RITUAL OF FILTH
A REVIEW OF GEORGES BATAILLE’S THE DEAD MAN (RAGGED LION PRESS, 2020)
by Tom Bland
RJ Dent’s masterful translation of Georges Bataille’s The Dead Man opens the work to the English speaking world. The work is essentially about the explosive lust that arises from grief: it may seem alien to connect the two, but psychoanalysis has often proposed a correlation between eroticism and mourning. I once read a case-study of a woman who masturbated for two days after she lost her father, which made me think of Bataille’s My Mother, where the main character masturbates while standing over the corpse of his mother in the funeral parlour.
In the opening of The Dead Man:
When Edouard fell back back dead, a vast emptiness opened up inside Marie. A prolonged shudder went through her, and lifted her up like an angel.
Marie seduces a rich Dwarf (with the title of Count) entangling him in the sexuality that erupts out of the “shudder”:
What Marie saw in the Dwarf’s eyes was the insistence of death.
…
On unsteady legs, she trembled.
Staring at the [Dwarf], she backed away.
Without warning, she vomited.
…
She looked at the pool of vomit in front of her.
Her torn and ripped coat was barely covering her body.
The book becomes more extreme as Marie’s world falls apart. As her life twists out of shape so does her libido, as the loss manifests as pure unadulterated desire like the cocaine only Kate Moss or Quentin Tarantino can afford. Marie needs to fuck but not the normal kind of fucking; her body explodes in the spontaneous acts of pissing, shitting, vomiting, which rip apart the confines of her life. The Dwarf has an erection throughout, and he is not the only one.
Marie went wild. She bared her teeth and bit down on the [Dwarf’s] cock, hard.
Pierrot dragged Marie off the [Dwarf]. He held her by the wrists, dragging her.
…
The [Dwarf] guided Pierrot’s cock into Marie…
Bataille describes everything in exquisite detail as if writing the notes for a case study he is going to submit to a psychoanalytic journal but he has yet to obscure the sexuality with technical terms such as the id, “the seething cauldron of excitation” [Freud].
“Stop staring at me,” Marie said, “or I’ll piss on you…”
She clambered onto the table and squatted.
“If you do, you’ll get me even more excited,” the [Dwarf] said.
…
Marie pissed on him.
The [Dwarf] received the stream of piss full in the face as Pierrot vigorously wanked his big cock.
RJ Dent’s translation of Bataille’s neglected work is superb and opens and lays bare the philosophical backbone of the work while remaining faithful to Bataille’s erotic story-telling. It is quite obvious that R J Dent is a poet and novelist himself by the way he opens up the intensity and the beauty of the language.
The Dead Man is published by Ragged Lion Press in a limited edition.
It is available at: https://www.raggedlionpress.co.uk/product-page/the-dead-man-georges-bataille-translated-by-r-j-dent
R J Dent’s books and information on current projects can be found at: www.rjdent.com
Tom Bland’s The Death of the Clown came out with Bad Betty Press in 2018, and his next book, Camp Fear, will be out in 2021. He trained in psychotherapy and dream analysis at SOPH/Middlesex University, and studied live art at UEL. He edits the online magazine, Spontaneous Poetics.
https://badbettypress.com/product/the-death-of-a-clown-tom-bland/
https://www.spontaneouspoetics.co.uk
Ritual of Filth: A Review of Georges Bataille’s The Dead Man (translated into modern English by R J Dent) – by Tom Bland – June 2020
R J Dent 