September 14th, 2010 / 2:05 pm
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Blake Butler
Uncategorized
Bataille’s Lone TV Interview: On Lit & Evil (1958)
Tags: georges bataille
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Meta
love this. thank you, blake, for posting.
Ditto. Thanks for posting this, Blake.
all of it yes
I like this idea that evil in literature is like a vaccine for evil. Also that reader interest is tied to the presence of evil. It is as if literature, assuming these ideas are accurate, is similar to some self-perpetuating, cultural immune system.
this is terrific, esp. that part at the end where GB says “as if a man plays a game and finds within the game the force to overcome what the game contains of horror,” but it would have been interesting if the interviewer would have drawn GB out on where God figures into his analysis, since for both of his examples Baudelaire and Kafka God seems to have been a concept that still possessed the full force of a transcendental fact.
interesting. thanks, blake. i’m confused by/not attracted to the use of the word/concept “evil” as he uses it here, or it seems like the senses of the word with which i am familiar are somewhat incompatible with the ideas he builds from that word. seems like too melodramatic of a word for what’s being described (then again, in french “mal” can sometimes simply mean “bad,” ne c’est pas?). i am, on the other hand, very attracted to the ideas of “puerility”/”childishness”/i would add “play” re literature. and the ideas about guilt/parents interest me as well. i think i am not attracted to the idea of literature being “evil” or “evil” in general because it seems like an abstraction to me, completely abstract to the point of nullity or imprecision (another word would “do better there”). i don’t know how to connect to my next thought, but my next thought is that “evil” and “childishness”/”puerility” and viewing/making literature with those respective mindsets/concepts in mind would produce different results, i think, the former perhaps producing more “indulgent”/”self-righteously decadent”/”self-lacerating for its own sake” work and the latter producing more “free”/”alive”/”aware.” something like that. i am speculating/making shit up, of course.
If/As making art becomes more the acceptable behavior for adults, if/as the rejection of commercial activity gets stronger, where does the childish feeling go? Where will the sense of evil go in the making?
seems like if you’re making people angry and/or jealous, you might be doing something they think is childish/bad
angry, jealous and/or dismissive
love this. thank you, blake, for posting.
Ditto. Thanks for posting this, Blake.
Can you think of any recent art that’s made you angry? Not angry-because-it’s-bad, but the real mad.
Would you include documentary film or reportage as “art”? Or do you mean things like lingering rape depictions or uncontested racially antagonistic portrayals?
Art that makes me “mad” about things that I’m mad about in principle – or that brings to my angry attention something I was indifferent towards or ignorant of – is art that makes me feel good about “art”. Right?
i interpreted evil as going against the morality of the majority.
if you don’t like being scolded, stop looking to your parents for guidance?
can art exist without ego?
is the root of the question, i think. i have been wrestling with this one for a while.
i say no.
Interviewer: What “evil” are you talking about?
Bataille: I think there are two opposite kind of evil. The first one is related to the necessity of human activity going well, of having the desired results. And the other consists of deliberately violating some fundamental taboos, like, for example, the taboo against murder, or against some sexual possibilities.
[. . .]
[Baudelaire and Kafka] felt that they were in the same situation as a child before his parents – a child who’s been naughty and who consequently has a guilty conscience because he thinks of his beloved parents who are always telling him what not to do – that it [the “naughty” deed] was an evil thing to do in the strongest sense of the word.
–
I think that doing “evil” being rooted in a ‘sense of taboo, of violable regularity’ is a pretty thin meaning.
Where did parents get the taboo sense that they pass on to their kids? From nowhere other than their parents? And they from their parents? – and ‘it’s turtles all the way down’??
I mean: where does taboo-enforcement itself come from? What’s the foundation – other than central-nervous pattern recognition – for any normativity or convention at all?
all of it yes
I like this idea that evil in literature is like a vaccine for evil. Also that reader interest is tied to the presence of evil. It is as if literature, assuming these ideas are accurate, is similar to some self-perpetuating, cultural immune system.
this is terrific, esp. that part at the end where GB says “as if a man plays a game and finds within the game the force to overcome what the game contains of horror,” but it would have been interesting if the interviewer would have drawn GB out on where God figures into his analysis, since for both of his examples Baudelaire and Kafka God seems to have been a concept that still possessed the full force of a transcendental fact.
