Alejandra Pizarnik, Georges Bataille, and the Literature of Evil

Alejandra Pizarnik, Georges Bataille, and the Literature of Evil
Author(s): Melanie Nicholson

Source: Latin American Literary Review, Vol. 27, No. 54 (Jul. - Dec., 1999), pp. 5-22
Published by: Latin American Literary Review
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20119809
Accessed: 25-09-2016 23:23 UTC
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted
digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about
JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms
Latin American Literary Review is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to
Latin American Literary Review
This content downloaded from 144.82.108.120 on Sun, 25 Sep 2016 23:23:07 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
ALEJANDRA PIZARNIK, GEORGES BATAILLE,
AND THE LITERATURE OF EVIL
MELANIE NICHOLSON
Esta es ahora mi vida: mesurarme, temblar

ante cada voz, templar las palabras apelando
a todo lo que de nefasto y maldito he o?do y
le?do en materia de formas de seducci?n.
A. Pizarnik, "Palabras"1
Mais il s'agit de faire l'?me monstrueuse...
A. Rimbaud, Letter to M. D?meny
Bataille and the Meaning of Evil

"Literature is not innocent," claims the French writer Georges Bataille
in the preface to his 1957 book Literature and Evil. "It is guilty and should
admititself so."2 He explains the premise of his study as follows: "Literature
is either the essential or nothing. I believe that the Evil?an acute form of
evil?which it expresses, has a sovereign value for us. But this concept does
not exclude morality: on the contrary, it demands a 'hypermorality'" (viiii).
Bataille's book is a series of essays on the work of Emily Bront?, Charles
Baudelaire, William Blake, the Marquis de Sade, and Jean Genet, among
others. To this company I would add Alejandra Pizarnik (1936-1972), the
Argentine poet whose work has received increasing international critical
attention and respect. Pizarnik's work is unrelentingly dark, death-focused,
violent, and, in some cases, obscene. Rhetorically, Pizarnik seems always to
be pushing toward precipitous edges, desperately seeking that mot juste
capable of rendering extreme states of subjectivity. In fact, it is this concern
with what, from a psychological point of view, might be termed "abnormal"

or "perverse" states of consciousness?and with the language that strives to
correspond to such states?that places Pizarnik alongside Bataille's group

of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writers. Her poetry is "guilty" to
the degree that it challenges norms of conventional morality and pushes

irremediably across borders into forbidden and dangerous zones. And this,
Bataille would argue, is exactly what literature should do.
How, then, does Pizarnik's work merit association with the term evil,
in the sense Bataille gives the term, and how would the acceptance of
such an epithet modify the way in which we read her? These are the
questions I propose to address in the following pages. After first examining
Bataille's rather complex notion of evil in literature, I will consider

fragments from Pizarnik's work?both lyric poems and prose pieces?in
order to determine how she might fit into the strange company of Bataille's
subjects.
Critical assessment of Pizarnik's poetry, it seems to me, has failed to
recognize this important connection. A vast majority of essays published to
date on her work emphasize, understandably, Pizarnik' s preoccupation with
language (i.e., the power and the limits of the poetic word) and with death
and its corollary, silence. Indeed, these are the concerns to which she returns
with nothing less than obsessive regularity. Both preoccupations point to
Pizarnik's interest in the experiencia l?mite, the point beyond which all
meaning disappears. Pizarnik's poetic speaker tells us that "la rebeli?n

consiste en mirar una rosa / hasta pulverizarse los ojos" {Obras 80). This
rebellion, which mocks the classical esthetic appreciation of the rose by
carrying it to an extreme of self-disintegration, points to Bataille' s own call
to revolution, in which the bourgeois sense of beauty (and morality) is
overturned. In brief, I do not wish to dispute the assessment most critics have
made of Pizarnik's work, but rather to suggest that by considering her body
of poetry and poetic prose under the rubric of "the literature of evil," we
might find an integrative critical approach that will take account of all the
prominent concerns of her writing: not only language and death/silence, but
also childhood, sexuality, obscenity, violence, and suicide.3
Pizarnik's work stands on its own, I believe, as sufficient testimony to
the parallels between her thinking and that of Bataille with regard to
questions of evil as a value in literature. However, anecdotal evidence of a
personal relationship between the two writers seems appropriate to present
here, if for no other reason than to underscore the vital intellectual presence
that Bataille represented for the young poet from Buenos Aires. Pizarnik
resided in Paris from 1960 to 1964, a period of intense literary activity for
her, both in terms of her own production and of her circle of acquaintances.
She crossed paths with Bataille on several occasions, most often in the
renowned Caf? Flore, and conversed with him on the passions they both
shared?most notably, literature and art. Although there appears to be no
written record of her impression of Bataille as a person, we do know that
during her years in Paris Pizarnik became an avid reader of his writings. In
an undated letter to Ivonne Bordelois, Pizarnik speaks of her enthusiasm for
the work of Karen Blixen, then adds: "Pero mi lectura de fondo sigue siendo
Georges Bataille" (qtd. in Bordelois 242).

