Georges Bataille

Essays discuss the work of Emily Bronte, Baudelaire, William Blake, Proust, Kafka, Genet, and de Sade, and examine the depiction of evil

Literature and Evil

In this collection of essays, first published in France in 1957, Bataille explores the value of evil as expressed in literature. He studies the work of Emily Brontë, Baudelaire, Blake, Michelet, Kafka, Proust, Genet̂ and de Sade.

Tim Pendry

On balance, I am going to have to class this 1957 collection of eight essays on significant literary figures as rather dreadful. Not that there are not occasional insights but the essays are largely obscurantist attempts to engage with the fashionable theories of the age and not much more. Sartre hangs like a pall over the book, notably in the essays on Baudelaire and Genet. Bataille plays with Christian notions, Marxism, existentialism, contemporary anthropology and whatever is to hand to say not a great deal - or rather to write a great deal that seems to say little. The problem is with his starting point - the assumption, without any attempt at serious definition, that the notions of Good and Evil are more than rhetorical gestures. The claim that literature is evil by its very nature is actually arguable but it needs far more consideration of terms than this. The essays are variable and suggest the self indulgence of someone on the fringes of French intellectual life trying to shout out to his peers that he is present and that he can be judged by his ability to 'intellectualise' like the best of them. The essays do, as I note, have insights but then descend into obscurantism. His creative and worthwhile theory of economics (wrong-headed but stimulating), based (in effect) on the potlach where excess or luxury has its role, gets its exposition in passing but only in passing. The essay on Kafka is mostly rather good. His thesis on the consonance of literature and evil is best articulated, yet not yet articulated fully, in dealing with Emily Bronte. He usefully helps introduce Willian Blake to a French audience with some acute insights. So there are good things to say - just! But the sections on Baudelaire, Michelet, Sade Proust and Genet are speaking to local, almost provincial in time and place, literary disputes and concerns. It is Bataille's lack of clarity when clarity is possible that I find most problematic - but then I am an Anglo-Saxon so what do I know. No doubt the essays might have been amusing and even insightful to a Rive Gauche-aspirant in the late 1950s but they do not inspire now if only because Bataille never allows you to see the wood of his argument for the trees of games-playing wordiness. This negative review it is not intended to criticise Bataille for more than this book. He falls into that category of people - Alesteir Crowley is another - who may not be great systematic thinkers but who tap into a zeitgeist and become great provocateurs and so changers of cultural norms. But I do feel that the nearly four hours of my life spent on this book was not the most productive. As you get older, patience begins to start to run out. Indeed, I almost gave up after the third essay because its obscurity and intellectual narcissism was almost beyond endurance. I am glad (I think) that I did not give up. Only be reading the whole was I able to get a sense of just how useless a culture of intellectualism could become when it is indulged by the wider literary community. Still, there were a few insights and half the Kafka essay was actually enjoyable.

Literature and Evil

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