Madame Edwarda by
Pierre Angélique Preface by
Georges Bataille
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (September 2009)
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If you’re afraid of everything, read this book − but listen to me first: if you laugh, it’s because you are afraid. A
This translation is dedicated to Claire Harrison in memory of the nights it describes
book, you think, is something inert. That’s possible. And yet what if, as is the case, you do not know how to read? Would you begin to doubt . . . ? Are you alone? Do you shake with the cold? Do you know to what point man is ‘yourself’? A fool − and naked?
PREFACE Death is of all things the most terrible, and maintaining the work of death is what demands the greatest strength. − G. W. F. Hegel
The author of Madame Edwarda has himself drawn attention to the gravity of his book. It seems important to me, nevertheless, to insist on the fact, if only because of the levity with which we are accustomed to treating writings whose theme is man’s sexual life. Not that I hope − or intend to try − to change anything in those customs. But I ask the reader of this preface to reflect for a moment on the attitude traditionally adopted towards pleasure (which, in the play of the sexes, attains a mad intensity) and suffering (which death finally relieves, of course, but which, before that, it pushes to its extreme limit). A combination of conditions leads us to make of man (of humanity) an image as distant from extreme pleasure as it is from extreme suffering: the most common interdictions are observed, on the one hand, towards man’s sexual life, on the other, towards his death; to the extent that around these realms a single sacred domain has formed that is at the origin of religion. The difficulty began when the interdictions surrounding the disappearance of a human being were the only ones to be accorded grave respect, while those surrounding the appearance of a human being − which is to say, all genetic activity − came to be taken lightly. I don’t want to protest against the profoundest tendencies of the majority of people: it is an expression of the destiny which has made man laugh at his own reproductive organs. But this laughter, which accentuates the opposition between pleasure and suffering (that suffering and death are worthy of respect, while pleasure
is derisory, worthy only of our contempt), also indicates their
The preface to this little book − in which eroticism is clearly
fundamental kinship. Laughter is no longer a sign of respect,
shown as opening onto the consciousness of the wound in
but it may be a sign of horror. Laughter is the attitude of
being − is for me the occasion of an emotional appeal. Not that I
compromise which man adopts in the presence of something
find it surprising that the mind should turn away from itself,
which repels him, but whose appearance is not particularly
and with its back turned, so to speak, become the obstinate
grave. Thus, when eroticism is considered with gravity, is
caricature of its own truth. If man needs to lie, after all, he is
envisaged tragically, it represents a complete reversal in our
free to lie! Perhaps the man who, in his pride, is swallowed in
way of thinking.
the human mass . . . But in the end, I shall never forget what binds me to violence and marvels, nor the will to open my eyes
I must start by making clear the futility of those banal
wide and look, face to face, at what is happening, at what is.
assertions to the effect that sexual interdictions are nothing
And I should never know what is happening if I knew nothing of
more than a prejudice, and it is time we rid ourselves of them.
extreme pleasure, nothing of extreme suffering!
According to this view, the shame and modesty which
Let us understand each other. Pierre Angélique takes care
accompany the strong sensation of pleasure are merely proofs
to say it: we know nothing, and we are lost in the depths of the
of a lack of higher intelligence. One might just as well say that
night. But we can at least see what it is that deceives us, what
we should wipe the table clean and return to the days of our
it is that diverts us from knowing our distress, from knowing,
animality, to devouring what we wish and being indifferent to
more precisely, that joy is the same thing as suffering, the same
filth and ordure; as though the whole of humanity did not
thing as death.
emerge from powerful and violent impulses of revulsion and
What this laughter diverts us from, what incites our joking
attraction, to which our peculiarly human sensibility and
attitude, is the identity between extreme pleasure and extreme
intelligence are intimately bound. But without wishing in any
suffering, between being and death, between the knowledge
way to oppose the laughter caused by indecency, we are free to
that ends with this dazzling view and a definitive darkness. No
return − at least partially return − to an attitude which laughter
doubt we could end by laughing at such a truth, but it would
alone introduces.
be with an absolute laughter, one that does not stop at our
It is laughter, in fact, that justifies a form of condemnation that does us no honour. Laughter leads us along this path on
contempt for something repulsive, but in which our disgust would penetrate our very being.
which the principle of the interdiction, of necessary and inevitable decency, is transformed into blind hypocrisy and
To reach the point of ecstasy, the moment when we lose
complete incomprehension of what the interdiction brings into
ourselves in the joys of the flesh, we must always posit an
play. Complete licence combined with joking is always
immediate limit to this joy: this limit is horror. Not only the
accompanied by a refusal to take seriously − by which I mean
suffering of others but also my own suffering, pushing me to
tragically − the truth of eroticism.
