My Mother / Madame Edwarda / The Dead Man

by Georges Bataille, Austryn Wainhouse (Translator), Yukio Mishima (Contributor)

My Mother is a unique bildungsroman of a young man's sexual initiation and corruption by his mother.—Publishers Weekly

My Mother, Madame Edwarda and The Dead Man comprises three short pieces of erotic prose that fuse elements of sex and spirituality in a highly personal vision of the flesh. They present a world of sensation in which only the vaulting demands of disruptive excess and the anguish of heightened awareness can combat the stultifying world of reason and social order. Each of the narratives contains a sense of intoxication and insanity so carefully delineated by the author that it seems to infect the reader.

Philosopher, novelist and critic, Georges Bataille is a major figure in twentieth-century literature whose startling and original ideas increasingly exert a vital influence on the shaping of thought, language and experience. Best known outside France for the vertiginous sexual delirium of his short novel, Story of the Eye, the vast scope of Bataille's interests and intellect made him a major force in many spheres.

Bataille's essays range over such diverse topics as economics, psychoanalysis, Marxism, yoga and anthropology. His critical essays, Literature and Evil and his complex meditations on the dark coupling of sex and death, Eroticism, are both available from Marion Boyars. Bataille's available fiction includes L'Abbé C, a twisted document detailing the holy horrors of sex and Blue of Noon, now an established modern classic in its seventh printing.

Genres: Fiction, Short Stories, France, Erotica, Philosophy, French Literature, Literature

224 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1966

About the author

French essayist, philosophical theorist, and novelist, often called the "metaphysician of evil." Bataille was interested in sex, death, degradation, and the power and potential of the obscene. He rejected traditional literature and considered that the ultimate aim of all intellectual, artistic, or religious activity should be the annihilation of the rational individual in a violent, transcendental act of communion. Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, and Philippe Sollers have all written enthusiastically about his work.

Reviews

[Steven Godin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Second Bataille book I've read this week, and although I didn't find it as good as Blue of Noon, it did come with a fascinating Yukio Mishima introductory essay, who sights Bataille as one of only three western writers he ever truly admired. Of the three pieces here, the novella 'My Mother'(which remained unfinished) was by far the longest and most deeply psychological piece, thus for me, the best. Erotic obsession dominates in the short 'Madame Edwarda', while a young woman's debauched excess after returning from the deathbed of a friend is the focal point in 'The Dead Man'. Will now likely switch to Bataille's non-fiction/essay writing when reading him next.

[Mariel · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this lifeless world what else was there for me to do but forget the searing light whose glare had blinded me when I had felt my mother in my arms? But I already knew that it was not going to be forgotten, ever.

- 'My Mother'

Degradation gave birth to him and can take it back. Grunting copulation, squealing pigs meat house. Everybody cries when baby is born. His mother gets further away as the father is further away. Death is over or the sweaty affairs. Don't walk away when I am oozing pain like slow motion wife snails. Widow's weeds and lofty words closer to God or Hell trail from her posing like choking on old women's cigarettes. Mother and son have each other. She never shuts up. I will never believe you anyway so choose sides of my mythic head. I love you and I hate you. A script returns him to the womb of humiliation. She talks so much. The words steal from other truths, scabbing over knees in scrawl. A bird's nest won't fly. If he knows her filth and only then. I can't see the secret world infrared in the funhouse of love triangles, thin lines and hate, the pentagons and sharp edges of squares. I know she will cut you, bitch. He talks too much too. He lives by her words. I don't find much less erotic than stand right here, I got this itch in my mind. Get in front of my smoke vision, if you could just. Like that possession. His mother sets him up with her laughing friends. Everybody laughs from dark knowledge and the skin crawling gives him his days. I didn't care about the super rich and super beautiful let's have sex all of the time every day Hansi. Her "maid", her schoolgirl friend, does not make Hansi more beautiful in her worship. Doesn't add another dimension to her room. Her stand right there, just like that, I have this want to happen bent. Hansi doesn't want to have them crawl for her and her boyfriend and girlfriend live in plots. She's almost a real person, resist the script, but then her bubble of gilded fades her away for me again. She couldn't be real, this escape from his mother's will. I don't believe him when she is his something to lose. She was there to role play he had something to lose so that it would feel the thrill of dream come true when his mother's laughter is Beetlejuiced enough to be flesh. I don't feel the shock in it was his mother. Some people have mothers who love and care for them. Some don't. It doesn't help saying that, though. It is enough to make "my mother" as a ceiling a crumble and left overs. There's a past knowledge that is just meaningless sick. I still feel sick remembering when my mother publicly humiliated little kid me by bringing up baby body exploration in front of other people. I won't forget the knowledge and the judgement, the can't make her shut up deriding laughter. 'My Mother' is just like that the surviving the you can try to talk so much you can rebirth anything in your own image but it isn't going to work like that. There's a womb mold you can't break. The origins of the dream were powerful as much as I cannot abide the revisiting the scene of the crime let's make it a sex game. Behind the first time high he isn't going to get back is the first time he is dirty kneed in the altar of his father's forbidden photographs. A look in a victim's eye. Was it a stage that steals the prey's death in the jaws that never dies. Don't let it be true, don't make me like her. He had already lost his way in the laughter and this is a haunting of a decision that will not be spontaneous, not this time. Every rebirth is more dead meat.