In that art must pass through ego: no.
I crave blank states much less now, so it works for me.
Both.
But what about something that’s not obviously political; no documentary about explicit suffering/suffering caused by something. Can you name something that doesn’t seem political, ethical; can you name something that you wouldn’t say depicts suffering?
i have a feeling we will be debating this one later.
ego is a precursor to art. almost always.
there is “real” suffering and there is “mental” suffering.
which are you talking about.
I agree with you. How couldn’t it be? (automatic art? machine made? but, then, if it’s assigned as artistic, as art…) Ego is the birthing mom of form, and also the sucking child.
Both. I know this leads to suffering = conflict, no conflict = no foundation of form, no base for story, expression, etc. There’s gotta be some book that’s completely of one mindset and nothing changes; why do we often think that kind of thought/art is bad again?
strike ‘bad’, substitute ‘not interesting’
interesting. thanks, blake. i’m confused by/not attracted to the use of the word/concept “evil” as he uses it here, or it seems like the senses of the word with which i am familiar are somewhat incompatible with the ideas he builds from that word. seems like too melodramatic of a word for what’s being described (then again, in french “mal” can sometimes simply mean “bad,” ne c’est pas?). i am, on the other hand, very attracted to the ideas of “puerility”/”childishness”/i would add “play” re literature. and the ideas about guilt/parents interest me as well. i think i am not attracted to the idea of literature being “evil” or “evil” in general because it seems like an abstraction to me, completely abstract to the point of nullity or imprecision (another word would “do better there”). i don’t know how to connect to my next thought, but my next thought is that “evil” and “childishness”/”puerility” and viewing/making literature with those respective mindsets/concepts in mind would produce different results, i think, the former perhaps producing more “indulgent”/”self-righteously decadent”/”self-lacerating for its own sake” work and the latter producing more “free”/”alive”/”aware.” something like that. i am speculating/making shit up, of course.
i mean to say, there is real suffering (i.e. starvation) and there is mental suffering (i.e. conditioning through teaching aka dogma of the majority).
i think art will always exist with the latter. they are born out of the same thing.
if the mother & child are aware of their condition, can they not break away?
For the child: to do so is to wilt and die.
For the mother: to do so is to wilt and die.
a cycle does not move on its own accord.
or: for the maker: stop making
for the audience: stop experiencing
Blake, thanks from *le coeur.* This argument remains an essential touchstone what matters in the novel (especially) — all the more so since it’s so fearfully derided by so many so-called critical readers here in North America (cf., that Glenn Beck of lit-crit, John Gardner). Evil remains crucial to storytelling of significance, & not simply in the obvious sense of an obstacle.
The problem is, no writer can get at transcendent evil simply by throwing in bad behavior. That’s the mistake, too often: forcing a character to become, say, a nasty Mom who hooks her son on heroin. The evil must emerge more organically & operate like a penetrating agent, seeping to core social or cultural issues. Nabokov’s pederast matters not just because he likes little girls, but because of how America suddenly affords him freedom to live out his fantasy. More recently, hmm, perhaps Zachary Mason’s LOST BOOKS OF THE ODYSSEY strikes us so sharply because it enacts the evil of shredding classics, book-burning.
If/As making art becomes more the acceptable behavior for adults, if/as the rejection of commercial activity gets stronger, where does the childish feeling go? Where will the sense of evil go in the making?
seems like if you’re making people angry and/or jealous, you might be doing something they think is childish/bad
why can’t the creator create something different?
pussies like milk
…not to interrupt or anything.
angry, jealous and/or dismissive
I think that’s probably the best and only practice; the ego reapplication/modification.
Bobby: Who says the mother leaks milk? Who says the baby drinks from her breast?
:)
Seems to react to a certain kind of art and attendant feelings. There is playfulness, which is childish, but also guiltless, even joyful. And this is also interesting but not transgressive, violent, or sexual – not related to taboo. I’m wondering why childishness is framed in terms of economy, not by the art itself, but the real life / livelihood of the artist. Calling artists childish because they aren’t supported by the economy seems odd. In another culture they might be supported / reveared – are they still childish if they happen to be rich? Are they guilty if the parents encouraged art?
