Elliott Vanskike Pornography as paradox: the joint project of Hans Bellmer and Georges Bataille

Mosaic (Winnipeg); 12/1/1998 The conservative cultural right has continued to question the place of sexuality in art and those who would defend the aesthetic legitimacy of pornography in art frequently attract public ire upon themselves. Georges Bataille (1897-1962) through his pornographic fiction and Hans Bellmer (1902-1978) through his visual art deliberately attacked philosophical systems through their portrayals of sexuality in a concerted effort. Their collaboration and its inextricably entwined nature are analyzed. Elaine Showalter has noted in her book, Sexual Anarchy, that ends of centuries are often marked by an increased fascination with sexual scandals; 19th-century England had the Woman Question, the Oscar Wilde homosexuality trial, and public health scares over syphilis and prostitution (2-4). The 20th century is no different. Our fin-de-siecle scandals have often entered public discourse as debates about what distinguishes pornography from art, or more accurately, at what point the putative pornographic content of a photograph or a movie outweighs its salutary effect on the public. In 1989 the work of photographers Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano was decried as obscene on the floor of the United States Senate in a flap over whether their work should be funded by the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1997 Oklahoma police removed copies of Volker Schlondorff's film The Tin Drum from the shelves of libraries and video stores after a district court judge determined that it was obscene under the state's child pornography laws. Clearly, the place of sexuality in art is being contested by the conservative cultural right. But this, too, is nothing new. Those who would defend pornography often draw fire themselves. Critics such as Simone de Beauvoir and Susan Sontag have defended the aesthetic legitimacy of pornographic works - not, however, in spite of the works' offensiveness, but because of it. Beauvoir points out in her 1952 essay, "Must We Burn Sade?" that his writings are indefensible from almost any other stance. The philosophy is banal, the prose is ham-handed, the sexual escapades are unoriginal "The fact is that it is neither as author nor as sexual pervert that Sade compels our attention: it is by virtue of the relationship

which he created between these two aspects of himself" (12). Sade's achievement is that he shows us his own struggle to justify the unjustifiable. It is this tension that compels us when we read Sade; without the pornographic pull, we are left merely with the hamhandedness and banality. Sontag makes a similar argument for the power of pornographic fiction, what she calls "one of the extreme forms of consciousness" (46). Cleverly using the brush that is usually used to tar pornographic fiction - that it is designed to produce physical arousal in its readers - she paints an all-the-more compelling portrait of its power: "The physical sensations involuntarily produced in someone reading the book carry with them something that touches upon the reader's whole experience of his humanity - and his limits as a personality and a body." Pornographic literature, as she sees it, is not rendered ineffectual because it produces arousal; instead, this most visceral of reader's responses renders it more cogent in that it aims at "disorientation, at psychic dislocation" (47). The visual art of Hans Bellmer (1902-78) and the pornographic fiction of Georges Bataille (1897-1962) both exhibit this aim to attack philosophical systems through depictions of sexuality. Moreover, in their case it is a concerted project: Bellmer provided a series of engravings to illustrate two pornographic novels by Bataille, Story of the Eye and Madame Edwarda. Bellmer was a German artist who first came to the attention of Andre Breton and his Surrealist circle when Bellmer created a mannequin-type sculpture that he called Die puppe (the Doll), which he photographed in a variety of frankly sexual positions. These photographs were hand-tinted and published in France in two art books: La Poupee (1936) and Les Jeux de la poupee (1949). Bataille - primarily known today as a critic who wrote on a wide variety of topics, including economics (The Accursed Share), literature (Literature and Evil), philosophy (Erotism and Inner Experience) - was known during his lifetime, as Allan Stoekl notes, "mainly as the editor of Critique. . .and as an author of 'erotic' or 'pornographic' literature. . ." ("Preface" 1). According to Stoekl, it is misleading to treat these two Batailles, scholar and pornographer, as distinct, for Bataille's philosophical writings and his fiction share a single purpose: to confront the reader with what he called "heterogeneous matter" and what Stoekl characterizes as "matter so repulsive that it resisted not only the idealism of Christians, Hegelians, and surrealists, but even the conceptual edifice-building of traditional materialists" ("Introduction" xi). Bataille did not attempt to tear down Hegel's formulation of the dialectic; instead, he explored the limits of the dialectic by focusing on the excesses of the body - waste, laughter, orgasm, religious ecstasy - that could not be reincorporated and explained by dialectical systems of thought. In Story of the Eye and