Years later, when Pizarnik returned to Paris in what turned out to be an
abortive attempt to relive the vital and transformative experience of her first
journey there, she reported to friends the desperate sense of disillusion and
loss she felt. Paris, in those brief five years between 1964 and 1969, had been
spoiled for her: it had become Americanized and commercialized, and most
of her literary and artistic companions had gone elsewhere or were dead.
Pizarnik's biographer, Cristina Pina, sums up Pizarnik's reaction to this

second experience of Paris with these words: "Porque tanto como Elias
Pizarnik, el padre real, hab?a muerto en la patria adoptiva, Georges B ataille?
cuyos ojos azules duplicaban, en la patria literaria, los ojos del padre
?ntimamente amado y rechazado, permiti?ndole a Alejandra designarlo su
padre en el reino de la creaci?n?hab?a muerto en Par?s" (210).
Who was this man that had become, at the end of his life, a "living
fetish" for Alejandra Pizarnik?4 Georges Bataille (1897-1962) was, by the
decade of the 50s, a prominent figure of the French intellectual avant
garde.5 Although he was employed for twenty years (1922-1942) at the
Biblioth?que Nationale (1922-1942), Bataille was, as one critic wryly
observes, "far from being a calm and orderly librarian" (Stoekl x). Early in
his career he wrote a book called W. C., but burned the manuscript before it
could be published, claiming that it was a book "violently opposed to all
dignity" (qtd. in Stoekl x). He went on to write pornographic novels such as
The Story of the Eye (1928), and was instrumental in the founding of avant
garde journals. In 1935, Bataille helped to found a group called Contre

Attaque that was dedicated to political change through agitation and even
violence. From the twenties until his death in 1962, he wrote and published
numerous essays on art, literature, and politics, taking a strikingly heterodox
stance on virtually every issue he addressed. In 1957, Bataille published La
Litt?rature et le Mal as well as U Erotisme (translated as Death and

Sensuality).
By 1960, the year of Pizarnik's arrival in Paris, Bataille had gained a
following as an important member of the intellectual underground, although
his writings (still largely untranslated at that point) had not begun to receive
the international attention they now command.6 We can only surmise the
degree to which Pizarnik subscribed personally to the notions of revolution,
violence, sexuality, and evil put forth in those texts. The evidence we can
glean from her own poetic texts, as I intend to show here, suggests certain
strong affinities.
Evil is a slippery term, and nowhere does Bataille provide us with a
concise and workable definition. The various permutations of the concept
emerge with fair consistency, however, as one examines his work. Clearly,
Bataille means to take the term beyond its common denotations of moral
depravity and wickedness; in fact, his intention in examining the works of

Sade, Blake, and others is to raise these texts, and the spirit behind them, to
a plane of "hypermorality." How did he arrive at these unconventional

conclusions about literature and evil? Bataille was committed, first and
foremost, to revolution. His revolt was a socialist one: he wished to
participate in bringing down what he saw as the "crippled existence" of
modern bourgeois life {Visions 225). This degraded existence suffered
everywhere from what Bataille termed homogeneity: the sterile, repetitive
production of forms of knowledge or social structures that suffocated

creative life. All that Bataille came to stand for might be condensed into the
concept of homogeneity's dialectical opposite, heterogeneity, which is

conceived as a category of knowledge and experience including dreams and
myth?the contents of the unconscious?as well as the realms of religion

and magic. All of this could be subsumed under the rubric of "the sacred,"
a key concept in many anthropological and philosophical discourses of his
day. But Bataille's thinking is heterodox in this arena as well, in that he
insists on the relative significance of those forms of the sacred that are
traditionally considered "impure":
Included are the waste products of the human body and

certain analogous matter (trash, vermin, etc.); the parts of
the body; persons, words, or acts having a suggestive erotic
value; the various unconscious processes such as dreams or
neuroses; the numerous elements or social forms that

homogeneous society is powerless to assimilate: mobs, the
warrior, aristocratic and impoverished classes, different
types of violent individuals or at least those who refuse the
rule (madmen, leaders, poets, etc.)... . {Visions 142)

Evil, then?obscenity of language and image, perverse sexuality, violence
perpetrated against others, self-mutilation, suicide, blasphemy, fascination
with death and material decomposition in its most morbid and putrefying
aspects?can be taken as a valuable element of human experience and

expression insofar as it serves to excavate "the fetid ditch of bourgeois
culture" (Visions 43). In an allusion to the image of a eye slit open in Luis
Bunuel's film "Le Chien Andalou," Bataille remarks that such images
compel us to understand "to what extent horror becomes fascinating, and
how it alone is brutal enough to break everything else that stifles" (Visions
19). In sum, the breaking of whatever stifles is Bataille's touchstone for
aesthetic judgment. That which produces in us aversion or, in the extreme,
horror, is of "sovereign value" in writing and art. As a literary theorist,
Bataille does not advocate that the writer become a perpetrator of evil in the
world, but rather that he or she represent that evil in order to produce a
certain radical response in the reader. This means pushing written language
beyond all limits of bourgeois acceptability, as well as creating images that
produce shock and disgust, all of which should lead to a r??valuation of the
very notions of "good" and "evil."

Pizarnik's poetry and poetic prose, although it rarely reaches the
degree of horror to which Bataille alludes, is suffused with an atmosphere
of suffering, fear, and a kind of disembodied malevolence. Although

apparent in her earliest collections, La ?ltima inocencia (1956) and Las
aventuras perdidas (1958), these elements come increasingly to dominate
the lyric quality of many of the poems of El infierno musical (1971) and of
her posthumous poetry, collected under the title of Textos de sombra y
?ltimos poemas (1982). The text which most clearly embodies Bataille's
notions of literary evil, however, is La condesa sangrienta (1965), a long
prose piece?part novel, part essay, part poem?that I will consider in more
detail later, as the culmination of Pizarnik's preoccupation with evil in its
erotic incarnation. Initially, however, I would like to discuss Bataille's

notions of evil in relation to the themes of childhood and death as they
correspond to much of Pizarnik's lyric output.
Childhood and Evil