Madame Edwarda went on ahead of me, raised up until the very clouds... The room's noisy unheeding of her happiness, of the measured gravity of her step, was royal consecration and triumphal holiday: death itself was guest at the feast, was there in what whorehouse nudity terms the pig-sticker's stab.

- Madame Edwarda

He comes to Madame Edwarda with drunken cock in hand. Her pink and hairy crack. She calls herself God. Under the void sky, the roving eyes of public world in world. Right here with the others. He calls it making love in the whorehouse. In this ceiling cracks she's God's tracing. He follows her as an animal into the streets again. He loses her, a fading laughter. The sky changes its depth in missing tears. Her naked body out of water, barren land fish.
Yukio Mishima's essay "Georges Bataille and Divinus Deus" compared this to Jean Genet glorification of filth. Totally. I always felt like Jean Genet's altar of dark was in place of having nothing else, though. That he had to glorify the scars or else. If you stop swimming in the shark bowl for a moment you will choke on the filth. Genet's prostitutes and sailors are Hansi and the time capsule of the mouse in hawk mouth. Jesus weeps and the church isn't his house. Genet can be tedious as hell in crying too long but his writing as the power of living in names. Dream dies so count sheep, pitch dark bleating, as long as it takes. I've read lots of Genet and this was my first Bataille. Bataille was a relief to me too going straight for the stick swallow. There's something else that is no choice that's not resurrection in conditions of incarnadine mind limits. I get from Bataille a conscious direction that Genet didn't have. Why do you resurrect the murders when you are feeling good? So you won't feel good, to bring some terrible life see-saw in no rug balance? I have no idea but do it. Stop before the enduring where is the heading for the hole in your head.

Will I be reproached if I have the weakness, finally, to confess that at present the kind of insignificance I am gradually turning into, which, I think, I have turned into, by now even lacks the meaning my last phrase, 'a violent silence', takes on? An instant ago, beside me, in a mirror, I caught sight of an empty face: my face. It does not have the meaning of a violent silence. Through the window what I am really watching is 'the multitudinous smiling of the sea'.

- Dead Man

Marie's dead husband in the room had dying wished her nakedness. Into the world's small world she goes, naked stillness. They will see. Marie is singing desperately and a working girl is work sad singing. In dark crying, she has a coat to be naked again. Men are taking it in for themselves. Drunken cocks, standing for no attention. Golden showers and flesh puppets can't wash away the expression behind theirs. Never mind about them and their sucking. She is naked. 'The Dead Man' is a real cinema of outsides helpless to the insides boiling. Rising up lava bodily fluids. Did you see the Lynne Ramsay film Under the Skin from the 1990s? Samantha Morton's grieving daughter is this inhabiting the skin world. When Marie's smiles mean something it is like this for me. The what makes tick is a clock hitting all slow motion possibilities. The end of your life flashes before their cock's eyes. Bataille is so damned good.

[Tosh · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am a big fan of Georges Bataille's fiction. He borders on the creepy of course, but its his intelligence that is seductive. I wish he was alive now. He's someone I would like to meet and have a cup of coffee with. Would he drink coffee? Yukio Mishima wrote the introduction to this book which is worth the price of the volume.

[Ana · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think that what Bataille is saying in the three stories included in this volume is that eroticism will always destroy the innocents. Unlike de Sade, whose language is jarringly crude, Batalille writes poetically about violent sex. He is less interested in obscene technicalities, and more in the soul-destroying and body-decaying effects of sex as a response to loss and grief. Bataille philosophy is filthy and dark. And he may have taken pleasure from making his readers unhappy. Each central character lost someone or something important to them. In the first story, My Mother, seventeen year old Pierre lost his father and his piety. He was the submissive son of a woman who became revolting to him. He continued to venerate her like a saint, while painfully realizing that he had no basis for that veneration. His mother’s debauchery nauseated him and his continued respect for her made him – but never her – the object of his own horror. He entered a delirium where he felt lost, and in that lifeless void, he glimpsed God. He decided to follow through the interwoven joy and terror that strangled him from within. The sole remedy for his suffering was to heighten it. After all, doesn’t everyone enjoy walking on the edge of a cliff? Along with revolt, Pierre was gripped by greediness for terrifying pleasures. The more his pleasures strangled him, the more they overpowered him. Happiness hurt him like poison, because, as his mother explained, “pleasure only starts once the worm has got into the fruit, to become delightful happiness must be tainted with poison. All the rest is childishness.” More than love for his mother, Pierre loved the possibility of loving her to the point of no return.

In all of the three stories, the characters crave poisonous sweetness blended with pain and suffering. The unnamed man who spent a night with Madame Edwarda, whose presence was as mindless, absent and rapt as God’s (she was God), and Marie in The Dead Man, who was suspended in an unintelligible emptiness after her lover Edouard died, wanted to enter fully into destruction because destruction is always more complete and more violent than any simple desire.

