Autumn 1994
Volume 21, Number 1

"It was just five o'clock and the sun was burning hot. In the middle of the street, I would have liked to speak to the others; I was lost in the middle of a blind crowd. I felt as dull and as impotent impuissant as a baby."
-Georges Bataille, Le Bleu du Ciel

"At the corner of a street, anguish, a dirty dizzying anguish undid me (maybe because I had just seen two furtive whores on the staircase of a toilet)...I began to wander down those receptive streets which run from the Carrefour Poissoniere to the rue Saint-Denis. The solitude and darkness made me completely drunk. The night was naked in the deserted streets and I wanted to strip myself as naked as she: I took off my pants and hung them on my arm. I would have liked to tie the coolness of the night over my legs, a heady sense of freedom carried me forward. I felt myself growing bigger. I was holding my erect member in my hand."
-Georges Bataille, Madame Edwarda

These two passages, taken from Bataille's erotic fiction, were written six years apart (le Bleu de Ciel, although not published until 1957, was written in 1935; Madame Edwarda was written and first published in an extremely limited edition, under the pseudonym Pierre Angelique, in 1941). Both may be called secret works, unavowed by their author at the time of writing except to his close friends. Maurice Blanchot has spoken of a "communication diurne" and a "communication nocturne" in Bataille's writing. These two works belong to the nocturnal category.

The relation of these "night works" to the "daytime works"–the political or philosophical essays–Bataille was writing around the same time is, however, interestingly different; and the two "night works are significantly different from each other, despite a certain family resemblance. This is evident in the above passages. In the first, the solitary narrator is surrounded by a crowd but feels all the more alone and lost. The sun, way past noon, is still burning hot (we are in a southern city, Barcelona); and although he is a grown man, the narrator, Troppmann, feels reduced to the powerlessness of a baby. In the second passage, the narrator is also an anguished soul alone in the street, this time literally as well as spiritually. He is wandering Paris, in the neighborhood Andre Breton had celebrated in Nadja thirteen years earlier- deserted now, not the bustling place of Breton's fateful encounter. In paradoxical contrast to Troppmann, this narrator's anguish leads to a triumphant, if transgressive, virility; in the cool of the night, he walks the street half naked, holding his erect penis before him- like a lance, perhaps, or a gun.

Despite his persistent anguish and obsession with "undoing" (l'angoisse... me decomposa" ["anguish undid me"]), the narrator of Madame Edwarda is a potent male; soon after this opening passage he will enter a brothel and "go upstairs" like any other john. Of course that is not all he will do, for Madame Edwarda is no ordinary piece of pornography. As Bataille explained years later, it is the work without which the central section of his major philosophical work, L'Experience interieure, which he was writing at the same time, could not be properly understood. In both works, virility is an important preoccupation, as it is in Bataille's political essays of the 1930s and in Le Bleu du Ciel, where the sexual and political imbrications of that word are explored with particular acuity.

Susan Rubin Suleiman is professor of romance and comparative literatures at Harvard University. Her latest book is Risking Who One Is: Encounters with Contemporary Art and Literature (1994). She is currently working on a diary and memoir about Budapest. The present essay will appear shortly in George Bataille: Writing the Sacred, edited by Carolyn Gill.