the moment when my horror arouses me, can help me reach
the state where joy slides into delirium; but then there is no
Being is given to us in an unbearable surpassing of being, no
form of revulsion whose affinity with desire I do not perceive.
less unbearable than death. But since, in death, being is taken
Not that horror is never confused with attraction; but if it
away from us at the same time that it is given, we must search
cannot inhibit or destroy it, horror increases the attraction.
for it in the feeling of death, in those unbearable moments
Equally, danger typically paralyses us; but when it lacks the
when, no longer being within us except through an excess of
power to do so, danger excites our desire. We never reach
being, it seems that we are dying, and the fullness of our horror
ecstasy except when, however remotely, we are faced with the
coincides with the fullness of our joy.
prospect of death, with the prospect of what destroys us. A man differs from an animal in that certain sensations
Even thought (reflection) only ends with its own excess. What, beyond the representation of excess, does truth signify if
wound him and reduce him to the intimacy of his being. These
we do not see what exceeds the possibilities of seeing, what it is
sensations vary according to the individual and his way of life.
unbearable to see − just as, in ecstasy, it is impossible to attain
But the sight of blood or the odour of vomit, which arouse in us
pleasure? What, if we do not think that which exceeds the
the horror of death, can force us to experience a state of nausea
possibilities of thought . . . ?*
which afflicts us more cruelly than any suffering. The sensations associated with the final vertigo are literally
At the end of this pathetic meditation − silenced, with a
unbearable. There are persons who prefer death to touching a
despairing cry, as it is swallowed in the impossibility of
snake, however harmless it may be. There exists a domain in
sustaining itself − we rediscover God. This is the meaning, the
which death signifies not only our disappearance, but the unbearable process by which, despite ourselves, we disappear, even when, at all costs, we must not disappear. It is precisely this at all costs, this despite ourselves, that distinguishes the
*
I apologise for adding here that this definition of being and excess
cannot rest on a philosophical foundation, since excess, by definition, exceeds every foundation. Excess is that through which being, before it is
moment of extreme joy and an indescribable but miraculous
anything else, is beyond all limits. Being undoubtedly also exists within
ecstasy. If there is nothing which surpasses man, which
limits: it is these limits that permit us to speak of it (I speak also, but in
surpasses us despite ourselves, which, at all costs, must not be, we will never attain the insensate moment towards which we
speaking I do not forget not only that speech will elude me, but that it is eluding me now). These methodically arranged sentences may be possible (largely because excess is the exception, it is the marvellous, the
strive with all our strength, but which, at the same time, we
miraculous; excess designates attraction − attraction, if not horror,
use all our strength to avert.
everything, in short, which is more than that which is) but their impossibility is taken as given from the first. As a result, no chains bind me, never am I enslaved; I retain a sovereignty from which only my death − which will
Pleasure would be contemptible were it not also this
demonstrate the impossibility of limiting myself to being without excess –
appalling surpassing of limits, which is not confined to a sexual
will separate me. I do not reject consciousness − without which I could not
ecstasy which the mystics of various religions − but the Christian mystics above all − have known in the same manner.
write − but this hand that writes is dying, and only through the death to which it is promised can it escape the limits it accepts in writing (accepted by the hand that writes but refused by the hand that dies).
enormity, of this insensate little book: its narrative brings onto
secret.† Since sexual joy relies upon opening the mind to a
the stage God himself, with all his attributes; yet this God is a
potentially harmful perspective, we usually deceive ourselves,
public whore, no different from any other whore. But what
attempting to reach our joy on a path as distant as possible
mysticism could not say (at the moment of speaking it fell into
from horror. The images which excite our desire or provoke the
a swoon) eroticism can: God is nothing if he is not, in every
final spasm are typically dubious or equivocal: if they depict
sense of the word, the surpassing of God − in the sense of
horror or death it is always in an underhand manner. Even
vulgar being, in the sense of horror and impurity, in the sense,
from Sade’s perspective death is diverted onto the other, and
finally, of nothing . . . We cannot, with impunity, incorporate
the other, at least initially, is a delicious expression of life. The
into language the word which surpasses words, the word God;
domain of eroticism is inescapably sworn to ruses. The object
the moment we do so, this word, surpassing itself, vertiginously
which provokes the urges of Eros appears in other guise to its
destroys its own limits. What this word signifies recoils before
true identity. So much so that in erotic matters it is the ascetics
nothing. It is everywhere it is impossible to expect it to be: it is,
who are right. They say of beauty that it is the snare of the
in short, enormity. And he who even suspects as much,
devil: beauty alone, in effect, makes bearable our need for
instantly falls silent. Or, seeking for a way out but knowing that
disorder, for the violence and indignity that are at the root of
he is trapped, he searches within himself for that which, having
love. I cannot examine here the details of deliriums whose
the power to destroy him, renders him similar to God, similar to
forms continue to multiply, the most violent of which are made
nothing.*
known to us, slyly, in pure love − carrying the blind excess of life to the very limits of death. Undoubtedly the ascetic
On the incredible journey to which this most incongruous
condemnation is coarse, it is cowardly and cruel, but it accords
of books invites us, there may, nevertheless, still be some
with the trembling without which we distance ourselves from
discoveries for us to make.