[Hendrik · Rating 3 out of 5]

Georges Bataille vermag mit seinen erotischen Phantasien gleichermaßen Faszination wie Abscheu zu erregen. Weit entfernt von schnöder Pornographie, bestechen seine fiktionalen Texte durch ihre Ambivalenz und eine vielschichtige Symbolik. Verschweigen darf man allerdings nicht, dass Bataille lesen immer eine Zumutung bedeutet. Er überschreitet Grenzen der Moral und des Geschmacks. Ein Zeichen unbedingter Freiheit, die nicht jeder in der Form vertragen kann. Ob sein Provokationspotenzial heutzutage noch genauso hoch ist wie zu seiner Zeit, darf mit Recht bezweifelt werden. Trotzdem eine Empfehlung für alle, die einmal einen Blick in die Abgründe der menschlichen Psyche wagen wollen.

[Maribeaux · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ah, I wish I could discuss this with someone.

Georges Bataille is one of those authors that you will either love for his uniqueness or ignore due to the inability of understanding his mindset in his works; so the lack of discussions around this book all over the internet is in a way justified but on the other hand I wish more people would be open to taboo subjects and educated enough for complex ideas. I have discovered a gem.

Georges Bataille's ideas simply were and still are too ahead of their time. I had no previous background information on Bataille other than the fact that his philosophies are dark, filthy, and immoral. I recommend prior to reading any of his novels to dive a bit into his philosophies, non-fiction essays and his biography. For example, the fact that he tried to become a priest and failed due to the incompatible-with-religion ideas he had gives a good basis as to why Bataille is such a "deviant" (but brilliant to me) thinker.

Mishima's introduction gave me the impression that spoiled the plot of the novelettes "My Mother" and "Madame Edwarda". That certainly was not the case at all after I finished all the reading. I would discourage you from trying to answer the "why"s and the "how"s you might have. This "trilogy of filth" as I like to call it now, is a journey of metaphysical and intellectual sexual experience that goes beyond what one sees with the reader's eyes. I can personally identify with some of his ideas on limit experiences and the relationship of excitement and eroticism with death, as well as with a few of the imageries presented in the novelettes that I have been unable to put into words (and that I won't mention). This is another thing that makes Bataille a genius to me: he is able to describe situations and feelings that not only are rare and horrifying, but they are hard to imagine, let alone to understand and explain.

I paid special attention to "The Dead Man" because in it I saw some Lars Von Trier, "Antichrist" and "Nymphomaniac". What all these works have in common is the representation of sex, madness, obscenity, as a response to some kind of grief.

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bataille is an analyst of the erotic, and in these narratives he explores and exploits the transformative and sometimes destructive power of sex. While his association of violence with eroticism may remind some of the Marquis de Sade, one significant difference between the two writers is that Bataille does not focus as much as de Sade does on representing the details of the sexual act itself; rather, Bataille emphasizes the moral and cultural context in which the sexual act occurs. Moreover, in contrast to conventional pornography, Bataille is not interested so much in the Kama Sutra possibilities of sex, or in such devices as promiscuity or jealousy, but in the unpredictable changes that sex may cause in an individual.

Bataille’s writing reflects an interesting relation between language and carnality that may remind one of Jean Genet’s work: while the situation Bataille depicts may be obscene, the language is seldom less than literary, suggesting that it is the obscenity that makes the beautiful language possible. Here is a sample quote from “My Mother”: “Rhea failed to enact the whole of that ludicrous sacrifice; at any rate from the unlimited gift she made of her body, of the intimacy and gleefulness of her joy, she chose to except the usual thoroughfare to the limited operation.” There are lines more poetic in the book (and more prosaic), but I mention this one as an example of the way that Bataille is able to camouflage the representation of an erotic act in the language of religion, economics and technical jargon.

Acquired Sept 17, 2009
Attic Books, London, Ontario

[Holly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely devoured this. As I would devour God if She were to spread her legs for me in laughter at the horrors of my insatiable desire, to know the very edge of reason.

[Allan MacDonell · Rating 5 out of 5]

As an author, Georges Bataille is a tricky motherfucker. This fit, slim volume collects a clutch of the slimy writer’s shame-based themes and excessively erotic obsessions. My Mother, Madame Edwarda, The Dead Man pay proud homage to incest, degradation, exaltation, pleasure flipping unto agony. Such healthy, earthy delights as the irresistible temptation of being fucked and fucking to death are divided by philosophic statements linking and likening God to eroticism. Somewhere, somehow, someone is jerking off to this stylish stacking of scum prose and its justification.

[Emm · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bataille is great. The Dead Man was my favorite in this collection (and it's format on the page is fantastic!) but I think I prefer reading Batailles theoretical works to his fiction--their just so much more sumptuously beautiful.

[Jonathan Lee B. · Rating 4 out of 5]

My Mother/Madame Edwarda/The Dead Man is a secret handshake you share with your 1-3 friend(s) who have also read it.

[Jemma · Rating 5 out of 5]

Engrossing, fucked up, intriguing, disgusting, erotic, tragic.

