Essays:

My name is Hélène: Bataille's transgressive eros
by Chris Tysh

Victim Elixir:
Kathryn Harrison's Poison, Retasted

Only a Mother: Notes on Poems by Stanley Kunitz and Billy Collins

~ . ~ . ~

Essay:

My name is Hélène: Bataille's transgressive eros
by Chris Tysh

Mary Cassatt
Mother and Child
1888, Pastel on paper
Art Institute of Chicago

Georges Bataille (1897-1962), the French novelist, essayist, philosopher and poet, has been undergoing a parade of recognitions, delayed claims and intellectual parentings for nearly three decades now. The American discovery of this enigmatic and painfully difficult author has culminated in book-length analyses and publishing events, bringing to print long unavailable texts and an impressive corpus of exegetical work.

Bataille stands alone at an elevation point in literature where what is visible has the attractiveness, the beauty and vertigo of nothingness, of an ecstatic violation of life. His is a literature of abjection, horror, always invoking what is divinely obscene, sacredly profligate, poetically pornographic. The savagery of his negativity demands we inscribe him in the ranks of what the French call les écrivains maudits, along with the likes of the Marquis de Sade, comte de Lautréamont and Charles Baudelaire.

Je fais peur. --G. Bataille

In order to measure the phenomenal dissolutions and suspensions of being, in order to gauge the effervescence of the sexual violence encountered in Georges Bataille's oeuvre, one needs to have recourse to the dionysian excesses, the orgiastic rituals of ancient cultures, human sacrifice, the potlatch rites of Native Americans, to the self-inflicted mortifications and penances of real-life saints (such as Santa Rosa of Lima or Sainte Colette of Gand). And finally, one would have to import the notions of crime and murder as known to us through the ages by the extraordinary chronicles of faits divers which mark our societies. Figuring the impossible, the unspeakable, tangling with the formidable taboos of our culture is what animates Bataille's writing.

Written under the pseudonym of Pierre Angélique, Ma Mère, published posthumously as a novella in 1966, constitutes an unfinished manuscript, generically difficult to classify, though it could be said to parody a Bildungsroman in its diegetic movement. The sentimental education reserved for Pierre, the young protagonist, is an infernal descent into libertinage and incest.

The fantastic (and phantasmatic) transgression documented in this text can be measured against the distance the mother, Hélène, travels from her culturally enforced place as nurturer and reproducer to that of seducer and corrupting agent. From her maternal role, Hélène retains nothing but "the affectionate sweetness" of the word, maman. The rest is a bittersweet rhetoric of defilement, terror and, overall, the "shrine of mad laughter."

Hélène, the infinitely bad mother, violates maternal logic with an abandon rarely encountered in contemporary culture. For feminist theorists, what seduces in Bataille's text is the solid fact that here is a maternal subject apprehended as a site of knowledge in contrast to the habitual representations, wherein mothers function as mere relay posts of information necessary to the good transmission of the system: Say hello to the nice lady. or On ne parle pas la bouche pleine. This self-imposed policing of our children is never valorized as knowledge but seen rather as a small-minded currency, a resented obsession with the unimportant, or worse, complicity with patriarchy's repressive ideology.

"I want to know what you want," Pierre says to his mother. More than her youthful beauty, more than her sins, it is Hélène's carnal knowledge (the knowledge of a maternal jouissance) that acts as a fil aimanté, a magnetic thread, luring the son into the awesome machinery of incestuous desire.

Child Picking a Fruit
1893, Oil on canvas
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

A death is needed to generate Pierre's quest. The father's eviction from the scene of writing will provide the necessary narrative lever. In fact, Pierre's vile father is not only chased from the novella, he is vilified and erased with punitive brutality.

For Denis Hollier, a superb reader of Bataille, it is this very thrashing of the Name-of-the-father which comes to stall the reign of patriarchy.