Bataille develops his notions of evil in its relation to childhood in the
initial essay of Literature and Evil, on Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights
(LE 15-31). He comments that the two young protagonists, Heathcliff and
Catherine, "led their wild life, outside the world, in the most elementary
conditions, and it is these conditions which Emily Bront? made tangible?
the basic conditions of poetry, of a spontaneous poetry before which both
children refused to stop" (LE 18). It may strike us immediately that the
speaker of Pizarnik's poems did not find herself "outside the world," in a
wild physical environment such as that of the English moors. In those poems
in which Pizarnik's subject is a child, that child appears rather to be

hermetically enclosed "inside the world." But in either case the child is
painfully?we could say fatally?at odds with the surrounding human
community; she is a "min?scula salvaje" (Obras 218). This state is marked
by wildness, by an elementary violence not yet subject to adult social
constraints. In the long prose poem "Extracci?n de la piedra de locura,"
Pizarnik's speaker ponders the genesis of her own madness. Looking back,
she alludes favorably to "mi roja violencia elemental," and laments losing
that violence as a result of "El haberme prosternado ante el sufrimiento de
los dem?s, el haberme acallado en honor de los dem?s" (Obras 139). She
pleads for a sacred space of silence for this child who has lost something
vital, who is herself lost: "?A qu? hora empez? la desgracia? No quiero
saber. No quiero m?s que un silencio para m? y las que fui, un silencio como
10
la peque?a choza que encuentran en el bosque los ni?os perdidos" (Obras

135). The connection that Bataille draws between the elementary conditions
of the world inhabited by Catherine and Heathcliff and the "basic conditions
of poetry" is reflected in Pizarnik's own defense of the primitive quality of
the poetic voice. "Hablo como en m? se habla," says the speaker of

"Extracci?n"; "No mi voz obstinada en parecer una voz humana sino la otra
que atestigua que no he cesado de morar en el bosque" (Obras 134).

There appears to be a conscious rejection here of what is human, i.e.
of the kind of constrained voice appropriate to human?adult?society.

This rejection goes to the heart of Bataille's characterization of childhood
as "evil":
But society contrasts the free play of innocence with

reason, reason based on the calculations of interest. Society
is governed by its will to survive. It could not survive if
these childish instincts... were allowed to triumph. Social
constraint would have required the young savages to give
up their innocent sovereignty; it would have required them
to comply with those reasonable adult conventions which
are advantageous to the community. (LE 18)

The world of Wuthering Heights, the "spontaneous poetry before which
both children refused to stop," led inexorably to physical death for Catherine
and Heathcliff. Pizarnik's speaker, having survived childhood only by

submitting herself to the metaphorical extraction of the stone of madness,
suffers another kind of death. She ponders the loss in terms of "Haberse
muerto en quien se era y en quien se amaba..." (Obras 135). The spontane

ous child with her primitive voice has at some point been profoundly
compromised: "Perdida por tu propio designio, has renunciado a tu reino por
las cenizas" (Obras 135). Pizarnik seems to affirm, as does Bataille, that the
kingdom of childhood, with its violence and madness, represents a more

authentic existence than the one to which adult society eventually forces
children to submit, or die.
The value placed on childhood as a state of savage innocence is, in

Pizarnik as well as Bataille, a complex one. Thorpe Running observes that
in Pizarnik's work, "That fascination with childhood, of course, becomes
enmeshed with the contradictory aspects of life-death, presence-absence,
which she sees in the child" (53). One of her early lyric poems, "El
despertar," illustrates these contradictions:
Recuerdo mi ni?ez
cuando yo era una anciana
Las flores mor?an en mis manos
porque la danza salvaje de la alegr?a

les destru?a el coraz?n. (Obras 54)
Human time does not follow its rational linear dimension here: the child is
simultaneously an old woman. But the more striking contradiction occurs in
the next three lines. The child's unconstrained dance of joy does not, as we
would expect, reflect or increase the bounty of the natural world. In fact, it
withers the life of the flowers. I suspect that part of the explanation for this
odd dynamic lies in the personification suggested by the image of the

flowers' hearts. The traditional association of flowers with spring, inno
cence, and life in its unspoiled early stages, leads us back to the child herself.
In the same way that the girl is already an old woman, the flowers are already
moribund; metaphorically, it is the child's own heart that is being destroyed.
Bataille speaks in Nietzschean terms of "an instinctive tendency towards
divine intoxication which the rational world of calculation cannot bear. This
tendency is the opposite of Good" (LE 22). Pizarnik's "danza salvaje de la

alegr?a" is surely a manifestation of divine intoxication, and the destruction
toward which it points in this poem reaffirms Bataille' s contention that this
sacred state, instinctive for the child, cannot survive the pressures of
adulthood. He concludes from this that "Death and the instant of divine
intoxication merge when they both oppose those intentions of Good which
are based on rational calculation" (LE 24).

It is important to underscore the fact that Bataille's portrayal of
childhood has nothing to do with an idealized scenario of purity and
passivity. If Heathcliff and Catherine run in the paths of evil, it is because
they oppose (knowingly or unknowingly) the set of values upon which the
adult world is founded. This opposition cannot last: Bataille reiterates in
several passages of his essay the inevitable destruction of the children, their
way of life, their savage love for each other. The principle he draws from this
literary example is that "The road to the kingdom of childhood, governed by

ingenuousness and innocence, is thus regained in the horror of atonement"
(LE 24, his emphasis).