[Troy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Moeder en zoon verstrikt in oedipale dynamiek die alle grenzen voorbijgaat. En in adembenemend mooie taal. Wat een indrukwekkende kleine novelle dit - Bataille durft alles

[Davvybrookbook · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the second work I have read by Georges Bataille. His Eroticism is a critical philosophical grounding to his literature, without which one might simply brush these short stories aside as smut, degrading filth, hedonistic indecency; to be warned: the whole second part of Eroticism is devoted to a literary and historical analysis of the Marquis de Sade, and Bataille is not any different. Indeed, one wants to conceal one’s reading of such a book if moral values come into play.

“My Mother” is the long work of this compilation. “Madame Edwarda” a short piece. And “The Dead” a unique format of experimentation á la Raymond Quineau’s Exercises in Style. All three are fantastic, horrific stories of a ‘free’ imagination. The lack of ‘limits’ and the obvious ‘transgressions’ lead the reader through visions and experiences of eroticism, the body as flesh, and the degradation of the soul.

There are many things more I would like to say, buy I don’t think I have the honesty to embrace such a brash theory of man’s sexual condition.

My favorite things about Bataille are how his theories and fiction connect back to antiquity. “My Mother” is not a simple or brusque tale of incest. This novella has clear parallels with the Oedipal saga. The hatred of his father and loving of his mother, murderously and erotically, mark this tale as an ancient examination, but also as a retaling. Batailles use of the Greek term for followers of Bacchus, wherefore the narrator references his mother as a ‘maenad’, illuminated in Euripides Bacchus as women who live the cities to lay upon the ground and hallucinate with drink or medicine. The ‘maenad’ women of Thebes would celebrate the cult of Dionysus in the wild, and lay unconscious in the forest outside the city. One of the stories likens his father to Pan, the hunter, and his abduction and impregnation of his mother. The passage by Bataille makes this apparent:

Easily, frequently, we would, my mother and I, find ourselves in the state of the woman or the man who desires, and in this state we would rage, but I did not desire my mother, she did not desire me. She would be as I knew she used to be in the wild, I would hold her hands and know that in front of me she had turned into a maenad, that she was in the most literal sense deranged, and I would share her frenzy. Had we translated our trembling madness into the barren acts of copula-tion, the cruel game we played with our eyes would have ceased: I would have ceased seeing my mother ecstatic at the sight of me, my mother would no longer have seen me beholding her in ecstasy. We'd have exchanged the purity of the unattainable for a mess of pottage, to satisfy our immediate greed.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

(sper ca nu e vreo limita de cuvinte la recenziile de pe goodreads pentru ca am cateva citate edgy pe care vreau sa le scriu aici)

Prefata de la Madame Edwarda a fost absolut minunata, cumva asta si cateva alte fragmente m-au facut sa simt ca e ceva de capul cartii asteia, ca nu e doar delir si frenezie in fictiunea lui Bataille, ca are legatura cu teoria lui si cu o vedere de ansamblu asupra lumii.
My mother (desi suna naspa) mi-a placut cel mai mult, e cea mai lunga si are suficient content cat sa arate ca Bataille stie si ce e aia psihanaliza. Madame Edwarda e foarte nietzscheana (asa trebuie sa zic oare? sincer nu mai imi pasa) si seamana mai mult cu o poezie.

Personajele lui in general imi aduc aminte de Anna din Possession in scena de la metrou (mai ales Marie din the dead man).
Imi place cum Bataille exploreaza tendinta lor spre autodistrugere si cum fix asta e ceea ce le motiveaza pe ele sa traiasca. E o linie fina intre extaz si groaza, intre eros si moarte si Bataille nu mai vede aceasta linie, e chior.

si acum ceea ce mi se pare mai relevant decat ce am scris eu sunt citatele:

(mai ales asta din prefata de la Madame Edwarda care imi place mult si rezuma bine)
"And since, in death, being is taken away from us at the same moment it is given us, we must seek for it in the feeling of dying, in those unbearable moments where it seems to us that we are dying because the existence in us, during these interludes , exists through nothing but a sustaining and ruinous excess, when the fullness of horror and that of joy coincide."

"i wanted nothing but to have the feeling of destroying my capacity for inward peace"
"i am twisted by anguish and by delight as well. But it is not love's delight. the only thing possessing me is rage"
"Torn apart, a certain power welled up in me, a power that would be mine upon condition I agree to hate myself. Ugliness was invading all of me"

"I shall live in the expectation of that other world where i will be in ecstasies of pleasure. I belong body and soul to that other world and so do you. I have absolutely no interest in this world where they scratch about, patiently waiting for death to enlighten them"

ce vreau sa adaug e ca toate astea nu vin sa intunece realitatea lui bataille, nici sa o clarifice, doar sa o exprime.

