Georges Bataille : The Sacred and Society by Pawlett William

Author:Pawlett, William [William Pawlett]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781136155598
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2015-10-10T20:26:27+00:00

Blue of Noon

There are a number of fascinating readings of Bataille’s novel Blue of Noon (see, for example, Suleiman in Bailey-Gill, 1995, pp. 26–45). I will confine my comments to a brief synopsis and interpretive comments on one key scene. Blue of Noon is not an erotic novel in an obvious sense: Story of the Eye at least includes several scenes of copulation and orgasms aplenty; Blue of Noon, by contrast, is a novel about impotence – both sexual and political.

The novel begins with an introduction which is thought to be a surviving fragment of Bataille’s first fictional writing, W.C., which he subsequently destroyed. In it the narrator, Henri Troppmann, describes the time he spent with his lover, Dorothea (who he usually refers to as ‘Dirty’, and is thought to be based on Bataille’s lover, Laure), in London. They drink heavily, participate in an orgy and then retreat to the Savoy Hotel, where Dirty defecates in front of hotel staff and is cleaned up by a ‘pretty maid’ (Bataille, 1986b, p. 14). Troppmann is a failed political activist, with Marxist sympathies, and the novel recounts his sense of dejection, dereliction and sexual impotence. Troppmann’s name, as Suleiman suggests, literally implies ‘too much man’, or even ‘Overman’ (trop is French for ‘too’), and phonetically suggests ‘trop’ ‘peu’ ‘mann’ or ‘too little man’. Parallels between the sexual realm and the political realm are explored: Troppman, according to Dirty, is unable to ‘lose his head’, unable to forget himself and to act, unable to consummate either his sexual desires or his political beliefs. His colleagues, including Lazare, a Marxist, Christian revolutionary (thought to be based on Simone Weil) and Melou, a Marxist academic, discuss the necessity of revolutionary action against the fascist movements sweeping across Europe. Troppmann finds these discussion dull, and Lazare naïve and idealistic, yet he is also deeply attracted to Lazare, despite trying to assure himself that she is ugly and unattractive. Troppman travels to Spain, though he behaves more as a tourist than a participant in the Spanish Civil War. He meets Lazare and her colleagues and mocks them again, yet it is clear that his feelings towards a Marxist revolution are ambivalent. The fascists were succeeding in channelling and exploiting the demand for revolutionary change into a thirst for war, and Troppman feels a powerful sense of guilt that he is unable to commit himself to the Marxist cause.

Dirty travels to Spain to meet Troppmann. They spend a month together, then leave for Germany (Dirty now lives in Frankfurt). They arrive in Trier and encounter a troop of Hitler youth. Then, walking above a graveyard in the middle of the night, Troppmann and Dirty are seized with passion and make love, sliding down the sloping earth towards the graves. The narrator’s description of their intercourse repeatedly evokes death, darkness, silence and corpses. Afterwards, the narrator recalls that Trier was the town were Karl Marx grew up, and that he must have played in the streets now being patrolled by the Hitler youth.

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