Pizarnik's poetic evocation of childhood, to which critics often allude
without taking note of its complexity, is likewise permeated with a sense of
suffering. If there is nostalgia, it is two-edged: "La hermosura de la infancia
sombr?a, la tristeza imperdonable entre mu?ecas, estatuas, cosas mudas,
favorables al doble mon?logo entre yo y mi antro lujurioso" (Obras 158).
Paradoxically, a sense of the beauty of childhood arises from what is somber
and sad. The child in this passage is not, I am tempted to say, well-adjusted.
She does not commune with the outside world, but rather with her own
"antro lujurioso"?an allusion to the role that sexuality has already begun
to play in this dark scene. The mention of "tristeza imperdonable" here is
indicative of another feature of Pizarnik's allusions to childhood: a bewil
11
12
dered acknowledgement of wrongdoing and of the need for atonement. The

speaker of the passage just cited goes on to say: "Hemos intentado hacernos
perdonar lo que no hicimos, las ofensas fant?sticas, las culpas fantasmas. Por
bruma, por nadie, por sombras, hemos expiado" (Obras 158). This is surely
an expression of Bataille' s "horror of atonement." The implication seems to
be that childhood, as it is portrayed by Bront? and Pizarnik, is a state of being
so at odds with the rigid morality of adult existence that the child is forced
to pay, sometimes with life itself, for "sins" that he or she may not even
comprehend.
Sacred Death
The notion of death arises at every point in the Bataille' s discussion of
childhood in particular, and of evil in general. Death is also, as virtually
every critic has noted, a thematic center of gravity for Pizarnik's work. It is
not my intention in this essay to provide any comprehensive analysis of the
thematics of death for either writer; rather, I wish to focus on one aspect that
I consider indispensable for an understanding of both, that is, the notion of

death?often in its most horrific aspect?as transcendence of the individual
existence. In his seminal book Death and Sensuality: A Study of Eroticism
and the Taboo (1957), Bataille expands upon the commonplace notion that
without death there would be no renewal of life, arguing that "...for us,
discontinuous beings that we are, death means continuity of being" (13). In
this regard, death represents a primary value for art and literature. Bataille' s
essay on Wuthering Heights closes with an examination of the value of death

as the basis for what he calls "true literary emotion":
Death alone?or, at least, the ruin of the isolated individual
in search of happiness in time?introduces that break

without which nothing reaches the state of ecstasy. And
what we thereby regain is always both innocence and the
intoxication of existence. The isolated being loses himself
in something other than himself. What the "other thing"
represents is of no importance. It is still a reality that

transcends the common limitations. So unlimited is it that
it is not even a thing: it is nothing. (LE 26; his emphasis)

Death, then, can play a role in literature almost parallel to that of childhood.
An evocation of either state can call up both primal innocence and
Dionysian intoxication, each of which points to the dissolution of the

individual ego and a return to a state of unity or, in Bataille's terms,
continuity.
Not surprisingly, death in Pizarnik's work is often identified with the
child, who becomes the "peque?a muerta" (OC 79) or, conversely, the
"peque?a asesina" (OC 136). In the prose piece "El sue?o de la muerte o el
lugar de los cuerpos po?ticos," the lyric speaker refers to herself as the
"peque?a difunta en un jard?n de ruinas y de lilas" (OC 140). The image of
the child in a garden, innocence redoubled, is here given a morbid twist,
since both child and garden are dead. Furthermore, the poem seems to echo
Bataille's notion that death is the basis of authentic literary emotion when
it alludes to "[el] lugar en que se hacen los cuerpos po?ticos" as "una cesta
llena de cad?veres de ni?as" (OC 140). This rather hideous image reminds
the reader of Bataille's insistence on the value of representing morbid and
putrefying elements, a value which he attributes to their very capacity to
horrify us, to "break that which stifles" (Visions 19).
The rhetoric of death in Pizarnik never strays far from the horrifying.
If I speak of a "sacred" evocation of death in her work, it is only within the

parameters laid out by Bataille. The individual seeks to maintain his or her
own circumscribed existence, but at the same time?and in varying degrees,
of course?seeks to transcend that limitation. Ecstatic experiences of many
kinds, including the mystic and the erotic, can provide a momentary sense
of transcendence. But only death can assure it. This is why, in his essay on
William Blake, Bataille claims that "What [Blake's words] describe is
ultimately man's compliance with his own laceration, his compliance with
death and the instinct which propels him toward it" (LE 90). Few readers of
Pizarnik's poetry would deny that there is a strong sense of compliance with
her own laceration, so to speak. In certain moments, there is also a hint of
Bataille' s notion of transcendence or continuity. I take as example a passage
from "Extracci?n de la piedra de locura": "T? sabes que nunca sabr?s

defenderte, que s?lo deseas presentarles el trofeo, quiero decir tu cad?ver,
y que se lo coman y se lo beban" (Obras 136). We do not know whom the
speaker addresses here; it is likely that the interlocutor is another aspect of
the speaker herself, as is common in Pizarnik's poetry. Neither do we know
against what force this person must defend herself. What is clear, however,
is that the interlocutor desires first her own death, then the cannibalization
of her body. Bataille, discussing the ritual value of cannibalism, points out
that human flesh eaten in the communion feast following sacrifice is held as
sacred (Death 71). Transgression of the taboo against eating human flesh
carries a religious significance because it points toward a r?int?gration of the
corpse (and the individual, discontinuous life it represents) into the commu
nity. Death is consumed by life.
In another passage from the same poem, Pizarnik's speaker comes