"in me what being a philosopher built collapses"
"My life only has a meaning insofar as I lack one: oh but let me be mad!"

bonus - zilele astea am aflat mai multe despre backgroundul lui Bataille si a inceput sa aiba sens si entuziasmul meu fata de el; de exemplu am aflat ca l-a cunoscut si a fost foarte influentat de Lev Shestov (el l-a invatat despre Dostoevsky si Nietzsche), ca a fost prieten cu Camus si el a fost cel care i-a luat apararea cand a scris Omul revoltat (si avea in plan o carte despre politica si etica lui Camus, dar in fine a renuntat - dupa Omul revoltat cam greu sa mai fi respectat de marxisti daca voiai sa scrii despre Camus...)
oricum ce voiam eu sa zic aici e ca regasesc in Bataille parti din monologul omului din subterana a lui Dostoievski (asa cum a fost el interpretat de Shestov) si din Camus - critica unei filosofii care se axeaza strict pe partea rationala a lucrurilor si asta se imbina bine cu obsesia lui pentru delir in partea de fictiune a operei sale si cu tendinta spre suprarealism.
Si asa pot sa il pun in opozitie cu intregul sistem filosofic al lui Sartre si umanismul lui si nu ma mai mir de ce se cam ciondaneau.
si trebuie sa mai mentionez putin ce influenta IMENSA a avut Nietzsche pentru Bataille, Bataille ignora cam complet conceptul de "eterna reintoarcere" (il inteleg perfect, nici eu nu stiu sa interpretez acest concept si e partea din Nietzsche care ma cam plictisea ), dar in schimb are o obsesie cu ideea de "moarte a lui Dumnezeu" si cum se reflecta in societate (ceea ce mi se pare foarte simpatic si e pe gustul meu)

