Divine Filth by Georges Bataille
To date, my reviews have focused necessarily on the contemporary stars of erotic lit, preventing me from discussing the classic authors whose seminal and revolutionary works reinstated the possibility of an erotic literature. While erotic literature was something of a commonplace in the ancient, pre-Christian world (witness certain works by Ovid, Sappho and Catullus), and has always had a respected place in Eastern literature, the modern Western world took its sweet-ass time coming to terms with the sexual side of life. Which explains why I was so overjoyed to come across a “new” book by one of the gods of modern erotic literature, French novelist Georges Bataille.
Ever since reading his canonical work, The Story of the Eye, I’ve been practically obsessed with Bataille’s nearly neurotic admixture of eros and thanatos – and while I have yet to complete his collected works, this new book’s subtitle, “Lost Writings by Georges Bataille,” immediately had me sold.
Unfortunately, as editor/translator Mark Spitzer’s lengthy introduction relates, the works anthologized in Divine Filth are something less than “lost works.” There’s no exciting history of Indiana Jones-meets-A.S. Byatt literary-archeological skullduggery behind this collection, but rather a somewhat unromantic (though admirably diligent) bringing to light of fragments, notes and sketches.
The book consists of two shattered short stories as full of holes as a moth-eaten sweater (which are nonetheless quite lovely in their allusive suggestions of what they might have become), and slightly over 100 pages of what Spitzer calls “Fragments/Poetry.” The latter are a smattering of what could either be read as minimalistic koans, deeply surreal shards of thought or tossed-off scribblings in the margins of notebooks. Some of these marginalia did, eventually, coalesce into a long poem called “The Archangelical” (included in The Collected Poems of Georges Bataille, also edited by Spitzer), and the final section of the book is devoted to a gathering of these tatters of a poem yet to be. Sheerly for its glimpse of a brilliant artist at work, this section is perhaps the most interesting.
Now, all of the proceeding might suggest that I was not, overall, a fan of this book. Nothing could be further from the truth. But I’m absolutely conscious of the fact that the pleasure I derived from this text is probably only due to my intense interest in Bataille, and I would suggest that anyone interested in discovering one of the true greats of erotic literature seek out instead either The Story of the Eye or his book on taboo, which has been published as either Eroticism (Vintage) or Erotism (Grove).