Madame Edwarda this resistance takes the form of narratives that are dominated by altered states of consciousness and transgressive sexual debauchery. In this essay I will first discuss the details of the collaboration between Bellmer and Bataille - how they came to work together and the affinities between their experiences that made this collaboration all but ineluctable. I will then focus on Bataille's Story of the Eye and Madame Edwarda and discuss the way these novels challenge dialectical oppositions, and the way that Bellmer's illustrations for the novels provide the visual counterpart to Bataille's troubling of the dialectic. Bellmer and Bataille both sought to embody in the flesh certain internal states of mind, to show that sexuality expresses the key to being. Bataille's formulation in the introduction to Madame Edwarda may be the most succinct: "Man is more than a creature limited to its genitals. But they, those inavowable parts of him, teach him his secret" (142; also reprinted in Erotism 265-71). At the same time that both artists are trying to articulate this dialectic - humanity and its relation to sexuality they are also attempting to escape the systematic nature of the dialectic. Both are trying with a single stroke to set forth a philosophy and to destroy the systematic structure of preceding philosophies, to short circuit the dialectic. This is a paradoxical project. How does one always test the limits of the dialectic without arriving at resolution? For both men the answer lies in the continual and willful assertion of this paradoxical project, in the perpetuation of that moment of creation and destruction. The collaboration between Bellmer and Bataille is often read as inevitable. Most exhibition catalogs and critical studies of Bellmer's drawings include some version of Sarane Alexandrian's conclusion that "never perhaps have an artist and a writer found greater harmony of temperaments" (75). Yet, despite the seeming rightness of their collaboration and the astonishing similarity of approaches to sexuality, we are finally left only with speculations about when, where, and how they met. Many sources make note of the two meetings between the artist and the author in Paris in 1946 and again in 1955, foremost among them Bataille's biographer, Michel Surya, and Bellmer's biographer, Peter Webb. Both, though, are strangely silent about what transpired. What has been written about their collaboration is sufficient only to provide us with snarled strands of information that outline the actual events without touching their core. In fact, from Surya's biography we can intuit a meeting only from his passing mention of a collaboration between the two on Story of the Eye and Madame Edwarda (116-17, 311). Webb is also vague about when they met to discuss the engravings for Story of the Eye.

He places it in early 1946, but then goes on to cite a letter from Bellmer to Robert Valancay that fixes the publication of the collaborative edition in 1944 (277n3, 250). So, while there is a profusion of facts surrounding the meetings, the meetings themselves remain tantalizingly obscured - a lack at the center. In this way, the interplay between interior (the actual meetings) and exterior (our scant knowledge about those meetings) in itself describes the fundamental problem of the dialectic that both Bataille and Bellmer wrestled with in their art, as well as hinting at the way that they addressed the challenge. Bataille's erotic novels Story of the Eye and Madame Edwarda seem almost to call for illustration; they summon the eye. The illicit acts that they relate and the first person narrator they employ position the reader as a sort of voyeur. Told in retrospect, Story of the Eye recounts the sexual thrall that the narrator fell into with a young woman named Simone. After they involve their friend Marcelle and a libertine named Sir Edmond in bizarre sexual acts that frequently center around Simone's fascination with eggs, Marcelle hangs herself and Simone, Sir Edmond, and the narrator decamp for Spain where they attend a bullfight and torture Don Aminando, a priest, before raping him and removing his eye. The novel closes with the three lovers disguising themselves and fleeing on a ship. Madame Edwarda is a short novel that tells the story of one drunken night of debauch in the narrator's life during which he picks up a prostitute, watches her have sex with a cab driver, and then becomes convinced that she is God. The detailed descriptions of spatial relationships in these novels - from the physical arrangement of Simone and the narrator on the bicycle as they pedal to visit Marcelle in the asylum to Edwarda's movements around the arch at Porte Saint-Denis recall the obsessive primacy given to arrangement in Robbe-Grillet's nouveaux romans. This architectonics of objects sees its supreme expression in the organization of bodies, which at times is so complicated as to defy visualization: Simone "lay down with her head under my cock between my legs, and thrusting her cunt in the air, she brought her body down toward me, while I raised my head to the level of that cunt: her knees found support on my shoulders" (6). Add to these visual elements the centrality of looking in Bataille's Story of the Eye - not only the overdetermined presence of the eye but also the mutual gazes that the narrator and Simone exchange whenever they engage in a sexual act and the ocular summons these novels issue becomes almost an imperative. We might well assert with Bellmer's biographer Webb that, just as Bataille's novels seem to cry out for visual elaboration, Bellmer was their "predestined illustrator" (192). Certainly, as Michel Camus points out in