[Heronimo Gieronymus · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have read this particular Penguin edition collecting three shorter pieces of fiction by Georges Bataille before, some years ago, in a state of woeful dissipation, utterly in the mire of active addiction, and can recall the experience only vaguely. My copy of the actual book itself has some character to it, having survived a fire about five years ago that burned down much of the building in which I was then living; the fire department dumped a huge amount of water on my condo unit and some of my books received damage on that account, causing them to become mottled and ragged, a condition I believe very much suits this particular Bataille. Aside from the novella “My Mother” and the two shorter works, “Madame Edwarda” and “The Dead Man,” this edition contains an introductory appreciation by Yukio Mishima, written very near the end of the Japanese master’s life, and a scholarly afterward by Ken Hollings that deals with Bataille’s thematic universe broadly, not once touching explicitly on the three works collected in the volume the piece concludes. Mishima asserts that along with Witold Gombrowicz and Pierre Klossowski, the latter a contemporary of Bataille’s and his collaborator on the journal ACÉPHALE, ol’ G.B. was among his favourite contemporary Western writers, demonstrative as were the other two previously-mentioned men of “an anti-psychological delineation, anti-realism, erotic intellectualism, straightforward symbolism, and a perception of the universe hidden behind all of these, as well as many other common characteristics.” Readers of Mishima will not be the least surprised at his celebration of this particular set of values. Ken Hollings goes deeper into the matters at hand, focusing, in his piece titled “In the Slaughterhouse of Love,” on themes of darkness, nudity, penetration, sacrifice, and violence. This evaluation refers both to Bataille’s theoretical works and his fiction but, again, does not address the three pieces collected in this volume. It is nevertheless of great value. Hollings, early in his piece: “The sexual act poses a threat to our being because it places no limit on experience. During the act, the body no longer has limit or definition: it is dissolved into a storm of sensations which are violently superimposed and fluctuating. The effect that this has upon our consciousness can only be expressed negatively: in terms of exclusion and absence. The contemplation of the sexual act begins and ends in darkness and silence because it is contained by a law of exclusion which operates at the extreme limits of language and lucidity.” Much of Bataille’s theoretical work deals with eroticism and other matters (mysticism, sacrifice, political economy) within the context of excess (the “accursed share” etc.), and his fiction has a general tendency to depict an erotic interiority characterized by the tempestuous play of destabilizing intensities. In his own preface to “Madame Edwarda,” the piece proper originally published under the Kierkegaardian pseudonym Pierre Angélique, Bataille writes of “a certain lacerating consciousness of distress” and an “unbearable surpassing of being.” This is indeed at the heart of Bataille’s fiction, a body of work that may be the best we have on the diabolic power of excitation. Certainly when I was young I was very much taken with STORY OF THE EYE, but I judged BLUE OF NOON the superior and more meaningful book, indeed perhaps the most personally meaningful book I read in my early twenties, precisely because of the way BLUE OF NOON so profoundly captured my own torments at that time, my oft-wracked cognitive operations and my highly-excited condition of dread. Yes, indeed, “a certain lacerating consciousness of distress.” Then there are these ideas of limit and “unbearable surpassing,” the precise way in which mysticism and debauchery become coupled, not so much a matter of transgressing, but of first systematically destroying standard measures of valuation (in eminently Nietzschean fashion) and ultimately superseding rather than subverting. This visionary overcoming brings with it overwhelming pleasure and blinding divine horror, annihilating ecstasy. All three pieces in this collection testify to this vision. “My Mother” is the lengthiest piece by some measure and in other regards also probably the most substantial. I have read it before and have seen the film adaptation by Christophe Honoré. It is no doubt in large part on account of my recall of both experiences being meagre at best that I found returning to “My Mother” so revelatory. Those with a cursory knowledge of Bataille’s backstory will immediately grasp the autobiographical thread running through the piece. It is narrated by Pierre, a man of about Bataille’s age. Pierre is reflecting upon a time about fifty years in his past, beginning in about 1906, when a number of decisive events occurred, all of them to one extent or another orbiting around his deeply perverse relationship with his mother Hélène. Like Bataille, young Pierre has in his youth rebelled against his anti-clerical father, a man he despised, by becoming a devout Catholic and even considering a career in the church, a rebellion against which he will in turn rebel. Pierre is also extremely close to his mother, a woman he revers beyond measure, and their intimacy will perilously intensify in the wake of the father’s death. All of this hews extremely close to Bataille’s own biography. “My Mother” goes on to detail the ways in which Pierre is initiated into debauchery and decadence by Hélène, how this is informed by death, present always in the putrescence and filth behind the veil of flesh, and the inevitability of a particular death. I am not in a position to speak about the particulars of Bataille’s actual relationship with his mother, except to say that he appears to have been devoted to her and somewhat troubled in that devotion. What we can say for certain is that “My Mother” is clearly interest in surpassing a limit, in a truth beyond facts. “Up till then [the alcoholic father’s death] I had never noticed that she drank. I was soon to realize that she drank every day, in the same way. But that rippling laughter, that indecent exuberance; she was not always like that. Rather, she would be sad, appealingly mild; she would seal herself up; she had a deep melancholy I blamed on my father’s wickedness, and that melancholy was what decided my lifelong dedication.” The melancholy takes the form of piety, devotion to God and idealized mother, the “indecent exuberance” represents the introduction of a “lacerating consciousness of distress” that will transform Pierre. His mother, intoxicated, tells him: “The gutter, the dungheap, that’s where your mother feels at home. You shall never know what horrors I am capable of. I’d like you to know, though. I like my filth.” The pleasures of the flesh, dung, decay, filth, dissolution. Hélène drunken self-pity and attenuated efforts to warn her son of the perdition that lies before him if he remains at her side are a remainder, the pathetic sputtering of the social animal, the pathologized woman for whom deep down only total abandon is adequate ethic. Pierre muses: “Inherent in motherhood, I told myself, is the doing of that which in children causes these terrible convulsions.” The mother’s sin which “must eventually lay her low as it was laying me low, but which, I later understood, by torturing us, provided it tortured us, was to prepare us for the one happiness which is not meaningless, since we becomes its prey when in the grip of misfortune.” Hélène writes of “the mind’s pleasure, fowler than the body’s,” and how in giving herself over to debauchery, she experiences a growing lucidity and, paradoxically, “the steady breakdown of my nerves is nothing else in me than a havoc whose source is my innermost thinking.” Hélène associates her true self, the self subject to abandon and wild tempests, with the woods. Nature is a dance of decay and new life, God and the blinding sun, debauchery is sacramental, the woods have been passed on in the blood and through a kiss. “My Mother” goes on to detail an uncanny play of proxies, as Hélène conscripts young women, her own lovers, to minister sexually to Pierre, first Rhea and then Hansi. Hansi and Pierre, along with Hansi’s submissive maid, will enter into a dalliance that utterly saps them of energy, drains them by way of a tumultuous bliss. Hansi cajoles Pierre: “Tell me that you are suffering and that you are on fire. I want to come alive through my suffering—and to feed on yours.” Infernal bliss. Before her tragic end, hinted at earlier in the text but not returned to as the piece reaches its termination, Hélène will address a letter to Pierre in which she attempts to express a motivating principle: “I would like us to go out of our minds together. I would like to drag you with me as I die. A brief instant of the madness I shall give you is better, is it not, than freezing in a universe of stupidity? I want to die, I have burned my boats. Your corruption was my handiwork: I gave you what was purest and most intense in me, the desire to love that which tears the clothes off my body, and that alone.” In his afterword, Ken Hollings writes of what it means in Bataille to be stripped bare: “Nudity is not a finite or absolute state: to be stripped naked is an experience which perpetually exceeds itself. The tearing away of clothing which exposes the flesh becomes a tearing away at the flesh itself.” A cosmic ravishment, chaosmatic, a surrender to the divine surge. God does not disappear from Bataille, it is rather a matter of God being transformed into an immaterial agency of pleasure and horror. “My Mother” is full of phrases such as “vortex of joy,” “this delight that distress created,” and “annihilated by delight.” These are pure expressions of that which constitutes Bataille’s subject. “Madame Edwarda” and “The Dead Man” are much shorter pieces, highly concentrated depictions of truncated sprees, erotomaniacal delirium. In “Madame Edwarda” the narrator pursues the eponymous prostitute (who declares herself GOD), has a dalliance with her, is beaten and crazily excoriated by her, and finally watches her fuck the driver in the back seat of his cab, all three parties achieving a sufficient level of excitation such that they lose consciousness. “The Dead Man” was written in the middle of the Second World War, probably near Normandy, when Bataille was suffering from tuberculosis, but was not to see publication until after his death. Again, it depicts a frenzied spree, but in a hyper-fragmented mode and with an uncommon level of general ghastliness, involving a golden shower, feces, vomit, and a dwarf who happens to be a fantastically disreputable count. It is a piece in which an act of copulation is described as “hand to hand combat, unbelievably bitter,” and which depicts a demoniacal abandon in the wake of a death, or rather the demoniacal abandon of Marie in the wake of the death of the mysterious Edouard, an abandon that terminates in her own death (and subsequently that of the dwarf count). It ends with a counterpoint positioning obscene and absurd transience in relation to impassive permanence. Though he does not write specifically about “The Dead Man,” in his afterward Ken Hollings does write of anthropologist-theorist Bataille’s discovery of “several oceanic cultures where a whole community would react to the death of their chief by entering into a prolonged period of frenzy. They gave themselves over to murder, looting, arson, and sexual excess, continuing to do so until the decaying flesh had fallen away from the dead chief’s bones. At this point normal patterns of behaviour reasserted themselves.” Death is the decaying flesh we already are and the imminent absence that will absorb both the object of our ardor and ourselves. This is certainly the core of Freud’s concept of the death drive, and in Bataille it is the fundamental impetus behind frenzy, abandon, dissipation, absorption. How Bataille’s writing speaks to me has changed over time. I was myself once a wild and frenzied individual. My youth was a spree. I had many lovers, I raced after intensities, I drank and did drugs with hapless abandon, I was always racing the beyond, I stripped myself of identity and communed with the annihilating sun as a matter of routine. I will this year turn forty, am many years into active recovery from addiction, and live something like a monastic life. I don’t take lovers, which is not to say I have ruled out doing so as such. My relationship with sex involves a relationship with my own codependency, a tendency which causes me often to lose myself when gaining another, a tendency with serious real world mental health implications (time-tested). I know I will not pick up a drink or take a mood-altering drug. But I know what sex can still do to me, its invitation to biorhythmic enmeshment and a kind of disappearance. We have turned sex in large part into a commodified arena of exchange, in doing so finding ourselves threatened with losing sight of its power. A truly intense sexual liaison might not be that far off from electric shock therapy, and there can be no guarantee that the person who emerges from that intense and destabilizing entanglement will be in any meaningful way the same person who entered it. In “Madame Edwarda” there is a moment when the narrator writes of how “the pungent odor of her flesh and mine commingled flung us both into the same heart’s utter exhaustion.” The same heart. A heart that now incorporates two people. Then later, as Madame Edwarda, organ of God, fucks the cabdriver: “little by little that embrace strained to the final pitch of excess at which the heart fails.” The heart fails. The shared heart fails. The French sometimes call the moments after orgasm a petite mort. We might call Bataille the great writer of petite mort if only the word petite did not seem so ill-suited to such pleasure and horror, such fracture and ecstasy and damage. Absolutely, yes, “annihilated by delight.” Nothing less. Them's the stakes.