Alexander J. Cassatt and His Son, Robert Kelso Cassatt
1884-85, Oil on canvas
Philadelphia Museum of Art

Having dephallicized and banished the father, Bataille's text sets the mother as an all-powerful (phallic) figure who orders and directs (i.e. met en scène) Pierre's rites of passage. It is the mother who demands to be seen and recognized and who insists on correcting the son's misreading of her. In effect, she says, what he has seen of her is not she.

By throwing down her maternal mask, Hélène disavows the official versions of bourgeois motherhood and tramples their patriarchal lies and ruses with shameless glee.

Refusing to separate sexual pleasure from knowledge, Bataille denudes "la blessure du savoir." To know is to reveal, to unveil the ob/scene. For the author of Erotisme, sexual experience is a privileged topos for a practice of transgression because the amorous subject detours "normal" sexual economy in favor of a perverse, abject, libidinal economy marked by loss, instability and deperditions of self, life and, ultimately, meaning.

Whether one attempts to read Bataille's sentimental education as a variant of the pre-symbolic family romance or perhaps as a contradictory model of maternal subjectivity which problematizes the mother-child dyad by displaying the deadly law and its transgression, one finds oneself under its spell because it disengages the maternal figure from the forever goody-gooey-mommy object, insipid and unknowing.

But how do we read Hélène's suicide? This violently independent mistress of her desires will nonetheless be forced to do away with herself. The sacrificial eroticism of Ma Mère is not admitted without raising hackles for feminists. Her suicide does not sit well with feminist discourse. Seen as yet another scansion of the maternal victim, her suicide can only reinforce patriarchy's sanctions against anyone mad enough to defy the phallic law. Read against Bataille's notion of dépense (libidinal potlatch), Hélène's death, following the only embrace authorized by the text, becomes a legacy, an unbarterable commodity for Pierre, who survives.

The mother's transgressive expenditure inscribes a debt which will haunt the Bataillean subject in his very obligation to writing. If suicide is a coded message addressed to the other, then Pierre, the receiver of this murderous maternal gift, will have to return it with interest. Writing, for Bataille, like the translation of an original, will keep alive, without quite replacing it, the unbearable mark of the mother's desire.

(Paris-born, Chris Tysh's publications include Continuity Girl, Coat of Arms and In the Name, this last a collection of poetic plays, two of which were staged: Vice Versa, directed by Lynn Crawford at La Mama in New York; Car Men, a play in d, directed by Carla Harryman at The Detroit Institute of Arts. She teaches Creative Writing and Women's Studies at Wayne State University in Detroit.)
[The illustrations in this essay were selected by the editors.]

~ . ~

New Release:
The Beforelife by Franz Wright
(Jan. 2001, Knopf, hardcover $22, 75 pp. hardcover)

Sapphire read with Franz Wright at Makor (35 West 67th St.) on Thursday, April 5. Since her performance has recently been discussed in this publication [See Archive, April 2001, Series Review. Ed.], my focus is Franz Wright, the son of the major American poet James Wright. I have at least two important things in common with him.

First, like him, I was encouraged by James Wright to write poetry, and second, my father was alcoholic. There are other similarities, but I choose not to disclose them here.

I did not look forward to writing this review. It seemed a task fraught with difficulty. There was the possibility that I might not like the work of my old teacher's son. Leaving aside the question of whether or not Mr. Wright's soul lives on, I had/have no wish to utter anything that might give discomfort to even the memory of my old mentor or to his relatives.

It is obvious that the days of the medieval craft unions when generations of the same families worked expertly at the same trades or arts are gone. We live in a world which, by and large, expects its children to pursue careers other than those their parents have pursued. It should be noted, however, that the rarity of a son or daughter practicing the same art his or her parent has is not cause for certainty the child will fail. And the ineluctable human need children have to be loyal to their parents in whatever ways they possibly can makes it perhaps surprising that there aren't more children who strive to make significant contributions to the arts their parents have succeeded in. Nonetheless, such attempts when the parent is a major figure, as James Wright continues to be even in death, must entail struggle and significant risk.

