Madame Edwarda by Georges Bataille - Essay Example

The relationship between violence and erotic sketched out by Bataille in Madame Edwarda. Madame Edwarda is a prostitute. We discover her character through the narrator who seems lost in the streets of Paris and finally ends in a brothel. Their first encounter is wordless as they immediately start to kiss and touch themselves. At this point we witness the first outburst of violence in Georges Bataille’s novel, Madame Edwarda1. Our essay will focus on the relationship between violence and erotic that Bataille expressed. It also seems important to point out the construction of the book as it is made of two parts: the preface, written by Bataille himself and the novel wrote using a pseudonym: Pierre Angélique. Inside the novel, Angélique/Bataille did not want to give any further explanations about his writing, he only wanted to present the facts and the feelings connected to the situations. It is certainly why, in the preface, he put forward some precepts of his thinking. The duality inside the work shows very strongly the need for understanding and analysis that Bataille feels about Madame Edwarda both the character and the novel as Madame Edwarda. As he stated near the end of the novel: “Should no one unclothe what I have said, I shall have written in vain […] this book has its secret, I may not disclose it”. The structure of the book and the constant interactions between the preface and the novel are clearly an idea of the complexity of the feelings and ideas presented. The strength of the theories expressed may explain Bataille’s need to cover his real identity. Madame Edwarda gives us an accurate introduction to Bataille’s work, where sometimes opposite feelings are combined to describe human state and his connections to higher thoughts. Whether violence is expressed through the narrator or Madame Edwarda’s character, it will give us different point of views. It will also help us understand the connection between violence and erotic that Bataille seems to convey through his work. The first encounter between the narrator and Madame Edwarda, as presented before, is wordless. As soon as the narrator finished kissing and touching Madame Edwarda, he felt like something high above froze him and he “became unhappy and felt painfully forsaken, as one is when in the presence of GOD”. The consequence of this sadness was the narrator fear of losing the pleasure he was planning to have with Edwarda and his need to destroy the objects that were surrounding him. In Georges Bataille: Essential Writings edited by Michael Richardson2, we are explained Bataille’s interest in death and sexuality as they are both manifestation of Bataille’s theory of man’s obsession to nature on which he bases most of his fictional work, historical and social analysis and mystical theory. Nevertheless, death and sexuality are contradictory to social life as they are both founded on taboos and prohibitions. In that first passage, we are clearly shown the basis of Bataille’s theory as the narrator feels sadness in the will of having a relation with a prostitute. It is a direct result of the social taboos linked to society: having sexual relationships with a prostitute in order to have pleasure and not for breeding is sinful and puts you on the verge of the society and is totally contrary to the conception of sexuality from a Christian point of view. Describing angels and writing about God in this passage is not a coincidence, it stresses out the idea of the forbidden. What is even more stunning is the direct consequence of the understanding of the narrator’s sin: violence. A taboo leading to another is made to find relief. The narrator felt so much uneasiness that he wants to kick the table and throw the glasses, but the narrator did not find any relief in violence because he felt unable to proceed with his impulses. Bataille in Eroticism explains that transgressions, as the ones described in that passage, when limited do not lead to a return to the animal state of violence. Organized transgressions joint with the taboos and prohibitions are mainly what constitute social life. Here, the narrator enters a brothel. Even if society at that time prohibits these acts, places of this type exist in order to imprison them. Society allows in everyday life transgressions because, as Bataille states, they are bound to the very desires of human being. The narrator’s confusion only vanishes when he heard Madame Edwarda’s voice saying that she was God while spreading her legs for him to see her vagina. The strong relation between death, sexual taboos and the divine is one of Bataille’s most important contributions. Violence and erotic were presented to us in that passage for several reasons. Most of all Bataille’s thought is that these two human impulses are strongly bounded. A human not being able to satiate his need for sexuality is led to moments of violence that could be expressed psychologically or physically. Here, as the narrator thought he could not have any relations with Madame Edwarda was willing to break everything around him. Bataille intelligently demonstrated another aspect of his belief: both of these impulses are human. Even if we try to control or stop them they are in every one of us and there is absolutely no escape from them. After having a sexual relationship with Madame Edwarda, she went out with the narrator, wandering in the street, dressed with a bolero, stockings and a mask. They reach La Porte Saint Denis, an arch on a square in Paris, and she stood right beneath. When the narrator finally joined her, she vanished for only seeing her, in front of a café in a sort of trance. She fell, started to convulse and pushed violently away the narrator from her only to reach him again and furiously beat him. This second passage reflects violence and eroticism from another perspective as she was nearly naked, lying on the street, fighting the narrator for no obvious reasons. Eric Tricart in La question de la perte chez Georges Bataille3 presents Bataille’s belief on human beings. Each human being is excess, excess of him and only exists in an unbearable state leading to its own transcending. We have the exact example of Bataille’s thought in Madame Edwarda’s falling and fighting the narrator. She was the victim of her own sexual excess and this excess causes her not to be able to bear herself anymore. The direct consequence was her violent outburst on the narrator. This need of destruction bound with human excess is an interrogation on human consciousness that is presented in Georges Bataille and Eroticism4 by Osvaldo Baigorria. According to Baigorria’s reading of Bataille’s L’érotisme5, Bataille offers four steps in the