[Arafat Pratik · Rating 1 out of 5]

Hack psychology, shit philosophy, annoying, obnoxious, repetitive bullshit narrative by simpering sissies and the most cringeworthy dialogs I have ever encountered ("Oh mother, make me tremble", "I feel the beast ascendant in me", "Mother, you make me suffer," "I am silly and crazy..... Come, take me, my darling" and more blah blah blah blah bullshit) all my life including all books I read, all videos I watched and all the people I have ever heard talking. My Mother and Madam Edwarda are written in the style of cheap romance novels where the limp dick guy just want to worship the woman as God. Reviews of customers of their whore mistresses in escort websites would be more entertaining to read. Dead Man was the only readable thing in this book but by the time you have read My Mother and Madam Edwarda, you just don't care anymore. You already know what's going to happen. It's just less obnoxiously written than the other stories. It's actually an unfinished manuscript and the publisher tried to recreate the manuscript feeling by leaving out a lot of spaces on each page. Or maybe the assholes were trying to increase the page count. But it doesn't have anything new to add. The essay of Ken Hollings is intentionally written in a complicated way when the things could be said in a much simpler way proving he is as big an asshole as Susan Sontag whose bullshit essay was featured in Bataille's Story of the Eye which was actually a damn good book barring the horseshit essays by Miss Sontag and Ronald Barthes proving Bataille actually has the ability to get the job done. The essay by Yukio Mishima in the beginning was well written but he hyped the book by praising such rubbish writing that I just don't trust him enough to check out his work which I have been thinking for a while to do.

This is quite possibly the worst book I read in my adult life. If you want to check out Bataille, stick to Story of the Eye. That was his first novel and this was published posthumously. It's obvious to me the guy had gotten completely batshit crazy over that period of his life. This is what happens when you think about garbage sex all the time instead of just fucking or jacking off and move on with other activities. Bataille's talent was still in display even if for only one line amidst all this crap and cringe: "She was enjoying the prolonged pause during which underneath that multitude of lights everything was deprived of definition." Unfortunately everything else was phony trash.

