Archive for the ‘Bataille, Georges’ Category
A promo book trailer for The Dead Man by Georges Bataille
November 23, 2020Ritual of Filth: Georges Bataille’s The Dead Man (Translated into English by R J Dent) – a review by Tom Bland
June 22, 2020RITUAL 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’s translation of Georges Bataille’s Le Mort
May 16, 2020Poet, novelist and translator R J Dent discusses aspects of his new translation of one of Georges Bataille’s neglected works:
“In my new English translation of Georges Bataille’s The Dead Man, there is a three-page afterword by Bataille, explaining the genesis of his story. In that afterword, Bataille writes of a plane crash he went to investigate:
‘I remember one day hearing an aeroplane whose engine was in trouble.
After a series of splutterings faded into the near distance, there was a heavy, percussive shock. I got on my bicycle and pedalled in the direction of the crash. It took me a while to find the crash site.
It was burning in the centre of a large apple orchard. Trees near to the plane had been scorched black. Three, maybe four, bodies flung from the wrecked plane, lay dead on the grass.
It was a German plane, probably shot down by an English fighter somewhere over the Seine Valley, which was only a short distance away from where I was staying, which was why it had managed to get to the orchard before crashing.
A dead German airman…’
Georges Bataille’s crashed plane anecdote wouldn’t be out of place in one of J.G. Ballard’s books; it has the same detached and dispassionate tone and style. It was clearly a defining moment for Bataille, and its depiction of the horror of violent death in the midst of everyday calm is the same tone (and the same theme) that infuses The Dead Man.”
The Dead Man
Author: Georges Bataille
Translator: R J Dent
Language: English
Pages: 36
Format: A5
Published May 2020
Price: £3.75
The Dead Man by Georges Bataille
Originally published in 1967 as Le Mort by Jean-Jacques Pauvert
Translated into English by R J Dent
Translation Copyright © R J Dent (2020)
Cover Art by Alexander Adams
Image © Alexander Adams
https://www.alexanderadams.art/
Published by Ragged Lion Press in an edition of 100 copies
Georges Bataille’s The Dead Man translated into modern English by R J Dent
May 9, 2020R J Dent’s brand-new modern English translation of Georges Bataille’s The Dead Man, originally published in France in 1967, is now available in modern accessible English from Ragged Lion Press.
Georges Bataille’s The Dead Man, originally published as Le Mort, is the story of Marie, a woman who after witnessing the sudden death of her lover, Edouard, wanders naked and grieving through the night streets of a French town, sinking deeper and deeper into depravity as she seeks to escape the agony of loss…
R J Dent’s brand-new version of The Dead Man is the first twenty-first century modern English translation of Georges Bataille’s classic tale of devotion, depravity and damnation…
Product details:
Title: The Dead Man (Le Mort)
Author: Georges Bataille
Translator: R J Dent
Language: English
Pages: 36
Format: A5
Published May 2020
Price: £3.75
The Dead Man by Georges Bataille
Translated into English by R J Dent
Translation Copyright © R J Dent (2020)
Cover Art by Alexander Adams
https://www.alexanderadams.art/
Printed by Ragged Lion Press in an edition of 100 copies
Georges Bataille
November 20, 2015
Georges Bataille (10 September 1897 – 9 July 1962) was a French intellectual and writer working in literature, philosophy, and the history of art. His writings included novels, essays and poetry. His subjects included eroticism, mysticism and transgression.
His fiction includes:
Story of the Eye:
Story of the Eye (L’histoire de l’oeil) is a 1928 short novel that details the increasingly bizarre sexual perversions of a pair of teenage lovers. It is narrated by an unnamed young man looking back on his exploits.
L’Abbé C:
L’Abbé C (1950) is a work of dark eroticism, centred on the relationship between two twentieth century brothers in a small French village, one of whom is a Catholic parish priest, while the other is a libertine. The novel explores issues of split subjectivity, existential angst and bad faith.
Blue of Noon:
Blue of Noon (Le Bleu du Ciel) is a blackly compelling account of depravity and violence. It is an erotic novella in which the narrator travels from city to city in a surreal nightmare, experiencing squalor, sadism and drunken encounters that culminate in incest and necrophilia. Bataille completed the work in 1935, but it was not published until 1957.
My Mother, Madame Edwarda, The Dead Man:
My Mother is a frank and intense depiction of a young man’s sexual initiation and corruption by his mother, where the profane becomes sacred, and intense experience is shown as the only way to transcend the boundaries of society and morality. Madame Edwarda is the story of a prostitute who calls herself God, and The Dead Man, published in 1964 after Bataille’s death, is a startling short tale of cruelty and desire.
His non-fiction includes:
Eroticism:
Eroticism is a collection of essays on taboo and sacrifice, transgression and language, death and sensuality. Bataille examines these themes with an original, often startling perspective. He challenges any single discourse on the erotic. The scope of his inquiry ranges from Emily Bronte to Sade, from St. Therese to Claude Levi-Strauss and Dr. Kinsey; and his subjects include prostitution, mythical ecstasy, cruelty, desire and sexuality.
Literature and Evil:
Literature and Evil is an extraordinary 1957 collection of essays, which begins with Bataille’s assertion that ‘Literature is not innocent.’ Bataille argues that only by acknowledging literature’s complicity with the knowledge of evil can literature communicate fully and intensely. The literary profiles of eight authors and their work, including Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal and the writings of Sade, Kafka and Sartre, explore subjects such as violence, eroticism, childhood, myth and transgression.
Georges Bataille’s books are available at:
Details of R J Dent’s work is available at:
Website: http://www.rjdent.com/
Blog: https://rjdent.wordpress.com/
twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/RJDent
facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/R-J-Dent/344369095423?v=wall
Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/user/rjdent69?feature=mhum#p/a/u/0/CmnYHWJqQK4
Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/R.-J.-Dent/e/B0034Q3RD4/ref=cm_sw_r_fa_nty_author_2gf4mb19VD5NN
R J Dent 