the truth of the night. There is no reason why sexual love
For example, by chance, happiness . . .
should be invested with an eminence which only belongs to the
Joy is found precisely within the perspective of death (thus,
entirety of life, but if we do not bring the light to bear on the
it is masked under the appearance of its opposite, sorrow).
very point where night falls, how should we know ourselves to
I am in no way inclined to argue that sensual pleasure is the essential thing in this world of ours. Man is not limited to the organ of pleasure. But this unavowable organ teaches him his
†
I could point out, moreover, that excess is the very principle of sexual
reproduction: in effect, Divine Providence willed that, in its works, its secret should remain legible! Could man be spared nothing? The very day he notices that the ground has gone from beneath his feet, he is told that it is has been
*
Here, therefore, is the first theology proposed by a man whom laughter
removed providentially! But even if the sins of his blasphemy are visited upon
has illuminated, and who refuses to limit that which does not know what the
him, it is by blaspheming − by spitting on his own limits − that the most
limit is. Mark the day when you read by a pebble of fire, you who have paled
unhappy of men finds his enjoyment, it is in blaspheming that he is God. In
over the texts of philosophers! How should he who would silence them
truth, creation is inextricable, irreducible to any movement of the spirit other
express himself, if not in a manner which to them is inconceivable?
than the certainty, being exceeded, of exceeding.
be, as we are, the projection of being into horror? If being is swallowed in the sickening void from which, at all costs, it must flee . . . ? Nothing, surely, is more dreadful than this! How ludicrous, in comparison, must the scenes of hell above church doors appear to us! Hell is the feeble image of himself that God has involuntarily inspired! But on the scale of unlimited loss we rediscover the triumph of being, from which nothing has ever been lacking save its consent to the movement that makes it perish. Being, of its own accord, joins in the terrible dance whose syncopation is the dancer’s rhythm, and which we must learn to accept for what it is − knowing only the horror with which it is in perfect harmony. If we lack the courage to do so, no greater torture exists for us. And the moment of torture will never fail to arrive: how, if it failed to do so, should we overcome it? But the open spirit − open to death, to torture, to joy − without reserve, the open and dying being, suffering and happy, already appears in a veiled light: the light of the divine. And the cry which, from a twisted mouth, may twist and wring the being that utters it, is an immense alleluia − lost in a silence without end. − Préface de Madame Edwarda (1956)
− Hans Bellmer, Madame Edwarda (1966)
ANGUISH IS THE ONLY ABSOLUTE SOVEREIGN.
THE
SOVEREIGN IS NO LONGER A KING: HE IS HIDDEN IN THE GREAT CITIES. HE SURROUNDS HIMSELF WITH SILENCE, CONCEALING HIS SORROW. HE LURKS IN WAIT FOR SOMETHING TERRIBLE
− AND YET HIS SORROW LAUGHS AT
EVERYTHING THAT COMES TO PASS.
I At the corner of the street, anguish, a foul and intoxicating anguish, attacked me (perhaps because I had just seen two furtive girls on the steps of a urinal). At moments like this I am overwhelmed by the urge to vomit. I suddenly felt that I had to be naked, then and there − either that, or strip naked the girls I lusted after: only the warmth of stale flesh can sate me. But this time I resorted to more impoverished means. I ordered a Pernod at a bar, downed the glass in one gulp, then went from counter to counter, until . . . The night finished falling. I began to wander through the narrow streets which run between Rue Poissonniére and Rue Saint-Denis. Loneliness and the darkness completed my drunkenness. The night itself was laid bare in those deserted streets, and I wanted to be just as naked: I took off my trousers and draped them over my arm. I wanted to feel the coolness of the night air on my loins, and a sudden wave of freedom carried me along. I felt myself getting bigger, and held my erect cock in my hand. (My entry into the matter is hard. I could have avoided all this and still made my tale sound ‘plausible’. It would have been in my interest to take detours. But this is how it has to be − a beginning without diversions. I continue . . . and it gets harder . . . ) Worried about attracting trouble, I put my trousers back on and headed for a place I knew called Mirrors: on entering, I found myself in the light again. Amidst a swarm of girls, Madame Edwarda, completely naked, looked bored
to death. She was, to my taste, ravishing. I chose her, and
in, only that in the midst of that tumult of lights, the night
she came and sat down next to me. I hardly took the time
descended upon me! I wanted to turn the table over, smash
to respond to the waiter when he asked me what I wanted.
