George Bataille is French, postmodern novelist who is profane, promiscuous and drunken. His novels exemplify all kinds of vices. Women are treated with utter profanity and he maintains many links with promiscuous strumpets.
The main characters in his novel are Tropman and a woman called Dirty. The novel is set in three places, and those are London, Barcelona and Germany. The novel is a caricature of pathetic irony and signifies existential nihilism. What I find surprising in the novel is that none of the character’s sexual adventures reach a dizzy height of poetic sublimity. The novel evokes a chaotic and anarchic pathos.
Tropman for most of the time is drunk and whoring. It’s questionable whether he gets an existential pleasure. Tropman can be considered like Camus’ myth of the Sisyphus where Sisyphus is condemned by the Gods to roll a boulder uphill only to find that it rolls down again. Sisyphus forced to do the same act again and again. The novel cannot be regarded as masterpiece of art. The novel takes little account of the prevalent political climate of the places. We all know that a revolution is boiling in Barcelona. The novel can be considered as Nietzsche’s Dionysian because it contains violence, sadism, drunkenness and orgies. Is the novel a modern day celebration of defeated hero like Don Quixote?
Tropman is a tragic hero who wants to escape from the realities of his family and life. The novel is a literature of the abyss. Irony is a pathological symptom and has been used as a neurotic metaphor. The novel symbolizes the degradation of the human mind. There is no soulful catharsis in the novel. One feels depressed when one reads the novel. The novel is a result of lunatic mind caught in the fetish of sadistic and masochistic narcissism. None of the characters in the novel are happy. For Bataille brothels were considered as temples. Bataille is a prodigal son who never returns to the father. The novel is disgustingly pathological and neurotic. There is no richness of literature or the beauty of prose. The novel is written in plain everyday language. The characters suffer from the poverty of their minds. The novel is symptomatic of pathological cultural disease. The self becomes a dialectical machine caught in the neurotic delirium of subdued passions. The novel is a carnival of narcissism. Beliefs and value systems collapse into an abyss. The novel’s portrayal of characters is myopic. We are caught in the deluge a meaningless passion.