even closer to a direct espousal of the notion of death as transcendence:
"Hundirme en la tierra y que la tierra se cierre sobre m?. ?xtasis innoble"
(Obras 136). The structure of the phrase, in particular the use of the
personalized infinitive "hundirme," marks the statement as a death-wish.
13
14
But here the image is not simply that of a cadaver, but rather that of a body
sinking into the earth, ready to be reabsorbed into the natural world. This
would be, claims the speaker, an experience of ecstasy, a "standing outside
oneself," as the etymology of the term ekstasis would suggest. But finally,
as if to remind herself that this vision carries its share of negativity, the
speaker calls the ecstasy "ignoble." In its wish to protect itself, the ego can
only respond to the death-wish by debasing it. This passage keenly illus
trates the internal conflict of the individual who simultaneously wills both
self-destruction and survival.
A less complex approach to the ecstatic or unitive aspect of death can

be seen in a passage from a later poem: "La noche, de nuevo la noche, la
magistral sapiencia de lo oscuro, el c?lido roce de la muerte, un instante de
?xtasis para m?, heredera de todo jard?n prohibido" (Obras 156). Here,
several of the semantic elements fundamental to Pizarnik's work are
brought together: night, darkness (with its promise of knowledge), death,
the garden, and forbidden zones. Pizarnik, like Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud,
the Comte de Lautr?amont and Antonin Artaud, whose inheritance she
claims, chose to locate herself within the "jard?n prohibido" in a literary as

well as an experiential sense. The knowledge to be gained in this forbidden
garden was a knowledge of absolutes. Poetry, in its most vital sense,

sustained Pizarnik until her death, because she attributed to it the power of
which Bataille speaks:

Poetry alone, which denies and destroys the limitations of
things, can return us to this absence of limitations?in

short, the world is given to us when the image which we
have within us is sacred, because all that is sacred is poetic
and all that is poetic is sacred. (LE 84).
However, when the possibility of crossing the threshold into the absolute by
means of the poetic word seemed to have failed Pizarnik definitively, death
appeared to be the only alternative. It was a lesson well learned from those
she considered her literary forefathers. It is death, in Bataille's sense of a
restoration of continuity, a merging with the absolute, that constitutes the
"instante de ?xtasis" of which Pizarnik wrote. Her suicide, and all the
rhetorical markers in her poetry that pointed toward it, may have been a
desperate response to schizophrenia and depression, but it may also have
been a conscious desire to achieve "that break without which nothing

reaches the state of ecstasy" (LE 26). Bataille states the relationship between
violence, life, and death in unequivocal terms: "In so far as violence casts its
shadow on the being and he sees death 'face to face', life is purely beneficial.
Nothing can destroy it. Death is the condition of its renewal" (LE 29).
Pizarnik's work, though laden with a sense of horror over death's finality for
the individual self, also reveals a poet's grappling with this broader and less
subjective view of death.
Eroticism as Excess, Love as Death

In Bataille's writings, death is inextricably linked to eroticism. This
link is the principle underlying his anthropological study Death and Sensu
ality-, it also provides the philosophical groundwork for many of the essays
of Literature and Evil. He states his argument as follows:
I believe eroticism to be the approval of life, up until death.
Sexuality implies death, not only in the sense in which the

new prolongs and replaces that which has disappeared, but
also in that the life of the being who reproduces himself is
at stake.... The basis of sexual effusion is the negation of
the isolation of the ego, which only experiences ecstasy by
exceeding itself, by surpassing itself in the embrace in

which the being loses its solitude. Whether it is a matter of
pure eroticism (love-passion) or of bodily sensuality, the
intensity increases to the point where destruction, the death
of the being, becomes apparent. What we call vice is based

on this profound implication of death. (LE 16-17)
We have already seen how Pizarnik's work at times touches upon an ecstatic
sense of death, but the convergence with Bataille's thought becomes even
more apparent as we consider her treatment of the erotic.7 My intention here
is to consider the erotic in the broad context of its relationship with violence
and death. In particular, I will examine the imagery of sadism as it appears

in Pizarnik's work, given that this experience of sexuality, perhaps more
clearly than any other, reflects the transgressive possibilities of literature
that fascinated both Bataille and Pizarnik.
As DiAntonio accurately observes, Pizarnik does not approach the

erotic graphically (with the exception of certain texts such as the dramatic
work "Los pose?dos entre lilas" [1982], in which Pizarnik uses obscene
language and gestures to express sexuality in ironic and even ludic terms).
Rather, in her poetry she explores "an extremely sensuous private realm...
a region where the aforementioned love-death polarity fuses" (DiAntonio
51). As a basis for the analysis of this polarity in Pizarnik, I cite the poem
"Exilio" in its entirety:
Esta man?a de saberme ?ngel,

sin edad,
sin muerte en qu? vivirme,
15
16
sin piedad por mi nombre

ni por mis huesos que lloran vagando.
?Y qui?n no tiene un amor?

?Y qui?n no goza entre amapolas?
?Y qui?n no posee un fuego, una muerte,
un miedo, algo horrible,
aunque fuere con plumas,
aunque fuere con sonrisas?

Siniestro delirio amar a una sombra.
La sombra no muere.
Y mi amor s?lo abraza a lo que fluye
como lava del infierno:
una logia callada,

fantasmas en dulce erecci?n,
sacerdotes de espuma,
y sobre todo ?ngeles,
?ngeles bellos como cuchillos
que se elevan en la noche
y devastan la esperanza. (Obras 41)
Absence, violence, desire, and death are the cardinal points of this poem.
The "logia callada" serves as emblem for the sensuous private realm of
which DiAntonio speaks. But the silence of this space is not a sign of inner
peace or communion, but rather of "something horrible" that delineates the
experience of love for the speaker. Phallic allusions, including knives,