everything − but it was fixed to the floor and wouldn’t
I seized Madame Edwarda, and she gave herself up to me
budge. Has any man faced a more farcical situation? Then
immediately, our two mouths meeting in a sickly kiss. The
everything began to dissolve, the room and Madame
room was packed with men and women: such was the
Edwarda. Only the night remained . . .
wasteland in which our game was played out. In an instant her hand slid, and I broke suddenly like a pane of glass,
An all-too-human voice dragged me out of my stupor.
trembling in my trousers; at the same moment I felt
Madame Edwarda’s voice, like her slender body, was
Madame Edwarda, whose buttocks I clasped in my hands,
obscene:
break in two: her wide, upturned eyes filled with terror, and from her throat came a long, strangled cry.
‘I suppose you want to see my rags’, she said. Gripping the table with both hands, I turned to face her. Still sitting, she lifted one leg high and wide above her
I remembered my desire for scandal − or rather, that it
head, and to open her gash still further, used the fingers of
would be necessary, at all costs, to be scandalous that
both hands to draw the folds of skin apart. Thus, Madame
night. I could hear laughter over the tumult of voices,
Edwarda’s ‘rags’ looked at me, hairy and pink, and as full
reaching me through the lights and the smoke. But nothing
of life as some revolting squid. I stammered softly:
mattered anymore. I took Madame Edwarda in my arms,
‘Why are you doing that?’
and she smiled at me. Transfixed, I experienced a new
‘You can see,’ she said, ‘I am GOD’.
shock as a sort of silence fell on me from above, freezing me
‘I’m going crazy.’
to the spot. I seemed to be borne aloft in a flight of angels
‘Oh no you’re not, you’ve got to see: look!’
with neither bodies nor heads, but shaped from something
Her harsh voice sweetened, becoming almost childlike
like the gliding of wings through the air − only more simply.
as she said with such weariness, with the infinite smile of
Suddenly I grew unhappy and felt myself forsaken, as one
abandon:
is in the presence of GOD. It was far worse and more crazy
‘Darling, the fun I’ve had . . .’
than simple drunkenness. At first I even felt sad that the grandeur descending upon me was robbing me of the pleasures I had counted on tasting with Madame Edwarda.
Holding her provocative position, her leg still raised in the air, she spoke to me with an air of command: ‘Kiss me!’
I told myself I was being ridiculous: Madame Edwarda and I hadn’t exchanged two words yet. I experienced a moment of doubt. I could say nothing about the state I was
‘But . . . ,’ I protested, ‘in front of all these people?’ ‘Of course!’
I trembled. I stared at her, motionless, and she smiled
...............................................
back so sweetly that I trembled again. At last, staggering
...............................................
forward, I got down on my knees and pressed my lips to
...............................................
that living wound. Her naked thigh caressed my ear and I
...............................................
thought I heard the sound of a sea swell, the same sound
...............................................
you hear when you put your ear to a large conch shell. In
...............................................
the absurdity and confusion of the brothel (I felt I was
...............................................
choking, flushed and sweating with the heat) I remained
...............................................
strangely suspended, as if Madame Edwarda and I were
...............................................
losing ourselves on a night of wind, alone together at the
...............................................
edge of the ocean.
............................................... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . the mirrors
I heard another voice, coming from a strong and beautiful woman dressed in respectable clothes. ‘Come my children,’ she said in a masculine voice, ‘it’s time you went upstairs’. The sous-madame took my money and I rose and
that covered the walls of our room from floor to ceiling, and from which the ceiling itself was made, multiplied the image of our animal coupling, and at the slightest movement our pounding hearts were opened to the void into which we disappeared in the infinity of our reflections.