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Never more clear are Bataille's linked obsessions of death and eroti(ci)sm than in this volume. Though significantly less vague and dense than his philosophy and theoretical pieces, one is at a significant disadvantage here if you have not read at least some of his writings, and preferably, quite a number of them. Otherwise, these novellas - with 'Madame Edwarda' and 'The Dead Man' being rather shorter than 'My Mother' - would seem to be void of any intellectual content and border on the strictly prurient or pornographic, though for Bataille neither of those terms hold the disgust or pejorative meanings most people associate them with, being as he lived well past the baser concerns of the rabble. I particularly enjoyed the mini-essays at the end of this book, titled appropriately 'Nudity', 'Penetration', 'Sacrifice',and 'Violence'. Short but dense and intimately related to his various writings on sex, death, God, and the like.
Words that recur throughout these stories (and many other tests) by Bataille: - sex, alcohol, religion, violence, death, transgression, love, repulsion, purity, filth, debasement, worship, obscenity, emotional upheaval, Heaven contra Hell, sin, shame, masturbation, revelry, pleasure, pain, sweet and rotten, ritual, sacrifice, license, licentiousness, whorehouse, rage, anger, delay, denial, build-up, masochism, perversity...
As best as you can, try to strip them of their oft-associated ugliness, negativity, judgement, and wrongness and you may find Bataille to be less Sade-ian than he at first seems in these narratives, not that either man would have give a jot as to anyone's feelings on the matters at hand. Though I will say dismissing de Sade as merely a pornographer or purveyor of filth and unseemliness does him a great disservice. He was quite the thinker and rebel, truly.

[Caspar "moved to storygraph" Bryant]

I have to wonder if Bataille ever sat down and read Spot the Dog did he ever write a nice murder mystery without his sexual omnishambles erupting?

Anyway My Mother is one of the most ridiculous stories he's ever written I don't ever want to know how much of it is literal and autobiographical but it's incredible & Yukio Mishima's introduction perfectly sways into it. Amazing I don't want to talk about it overlong

Madame Edwarda also incredible and knows precisely when it should end and does so. Mish also works this into the intro very nicely. How on earth does somebody decide this is a story they're going to tell

The Dead Man was unpublished during his lifetime and possibly intentionally so it's kind of at a loose end in the otherwise apex Bataillanism happening here but I appreciate some of what's happening with the form

Basically I'm still reeling from this ---- what

[Stephen Durrant · Rating 3 out of 5]

Georges Bataille was a highly controversial French writer, and the first of these novelettes, "My Mother," reads fairly easily in the original French ("Ma Mere"). Like all of his work, this is slim book is deeply disturbing. A mother sets out to corrupt her young son. She wants to disabuse him of the notion that she is virtuous and that his now deceased father is the cause of the family's unhappiness. She demands that he love her not as a naive imagination but in all her drunken and sexually promiscuous reality. This corruption includes incest, and while the situation is deeply troubling, "My Mother" is not as raw as most of Bataille's work, which is reminiscent of his friend Henry Miller.

[Michael A. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Horrifyingly erotic tales, but what else to expect from Bataille's fiction? Yukio Mishima's opening essay is a lucid summary and analysis of My Mother and Madame Edwarda, while Ken Hollings's essay is an explication and interpretation of the components of Bataille's eroticism in general. Mishima's essay is clear and easy to comprehend, Hollings's is more academic and tougher to grasp. Both were good and added something extra to the three great short stories within.

[Allie · Rating 4 out of 5]

It will never leave my head.

[euunmiroir · Rating 4 out of 5]

just finished my mother, need to read the other two stories + mishima's essay but want to read story of the eye first

edit: done :)

[Kwan-Ann · Rating 4 out of 5]

Would have been 3 stars except for The Dead Man, which was actually very interesting and read almost like a piece of interactive fiction, with the interspersed second person detached narrator, or like one of those black and white films where the conversation is laid out in a card. My Mother was less interesting, simply Freudian, and Madame Edwarda was alright, except even Bataille got bored and did such a half-assed ending it's a little hilarious.

[Andy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ma Mere aka My Mother started out as potentially one of the greatest Freudian novels ever written, but it flops and droops like a spent member halfway through. How they managed to make a cool movie out of this is a mystery to me, and the book didn't have Louis Garrel jacking off to Isabelle Huppert's dead corpse, so pooh.

[Florence Salmon · Rating 3 out of 5]

'What I want is that you love me even unto death. For my part, it is in death I love you at this very instant. But I don't want your love unless you know I am repulsive, and love me even as you know it.' And other things I've said to random men in the club smoking area in my desperate attempt to bum a cig.

[Cameron · Rating 5 out of 5]

Three stories by the master of shocking subjects. Or at least one of them... My Mother follows Pierre through madness caused by his mother and her various cohorts. Madame Edwarda is a man looking for a evening among women and finds one is g o d. The Dead Man... well there's the shocking stuff you're looking for. Jaw dropping, awe-inspiring.

[m]

(My Mother is the weakest text here!) oh bataille how I love you

[kelly]

"Pleasure only starts once the worm has got into the fruit, to become delightful happiness must be tainted with poison."

[hajin yoo]

ma mère est le meilleur pour moi