"espuma" (which easily becomes "esperma"), and the sweet erection of
ghosts, all point toward the culminating image of the angels who rise in the
night, only to destroy hope. The figure of the angel here suggests innocence
inverted: its beauty is compared to that of knives, the instruments of

laceration. And since the angels are not only object but also subject ("esta
man?a de saberme ?ngel"), the laceration is turned back upon the self. The
hint of masochism in these lines is borne out more concretely in other
passages of Pizarnik's work. In Bataille's terms, both masochism and
sadism can be said to fall under the rubric of erotic evil insofar as they
represent a form of human activity that threatens the survival of the
individual. "Sexual disorder," he goes on to say, "discomposes the coherent
forms which establish us, for ourselves and for others, as defined beings?
it moves them into an infinity which is death" (LE 120-21).
I will focus the remainder of my discussion of erotic evil in Pizarnik's
work on a text that has, perhaps more than any other single piece, fascinated
and perplexed readers and critics.8 La condesa sangrienta9, is a collection
of eleven prose vignettes that serve as meditations on a novel called Erz?bet

B?thory, la Comtesse Sanglante (1963), published in France by the surreal
ist writer Valerie Penrose. B?thory was a sixteenth-century Hungarian
countess condemned for the sexual torture and murder of more than 600
young women, mostly peasants from the surrounding countryside. Not

surprisingly, Bataille refers to the Countess and her deeds in the book that
he was preparing at the time of his death, The Tears of Eros (1961)10.
Pizarnik's text joins the corpus that D. W. Foster calls "a literature of the
horrible," and can be explicated, I propose, by means of Bataille's notions
of evil, particularly as they are developed in his essay on the Marquis de Sade
(LE 103-129).11
We have already considered Bataille's arguments linking sensuality
and death (see above, 16), in particular his claim that sexual effusion leads
to the negation of the individual ego, and that, when carried to extremes, this
negation implies the death?figurative or literal?of the self. Such extremes
are more likely to be reached in forms of sexuality that correlate the

expression of desire with violence. Bataille, explicating Sade, considers the
implications of the limits of the individual human psyche:
There is only one means in his power to escape from these
various limitations?the destruction of a being similar to
ourselves. In this destruction the limitations of our fellow
human beings are denied; we cannot destroy an inert object:
it changes but does not disappear: only a being similar to
ourselves disappears, in death. The violence experienced

by our fellow human beings is concealed from the order of
finite, ultimately useless things. It returns them to immen
sity. (LE 122)

This line of reasoning returns us once again to the notion of death as
transcendence, but what is new here is the death of the other?that is, the
inclusion of murder as a means for crossing ultimate boundaries. Within the
realm of literature, the implication is that distinctions between subject and
object are collapsed: writer, character, and reader share equally in the crime.
Pizarnik touches upon this very phenomenon in a diary entry in which she
reflects upon her rereading of Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment: "Me
duelen los brazos como si hubieran bajado el hacha homicida. Y sufro de un
sufrimiento ajeno pero misteriosamente m?o" (Semblanza 260). This ability

to imagine herself, as reader, implicated in the horrors of a text's violent
crime may explain some of Pizarnik's fascination with Penrose's book on
B?thory. The subject-object fusion, on whatever level it may occur, imparts
a certain power to scenes, written texts, or works of art that would otherwise
merely nauseate the viewer/reader/witness. Sade had the misfortune, says
17
18
Bataille, to live the dream "whose obsession is the soul of philosophy, the
unity of subject and object. The identity is in the transcendence of the
limitations of beings, of the object of desire and the subject which desires"
(LE 125). Although Pizarnik may have lived a dream entirely different from
Sade's, the same obsession surfaces in much of her work.
Reiterative murder?the outcome of extreme sexual torture?is the
only real story-line o? La condesa sangrienta. The narrator informs us of the

number of victims, 650, in the first line of the introduction, and reminds us
of it in the last lines of the final vignette.12 The sheer numbers are reinforced
by the cumulative effect of the descriptions of methods and instruments of
torture?"La virgen de hierro," "Muerte por agua," "La jaula mortal,"

"Torturas cl?sicas." Pizarnik's style, which often relies on an accumulation
of nouns, adjectives, and condensed verbal phrases, emphasizes the repeti
tive, even monotonous, nature of the crimes: "Sus viejas y horribles

sirvientas son figuras silenciosas que traen fuego, cuchillos, agujas, atizadores;
que torturan muchachas, que luego las entierran" (Obras 373). In some
passages, a parallel or anaphoristic structure imbues the descriptions with
the quality of litany: ".. .les aplicaban los atizadores enrojecidos al fuego; les
cortaban los dedos con tijeras o cizallas; les punzaban las llagas; les
practicaban incisiones con navajas..." (378).
The echoes of Sade here are unmistakable. Bataille claims that the
Marquis "only had one occupation in his long life which really absorbed
him?that of enumerating to the point of exhaustion the possibilities of
destroying human beings, of destroying them and of enjoying the thought of
their death and suffering" (LE 115-16). I do not mean to imply any close
analogy between Pizarnik and Sade as writers, mainly because Pizarnik is
twice removed from the crimes being narrated. That is, Pizarnik did not
imagine (or recall) sadistic scenes and write them down; rather, she is
commenting on a text that comments on historical events. Nevertheless, the
literature she chose to produce?in the case of La condesa sangrienta, at

least?does reflect a fascination with the act of writing the sexual crime.
Furthermore, she adopts rhetorical methods that highlight and lyricize the
most horrible aspects of the crime. It is in these terms that I see her writing
as aligned with Sade's?as "guilty" in Bataille's sense of pushing accept

able limits?and therefore as meriting the designation of "literature of evil."
Utilizing the same stylistic device of condensation and repetition,