followed Madame Edwarda, whose tranquil nudity guided me across the room. Yet this simple passage between
Pleasure, finally, shattered us. Rising from the bed, we
densely packed tables of girls and clients, this vulgar rite of
looked at each other gravely. Madame Edwarda held me
‘The Lady Ascending’ followed by the man who will make
spellbound: I had never seen a prettier girl − nor one more
love to her, took on for me, at that moment, nothing less
naked. Without taking her eyes off me, she took a pair of
than a hallucinatory solemnity. The click of Madame
white silk stockings out of a bottom drawer, sat on the edge
Edwarda’s spiked heels on the tiled floor; the swaying of
of the bed and slowly pulled them on. But the delight at
her long, obscene body; the acrid odour of an aroused
being naked took hold of her again: she parted her legs and
woman in my nostrils, issuing from that pale body . . .
offered herself to me, and the acrid nudity of our bodies
Madame Edwarda went ahead of me . . . rising into the
pushed us to the same exhaustion of hearts. She put on a
clouds. The room’s noisy indifference to her happiness, to
white bolero and concealed her nakedness beneath a
the measured gravity of her step, was both a royal
domino; pulled the hood of the domino over her head, and
consecration and a flowering festival: death itself was
hid her face behind a black mask lined with a beard of lace.
present at the feast in the guise of what is called, in the
Thus arrayed, she sprang away from me:
nakedness of the brothel, ‘the butcher’s cut’.
‘Let’s go!’
‘But . . . are you allowed out?’ I asked stupidly.
II
‘Hurry up, fifi,’ she replied gaily, ‘you can’t go out naked!’
At that hour of the night the streets were deserted. All of a
She tossed me my clothes and helped me to get
sudden, wildly and without a word, Madame Edwarda ran
dressed: but as she did so, out of whim, a sly exchange
on alone. The vast arch of the Porte Saint-Denis loomed
passed now and then between her flesh and mine. We
before her and she stopped. I hadn’t moved a step, and
descended a narrow staircase at the rear of the building,
standing now as still as I was, Madame Edwarda waited for
encountering only the chambermaid. In the sudden
me under the gateway, in the middle of the arch. She was
darkness of the street I was surprised to find Madame
completely and utterly black, as full of anguish as a hole. I
Edwarda fleeing my side, draped in the black of the night.
realized that she was no longer laughing, and that, beneath
She ran off, evading my grasp: it was as if the mask she
the clothes giving her form, she was now absent. All the
wore had turned her into an animal. It wasn’t cold, yet
drunkenness drained out of me: I knew then that She had
suddenly I shivered. Madame Edwarda had become
not lied, that She was GOD. Her presence had the
something alien, and looking up I saw a starry sky, empty
unintelligible simplicity of a stone: in the middle of that
and mad, open darkly over our heads. For a moment I
city, I had the feeling of being in the mountains at night,
thought I was going to stumble − but I kept on walking.
lost in the midst of a lifeless solitude. I felt I was free of Her – alone before this black rock. I trembled, seeing before me what is bleakest in this world. No aspect of the comic horror of my situation escaped me: that the sight of this woman whose appearance petrified me now, the instant before had . . . And the change had occurred the way one slips over. Within Madame Edwarda, grief – a grief without suffering or tears − had turned into an empty silence. And yet, I still wanted to know: this woman, so naked a moment ago, who had gaily called me ‘fifi’ . . . I crossed the street: my anguish told me to stop, but I went on. Silently she slipped away, retreating to the pillar on the left. I was no more than two paces from that monumental gateway: when I passed under the stone arch, the domino
vanished noiselessly. I listened without breathing. I was amazed at being able to grasp it all so clearly. I had known, when Madame Edwarda had run off, that no matter how
As if I had woken her up, she murmured in a lifeless voice: ‘Where am I?’
quickly, she must have ran under the arch; and, when she stopped, that she had been suspended in a sort of trance,
Desperately, I pointed to the empty sky above us. She
far beyond the possibility of laughter. But I could no longer
looked up, and for a moment she stood still, her eyes vague
see her. A deathly darkness descended from the vault.
under the mask, lost in the field of stars. I supported her
Without giving it a moment’s thought, I ‘knew’ that a
gently, and her two hands clutched the domino in a sickly
season of agony had begun for me. I accepted it, I wanted
manner. She began to shake convulsively. She was
to suffer − to go further, to go, even though I should be
suffering − I thought she was crying, but it was as if the
struck down, to the ‘void’ itself. I knew, I wanted to know,
world and her anguish were being strangled within her,
lusting for her secret, without doubting for an instant that
unable to melt into sobs. Gripped by a strange disgust, she
it was death’s kingdom.