realization of human consciousness: first, humanity has an irresistible impulse to destroy which is connected to nature and the destructive aspect of all that live and die. Second: desire to waste and destroy come from the destructive impulse that all men bear and this impulse which leads to useless acts without any further consequences could be qualified as divine. Third: Humanity often suspects these impulses to be unreasonable, but without these impulses we would not understand the true intensity of life. Fourth: if human being would have developed the need to understand his true life aspirations, intend to limit the most disastrous effects of its impulses, try no to reproduce them over his desire and oppose them, he would have developed a true need of self consciousness. This is exactly what we are facing in this scene. The human being has to face its own disastrous impulses in order to know himself and gain self consciousness. For Bataille these most disastrous impulses are best seen in sexuality and violence, the human being can easily reach the animal state when confronted to these dark sides of his mind. In Madame Edwarda, this process is shown through two characters: Edwarda and The narrator facing her while she shows the worst part of herself after convulsing. The narrator explained that after being the witness of Edwarda’s seizure and madness half naked lying on the street, he felt like life was taken out of him and he was left dry. The feelings that came from the experience of the worst impulses of human being made him understand his state, as a human being as a thinking person. He finally reached self consciousness, of his irremediable fate, of his surroundings. As he takes the example of a man sentenced to death, he clearly depicted him as a person more aware of all the actions, objects and persons that are all around him. Furthermore, he started to understand the importance of all these impulses and the role that he has in this system, in this society. Bataille used two characters to explain his thought, just like he used a pseudonym to write his novel, for the reader to correctly understand his idea. It is when you are confronted with the worst parts of yourself that you can fully reach self consciousness as one will not be willing to witness his own deviances again. For Bataille, violence and eroticism are the very dark impulses a human being is afraid to face. In violence you can be sexually aroused hurting a person and in sexuality you can highly increase your pleasure through sadism. The libertine Clairwill in Justine6 considered committing a crime, not for ending a person’s life but for the consequence of this crime and the legacy that this crime would leave after his death. The crime is so terrible that it will leave a legacy of teroor after the perpetrator’s death. It transcends death. The narrator was faced with death, Edwarda’s and his own and he finally understood his state as a mortal figure and this fate left him the thought that the nature of man will transcend his own death. In the end of the novel, Edwarda and the narrator were in a cab and when they reached their destination Edwarda, as payment, offered the cabdriver to have sex with her. She took off her coat and showed herself naked to the driver. They ended having sex in the back of the cab next to the narrator. Emmanuel Tibloux in Georges Bataille : Je pense comme une fille enlève sa robe7 explains that moments of excess are made to question the basis of ourselves because in those moments of excess everything that composes us plays a part. To understand ourselves, to become self-conscious, we have to search for these moments of excess. And, if Bataille uses eroticism, it is only as a means because the erotic situations that he describes are exactly the moments of excess that he wants every human being to look for to reach self- consciousness. When Edwarda was on the cabdriver, the narrator described her eyes: “Love was dead in those eyes”. This situation, the narrator, Edwarda and the cabdriver sitting on the backseat was the climax of excess because both violence and eroticism are combined. It is the reason why the narrator explained that his distress was nothing compared to this moment that he described as a miracle. It is through both Edwarda’s and his repulsion of the act that the narrator finally reached the divine in him. All this excess allowed him to understand his state as a human being and helped him undermine his own distress. Carrying all human dark sides, Edwarda’s behaviour conveys the true nature of the narrator’s conflict and Bataille’s idea: you have to discover and explore all your destructive impulses, your animal instincts to be able to find out how to live with them. Bataille as we have seen before used his two characters and mixed eroticism and violence for one purpose: reach self-consciousness. A duality lies in this statement. For human beings to be able to live with all the possible taboos and prohibitions, they have to go to the farthest frontier of their excess. Violence and eroticism are used in this novel because as Bataille believed they represent the darkest prohibited desires of men as Agathe Simon explains it in Bataille: l’obscène et l’obscedant8. Their relationship is very clear to Bataille: the erotic gesture taken to its limit could be fatal ultimately leading to violence. This novel needed two characters to present Bataille’s thought as Bataille needed two characters himself and Pierre Angélique (which literally means Angel-like) to write his novel. As if trying to reach our darkest frontiers, we need to divide ourselves into two different persons to prevent us from facing madness and achieve self-consciousness. Works Cited List Baigorria, Osvaldo. Georges Bataille y el Eroticismo. Madrid: Campos de ideas SL. 2002 Bataille, Georges. L’érotisme. Paris : Les Editions de Minuit. 1957 Bataille, Georges aka Angélique, Pierre. Madame Edwarda. Paris: Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1956. Richardson, Michael (edited by). Georges Bataille: Essential Writings. School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. 1998. Tricart, Eric. La question de la perte chez Georges Bataille. Université de Poitiers. 10 Feb. 2005. spip.univ-poitiers.fr/philosophie/IMG/rtf/La_perte_chez_Bataille.rtf Sade, Marquis de. “Justine ou les Malheurs de la vertu,” Oeuvres complètes du Marquis de Sade. Paris : Edition (Nouvelle) de Gilbert Lély, Cercle du Livre Précieux.1966-1967 Simon, Agathe. “Georges Bataille: l’obscène et l’obsédant,” La voix du regard. 15 (2002) Tibloux, Emmanuel. Georges Bataille: je pense comme une fille enlève sa robe. Université de Rennes. 2002 http://www.adpf.asso.fr/adpf-publi/folio/bataille/ Read More