Pizarnik's narrator clarifies for the reader the expressly sadistic nature of the
countess and her environs: "Resumo: el castillo medieval; la sala de torturas;
la hermosa alucinada riendo desde su maldito ?xtasis provocado por el

sufrimiento ajeno" (379). We recall that "?xtasis" is a term used by Pizarnik
in her lyric poetry, specifically in conjunction with the speaker's own

imagined death. In apparent contrast to this, ecstasy for the countess is
achieved by witnessing the suffering of others. Pizarnik insists, throughout
this text, on the visual aspect of this enjoyment of "sufrimiento ajeno." The
countess is primarily a voyeur: "Si el acto sexual implica una suerte de

muerte, Erz?bet B?thory necesitaba de la muerte visible, elemental, grosera,
para poder, a su vez, morir de esa muerte figurada que viene a ser el
orgasmo" (380). In this regard, the sadistic act requires a separation of the
object (victim) from the subject (torturer/voyeur). The moment of ecstasy?
or, as Bataille would say, the temporary loss of the discontinuity represented
by the ego?occurs at a physical distance from the being who experiences
death.
There are several passages in this text, however, that signal a more
physical and literal fusion of desiring subject and desired object. "La jaula
mortal" contains a description of a reiterated scene in which the countess's
servant would enclose the victim in a small, suspended cage into which
sharp points protruded. The servant would then poke the girl with a red-hot
iron, causing her to impale herself on the steel points. The countess, seated
impassively below, would be covered with the victim's blood?a kind of
perverse baptism. The narrator finalizes the scene with these words: "Han
[sic] habido dos metamorfosis: su vestido blanco ahora es rojo y donde hubo
una muchacha hay un cad?ver" (377). The clear implication is that the girl's
very life is transferred to the countess; in Bataille's terms, the countess's
destruction of a being similar to herself "returns [that being] to immensity"
(LE 122). Perhaps even more significantly in this regard, three allusions to
cannibalism occur in La condesa sangrienta. In one, we are told that when
the countess was taken ill, she would have girls brought to her bed and would
tear their flesh with her teeth (379). The collapsing of subject/object
boundaries is to be taken quite literally here, I believe. The countess
incorporates the victims' flesh into her own; in this way, the healing of one
being is predicated upon the mortal suffering of another.
We seem to have strayed a long way from any sense of the sacred with
regard to Eros or Thanatos. Yet I would maintain that Pizarnik's rendering
of the B?thory story goes far beyond a mere morbid fascination with
sensuality, death, or their point of intersection. If she is in any way to be
considered a disciple of Georges Bataille, it is because she sensed in him a
willingness to grapple with certain "forbidden" questions in profound and
unorthodox ways. Bataille says of Sade: "He did not think that he could, or
should, cut out of his life these dangerous states to which his insurmountable
desires led him. Instead of forgetting about them, as one usually does, he
dared to look them in the face in his moments of normality, and to ask himself
that unfathomable question which they raise for all men" (LC 119). From
what we know of her life, Pizarnik was not obsessed by insurmountable
sexual desires, but rather by the desire to commit suicide. In either case, the
work of both writers, and that of Bataille as well, is a testimony to their
willingness to examine the "dangerous states" to which their desires led
19
20
them. The story of the Hungarian countess, says Pizarnik's narrator, should
not evoke pity or admiration; the appropriate response is "S?lo un quedar en
suspenso en el exceso de horror, una fascinaci?n por un vestido blanco que
se vuelve rojo, por la idea de un absoluto desgarramiento..." (391 ). The idea
of an absolute rending?laceration, rape, death, but also, perhaps, the

tearing of the veil of illusion?is mirrored by the idea of absolute liberty with
which Pizarnik concludes her account of La condesa sangrienta:
Como Sade en sus escritos, como Gilles de Rais en sus

cr?menes, la condesa B?thory alcanz?, m?s all? de todo
l?mite, el ?ltimo fondo del desenfreno. Ella es una prueba
m?s de que la libertad absoluta de la criatura humana es
horrible. (391)
The narrator here is able to unilaterally condemn the absolute freedom of

which the countess becomes an emblem: "es horrible." Bataille's consider
ation of the question is more complex and unsettling. Throughout his

writings, the value of liberty is equated with the value of evil. He attributes
positive worth to those actions or states of mind which free us from our limits
and which stand in opposition to the forces of good, whose only end is
conservation, homogeneity, and survival. Like Heathcliff of Wuthering
Heights, the Countess of B?thory acted in ways that ran counter to all
conventional morality. She pushed the bounds of human liberty almost
beyond imaginable limits. As a result, she was finally apprehended, im
mured within her own castle, and condemned to death.
Conclusions
Throughout the essays that comprise Literature and Evil, Bataille
returns to the notion that literature of a wholly transgressive nature?evil
literature, in a word?can hold a "sovereign value" for its readers. "A

rigorous morality results from complicity in the knowledge of Evil," he tells
us, "which is the basis of intense communication" (LE viiii). I believe that
if we approach Pizarnik's poetry by acknowledging the full extent of "evil"

that she took as her subject, we might heighten our estimation of her work,
allowing us to reexamine what appears, in the lyric poetry in particular, to
be an unrelenting self-enclosed subjectivity. I would argue that Pizarnik,
while seemingly focused on the expression of her own troubled psychic

states, does engage in "intense communication" with her reader?a value
that Bataille sees as lacking in the work of Jean Genet, for instance. What
she wishes to communicate has to do, in most cases, with those aspects of
existence that conventional morality would keep hidden: acts of violence,
sexual perversity, the attraction toward murder or suicide, and numerous
Alejandra Pizarnik, Georges Bataille, and the Literature of Evil 21
other transgressive acts or desires whose presence in her work I have