Ken, it sounds like you’re asking – a bit above on the thread – whether one has been caused to feel “angry” by a work of art – or any object of human manufacture; or (why not) by a process or object of nature – not as a sympathetic resonance, and not (in the case of art) because the thing was crap. Not me.
–
The position of a deliberately affectless, unaffecting story is, itself, interesting, but (for me) almost always merely “interesting” as an exercise in technique. For example, a description of objects in a room, presented as a ‘short story’: it’s overwhelmingly likely to be a lot more “interesting” that the piece is called a ‘story’ than that it’ll interest (me, anyway) as a ‘story’.
Beckett might be a counter-example:
“I took advantage of being at the seaside to lay in a store of sucking stones. They were pebbles but I call them stones. Yes, on this occasion I laid in a considerable store. I distributed them equally between my four pockets, and sucked them turn and turn about. This raised a problem which I first solved in the following way. I had say sixteen stones, four in each of my four pockets [. . .] ”
– and eight semi-famous pages follow, in which Molloy explains his “two incompatible bodily needs, at loggerheads” to suck the stones in “equal distribution” and to suck the stones “with method” (he wants each stone to be equally sucked, in accordance with his sense of order (?)). Well, whatever.
Except that, as you read about the patterns of movement of the stones from pocket to pocket and, one at a time, Molloy’s mouth, you find that you’re taking pleasure in the undulations and rationalizations of the sentences.
Ken, you probably won’t feel “anger” reading Molloy, but you should feel something – is this what you’re getting at?
Can you think of any recent art that’s made you angry? Not angry-because-it’s-bad, but the real mad.
Would you include documentary film or reportage as “art”? Or do you mean things like lingering rape depictions or uncontested racially antagonistic portrayals?
Art that makes me “mad” about things that I’m mad about in principle – or that brings to my angry attention something I was indifferent towards or ignorant of – is art that makes me feel good about “art”. Right?
i interpreted evil as going against the morality of the majority.
if you don’t like being scolded, stop looking to your parents for guidance?
can art exist without ego?
is the root of the question, i think. i have been wrestling with this one for a while.
i say no.
Interviewer: What “evil” are you talking about?
Bataille: I think there are two opposite kind of evil. The first one is related to the necessity of human activity going well, of having the desired results. And the other consists of deliberately violating some fundamental taboos, like, for example, the taboo against murder, or against some sexual possibilities.
[. . .]
[Baudelaire and Kafka] felt that they were in the same situation as a child before his parents – a child who’s been naughty and who consequently has a guilty conscience because he thinks of his beloved parents who are always telling him what not to do – that it [the “naughty” deed] was an evil thing to do in the strongest sense of the word.
–
I think that doing “evil” being rooted in a ‘sense of taboo, of violable regularity’ is a pretty thin meaning.
Where did parents get the taboo sense that they pass on to their kids? From nowhere other than their parents? And they from their parents? – and ‘it’s turtles all the way down’??
I mean: where does taboo-enforcement itself come from? What’s the foundation – other than central-nervous pattern recognition – for any normativity or convention at all?
Thank you, joyed the gunkier nooks of my day.
In that art must pass through ego: no.
I crave blank states much less now, so it works for me.
Both.
But what about something that’s not obviously political; no documentary about explicit suffering/suffering caused by something. Can you name something that doesn’t seem political, ethical; can you name something that you wouldn’t say depicts suffering?
i have a feeling we will be debating this one later.
ego is a precursor to art. almost always.
there is “real” suffering and there is “mental” suffering.
which are you talking about.
I agree with you. How couldn’t it be? (automatic art? machine made? but, then, if it’s assigned as artistic, as art…) Ego is the birthing mom of form, and also the sucking child.
Both. I know this leads to suffering = conflict, no conflict = no foundation of form, no base for story, expression, etc. There’s gotta be some book that’s completely of one mindset and nothing changes; why do we often think that kind of thought/art is bad again?
strike ‘bad’, substitute ‘not interesting’
i mean to say, there is real suffering (i.e. starvation) and there is mental suffering (i.e. conditioning through teaching aka dogma of the majority).
i think art will always exist with the latter. they are born out of the same thing.
if the mother & child are aware of their condition, can they not break away?
For the child: to do so is to wilt and die.