pushed me away: then, suddenly demented, she lurched forward, stopped short, threw her cloak up, flashed her
Groaning beneath the vault, terror overcame me, then I laughed:
buttocks with a quick slap of her arse, then came back and threw herself at me. A gale of savagery rose within her:
‘The only man to pass the nothingness of this arch!’
raging, she struck me in the face − struck me with
I trembled at the thought that she might run away,
clenched fists, carried away by an insane brawling. I
disappear forever. And I trembled at my calm acceptance,
stumbled and fell under her blows, and she fled into the
even in my imagination, that I would become mad. I leaped
night.
forward, circling the pillar. Just as quickly I circled the pillar on the right: she had disappeared, but I couldn’t
I was not yet on my feet, still groping on my knees,
believe it. I was left crushed before the door, and was just
when she returned. She raged in a rasping, impossible
sinking into despair when, on the other side of the
voice, yelling at the sky, her arms flailing the air in horror:
boulevard, I caught sight of the domino hidden in the shadows. Madame Edwarda was standing straight, yet still
‘I’m suffocating!’ she screamed. ‘But you, you fake priest, I SHIT ON YOU . . .
senseless, before a café terrace closed for the night. I crept
‘The broken voice ended in a sort of death rattle, her
towards her: she seemed out of her mind, a creature from
outstretched hands reached out to grab my throat − and
another world, and, in those streets, less than a phantom,
she collapsed.
less than a lingering mist. She withdrew softly before me until she stumbled into a table on the empty terrace.
Like an earthworm cut by a spade, she writhed on the ground, shaken by breathless spasms. I bent over her and
tore the lace from the mask; she had bitten it off and was
III
tearing at it now with her teeth. Her thrashing had left her naked to her bush: her nudity now had the absence of
The consciousness of this wound, when, during that night,
meaning − and at the same time the excess of meaning − of
I knelt down before Madame Edwarda, was no less clear
a death shroud. Strangest of all − and the most anguishing
nor less petrifying than it is now, in the hour when I write.
to me − was the silence which enclosed Madame Edwarda:
Her suffering was buried within me like the truth of an
no further communication of her suffering was possible,
arrow: I knew that she had pierced my heart, and that
and I let myself be absorbed into this absence of expression
death would follow. As I waited for nothingness, everything
− into this night of the heart that was no less of a desert
that continued to exist appeared as nothing more than the
nor less hostile than the empty void of the sky. The fish-like
dross over which my life lingers in vain. Confronted by so
flopping of her pale body, the primitive rage expressed on
black a silence, something leaped in the depths of my
her haggard face, burned the life in me until it was nothing
despair: the contortions of Madame Edwarda tore me out of
more than ashes, breaking it down till there was only
myself and flung me into a black beyond − mercilessly, the
disgust.
way one hands a condemned man over to the executioner.
(Let me explain myself. It is useless to dismiss it as
When, after an interminable wait, a man condemned to
ironic when I say of Madame Edwarda that she is GOD; but
death arrives in broad daylight at the very spot where the
to say that GOD is a public prostitute and mad − this makes
execution will be carried out, and he observes the
no sense at all. Strictly speaking, I’m happy for my sorrow
preparations, then his heart beats fit to bursting in his
to be an object of laughter: I will only be understood by
chest, and on his shrunken horizon each object, each face,
someone whose heart is wounded by an incurable wound,
takes on a weight of meaning that helps to tighten the
one that nothing, ever, will cure him of . . . And what man
noose from which there is no longer the time to escape.
who is wounded thus would ever consent to ‘dying’ of any
When I saw Madame Edwarda writhing on the ground, I
other wound?)
entered into a similar state of absorption, but the change that occurred within me did not enclose me: the horizon before which Madame Edwarda’s attack placed me was too elusive, like the object of my anguish; torn apart and broken down, I nevertheless felt a certain power stir within me − on the condition that, falling prey to the same sickness, I would despise myself. The vertiginous fall in which I had lost myself had opened onto a field of indifference; I no longer had either worries or desires, and
at the point I had reached, the parched ecstasy of my fever rose from the utter impossibility of halting my fall.
For a long while we remained sitting in silence, Madame Edwarda, the driver and I, motionless in our seats, as though the taxi were moving forward.
