Bataille Madame Edwarda Eng

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The Sorcerers Apprentice (September 2009)[email protected]

Madame Edwarda by

Pierre Anglique

Prefaceby

Georges Bataille


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This translation is dedicated to

Claire Harrison

in memory of the nights it describes

If youre afraid of everything, read this book but listen to me first: if you laugh, its because you are afraid. A

book, you think, is something inert. Thats possible. And

yet what if, as is the case, you do not know how to

read? Would you begin to doubt . . . ? Are you alone? Do

you shake with the cold? Do you know to what point

man is yourself? A fool and naked?


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PREFACE

Death is of all things the most terrible, and maintaining the work of

death is what demands the greatest strength. G. W. F. Hegel

The author of Madame Edwarda has himself drawn attentionto the gravity of his book. It seems important to me,nevertheless, to insist on the fact, if only because of the levity with which we are accustomed to treating writings whosetheme is mans sexual life. Not that I hope or intend to try tochange anything in those customs. But I ask the reader of thispreface to reflect for a moment on the attitude traditionally adopted towards pleasure (which, in the play of the sexes,attains a mad intensity) and suffering (which death finally relieves, of course, but which, before that, it pushes to itsextreme limit). A combination of conditions leads us to make of man (of humanity) an image as distant from extreme pleasureas it is from extreme suffering: the most common interdictionsare observed, on the one hand, towards mans sexual life, onthe other, towards his death; to the extent that around theserealms a single sacred domain has formed that is at the originof religion. The difficulty began when the interdictionssurrounding the disappearance of a human being were the only ones to be accorded grave respect, while those surrounding theappearance of a human being which is to say, all genetic

activity

came to be taken lightly. I dont want to protestagainst the profoundest tendencies of the majority of people: itis an expression of the destiny which has made man laugh athis own reproductive organs. But this laughter, whichaccentuates the opposition between pleasure and suffering(that suffering and death are worthy of respect, while pleasure


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be, as we are, the projection of being into horror? If being isswallowed in the sickening void from which, at all costs , it mustflee . . . ?

Nothing, surely, is more dreadful than this! How ludicrous,in comparison, must the scenes of hell above church doorsappear to us! Hell is the feeble image of himself that God hasinvoluntarily inspired! But on the scale of unlimited loss werediscover the triumph of being, from which nothing has everbeen lacking save its consent to the movement that makes itperish. Being, of its own accord, joins in the terrible dancewhose syncopation is the dancers rhythm, and which we mustlearn to accept for what it is knowing only the horror withwhich it is in perfect harmony. If we lack the courage to do so,no greater torture exists for us. And the moment of torture willnever fail to arrive: how, if it failed to do so, should we overcomeit? But the open spirit open to death, to torture, to joy without reserve, the open and dying being, suffering andhappy, already appears in a veiled light: the light of the divine.And the cry which, from a twisted mouth, may twist and wringthe being that utters it, is an immense alleluia lost in asilence without end.

Prface de Madame Edwarda (1956)

Hans Bellmer, Madame Edwarda (1966)


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ANGUISH IS THE ONLY ABSOLUTE SOVEREIGN . T HESOVEREIGN IS NO LONGER A KING : HE IS HIDDEN IN THEGREAT CITIES . HE SURROUNDS HIMSELF WITH SILENCE , CONCEALING HIS SORROW. HE LURKS IN WAIT FORSOMETHING TERRIBLE AND YET HIS SORROW LAUGHS AT

EVERYTHING THAT COMES TO PASS .


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I

At the corner of the street, anguish, a foul and intoxicatinganguish, attacked me (perhaps because I had just seen twofurtive girls on the steps of a urinal). At moments like this Iam overwhelmed by the urge to vomit. I suddenly felt that Ihad to be naked, then and there either that, or stripnaked the girls I lusted after: only the warmth of stale fleshcan sate me. But this time I resorted to more impoverishedmeans. I ordered a Pernod at a bar, downed the glass inone gulp, then went from counter to counter, until . . . Thenight finished falling.

I began to wander through the narrow streets whichrun between Rue Poissonnire and Rue Saint-Denis.Loneliness and the darkness completed my drunkenness.

The night itself was laid bare in those deserted streets, andI wanted to be just as naked: I took off my trousers anddraped them over my arm. I wanted to feel the coolness of the night air on my loins, and a sudden wave of freedomcarried me along. I felt myself getting bigger, and held my erect cock in my hand.

(My entry into the matter is hard. I could have avoidedall this and still made my tale sound plausible. It wouldhave been in my interest to take detours. But this is how ithas to be a beginning without diversions. I continue . . .

and it gets harder . . . )

Worried about attracting trouble, I put my trousersback on and headed for a place I knew called Mirrors : onentering, I found myself in the light again. Amidst a swarmof girls, Madame Edwarda, completely naked, looked bored


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But . . . are you allowed out? I asked stupidly.Hurry up, fifi, she replied gaily, you cant go out

naked! She tossed me my clothes and helped me to get

dressed: but as she did so, out of whim, a sly exchangepassed now and then between her flesh and mine. Wedescended a narrow staircase at the rear of the building,encountering only the chambermaid. In the suddendarkness of the street I was surprised to find Madame

Edwarda fleeing my side, draped in the black of the night.She ran off, evading my grasp: it was as if the mask shewore had turned her into an animal. It wasnt cold, yetsuddenly I shivered. Madame Edwarda had becomesomething alien, and looking up I saw a starry sky, empty and mad, open darkly over our heads. For a moment Ithought I was going to stumble but I kept on walking.

