Name: Blue of Noon
Rating: 3.625 (8 reviews)

Georges Bataille

Sex, death and madness as European society flirts grimly with the portents of World War II.

Blue of Noon

Tim Pendry

I have a tendency to choose short books of relatively low merit by famous authors in preference to their classic texts. This foible arises in part from a more general distrust of texts as guides to life really lived. The marginalia of 'great minds' often brings them down to earth and reminds one that little good work comes without much persistent labour. Persistent labour can, however, sometimes remove the authenticity of feeling that belongs to a particular age. 'Blue Noon' is typical of that sort of work that gets pushed late to the public when other work has brought a man to prominence. The author is both flattered and resigned. Bataille's curt foreward to the 1957 first edition of this 1935 novella tells us as much. Others have prevailed on him to publish the manuscript, he no longer thinks like the late thirty-something man he was then (he has, indeed, 'moved on' as we say now) and he tries to explain that the ham-fisted clumsy style of the work is deliberate (which at least relieves us from the mistake of blaming some hapless translator for its leaden sentences). So why bother with the book? Try treating it as a companion piece to the Henry Miller rant that we reviewed at: <a target="_blank" href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3343410.The_World_of_Sex" rel="nofollow noopener">http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/33...</a> - two literary males trying to cope with a world where sex is pushed into the realm of the near-criminal and where both are trying to find a way of expressing their true natures. In this context, it is a social document of sorts, set amongst the bien-pensant prosperous and idle French middle classes of the 1930s who were adopting leftist views without enthusiasm or understanding and sensing the cataclysm to come. Bataille was part of the Surrealist movement and the book is an uneasy marriage of dream sequence and realism - a brave attempt perhaps but unsatisfactory. And if Bataille is open about its clumsiness as a text, who are we to argue? The number of repetitions of the word 'ridiculous' alone are, well, ridiculous. The hero is a whining, lacrymose, self-absorbed (apparently once self-harming) rather nasty, sickly, death-obsessed, depressive and mildly sadistic figure without character whose attempts to cope with a wife, a mistress, a mother-in-law, a lover and an odd sort of anti-woman, a political activist, are played out across Europe - London, Paris, Vienna, Catalonia (oh, how we miss Orwell's insights) and the Rhine Valley with a cast of walk on servants, gilded youth, anarchists, communists and young bright-eyed and bushy-tailed Nazis. Not forgetting a dream trip to the Soviet Union. All in under 130 pages! The woman are not much better than our depressed and depressing hero. The wife with two kids left in Brighton and her mother come across as the most sympathetic characters probably because they are so thinly sketched. None are more than creatures of our 'hero's' tale. I may not always be the sharpest card in the deck when it comes to 'literature' but the obscurities and failures to communicate emotion, at least beyond the lachrymose and 'ridiculous', really do pall after a while. The mistress and the lover are neurotic - the political activist cold and disturbed in an entirely different way as if a woman (or perhaps a man) who was not lachrymose, suicidal and lying wasted on their beds periodically was bound to become a political fanatic. Everyone is weak and moody. Yawn! At one point we have the two neurotic women separately heading for Barcelona with the political activist in situ and what could have been a diverting comedy of manners or a tragedy of love turns into a rather dreary and sordid shuffling of persons around rooms while a general strike and some shooting goes on outside. So why keep the book in the library? Because, as I noted above, it is striving to tell us something about the mind of the powerless lost souls of its time despite itself, about the ones who had no ideology and just wanted to live, but were surrounded by fanatics. The sex, by the way, is abrupt, honest in its way and real enough but don't let anyone sell this to you as under the counter pornography - the sex is just a metaphor for despair and rage and little more. Now here's the spoiler because Bataille lets us into the secret of the book in a short exchange at the end: Henri, listen - I know I'm a freak, but I sometimes wish there would be a war ... This is a book about those who could see the cataclysm coming in the fanaticism of those around them and who just wanted the storm to break to put them out of their misery. To have something happen. Some would have actively sought war through fanaticism, whether that of the militarism of the Right or that of the reluctant revolutionary action of the Left, each feeding off the other, but the hysteria of the central character represents the real hysteria of the age - a shrill hope that the whole thing just go ahead because the tension was becoming unbearable! No wonder that in 1957, our fifty-something writer wanted to make it clear that his opinion had changed - the bloodletting proved to be a lot nastier than anyone had envisaged. Sartre wrote 'Nausea' in 1938 and, in addition to the general air of absurdity, there are moments when Bataille, in his observations of three years earlier, gets close to the imagery of the greater work. Since it is unlikely that Sartre read this work, either Bataille fiddled with the manuscript on the quiet later or this sense of 'nausea' (he uses the term) was widespread in European 'liberal' society. It is like the general air of despair amongst our middle classes as they contemplate the possibility that our society has broken down domestically as a result of the ideological 'war' betweem progressives and neo-liberals. There is another reason to keep the book in the library - a few moments of brilliant clarity. Small sections - most notably at the very beginning and at the very end - give us small prose poems of desperate depravity that are filmic in quality. Another writer of the period bears comparison - Antonin Artaud, whose equally hysterical 'Heliogabulus' (reviewed rather negatively and not remaining in the library at <a target="_blank" href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/75887.Heliogabalus_Or_the_Crowned_Anarchist" rel="nofollow noopener">http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/75...</a> ). Artaud and Bataille in this respect are two thin wedges from the past and the future respectively. Artaud writes as the last of the decadents and chooses an anti-modernist chaotic stance seeking to revel in the horrors to come and seeking comfort in insanity and paganism. Bataille writes as a confused Catholic-modernist and proto-existentialist avant la lettre periodically seeking immolation and death (albeit as a pose)as the tide of chaos created by competing rigid alternate conceptions of order rises. Artaud is working in the context of dionysiac theatre and Bataille thinks like a post war film maker before his time. The presiding philosophers are a forgotten Nietzche and, despite a Catholic faith that is not present in this book, a Sartre yet to be discovered. The point here is that the marginalia of literature often conspires to give us a better picture of the stresses of society than the great works. Artaud, Bataille and Miller are all, in their different ways, responding to a damaged failing bourgeois society that had repressed sexual passion and ecstasy. The failures saw this repression displaced into ideologies that competed to show off their ability to engage in violence for 'rational' ends. Things are much better now but the beast of psychic repression still lurks around our politics, waiting to return if it were but to be let it in. So this unattactive self-indulgent short book has its small uses but reserve it for a day when you really have nothing much else to do. And, by the way, do not bother with the equally obscure and portentous 1982 introduction by Ken Hollings - life is short and you do not need to waste precious moments of your life trying to make sense of it.

eris

drill

Like why is the goodreads summary so bad and completely unrepresentative..... Who Wrote Thatt.

Blue of Noon

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