(Since it is necessary to lay myself bare here, it would
At last Edwarda spoke to me:
be deceiving to play with words, to borrow the clumsiness
‘Tell him to take us to Les Halles.’
of phrases. If no-one strips back what I say to its naked
I repeated her directions to the driver and we set off.
state, removing the dress and form, I shall have written in
He took us through dimly-lit streets. Calmly and slowly,
vain. It’s just as well, as I’ve already said, that my effort is
Madame Edwarda removed the lace of her domino, which
hopeless, or the light that dazzles me − which strikes me −
slipped to the floor of the taxi; she no longer had the mask
would only have blinded my eyes. Madame Edwarda is not
on, and she now removed the bolero, murmuring to herself
the phantom of a dream; the sweat of her body soaked my
in a low voice:
handkerchief: and to the point where, led by her, I arrived, I would like, in my turn, to lead you. This book has its secret: I cannot reveal it, but it is far from all words.) The crisis finally subsided. Her convulsions continued for a while, but they had no more fury: her breathing
‘Naked as a beast.’ She rapped on the glass partition to stop the taxi and got out. She walked round to the driver’s window, close enough to touch him, and said in a deadpan voice: ‘You see, I’m stark naked . . . Come.’
returned to normal, her features relaxed, and she was no
Without moving, the driver regarded this beast:
longer hideous. At the end of my strength, I lay down on
standing back, she raised her leg to show him her gash.
the street beside her for a while, covering her with my
Without a word and without hurrying, the man stepped out
jacket. She was not heavy, and I decided to carry her; a taxi
of his car. He was large and thick-set. Madame Edwarda
stand on the boulevard was not far away. She lay
wrapped herself around him, clamped her mouth over his,
motionless in my arms the whole way. The journey took me
and with one hand fumbled in his trousers. Unloosening
a while, however, and I had to pause and rest three times;
the belt, she pulled them down to his ankles and said:
nevertheless, she slowly came back to life, and by the time
‘Come into the car.’
we reached the stand she wanted to stand up. She took a step and swayed. I held her up, and supported by me she
He came and sat next to me on the back seat. Getting in
got into the taxi.
behind, she mounted the driver, slowly and sensuously,
In a weak voice she murmured:
and slipped him inside her with her hand. I remained still,
‘Not yet . . . tell him to wait.’
watching; her movements were deliberate and subtle, and
I asked the driver not to move; then, almost out of my
she visibly gained a heightened pleasure from them. The
mind with weariness, I climbed in and slumped down next
driver responded, heaving with all the brute strength of his
to her.
body. Born of the naked intimacy of these two beings, little
by little their embrace reached that point of excess where
me with the exhausting sensation of witnessing a miracle.
the heart fails. The driver fell back, panting, and I turned
My own distress and fever seemed paltry in comparison −
on the overhead light in the taxi. Madame Edwarda was
yet that was all I had, the only emotions within me that
sitting upright astride the worker, her head thrown back,
could respond to the ecstasy of the one who, in the depths
her hair hanging down her back. Supporting her by the
of an icy silence, I called ‘my heart’.
nape of her neck, I looked into her blank eyes. She pressed
She was seized by some final shudders, but gently, and
against the hand that held her, and the tension thickened
her sweat-covered body finally relaxed. In the back of the
her moan. For an instant her eyes lowered in their sockets,
taxi the driver was sprawled out, drained. I still held
and she seemed to be at ease. Then she saw me: from her
Madame Edwarda by her neck: the cock slipped out and I
stare, at that moment, I knew that she was coming back
helped her to lie down, wiping the sweat from her body. Her
from the realm of the impossible, and I felt, at the very
eyes dead, she let me do as I please. I had switched off the
bottom of her, a vertiginous fixed point. From its source in
light in the taxi, and she was half asleep now, like a child.
the root, the sap that was rising through her sprang out in
The same drowsiness must have come over us, Madame
her tears − tears that ran streaming from her eyes. Love, in
Edwarda, the driver and me.
those eyes, was dead; only a cold morning dawned in them, a transparency in which I read death. Everything was
(Continue? I meant to, but now I don’t care. I’ve lost
bound together in that dreaming stare: the naked bodies,
interest. I speak of what oppresses me at the moment of
the fingers that prised open her flesh, my anguish, and the
writing: will everything I’ve written seem absurd, or might it
memory of saliva on lips − nothing did not contribute to
make some kind of sense? I’ve made myself sick thinking
this blind slipping into death.
about it. I wake up in the morning the same way millions of others do, men and women, children and old men − their
Madame Edwarda’s orgasm − a fountain of living water,
slumbers dispelled forever . . . Myself and these millions,
flowing through her till it broke her heart – was strangely
does our awakening have a meaning? Perhaps a hidden
prolonged: that stream of sensual delight did not cease to
meaning? Hidden, obviously! But if nothing has any
glorify her being, make her nakedness more naked, or her
meaning, I’ve written in vain, and I’ll make my retreat with
lewdness more shameful. Her body, her ecstatic face, was
the help of sly tricks. I could let my grip go, of course, and
abandoned to an unspeakable cooing, and, in the midst of
sell myself to the absence of meaning: but that, for me −
her sweetness, there broke a twisted smile: she was there
and not the shadow of hope − is the executioner who will
with me in the parched depths of my soul, and from the
torture and kill me. But what if there is meaning? Certainly
depths of my sorrow I felt the torrent of her joy released.
