JASON SMITH

Bataille’s Joyous Apocalypse

The animals seem to be grandiloquent toys, endowed with the meticulous puerility of the [painter] who conceived them.
—Georges Bataille, “Apocalypse of Saint-Sever” (1929)

Kafka’s puerile humor is indefensible.... Puerility cannot survive its victory.
—Georges Bataille, Literature and Evil (1957)

When Kafka first read the opening chapter of The Trial aloud to an audience of friends, he was frequently interrupted by bursts of laughter, both his friends’ and his own — according to Max Brod, Kafka himself “laughed so much that there were moments when he couldn’t read any further.” So why wouldn’t Georges Bataille be seized some years later with a ferocious laughter when he discovered what he proclaimed to be Kafka’s “joyous universe,” a world where a curious animal, half kitten, half lamb, is refused the “release” of a butcher’s knife (“The Crossbreed”), a world where nomadic horsemen set upon a bellowing ox, tucking into its still-living flesh with bare teeth alone (“An Old Manuscript”)?

This was the laughter heard coming from Bataille’s desk at the Bibliothèque Nationale’s Cabinet des Médailles as he handled the archived materials he would publish in the counter-surrealist journal Documents: but this laughter seems to have fallen on deaf ears, both his contemporaries’ and our own. In Documents, Bataille insists that the horses on Gallic coins from the 4th century B.C. resemble “equine gorillas and monkeys” and, as a result, compare favorably with their elegant Greek counterparts. The camel is celebrated for its “idiocy,” an idiocy quickly qualified as “disastrous,” while the “innocent cruelty” of certain wild animals is considered with a special delectation, a cruelty witnessed by the “opaque monstrosity” of eyes that, according to Bataille, are hardly different from little bubbles forming on the surface of mud. And it is the same humor that pervades Bataille’s analysis — offered in the flattest, most scholarly and objective tone — of several images from an 11th century manuscript called the “Apocalypse of Saint-Sever” (published in the May 1929 issue of Documents). The artist — a certain Stephanus Garsia — portrays scenes of “tranquil carnage” with a “meticulous puerility,” scenes whose figures express not unbridled horror before the worst but “foolishness,” a sort of idiotic cheer Bataille identifies as much with the amused cruelty of children as the blessed stupor of senility.

Sartre bitched that Bataille’s laughter was forced, bitter or out-and-out faked. Breton saw the descriptions in Documents as transcribed obsessions, mechanically repeated with “lyrical delectation.” In the “Second Surrealist Manifesto,” he charged Bataille with a “delirious abuse of adjectives” — abuse because these attributes circulate freely in his texts like viruses, looking for opportune, unsuspecting subjects to vampirize, carriers by which to proliferate. Bataille’s method is one of projection: beginning with a series of free-floating qualities (“soiled, senile, rank, sordid, lewd, doddering [gâteux]”) isolated and elevated to the dignity of fetishes, Bataille’s fetid interiority is transferred to the documents he examines. Once transposed, he then claims to observe, with astonishment and surprise, these same qualities in the objects under consideration. In his “Apocalypse of Saint-Sever,” Bataille repeatedly insists on terms like “senile” and gâteux, both covering an almost identical semantic field: infirmity, debilitation, incontinence and incapacitation. (Gâteux can have a very specific reference: heard in the hallways of hospitals, asylums and nursing homes, it refers to those who, by paralysis or profound debilitation, cannot avoid soiling their sheets[1] ). What are usually deployed as insults and denunciations are bestowed like benedictions or blessings: tender names, solemn consecrations. If there is lyricism here — there is — it is a lyricism that takes itself too seriously, a gravity whose force reverses the value or tenor of the terms it intones, a sudden and provocative metamorphosis that is perhaps the secret to the very peculiar and even terrible humor of Bataille’s writing in the late 1920s.

What is so compelling, and, Bataille claims, “surprising” about the images he addresses from the “Apocalypse of Saint-Sever” — including the head of a drowned man eaten by a raven, the prophets Elijah and Enoch decapitated by the Antichrist, and so on — is that their fundamental content, an apocalyptic violence (whose cruelty does not stop with death), is colored by a humor that, far from dampening their horror, renders them all the more horrible, even unbearable. This cheerful tone has nothing to do with the intelligence, the reflexivity of irony. To the contrary, the humor of apocalyptic cretinization is, as the original sense of “humor” indicates, difficult to isolate from the flesh in which it is embedded: humor was once the name for the consistency of the flesh, its fundamental disposition (cf. the doctrine of the four humors). The flesh is therefore the site of what Bataille calls a “physical optimism” surfacing, improbably, at the very instant when time touches its own limit. It is an optimism without calculation or anticipation, spontaneous and unreflective to the point of stupidity, a silent and ecstatic affirmation that, in these images, seems confounded with a very special vitality.