his article "Les avatars de l'oeil chez Bellmer," Bellmer was already manipulating and excoriating the eye in much the same way that Bataille does, well before Bellmer ever left Berlin and encountered Bataille's writings. The Doll that Bellmer constructed in the early 1930s was a female mannequin, outfitted with a wig and articulated by means of ball joints so that the arms and legs could be manipulated. Bellmer varied the settings for the photographs of his Doll - beds, staircases, the forest. And he varied the arrangement of the mannequin. But whether it was clothed in a chemise and child's patent leather shoes, or assembled with arms or legs missing or grotesquely rearranged, the Doll was always posed to suggest a certain degraded innocence, an unsettling juxtaposition of childish naivete and adult depravity [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED]. The first version of Bellmer's Doll (1934) was to have a visual center not in its head, but in its belly - a peephole in the Doll's torso through which the viewer of the piece would be able to see an internal wheel divided into six wedge-shaped scenes (Bellmer never executed this part of his design). In Bellmer's second version of the Doll, the mannequin almost never has a head, comprising instead arms and legs joined in bizarre configurations; constructed in 1936, this second Doll was the subject of photographs that Bellmer published, along with poems by Paul Eluard, in 1949 in Les Jeux de la poupee. When the Doll does have a head, the eyes are painted over to appear blank. La Poupee, a 1935 photograph (in permanent collection of the Ubu Gallery, New York) that was not included in Bellmer's book of the same name presents a large bead with a hole that resembles the eye of Bellmer's Doll; the hole/iris stares directly at the camera's eye and the viewer's. Tips of calipers are poised on either side of the bead/eye, as if to gauge the reach and power of vision. Bellmer's project can be seen as of a piece with Bataille's; both artists envision the overthrow of the eye as the organ which orders all experience. That Bellmer originally planned to have the eye of his first Doll migrate from the head to the belly emphasizes an analogous move away from visual abstraction and toward corporeal sensuality. Thus, we can see in Bellmer's early work, especially in his cephalopod drawings which feature women's legs constellated to form globular, squidlike creatures, the same impulse that led Bataille, in Story of the Eye, to torture the eye until the narrator and Sir Edmond scoop out Don Aminado's eye and implant it in Simone's vagina. Aside from these aesthetic and philosophical affinities between Bellmer and Bataille, there are obsessive details in both novels that call Bellmer's work to mind. The asylum fortress where Marcelle is incarcerated echoes the brick-works at Aix-en-Provence where Bellmer was interned for

seven months during la drole de guerre. This period of confinement, which Bellmer likened to Sade's imprisonment in the Bastille, profoundly influenced his work. The drawings he produced while in the prison camp show interiors and figures composed entirely of bricks with the figures of his obsessions (women's boots, torsos) emerging from the brick pattern of the walls. Bellmer also did a series of portraits of the Surrealists interned with him in which each face is constructed from bricks (the date given for most of these drawings is 1940). In these drawings we can already see the tension between the fluid curves of a face or a woman's figure and the gridlike pattern of bricks in which the curves are paradoxically rendered. A second, and quite striking correspondence between Bellmer's obsessions and Bataille's Story of the Eye, can be seen in the initial exchange between Sir Edmond and Simone. Upon hearing of Marcelle's death, he repeatedly asks Simone to draw the event for him. Dissatisfied with the results, "he told a servant to buy a wax mannequin with a blonde wig; he had then laid the figure out on the floor and asked Simone to urinate on its face, on the open eyes, in the same position as she had urinated on the corpse" (54). That this scene bears remarkable similarity to Bellmer's construction of the Doll is surprising only if we ignore the fact that both men were working from the same ideas of female sexuality that underpinned the Surrealist movement. The Surrealists certainly constituted a boys club with a near-univocal view of women as first and foremost erotic objects. From Magritte's portrayal of a woman with a naked torso in place of her face in The Rape, to Man Ray's headless portraits of women's naked torsos, to Breton's portrayal of Nadja as a means to his self-knowledge, the Surrealists depicted women as projections of male desire. This view of female sexuality, when coupled with the implication of sadism in Bellmer's posing of the Doll, has led many critics, such as Rudolf Kuenzli, to dismiss his work as only and ever a "means to dominate, colonize, female subjectivity" (25). In the same vein, Susan Rubin Suleiman has noted that the Surrealists cannot be viewed as subversive or radical to the extent that their depictions of women conform to the patriarchal expectations of the dominant culture (82-83). I would argue, however, that neither Bellmer nor Bataille can be dismissed this easily as merely misogynists; the politics of art are far slipperier than this facile labeling allows. Magritte's The Rape is illustrative here [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 2 OMITTED]. While it is valid to read the literal effacement of the woman in this painting as a reduction of women to their sexual parts, the title also permits the painting to provide a condemnation of this view of women that can result in their victimization. Similarly, Hal Foster has suggested that Bellmer's

