Expletives Deleted by Angela Carter Page B

Protestant sensibility.
    Bataille puts pornography squarely in the service of blasphemy. Transgression, outrage, sacrilege, liberation of the senses through erotic frenzy, and the symbolic murder of God. This is a scenario alien to the secular heritage of Protestant humanism. It confirms the free-thinker’s darkest fears about the nauseating madness inherent in Judaeo-Christianity itself. One can understand why Susan Sontag – whose worthy but dull essay, ‘The Pornographic Imagination’, is appended – refrains from commenting on the climax of
Story of the Eye
, where a priest is enticed into lapping up his own urine from a sacramental chalice. Sontag is concerned to define what kind of literature pornography might be; she doesn’t notice that
Story of the Eye
is didactically lewd.
    After the hapless cleric has drained the cup to its dregs of marinated Host, the polymorphously perverse heroine, Simone,orgiastically strangles him, gouges out his eye and pops it into her vagina, which she has already used as a repository for eggs, both raw and cooked, and the testicles of a bull. Roland Barthes, in
his
essay in the buxom appendix to the brief tale, points out the complex circularity of the dominant imagery of eye, egg, testicle. No content man, he; his whimsical formalism is too disingenuous by half.
Story of the Eye
was first published in France in 1928; two years later, French fascists smashed up the cinema in which Buñuel and Dali’s
L’Age d’Or
was celebrating erotic blasphemy. Bataille was dicing with death and
Story of the Eye
is about fucking as existential affirmation against death, who is also God. (Unless Bataille’s own blind, paralysed father – syphilis, naturally – is God; he materialises horribly in an afterword.)
    Now Simone, her lover, and an onanistic English milord set sail to America. They won’t be able to raise Susan Sontag’s eyebrows, whatever they get up to there; but since they crew their boat with black sailors, no doubt these guerrillas of the libido will think up a few stunts that will get up everybody else’s noses.
    That English milord, the non-participatory entrepreneur of obscene spectacles, is an unkind cut. The French have always thought we are sexually weirder than we have ever thought them, which is saying something. This has to do with the relativity of the notion of the sense of sin; and to do, too, with the way the metaphysics of
Story of the Eye
evaporate in the translation (by Joachim Neurgroschel), just as the crystalline rhetoric of Bataille’s incomparable prose muddies in English. Nevertheless, this marvellous, scatological fairytale about the omnipotence of desire, as Barthes says, ‘between the banal and the absurd’ still enlightens.
    (1979)

•   9   •
William Burroughs:
The Western Lands
    Since William S. Burroughs relocated from New York City to Lawrence, Kansas, the town blasted by IBMs in the antinuke TV spectacular, ‘The Day After’, he has evidently perfected a final loathing for the instruments of mass death and – ‘no job too dirty for a fucking scientist’ – their perpetrators.
    Pointless to head for the hills, these days: ‘What hills? Geiger counters click to countdown. Decaying lead spells out the last syllable of recorded time. Orgone balked at the post. Christ bled. Time ran out. Radiation has won at a half-life.’
    The densely impacted mass of cultural references here – Macbeth, the Western, Reich, Dr Faustus, pulp science fiction – isn’t an isolated example of
The Western Lands
’ intense awareness of literature and of itself as literature, suggesting that perhaps one of the things going on, here, is an elegaic farewell to all that. The peremptory demand on which the novel ends, ‘Hurry up, please. It’s time’, is a straight quote from ‘The Wasteland’, reminiscent also of Cyril