For the mother: to do so is to wilt and die.
a cycle does not move on its own accord.
or: for the maker: stop making
for the audience: stop experiencing
Blake, thanks from *le coeur.* This argument remains an essential touchstone what matters in the novel (especially) — all the more so since it’s so fearfully derided by so many so-called critical readers here in North America (cf., that Glenn Beck of lit-crit, John Gardner). Evil remains crucial to storytelling of significance, & not simply in the obvious sense of an obstacle.
The problem is, no writer can get at transcendent evil simply by throwing in bad behavior. That’s the mistake, too often: forcing a character to become, say, a nasty Mom who hooks her son on heroin. The evil must emerge more organically & operate like a penetrating agent, seeping to core social or cultural issues. Nabokov’s pederast matters not just because he likes little girls, but because of how America suddenly affords him freedom to live out his fantasy. More recently, hmm, perhaps Zachary Mason’s LOST BOOKS OF THE ODYSSEY strikes us so sharply because it enacts the evil of shredding classics, book-burning.
Interesting, the sort of trouble that arises when you take a word and define it however you want and then try to extend that definition beyond the nurturing confines of the canvas.
…Or if you take a concept that you conceive from an artistic work and then assume that to be a blanket description of all art.
why can’t the creator create something different?
pussies like milk
…not to interrupt or anything.
I think that’s probably the best and only practice; the ego reapplication/modification.
Bobby: Who says the mother leaks milk? Who says the baby drinks from her breast?
:)
Seems to react to a certain kind of art and attendant feelings. There is playfulness, which is childish, but also guiltless, even joyful. And this is also interesting but not transgressive, violent, or sexual – not related to taboo. I’m wondering why childishness is framed in terms of economy, not by the art itself, but the real life / livelihood of the artist. Calling artists childish because they aren’t supported by the economy seems odd. In another culture they might be supported / reveared – are they still childish if they happen to be rich? Are they guilty if the parents encouraged art?
Ken, it sounds like you’re asking – a bit above on the thread – whether one has been caused to feel “angry” by a work of art – or any object of human manufacture; or (why not) by a process or object of nature – not as a sympathetic resonance, and not (in the case of art) because the thing was crap. Not me.
–
The position of a deliberately affectless, unaffecting story is, itself, interesting, but (for me) almost always merely “interesting” as an exercise in technique. For example, a description of objects in a room, presented as a ‘short story’: it’s overwhelmingly likely to be a lot more “interesting” that the piece is called a ‘story’ than that it’ll interest (me, anyway) as a ‘story’.
Beckett might be a counter-example:
“I took advantage of being at the seaside to lay in a store of sucking stones. They were pebbles but I call them stones. Yes, on this occasion I laid in a considerable store. I distributed them equally between my four pockets, and sucked them turn and turn about. This raised a problem which I first solved in the following way. I had say sixteen stones, four in each of my four pockets [. . .] ”
– and eight semi-famous pages follow, in which Molloy explains his “two incompatible bodily needs, at loggerheads” to suck the stones in “equal distribution” and to suck the stones “with method” (he wants each stone to be equally sucked, in accordance with his sense of order (?)). Well, whatever.
Except that, as you read about the patterns of movement of the stones from pocket to pocket and, one at a time, Molloy’s mouth, you find that you’re taking pleasure in the undulations and rationalizations of the sentences.
Ken, you probably won’t feel “anger” reading Molloy, but you should feel something – is this what you’re getting at?
Thank you, joyed the gunkier nooks of my day.
Interesting, the sort of trouble that arises when you take a word and define it however you want and then try to extend that definition beyond the nurturing confines of the canvas.
…Or if you take a concept that you conceive from an artistic work and then assume that to be a blanket description of all art.
Georges Bataille walks his girlfriend, Laure, around Paris in a dog collar. Has anyone around here read Laure’s stuff? I have photographs of them hanging out at where Sade’s chateau used to be, smoking hash, getting lazy.
Georges Bataille walks his girlfriend, Laure, around Paris in a dog collar. Has anyone around here read Laure’s stuff? I have photographs of them hanging out at where Sade’s chateau used to be, smoking hash, getting lazy.
Exactly what I’m getting at. Beckett manages that threshold of presenting both movement and examination all the while making something feel new.