Doll might represent more than just violence toward women. Created as it was during the rise of fascism in 1930s Germany, the Doll can be seen as representing "a reflexive sadism aimed as an expose at the sadism of fascist father and state" (115). This, however, does not get us around the fact that he chose a woman as his Doll; presumably a male automaton could have just as effectively communicated his message of the mindless violence of fascism. As I see it, the reason he chose a woman doll is that, like Bataille, he used extreme depictions of sexuality in an attempt to push past the Surrealist notion of woman as a means to man's end, to unveil the power of desire as a means to self-knowledge. Their representations of sexuality are more unsettling than those of other Surrealists because, as a result of their use of women, the unsettling doubles back - the artists themselves are clearly unsettled. Sade is useful today because he articulated the tension between his monstrous desire and his attempt to be part of civilized society. Like Sade, Bellmer articulates a tension, in his case the tension between the sadistic manipulation of the Doll and the manifest affection he felt for it - Bellmer transported the Doll from Berlin to Paris, would bring it with him to parties, and kept it around in some form until he died. As Foster observes, this excessive and self-reflexive transgression is perhaps why Bellmer was only marginally accepted by the Surrealist core and why Bataille was banished by Breton in the "Second Manifesto of Surrealism," denounced as an embarrassing "excrement-philosopher" (185). Like Bataille, Bellmer created out of obsession. In the spirit of Bataille's foreword to Blue of Noon, Bellmer devoted his life to asserting that art must be compulsive: "How can we linger over books to which their authors have not been manifestly driven?" (153). In the prose that typically accompanied his photographs and drawings Bellmer made no secret of the fact that his art was personally cathartic, generated out of his need to work through the sexual desires of his youth. In La Poupee he writes, "Would it not be the final triumph over those adolescents with wide eyes which turn away if, beneath the conscious stare that plunders their charms, aggressive fingers were to assault their plastic form and slowly construct, limb by limb, all that had been appropriated by the senses and the brain?" (qtd. in Webb 34). From his early experiments with the Doll to his drawings of the late 1960s, Bellmer was continually exploring the same idea - the manipulation of the female body to suit his singular desires. But it is a mistake to assume that because the Doll was constructed as a response to Bellmer's treatment at the hands of schoolgirls its aesthetic reach is limited to a sort of personal aesthetic therapy. What Bellmer sought to show were "the innumerable integrating and disintegrating possibilities according to which desire fashions the image of the desired" (qtd. in Foster 107). To look at the Doll, then, is not

just to see the embodiment of Bellmer's desire but to explore the limits and potential of desire, the power of desire not just to form the desired object, but to unmake the maker. Confronted by the Doll, the viewer sees the stable dialectic between self and other collapse. To use Bataille's formulation of this confrontation, "we are faced with the paradox of an object which implies the abolition of all objects, of an erotic object" (Erotism 130). As in much of Bataille's fiction, the dialectic in Story of the Eye takes the form of an opposition between earth and sky. Most of the signal events of the novel feature some kind of meteorological oddity as their backdrop. From the deluge that accompanies the hilltop menage a trois with Marcelle, to the squall that rages on the first visit to the asylum, to the "rainless tempest" that coincides with the febrile flight on the bicycle, to the desiccating sun of the bullfight, Bataille is establishing dear metaphoric and metonymic links between the debauchery enacted below and the disturbances in the sky. Viewed dialectically, these opposed realms of heaven and earth can represent respectively the infinite and the finite, the divine and the human, the spirit and the flesh. Bataille, though, is not content to perpetuate these stable oppositions; he instead seeks to destabilize them. The scene where the narrator contemplates the Milky Way is one site of this collapsing of high and low. In this scene, distinguished from the rest of the novel by its stillness, the language of flesh gradually annexes the language of sky until their regions overlap. As the narrator reclines with his head on a rock, the heavens are figured as a skull and the Milky Way as the sperm and urine that besmirch it. The "ammoniacal vapors" (48) that are the astronomical explanation for the Milky Way thus become synonymous with the stench of urine; the crease that the Milky Way describes in the night sky becomes the crack between two buttocks. This merging of the heavens and flesh reaches its culmination in the narrator's assertion that "my kind of debauchery soils not only my body and my thoughts, but also anything I may conceive in its course, that is to say, the vast starry universe, which merely serves as its backdrop" (49). The dialectic of heaven and earth is contracted into a single region by the continual surpassing of sexual limits that Simone and the narrator enact. This same collapse of heaven and earth by means of sexuality can be seen in one of the photographs from Bellmer's Les Jeux de la poupee. Here the Doll has legs attached to its torso in place of arms and a head and both sets of legs wear a young girl's short socks and patent leather shoes. The Doll is posed in the woods with a shadowy figure looking on from behind a tree. As Herbert Lust observes, "it was as if the top genitalia were