It follows then that any such attempt is worthy of respect, and I respect Franz Wright's accomplishment, especially since some of his poems invite specific comparisons to his father's work.

I will illustrate by comparing a passage in Franz Wright's "Thanks Prayer at the Cove," the longest poem he read at Makor, and a passage in "With This Love" to lines in his father's "Three Sentences for a Dead Swan" and "To the Muse." In the first, Franz Wright uses a traditional emblem of the poet, the swan, an image out of Yeats (see "The Tower," "The Wild Swans at Coole," etc.)--by way of his father. Whether or not the influence is conscious is irrelevant, though it would probably be more to the younger poet's credit if he knew what he was evoking. I assume he did. Here are his lines:

It seems an image of a persona frightened that he may be powerless to prevent a regression into oblivion, (Franz Wright's poems make no secret of his stays in rehabilitation centers and mental institutions) and it is economical and effective--emblematic of struggle. It occurs in a poem that then re-presents a psychotic experience and the persona's gratitude that he survived it.

"Three Sentences for a Dead Swan" is not one of his father's best poems, but it is, nonetheless, a powerful elegy. As in the swan image in "Thanks Prayer at the Cove," the color black figures prominently: The dead swan is transformed into 'My black Ohioan swan.' And in the concluding stanza, the persona, like a priest conducting a funeral, says:

Here, carry his splintered bones
Slowly, slowly
Back into the
Tar and chemical strangled tomb,
The strange water, the
The Ohio river, that is no tomb to
Rise from the dead
From.

A passage in "Cloudless Snowfall," which appears to be another prayer poem, (not having the text at hand, I must approximate the enjambments)

reminds the reader of the conclusion of his father's moving poem "Speak," which is also a prayer:

Competing with poetry of this power is no small thing. In addition, in fairness, it must be said that stylistically, Franz Wright is a minimalist. Within his current limits and intentions, Franz Wright exhibits an ability to cope with the anxiety of influence and sense of belatedness it seems natural to assume his father's accomplishment must inspire.

In order to move to a summary of Franz Wright's achievement, I need to say a little more about the elder Wright. I consider James Wright's Shall We Gather At The River (1967) a great book, greater than the more praised, The Branch Will Not Break (1963). It was misread, he said, because it had been so "carefully dreamed" (Interview: Paris Review, 1972). It is the volume that makes possible the upward ascent, the spiritual progress of the rest of his career. Its poems had to be written.

In that book, his persona, a tormented modern Orpheus, invokes a latter-day Eurydice, Jenny the suicide. Everything in the collection moves to the last poem, the invocation "To the Muse," which attempts the rescue of Jenny, who has whored herself, abandoned their newborn child and drowned herself. Based on his reading at Makor and on what I have read in The Beforelife, I believe Franz Wright (b. 1953) has not yet attempted so large a theme, but his work, like that of his father, is concerned with the depiction of the movement from states of despair to states of grace. In that respect he is his father's son and rival, ineluctably. I hope he continues his endeavor with increasing lyricism.

(Michael Graves is the co-author, with Vic Schermer, of "The Abandoned Male Persona and the Mysterious Feminine in the Poetry of James Wright: A Study in the Transformation of the Self." The Psychoanalytic Review 85/6, Dec. 99, pp. 849-870. [See Archive for, "The Struggle with the Holy in the Poetry of Michael Graves", an interview by Schermer which appeared in the April 2001 issue. Ed.]

~ . ~

Essay:
Victim Elixir:
Kathryn Harrison's Poison, Retasted

J'entends venir un autre chant,
J'entends les sept luths éternels.
Les lys font toute la lumière,
ils font toute la mélodie.
Vous les fauchez, et ils renaissent.
Vous les brisez, ils sont debout.
Ils ont la tige impérissable.