delineated in this essay. Difficult, fragmentary, and frankly obscene texts
such as "Los pose?dos entre lilas" and "La bucanera de Pernambuco o Hilda
la pol?grafa" (both published in Textos de sombra y ?ltimos poemas, 1982)
call for more extensive study in which Pizarnik's "complicity in the

knowledge of Evil" is taken as a positive value. We may find that the figure
of the self-absorbed, schizophrenic poet counting the days to her suicide is
complemented by the figure of an intellectual who sought, in her own private
and apolitical way, to excavate the "fetid ditch of bourgeois culture" that she
experienced in Buenos Aires in the 1940s and 1950s, and later, in Bataille's
own Paris.
BARD COLLEGE
NOTES
alejandra Pizarnik, Obras Completas (Buenos Aires: Corregidor, 1994)
191. This edition contains all of Pizarnik's published collections of poetry (La
?ltima inocencia, 1956; Las aventuras perdidas, 1958; Otros poemas 1959; ?rbol
de Diana, 1962; Los trabajos y las noches, 1965 ; Extracci?n de la piedra de locura,
1968; Nombres y figuras, 1969; El infierno musical, 1971; El deseo de la palabra:
Antolog?a, 1975; and Textos de Sombra y ?ltimos poemas, 1982), as well as a

selection of her published prose, including La condesa sangrienta, 1965. Subse
quent references to this edition will be noted as Obras.
2Georges Bataille. Literature and Evil, trans. Alastair Hamilton (New York:
Boyaers, 1973) x. Subsequent references to this book will be noted as LE.
3Articles I have found useful in the discussion of Pizarnik's language

centered poetry (often, as it relates to the themes of absence and death) are Robert
E. DiAntonio's "On Seeing Things Darkly in the Poetry of Alejandra Pizarnik:

Confessional Poetics or the Aesthetic Metaphor?," Jill S. Kuhnheim's "Unsettling
Silence in the Poetry of Olga Orozco and Alejandra Pizarnik," Francisco Lasarte' s
"M?s all? del surrealismo: La poes?a de Alejandra Pizarnik," Jacobo Sefam?'s

"Vac?o gris es mi nombre mi pronombre: Alejandra Pizarnik," and Thorpe Running's
"The Poetry of Alejandra Pizarnik." Although no critic has pinpointed Pizarnik's
literary relationship to Bataille, Cristina Pina makes general mention of an associa

tion between the work of the two writers in her article "La palabra obscena" (31).
In many ways, Pina' s extensive essay on the element of the obscene examines points
relevant to my own, particularly with regard to "La condesa sangrienta."
4The phrase "uno de los fetiches vivientes," alluding directly to Bataille, is
taken from Cristina Pina, Alejandra Pizarnik (Buenos Aires: Planeta, 1991) 122.
5The few details available regarding Bataille's biography are taken from the
introduction to Allan Stoekl's edition of his selected writings, Visions of Excess
22 Latin American Literary Review
(Minnesota, 1985).
6Bataille' s thought is often cited as influential in the intellectual formation of
Maurice Blanchot, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva,
and Jean Baudrillard, to name only those thinkers and writers whose own work has
heavily influenced postmodern thought.

7I refer the reader to Cristina Pina's extensive and well-argued essay, "La
palabra obscena" Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos May 1990, Supp. 5: 17-38. Pina

focuses on the use of obscene language and image, particularly in Pizarnik's later
prose pieces such as "La bucanera de Pernambuco o Hilda la pol?grafa." Although
Pina's ideas in this essay parallel many of my own, I have attempted here to
approach the question of "erotic evil" in Pizarnik's work from a broader perspec
tive, focusing on the links Bataille establishes between eroticism and death.
8Extensive and useful analyses of this work can be found in Foster, Negroni,
and Pina ("La palabra obscena").

9First written in 1965, and published in Mexico in that same year, La condesa
sangrienta was not published in Argentina until 1971.

l0The Tears of Eros (San Francisco: City Lights, 1989) 139-40. Originally
published as Les larmes d'Eros in Paris in 1961.

nDavid William Foster, Violence in Argentine Literature: Cultural Re
sponses to Tyranny (Columbia, Missouri: University Missouri Press, 1995) 98-114.
Foster reads La condesa sangrienta primarily as "a meditation on the horror of
absolute power" (101). Although he presents convincing arguments for the links
between Pizarnik's depiction of B?thory and the cultural and political realities of
Argentina in the decades of the I960's and 1970's, he downplays the direct concern
with sexual perversity that, in my opinion, propels this text forward. My reading of
Pizarnik's text assumes that she takes B?thory's sadistic acts on their own terms,
rather than as a means for a meditation on power.
12Gilles Deleuze argues that the sadist "cannot do more than accelerate and
condense the motions of partial violence. He achieves the acceleration by multiply
ing the number of his victims and their sufferings" (29).

Alejandra Pizarnik, Georges Bataille, and the Literature of Evil

Diunggah oleh

Informasi Dokumen

Deskripsi Asli:

Judul Asli

Hak Cipta

Format Tersedia

Bagikan dokumen Ini

Bagikan atau Tanam Dokumen

Opsi Berbagi

Apakah menurut Anda dokumen ini bermanfaat?

Apakah konten ini tidak pantas?

Hak Cipta:

Format Tersedia

Alejandra Pizarnik, Georges Bataille, and the Literature of Evil

Diunggah oleh

Hak Cipta:

Format Tersedia

Alejandra Pizarnik, Georges Bataille, and the Literature of Evil

Author(s): Melanie Nicholson