inviting sexuality from the sky while the bottom genitalia invited sex from the earth" (n.pag.). For Bataille and Bellmer, to move outside the realm of societally sanctioned sexual behavior is to deconstruct the ratiocinative dialectic between heaven and earth, God and human, righteousness and sin. In Story of the Eye, a second site for this deconstruction is the scene where Simone and the narrator flee the asylum on bicycles. Here again Bataille foregrounds the sky, but the opposition between the heavens and the events on earth is not as distinct. In the previous example, the narrator's upturned eyes and supine position underscored the division between earth and sky; the dialectic between the two was collapsed as the vocabulary proper to each gradually overlapped. Here, the collapse seems already to be over, for the universe is already reduced to the narrator's physical world, already soiled by Simone's and the narrator's debauchery. It is "the universe of [their] personal vision," and the stars that it contains are not seen as before from below by the upturned eye, but instead viewed by "external gazes" (33). The vantage point is reversed. Now the gaze is directed down, looking from above at the collapsed dialectic of sky and flesh. The conflict that these coexisting antipodes present is figured in the series of juxtapositions this scene stages. The narrator's utter fatigue contrasts with the "superhuman effort" of carrying Simone back to town, his "prolonged state of exhaustion" with the "absurd rigidity of [his] penis" (33). The naked flesh of Simone and the narrator contrasts with the steel and gears of the bicycles. The most compressed of these juxtapositions perhaps best evinces the collapsed dialectic: "a geometric incandescence (among other things the coinciding point of life and death, being and nothingness) perfectly fulgurating." This point where creation and annihilation coincide is "the goal of [the narrator's] sexual licentiousness" (33). But it would be a mistake to view these various juxtapositions as framing and thus reinscribing the arc of a dialectic. As Gilles Mayne observes, "if opposites happen to coincide, they do so only very briefly and violently. . . . Bataille never makes this coincidence a third term of unity, a Hegelian synthesis, in any case a point situated beyond or above contradiction in which the contradiction, stabilized and secured, could then set itself up as a superior reality of the supernatural or the miraculous" (124). The collapse of the dialectic between heaven and earth, life and death is thus the end result of the narrator's excesses. Bataille's poetic and paradoxical phrase "geometric incandescence" provides us access to Bellmer's illustrations for Story of the Eye. The phrase conflates two worlds that are violently opposed to each other. It

posits the description of light waves by line segments. A truly geometric incandescence would make possible the impossible task of literally delineating a sourceless, spreading light by means of limits and borders, by circumscribing it. This impossibility made possible is what underpins Bellmer's depiction of the contracted dialectic. His first engraving for Story of the Eye shows a female figure who is at once woman and girl (see reproduction in Webb 194). Two shadowy sets of legs converge into a single set of buttocks and vulva. The legs overlap each other as well as the head and arms of the figure; one set wears a child's white socks and flats, while the other wears an adult's striped hose and boots. The figure is clad in both a child's pinafore (the bow just visible at the arch of the back) and a bustier that exposes her breasts. The two female figures are copresent; both are discernible, but neither can be separated from the other. The limits that distinguish each body are impossible to define. Bellmer's solution to the dialectical problem of Simone's youthful innocence and her adult sexuality is to conflate the two graphically so that both can be presented at once. In Bellmer's extended essay L'anatomie de l'image he explains this process of conflation: "the two images blend their contents as they become superimposed . . . . This results in a bizarre fusion of the real and the virtual" the aim of which is to evoke in the viewer "a spirit caught with the fancy of providing the proofs of a particular reality through the realization of the impossible" (qtd. in Saphire, n.pag.). A similar dialectical contraction can be seen in Bellmer's treatment of the figure's skirt, for rather than represent the curve and fall of the skirt with smooth lines, he has rendered it with a multiplicity of precise line segments. Curves are not drawn - they are delineated. By using very short line segments to describe the edge of the skirt, Bellmer can simultaneously suggest a curve at the same time he denies it. The result is that the border of the skirt is both a curve and a line. This same technique is put to even more striking use in the fourth illustration for Story of the Eye (see reproduction in Webb 198). Here it is the curve of flesh that the line segments approximate. The woman's limbs, hands, and partially exposed bosom are all detailed as if with drafting tools (and it is worth noting here that Bellmer attended engineering school for two years and made his living for a time as a mechanical illustrator). The simultaneity of line and curve presented here is richer than in the first engraving, however, for, the effect of this delineation of flesh is to make the woman appear like a mechanical doll, a merging of flesh and machine. In this way, Bellmer renders in a single image what Bataille presented as the juxtaposition of the bodies and the bicycles,"the irritating and theoretically unclean sight of a naked though shod body on a machine" (31). The conflation of flesh and machine into a single figure, the collapsing of curve and line into a single edge, are