I hear another song approach.
I hear the seven lutes eternal.
The lilies produce all the light,
they produce all the melody.
You cut them, and they are reborn.
You break them, they are erect.
They have undying stems.

--Gabriele d'Annunzio

In April, 1997, the New York Philharmonic performed Débussy's Le martyre de Saint Sébastien (1911) at Avery Fisher Hall. That experience alone might have been enough to convert a T.S. Eliot--maybe even an Ezra Pound. Since Luther, generations of Sunday schoolchildren have been spared the bewildering series of iconographic torture scenes, none bearing the name 'Jesus.' Certainly among the most intriguing of those depictions (and usually a fairly bloodless one) for a kid brought up on tales of Robin Hood, the archer-bandit of Sherwood Forest, is that of Saint Sebastian.

The many renderings of the young man's arrow-pierced body convey a pious submission of mortal flesh, but it is Gabriele d'Annunzio's poetry that conveys the resistance of spirit, and what's more, the active solicitation of assailant by martyr: "Remember. I am the Target!" Not arrogance, but righteousness assures the other's frustration, reinforced as victim attempts a reversal of torment, one that will linger after his inevitable death: "Remember that terrible Hope."

Because the trial of religious fervor withstood invites comparison to body-transcending erotic delirium, some have inferred a homoerotic cast to the portrayal: Violence--albeit elegant--is inflicted upon manly beauty by manly means. Whatever the relevance, if any, of this inquiry, the narrow interstices between the spiritual and the erotic have drawn to the larger inquiry the imaginations of some of our finest writers: Georges Bataille for one, whose work Chris Tysh in her accompanying essay calls "sacredly profligate", and Kathryn Harrison.

Harrison's unique treatment of two women casualties of the Spanish Inquisition, one noble, one not, was present in the air of collective consciousness around the same time as the Philharmonic's performance, and remains quite nearly as memorable. Her "musky eroticism" reminded one reviewer of Flaubert's remark that the smell of arsenic haunted him long after writing Madame Bovary's death scene.

         Burning. But not the sting of a coal, not the sizzle of nettles or the shriek of scalding water spilled upon you. No earthly burning, this, but how light might feel were it to enter you, were flesh to become literate in senses other than touch.
         And of course flesh does, it does--flesh learns everything. Blood flows toward consciousness, bones apprentice themselves, a body's very skin sets itself a course of study. The only truths worth knowing, the only ones we remember, are those we learn by the flesh.
         Where did the burning begin? Wherever his tongue first touched. Yes, there, then. Why would he not begin there, and right away? I did not hesitate to open my legs to his tongue. We had no time to squander on modest kisses. Besides, it mattered not where he began, it was as if he touched me everywhere at once. The soles of my feet blistered, and flames licked between my fingers in his hair.
         Trying to remain still under the tutelage of his tongue. Its tick-tick-ticking followed by a calculated, expert, teasing pause. He was the clock that made a mockery of time.
         My inner eye saw only sky. Despite the late hour and the darkened room, on my back I looked up to a bright day, a day flooded with light. He touched me, and I saw one filament spun by a worm, one almost invisible thread cast between two branches and hung glistening in the air. Bowed by a breeze but impossibly strong. Why did it not break? As soon as I asked the question, snap, the strand was gone. I was gone. I was what gave way and snapped.
         He pulled away from me. "When were you born?"
         I gasped. "Now," I said. "I am . . . being born . . . now."
         He touched me, my belly, my shoulders, my face. I touched him too. Were we truly there? Was he? Was I? "Bonissimus. Yes," he said. "You are being born now."
         I felt the night sigh all around us, with us, through us. His lips seemed fuller when I could not see them, when I tried to know them by touch. I counted his teeth in the dark, I dug my fingers into the soft, wet well of flesh under his tongue. I pulled him to me, into me.