I know nothing of it today. And tomorrow? What do I know
Yet my anguish refused the pleasure for which I should
of tomorrow! I cannot conceive of a meaning other than
have yearned: Madame Edwarda’s agonising pleasure filled
‘my’ own torture, and as for that − I know it well already!
But for now, at this moment, there is only nonsense, the absence of meaning. Monsieur Nonsense is writing, and he understands that he is mad: how appalling! But his madness, this nonsense − how ‘serious’, all of a sudden, it has become! Might that, precisely, be ‘meaning’? (No, Hegel has nothing to do with the ‘apotheosis’ of a mad woman.) My life has meaning only on condition that it is lacking one: but let me be mad! Let him understand me who can, let him understand me who is dying . . . Being is there, not knowing why it is, and left trembling in the cold; the immensity of the night surrounds it, and it is there precisely in order . . . ‘not to know’. But GOD? What have you to say, Monsieur Rhetorician, and you, Monsieur Believer? Would GOD, at least, know? GOD, if he ‘knew’, would be a pig.* O Lord (I call to you, in my distress, from ‘my heart’) deliver me, make them blind! The narrative, should I continue with it?) I’ve finished. From out of the slumber which, for a short time, left us asleep in the back of the taxi, I was the first to awaken, sick . . . The rest is irony, the long wait for death . . . − Madame Edwarda (1941)
*
I said: ‘GOD, if he ‘knew’, would be a pig’. He (I suppose, at that moment, he
would be unwashed, his hair unkempt) who would grasp this idea to its end − what would be human about him? Beyond everything . . . further, and further still . . . HIMSELF, in ecstasy above the void. And now? I tremble . . .
− Hans Bellmer, Madame Edwarda (1966)
NOTE Madame Edwarda was written by Georges Bataille in September 1941, during the darkest days of the Occupation of Paris, and appeared at the end of that year, under the pseudonym of Pierre Angélique, in an underground edition published by Éditions Solitaire. As a precautionary measure it was back-dated to 1937. Following the Liberation a second edition was issued by the same publisher in 1945, again backdated to 1942, and illustrated with thirty-one engravings attributed to Jean Perdu, a pseudonym for Jean Fautrier. A third edition, published by Jean-Jacques Pauvert, appeared in 1956 under the same pseudonym, to which Bataille appended a preface in his own name. In 1966, four years after his death, a fourth edition, also published by Pauvert, and accompanied by twelve engravings by Hans Bellmer, finally appeared under Bataille’s own name. On its first publication the book was reviewed by Maurice Blanchot, who called it ‘the most beautiful narrative of our time’. Bataille himself called Madame Edwarda the ‘lubricious key’ to his war writings, and his return to it late in his life suggests the importance he accorded it in his oeuvre. It is possible to see in the character of Madame Edwarda a
− Eugène Atget, Porte Saint-Denis (c. 1920)
composite figure in which Bataille brought together several women dear to him: Violette, a young prostitute with whom he had fallen in love in 1931, and whose release from her brothel he had tried, in vain, to purchase; Laure, the dark sovereign who had reigned over his pre-war years, and who had died of tuberculosis in 1938; Angela of Foligno, the thirteenth-century Italian mystic whose ecstatic account of the theopathic state informed so much of Bataille’s vocabulary here; and Madeleine, an ecstatic at the Salpêtrière to whom the psychologist Pierre Janet, Bataille’s one-time collaborator before the war, had
dedicated his most famous study, De l’angoisse à l’extase. When Bataille came to write a preface to his narrative, however, some fifteen years after its first publication, it was to a famous passage in the preface to Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes that he turned for his epigraph. Beyond the particularity of its human
elements,
the
shared
language
of
its
textual
antecedents, it is the figure of consciousness Hegel describes in this passage that Bataille sought to embody in the character of Madame Edwarda: a figure which, in Hegel’s words, ‘attains its truth only when it finds itself in absolute laceration’, when the life of the spirit ‘contemplates the negativity of death face to face and dwells with it’.
Back cover: ‘The Sorcerer’, c. 13,000 B.C. Rock painting and engraving. Caverne des Trois Frères, Montesquieu-Avantès, Ariège.