Bellmer's visual articulation of "geometric incandescence" and his embodiment of the collapse of the dialectic. This scene on the bicycles clearly preoccupied Bellmer. He shot a series of photographs depicting naked female models astride bicycles. These he then used as guides for preliminary sketches. None of these sketches made it to the engraving stage, so none was included in the illustrated edition of Story of the Eye. Still, some twenty years later in a 1964 drawing entitled "The Blue Eye," Bellmer includes the small figure of a girl bent over a bicycle that is reminiscent of his photographs and sketches from the 1940s (see reproduction in Grall 96). An untitled 1946 drawing had similarly depicted a collage of the steel tubes and gears of a bicycle with the soft curves of a female torso (in permanent collection of the Ubu Gallery, New York). Like many of Bellmer's drawings, this one was done on graph paper. The grid on which this collage appears underscores the collapse of the dialectic between line and curve. In Madame Edwarda, Bataille executes the collapse of the dialectic in much the same way as he did in Story of the Eye, but in the later novel his explanatory preface and the story's brief action bring the process of that collapse into stark relief. The title page of the novel already announces the limits of this dialectic by joining the story's title character - a prostitute - with Bataille's pseudonym (Pierre Angelique) connotative of the heavenly. The arrangement of these names on the title page also prefigures the contraction of the dialectic into the single person of Madame Edwarda, a prostitute who declares herself to be God. As the epigraph to the novel's preface, Bataille quotes Hegel: "Death is the most terrible of all things; and to maintain its works is what requires the greatest of all strength" (137). But Bataille has not come to praise Hegel, but to bury him. Continual mindfulness of death is not enough, for, as Bataille argues in the preface, this knowledge achieves meaning only when we acknowledge the identity between death and eroticism; we need to be aware "that joy is the same thing as suffering, the same thing as dying, as death" (139). As merely an absolute end to life, death has no more meaning to us than it would to an animal, unless we recognize in the surfeit of ecstasy the fear of death: "Pleasure would be a puny affair were it not to involve this leap, this staggering overshooting of the mark which common sense fixes. . . . The act whereby being - existence - is bestowed on us is an unbearable surpassing of being, an act no less unbearable than that of dying" (141). At most times of our lives, Bataille asserts, we live as if this identity between sexual ecstasy and death were a dialectic. The nervous laugh that greets sexual excess or marks our discomfort with death is a device

to shield us from the understanding that orgasmic joy and horror at death are related. As Bataille explains in the preface: What the hearty laugh screens from us, what fetches up the bawdy jest, is the identity that exists between the utmost in pleasure and the utmost in pain: the identity between being and non-being, between the living and the death-stricken being, between the knowledge which brings one before this dazzling realization and definitive, concluding darkness. (140) The only way to remove this veil from our understanding and accept the fundamental identity between Thanatos and Eros is to acknowledge that "eroticism . . . is assenting to life up to the point of death," as he later puts it in Erotism (11). Only when we fix horror at ecstasy's limit, only when we uncover the buried affinity between revulsion and desire can we recognize that these various dialectics are spurious. There is no dialectical relationship between eroticism and death, between the titillated laugh and the chthonic laugh, between heaven and earth, nor finally between a prostitute and God. This final collapsed dialectic is the one that is most central to the story, suggesting that when Bataille wrote Madame Edwarda in 1941, he was already very much under the sway of the same ideas that he was to place at the forefront of his 1962 book Erotism almost twenty years later: . . . nothing has intrigued me more than the idea of once more coming across the image that haunted my adolescence, the image of God. This is certainly not to return to the faith of my youth. But human passion has only one object in this forlorn world of ours. The paths we take towards it may vary. The object itself has a great variety of aspects, but we can only make out their significance by seeing how closely they are knit at the deepest level. (8-9) Madame Edwarda identifies the "one object" that human passion seeks as God. And Bataille lays bare that "deepest level" by showing us a woman who is both prostitute and God. In order for this discovery to have any significance, in order for it to upend the fixity of the reader's mind in which sexual ecstasy and death are opposed, the tale must be one of petty debauchery. So, Bataille presents us with a drunken, half-naked narrator who wanders into a brothel, performs cunnilingus on Madame Edwarda in front of a crowd, undergoes the "vulgar ritual" (151) of accompanying the prostitute upstairs, pursues her pathetically through the streets, then looks on as she has sex with a cab driver in the back seat of his car.