         "Oh, please, I beg you. Please." Arching toward them like a bow, trying to divorce my spine from the rack to which they make me fast. "Please. Further. Go further. Kill me. Split my heart, please. I am begging you."
         They do this in the light. In the bright light. Standing near to me, making fast the ligatures, their robes are so long that they drag on the floor. Their hoods obscure their features, and all I can see of my tormentors is an occasional glint of light reflecting on the wet surface of their otherwise hidden eyes.
         The robes they wear and the hoods that preserve their anonymity are made of the most wonderful and lustrous silk. Silk so beautiful, so like the silk of which I dreamed when I was a child, that I find myself wanting to touch it. I wonder how it might feel under my fingers.
         Their robes are black, but a black that light reveals as containing all colors, a black that shimmers and glints red, green, purple: every hue. Their hoods are white, most of them, and a few are red. Those in red hoods are in charge, they direct those in white. One of them, one only, the one who asks the questions, is the head of this prison. He wears a purple hood.
         They do nothing in the dark, of course. They need light to see, they need light to write down what I say, to record my confession. But I can close my eyes. I need not be here, with them.
         Scindite cor meum. Split my heart.
         I am remarkable for sheer mortal stubbornness. My flesh will not succumb, and its insistent clinging to life enrages them. Is interpreted as a sort of insolence. But it worries them, too: how can so seemingly frail a creature survive all this without the help of some higher, or lower, power?
         We begin with the rack, as usual we begin with the rack. After one White Hood secures my ankles and wrists in their shackles, after he turns a crank until I am stretched as taut as a harp string, another stops up my nostrils with wax. Wax he has kneaded with his fingers until it is warm and pliant, until the feel of it is as intimate and terrible as that of his fingers themselves. When my nose is sealed, he forces water into my entrails through my mouth, pouring it from a little height, enough that it courses through the funnel jammed between my teeth. It's either swallow or drown, suffocate.
         As they do not want to kill me before they hear what I have to say, they stop after a jug or two, which I generally vomit, and then the Purple Hood begins his questions, after the caution that silence will likely result in further encouragement to make me speak.
         I've confessed to everything. I have confessed to too many things, so we keep starting over.
         Or, as they say, we "continue."

(Kathryn Harrison, Poison, (Avon Books, 1995) pp. 32-34)

~ . ~

Essay:
Only a Mother: Notes on Poems by Stanley Kunitz and Billy Collins

Upon a stone, seeing she did not recognize
My tears, because our sorrows did not coincide. . . .

(From "Poem", Stanley Kunitz)

Had their authorship been concealed and these lines offered as a translation from Pierre Emmanuel, perhaps even from Georges Bataille himself (see Chris Tysh's essay), the American reader would have assented to the attribution, so foreign yet nightmare-familiar, so deeply do they retrieve and reconvey man's primal vulnerability to the mother present, the mother absent--or self-hid.

(From "Father and Son", Stanley Kunitz)

Here, the poet appears to draw on a psychic space at once more English in feel, damp, but with a faintly Greek sharpness, to swipe away the smothering (mother) ferns and seize on a kinship with a kind nearer his own, lost or never known, recalled from death in death's form.

Even in excerpt, these two poems expose the feebleness of a vast, continuing production of the Dad-at-the-deep-end-of-the-pool, Mom-stirring-the-oatmeal mode of American parental tribute and hallmark personal revelation.

Slush pile aside, some of our most respected American writers seem content to laze through a mild reverie on challenging, archetypal material. Critics can be had no doubt who will parse through to discoveries of great depth in plainspoken understatement or catharsis in restraint, but it may take a large mother to suffer through this third poem's cell-phone discourse and one-side-of-the-conversation digressions to a sympathetic sigh.

(From "The Iron Bridge", Billy Collins*)

If a poet/reader is hardly stirred, it is little surprise that the casual reader has long since written off contemporary verse in favor of the more compelling lyrics of "Sitting on the Dock of the Bay" or "My Mama Done Tole Me".