In his recent Profanations, Giorgio Agamben describes a similar affective economy in the medieval poetry dating from the same period as these images. It is a poetic mode characterized by “audacious inversions” of damnation and salvation, of the sacred and the profane. It is this coexistence and even indiscernibility between the mystical and the burlesque that constitutes the Stimmung of these inexplicable texts: initiation into the mystery requires the rites of obscenity, just as certain medieval mystics had to flirt with atheism by blasphemously proclaiming that God is nothing and does not exist, precisely because to exist is to have descended to the plane of the creaturely, a profound and unacceptable humiliation unworthy of the divine. It is to just such a poem that Bataille has recourse when analyzing the images of the apocalypse: both the images and the poem express the same affective economy and operate through the same inversions. He describes the opening scene of a well-known, popular (it was recounted by jugglers in public spaces) epic poem that, he solemnly asserts, is marked by a “latent horror pushed to the point of delirium,” a horror recounted by the poem’s narrator with a naïve relish that seems inappropriate for the ravages it depicts. The narrator tells of a nobleman cowardly fleeing a battle in fear. In the course of his flight, he collides with a robber’s swinging corpse, dangling from a low-hanging branch. This causes him to shit his pants, requiring him to remove his saddlecloth while continuing unabated. Forced to cut through a flock of sheep, he plows into them at full speed. The head of one of the sheep gets caught in his stirrup. He continues. The sheep is hanging from the saddle, but the jagged stones of the road slowly tear apart its body as it is dragged along. By the time the nobleman finally comes to a stop, the animal’s entire body has worn away up to the neck. All that remains of what Bataille calls the “ridiculous animal” is the head, still lodged in the stirrup’s noose.

For Bataille, both the poem and the images of the Apocalypse demonstrate this same complicity between cowardice and cruel death, the flight from violence that drags violence along with it, the immediate metamorphosis of the scatological burlesque into the pulverization of faultless flesh. In his “General Interpretation” of the Saint-Sever miniatures, he claims to be astonished to find such scenes of destruction and horror (“blood, severed heads, violent death and the convulsive play of still-living entrails”) accompanied by figures that “symbolize” this terror not through the gravity and pathos of their expressions, but by a look of stupor, faces staring out but not at us, smiling stupidly at nothing in particular:

It is surprising [my italics — JS] to find in this book’s illustrations forms that, though apparently symbols of a disastrous state of affairs, are nevertheless overcome by an almost imbecilic [gâteuse] serenity: it is as if, rari nantes in gurgite vasto, during a sudden surge, ridiculous figures surfaced at the crest of a wave, staring forward with an inane, senile look on their faces.

The Latin phrase (“only a few float on the vast abyss”) is drawn from a wellknown passage in Virgil’s Aeneid describing how a chosen few survive a devastating shipwreck and float like wreckage or debris over a bottomless abyss. Bataille describes the figures floating on the surface of these images as bobbing up with a brusque quickness, the figures themselves surprised by their sudden appearance. The stupor on their faces reveals a spellbound incomprehension before the suddenness of salvation, as well as an unawareness that this salvation will have no duration. Grace here is an instantaneous reprieve before being sucked down beneath the waves. Quickness is all, suddenness the condition of a salvation that only comes over those who cannot expect or even await it. This is why salvation takes place only at the moment when all is lost. The idiocy washing over the faces of the saved is a suspension of the seriousness of gravity, a “lightness” expressed with a lunatic grin. Such a smile smiles at nothing because it is the grin of nothingness itself, belonging to no individualized face, the revelation of no interior sentiment. Strange impersonal joy. To be seized by it means to be incapacitated to the point of spaced-out paralysis: senility is here the sign of a face briefly colonized by a power that debilitates as it saves. Bataille concludes: “Nothing is, in fact, more serene — nor more vivacious — than the beatitude, however senile, expressed by most of the figures.” Beatitude therefore marks the point of reversal between the wasting away of senility and the lively, alert “quick” of life itself. And it is the quickness of this impersonal vitality that touches the figures with an oddly liberating violence, with a lightness and grace that floods the surfaces on and against which they take shape. A vitality expressed in the innocent, delighted cruelty of animals and children, a vitality from out of which the living emerge briefly, suddenly, to their amazement.