Juxtaposed with these sundry degradations is the narrator's religious epiphany upon embracing Edwarda for the first time. I felt smitten within by a new shock. From very high above a kind of stillness swept down upon me and froze me. It was as though I were borne aloft in a flight of headless and unbodied angels shaped from the broad swooping of wings, but it was simpler than that. I became unhappy and felt painfully forsaken, as one is when in the presence of GOD. (149) It becomes clear that Edwarda herself is the source of this epiphany, when she exposes her vagina to the narrator and declares, "You can see for yourself...I'm GOD" (150). As Mayne points out, Bataille is not merely making a crude attempt to debase God by personifying him as a prostitute (140), for God brought down to base human level would have no utility as a limit that can be surpassed. So Bataille assures us that this is not merely a rhetorical gambit by having his narrator observe parenthetically, "no use laying it all up to irony when I say of Madame Edwarda that she is GOD. But GOD figured as a public whore and gone crazy - that, viewed through the optic of 'philosophy,' makes no sense at all" (155). Here, again, Bataille strives to disquiet the reader such that the absurd contradiction posed by a prostitute baring her vagina and declaring herself God renders the dialectic itself meaningless. The narrator's epiphany does not result from seeing God. For Bataille, this sort of rapture would serve only to reinforce the mundane dialectic which places an omnipotent God in heaven and penitent man on earth. The epiphany results from the dizzying collapse of this mundane dialectic, from the jolting revelation that God and the prostitute who debases herself before him are one. Only simultaneous degradation and elevation, which prompts the narrator to remark in the midst of his epiphanic upward flight that "it was worse and more of a letdown than too much to drink" (149), could precipitate this vertiginous contraction of the dialectic. Bellmer represents this conflation of Madame Edwarda and God in several ways. All ten engravings he did for the book are slender, vertical pieces, their height measuring three times their width. And, in each engraving the eye is inevitably drawn upward by the use of perspective or by the curious placement of an object at the top of the piece. The fifth engraving, for example, employs a black and white tile pattern to draw the eye up to a chair where a woman pulls on stockings; similarly, the seventh engraving shows a woman's head with the hair swooping up to a striped awning located at the piece's upper border (see reproductions in Grall 65, 66). In short, each piece describes an upward movement at the

same time that it depicts (in some fashion) the flesh of a woman. As the eye moves upward it must per force trace the contours of the prostitute's flesh, and thus the eye's ascent heavenward is also a descent into the fleshiness of the body. In this way each engraving enacts the same collapse of the dialectic that the story's narrator experiences. Bellmer's first engraving for Madame Edwarda expresses this collapse not only in the way that it directs the eye, but in its subject matter as well [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 3 OMITTED]. Here we see a prostitute ascending a spiral staircase that continues up beyond the frame of the engraving. Her entire upper torso and head are replaced by a pubis, vulva, and exposed vagina that face the viewer. Her ascension identifies her with God, while the oversized genitalia assert her fleshiness. She becomes an acephalic representation of the vagina which precipitated the narrator's understanding that Madame Edwarda was both prostitute and God. This nude ascending a staircase, of course, can also be read as a fillip to the Dada/Surrealist patriarchs for whom Bellmer's Doll was too discomfiting, parodying as it does Duchamp's famous 1912 Nude Descending a Staircase. The third engraving [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 4 OMITTED] provides Bellmer's most literal interpretation of the text. Here we see an acephalic torso comprising various globular sections of flesh borne upward by large wings. Again, the motif of ascent is juxtaposed with the fleshy composition of the body. In what is perhaps the least imaginative of his engravings for Madame Edwarda Bellmer has at the same time best depicted the collapsed dialectic that renders God human, for this being is poised between the earth and heaven, part of both worlds and part of neither. Its angelic wings cannot drag the dead weight of its fleshy parts skyward, nor can the legs touch the ground. We see here not a resolution of the dialectic between heaven and earth, the synthesis to their thesis and antithesis, but the paradoxical simultaneity of thesis and antithesis that renders the dialectic void. This figure is the nodal point of Bataille's collapsed dialectic - a figurative representation of the identity between Madame Edwarda and God, and a literal depiction of the narrator's epiphanic descent. We are now in a better position to understand Bataille's assertion in the preface to the novel that "what mysticism could not say...eroticism does say": what eroticism teaches us is that in attempting to surpass its limits we also apprehend that "God is nothing if He is not, in every sense, the surpassing of God" (141-42). Bataille closes the story by reasserting the unavailing nature of Hegel's dialectic in the face of this new being - the prostitute-God Madame Edwarda: "No, Hegel has nothing to do with a maniac girl's 'apotheosis'" (159).

