatic communion. For Bataille, religious and sexual ecstasy were co-terminous, and he developed a surprisingly systematic and anthropological architectonic in support of this view, most notably in Eroticism.

While well capable of developing his ideas with clarity and intellectual attack, like Nietzsche, his true philosophic progenitor, Bataille was equally content to express himself in obscure and unsatisfying ways. Theres a delirious irony in the fact that, while he was the author of myriad texts, on subjects as diverse as thirteenth-century religious verse and the cave paintings of Lascaux, he remains best known for his pornographic novel Story of the Eye, which he wrote pseudonymously as Lord Auch. This nom de plume derived from the way that an acquaintance of Batailles abbreviated the cry Aux chiottes! (To the shit house!). And its just to say that in as much as the more notorious work rushes its readers to the shit house where sex and death merge in an act of involuntary evacuation, so Blue of Noon to my mind a far more important and significant work rushes its readers into the shitty charnel house which was the Second World War.

Batailles life reduced to its bare bones reads like a textbook curriculum vitae for the thinker he became. His mother was mentally ill, his father died of syphilis. He converted to Catholicism on the eve of the First World War and served for a year before being discharged because of tuberculosis. Like his fellow French anti-rationalist Louis-Ferdinand Cline, Bataille suffered from ill health and attendant depression for the rest of his life; and as with the author of Journey to the End of the Night, Batailles fiction is darkly adumbrated by the hell of the trenches.

In the post-war period Bataille struggled with his Catholic faith, training first as a priest, and then spending some time in a Benedictine monastery on the Isle of Wight. However, the inevitable loss of faith came, and by the early 1920s he was involved with the surrealist movement. Naturally, Bataille was expelled by Andr Breton for his divisiveness (and truly expulsion was the lifeblood of surrealism, a veritable squid of an artistic movement, propelled through the muddy waters of interwar Paris by successive expulsions), and entered a liberating period of psychoanalysis.