And so it comes as no surprise that one of the illustrations Bataille discusses is entitled “The Flood.” Included by the miniaturist in the series devoted to the Book of the Apocalypse, this image presents the aftermath of the great Flood described in Genesis. It represents those who are not saved. Almost all the figures are dead: men of different sizes are splayed out in the most compromised attitudes, accompanied by an array of animals (some domesticated) that have drowned along with them. Bataille is quick to point out, however, that at least two figures appear to have survived this global disaster, and that this survival in the midst of an almost total devastation introduces a tone into the painting seemingly at odds with its content:

Here it is particularly necessary to notice that although a sense of horror is expressed, through the help of arbitrary distortions, by the sprawled-out drowned man, an unexpectedly joyous sentiment emerges through the goat figuring at the bottom of the page, and even with the raven whose beak is plunged into the meat of a human head. This discontinuity is here the sign of the extreme disorder characteristic of free human reactions. It is not, in fact, a calculated contrast but an immediate expression of the inexplicable — and therefore all the more significant — metamorphoses that result from certain fatal inclinations.

The painting is an extraordinary reading of the eighth chapter of Genesis. Where the passage in question merely reports that Noah sent out a raven to “wander to and fro until the waters were dried up from the earth,” the artist elaborates on what happens when those waters finally recede — an earth strewn with corpses, the raven now no longer compelled to wander, able to set upon the flesh of the dead. But the image depicts another bird, the dove Noah sends out from the ark, which returns to him with a freshly plucked olive leaf, indicating the floodwaters have indeed “subsided from the earth.” The illustration has been composed in such a way that the two birds have a symmetrical relation. Directly opposed on the same horizontal line, they perform identical gestures with incompatible meanings: both pluck, one an olive leaf as a sign or offer of peace, the other an eye, tarrying over and with the aftermath, over and with the remains.

Bataille pretends not to notice the dove. This is not simply due to some morbid disposition or a predilection for the worst. Because of the relation established between the two birds at the level of composition, the dove is clearly introduced as a “calculated” — a question of symmetry, balance, proportion — contrast or opposition to the devastation covering most of the manuscript page. To leave out the dove is therefore to insist that the tension between the scene’s horror and the note of joy must be understood not as one of opposition but of sudden, immediate (and even magical) metamorphosis. The hope represented by the dove is a false, and therefore cruel, hope, signaling a relief or flight from the rich strata of reds that striate the page, shading off into a black that almost absorbs the raven itself. Hope and joy don’t exist apart from the violence, the turmoil, existence is: they are lodged in the depths of the flesh itself or, as Bataille emphasizes, in the “meat” of a human head. In the immediate and sudden mutation of horror into a joy bordering on beatitude, Bataille sees these moments marked less by exclusion than by a mysterious (“inexplicable”) coincidence. This sudden transvaluation illuminates the painting and the figures within it with a flash of unsustainable (or unbearable) grace that Bataille contends is the sole possibility of “human greatness”: “It seems as if human greatness is found at the point where puerility — ridiculous or charming — coincides with the obscure cruelty of adults.”

If Bataille is able to hint at a certain hope in the light note of joy and intolerable humor resonating in the image of the “The Flood,” this hope has nothing to do with the sentimentality of those who dream of better futures and fuller skies: in this image, the sky is a dingy, disheartening yellow. Hope seems sedimented in the red, rust and black where flesh and earth converge. And this humor has nothing to do with an irony that opens an infinite distance between consciousness and life, an unsuturable, gaping wound splitting life ever away from itself, glimpsing itself only across stellar distances. Humor is the way the flesh feels to itself; it is the expression of what Bataille modestly deems a “physical optimism.” Humor is a free reaction of the flesh to itself, an affirmation of hope possible only on the extreme edge of time, life’s obscure cruelty and salutary severity toward the living. Meticulous and exacting, life confronts itself with the exactness of a knife.

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 [1]In the coda to “The Story of the Eye,” Bataille recounts that his syphilitic father was already blind by the time Bataille was born, and would soon lose the use of his limbs. The Father is the gâteux par excellence: the epilogue tells of how his unseeing, glintless eyes would turn upward when he soiled himself, his face wearing a stupefied expression of “abandon and aberration.”