II

At that hour of the night the streets were deserted. All of asudden, wildly and without a word, Madame Edwarda ranon alone. The vast arch of the Porte Saint-Denis loomedbefore her and she stopped. I hadnt moved a step, andstanding now as still as I was, Madame Edwarda waited forme under the gateway, in the middle of the arch. She wascompletely and utterly black, as full of anguish as a hole. I

realized that she was no longer laughing, and that, beneaththe clothes giving her form, she was now absent. All thedrunkenness drained out of me: I knew then that She hadnot lied, that She was GOD. Her presence had theunintelligible simplicity of a stone: in the middle of thatcity, I had the feeling of being in the mountains at night,lost in the midst of a lifeless solitude.

I felt I was free of Her alone before this black rock. Itrembled, seeing before me what is bleakest in this world.No aspect of the comic horror of my situation escaped me:that the sight of this woman whose appearance petrifiedme now, the instant before had . . . And the change hadoccurred the way one slips over. Within Madame Edwarda,grief a grief without suffering or tears had turned intoan empty silence. And yet, I still wanted to know: thiswoman, so naked a moment ago, who had gaily called mefifi . . . I crossed the street: my anguish told me to stop,but I went on.

Silently she slipped away, retreating to the pillar on theleft. I was no more than two paces from that monumentalgateway: when I passed under the stone arch, the domino


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But for now, at this moment, there is only nonsense, theabsence of meaning. Monsieur Nonsense is writing, and heunderstands that he is mad: how appalling! But hismadness, this nonsense how serious, all of a sudden, ithas become! Might that, precisely, be meaning? (No, Hegelhas nothing to do with the apotheosis of a mad woman.)My life has meaning only on condition that it is lacking one:but let me be mad! Let him understand me who can, lethim understand me who is dying . . . Being is there , not

knowing why it is, and left trembling in the cold; theimmensity of the night surrounds it, and it is thereprecisely in order . . . not to know. But GOD? What have

you to say, Monsieur Rhetorician, and you, MonsieurBeliever? Would GOD, at least, know? GOD, if he knew,would be a pig. * O Lord (I call to you, in my distress, frommy heart) deliver me, make them blind! The narrative,should I continue with it?)

Ive finished.From out of the slumber which, for a short time, left us

asleep in the back of the taxi, I was the first to awaken,sick . . . The rest is irony, the long wait for death . . .

Madame Edwarda (1941)

* I said: GOD, if he knew, would be a pig. He (I suppose, at that moment, hewould be unwashed, his hair unkempt) who would grasp this idea to its end what would be human about him? Beyond everything . . . further, and furtherstill . . . HIMSELF, in ecstasy above the void. And now? I tremble . . . Hans Bellmer, Madame Edwarda (1966)


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Eugne Atget, Porte Saint-Denis (c . 1920)

NOTE

Madame Edwarda was written by Georges Bataille inSeptember 1941, during the darkest days of the Occupation of Paris, and appeared at the end of that year, under thepseudonym of Pierre Anglique, in an underground editionpublished by ditions Solitaire. As a precautionary measure itwas back-dated to 1937. Following the Liberation a secondedition was issued by the same publisher in 1945, again back-

dated to 1942, and illustrated with thirty-one engravingsattributed to Jean Perdu, a pseudonym for Jean Fautrier. Athird edition, published by Jean-Jacques Pauvert, appeared in1956 under the same pseudonym, to which Bataille appendeda preface in his own name. In 1966, four years after his death,a fourth edition, also published by Pauvert, and accompaniedby twelve engravings by Hans Bellmer, finally appeared underBatailles own name. On its first publication the book wasreviewed by Maurice Blanchot, who called it the most beautifulnarrative of our time. Bataille himself called Madame Edwarda the lubricious key to his war writings, and his return to it latein his life suggests the importance he accorded it in his oeuvre .

It is possible to see in the character of Madame Edwarda acomposite figure in which Bataille brought together severalwomen dear to him: Violette, a young prostitute with whom hehad fallen in love in 1931, and whose release from her brothelhe had tried, in vain, to purchase; Laure, the dark sovereignwho had reigned over his pre-war years, and who had died of tuberculosis in 1938; Angela of Foligno, the thirteenth-century Italian mystic whose ecstatic account of the theopathic stateinformed so much of Batailles vocabulary here; and Madeleine,an ecstatic at the Salptrire to whom the psychologist Pierre

Janet, Batailles one-time collaborator before the war, had


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dedicated his most famous study, De langoisse lextase .When Bataille came to write a preface to his narrative, however,some fifteen years after its first publication, it was to a famouspassage in the preface to Hegels Phnomenologie des Geistes that he turned for his epigraph. Beyond the particularity of itshuman elements, the shared language of its textualantecedents, it is the figure of consciousness Hegel describes inthis passage that Bataille sought to embody in the character of Madame Edwarda: a figure which, in Hegels words, attains its

truth only when it finds itself in absolute laceration, when thelife of the spirit contemplates the negativity of death face to faceand dwells with it.


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Back cover: The Sorcerer, c . 13,000 B.C. Rock painting and engraving.Caverne des Trois Frres, Montesquieu-Avants, Arige.

Bataille Madame Edwarda Eng

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