In 1998, American distributors are reluctant to release Adrian Lyne's new film adaptation of Nabokov's Lolita for fear of widespread boycotts and prosecution under the federal child pornography law of 1996. One can only imagine how this reluctance and the climate of censorship that created it would have nonplussed Bellmer and Bataille, artists whose works, while different in tone from Nabokov's, explore the same regions of extreme sexuality. Yet, perhaps the U.S. Congress, the Oklahoma police, and American movie moguls are justly pusillanimous, for according to Bataille, "eroticism always entails a breaking down of established patterns, the patterns...of regulated social order" (Erotism 18). To participate as a viewer or a reader in extreme portrayals of sexuality is to confront the collapse of dialectical oppositions such as God and human and to face the unmaking of the self, the "psychic dislocation" of which Sontag spoke. For Bellmer and Bataille, however, this was a promise, not a threat. Presaging Story of the Eye with its description of a "geometric incandescence" that has the power to conflate being and nothingness, in "The Practice of Joy Before Death" (1939) Bataille writes of "the geometric locus of all existence and all unity, of all separation and all dread, of all unsatisfied desire and possible death." For Bataille, this fundamental undoing of dialectical opposition through eroticism is a constitutive article of faith: "I adhere to this point and a profound love of what I find there burns me, until I refuse to be alive for any reason other than for what is there, for this point which, being both the life and death of the loved one, has the blast of a cataract" (238). WORKS CITED Alexandrian, Sarane. Hans Bellmer. 1972. Trans. Jack Altman. New York: Rizzoli, 1975. Bataille, Georges. Blue of Noon. 1957. Trans. Harry Mathews. London: Marion Boyars, 1979. -----. Erotism. 1962. Trans. Mary Dalwood. San Francisco: City Lights, 1986. -----. Madame Edwarda. 1956. Trans. Austryn Wainhouse. London: Marion Boyars, 1989. -----. "The Practice of Joy Before Death." Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939. Ed. Allan Stoekl. Trans. Allan Stoekl, Carl R. Lovitt, and Donald M. Leslie, Jr. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1985.235-39.

-----. Story of the Eye. 1928. Trans. Joachim Neugroschel. San Francisco: City Lights, 1987. Bellmer, Hans. Les Jeux de la poupee. Paris: Les Editions Premieres, 1949. -----. La Poupee. Paris: GLM, 1936. Beauvoir, Simone de. "Must We Burn Sade?" 1952. Trans. Annette Michelson. Marquis de Sade. London: Calder, 1962. 11-82. Breton, Andre. "Second Manifesto of Surrealism." 1930. Manifestoes of Surrealism. Trans. Richard Seaver, Helen R. Lane. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1969. 111-94. Camus, Michel. "Les avatars de l'oeil chez Bellmer." Obliques, Hans Bellmer, numero special (1975): 199-211. Foster, Hal. Compulsive Beauty. Cambridge: MIT P, 1993. Grall, Alex, ed. Hans Bellmer. London: Academy, 1966. Kuenzli, Rudolf E. "Surrealism and Misogyny." Surrealism and Women. Ed. Mary Ann Caws, Rudolf E. Kuenzli, Gwen Raaberg. Cambridge: MIT P, 1991. 17-26. Lust, Herbert. Hans Bellmer. Trans. Jacques B. Hess. New York: Isidore Ducasse Fine Arts, 1990. Mayne, Gilles. Eroticism in Georges Bataille and Henry Miller. Birmingham, AL: Summa, 1993. Saphire, L. M. "Introduction." Hans Bellmer. New York: Lerner-Misrachi Gallery, 1972. Showalter, Elaine. Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siecle. New York: Viking, 1990. Sontag, Susan. "The Pornographic Imagination." Styles of Radical Will. New York: Anchor, 1969. 35-73. Stoekl, Allan. "Introduction." Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 19271939. By Georges Bataille. Ed. Allan Stoekl. Trans. Allan Stoekl, Carl R. Lovitt, and Donald M. Leslie, Jr. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1985. ix-xxv.

-----. "Preface." On Bataille. Yale French Studies 78. Ed. Allan Stoekl. New Haven: Yale UP, 1990. 1-6. Suleiman, Susan Rubin. Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics, and the Avant-Garde. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1990. Surya, Michel. Georges Bataille. Paris: Garamont-Librairie Seguier, 1987. Webb, Peter, with Robert Short. Hans Bellmer. London: Quartet, 1985. ELLIOTT VANSKIKE is a graduate student in the English Department of the University of Iowa. He has published articles on Jean-Paul Sartre, Gertrude Stein, and Charlotte Bronte and is completing a dissertation on 20th-century experimental detective fiction. COPYRIGHT 1998 University of Manitoba, Mosaic