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  • Bataille conservateur: emprunts intimes d'un bibliothe´caire
  • Paul Hegarty
Bataille conservateur: emprunts intimes d'un bibliothe´caire. By Jean-Louis Cornille. Paris, Harmattan, 2004. 139 pp. Pb €13.00.

Critics have often lingered over the strangeness of Bataille's day job as librarian. In addition, a highly suggestive list of Bataille's borrowings awaits the reader at the end of the final volume of his Œuvres complètes. Cornille, though, is interested in neither of these, instead focussing on Bataille's literary readings and borrowings. Eschewing the literal, he seeks to expose a hidden library that surfaces tangentially through his texts (essentially those that deal with fiction, or are fictional or autobio-graphical). So Bataille's Bleu du ciel becomes a reworking of Céline's Voyage au bout de la nuit, and the traces of the reworking are covered up. There is great potential in the core idea here, but it turns into a sub-intertextual mush where the key to the 'argument' is that a bit in one book looks like a bit in another (pp. 21-29), and not even that precisely ('c'est sur un mode assez semblable', p. 21). Bataille's 'biographical' details, along with arbitrarily chosen historical occasions, are the murky glass through which Cornille sees resemblances. The connections between Bataille and Breton are tracked through some similarities between the former's Madame Edwarda and the latter's Nadja. Astonishingly, people go to the same parts of Paris (p. 57) and both protagonists go to cafés (p. 45)! Bataille's Histoire de l'œil brings together his interest in Proust and Sade, writes Cornille, emphasizing that it is not just that Bataille is influenced by Sade, but that Sade's own texts seem to emerge from within Bataille — a nice idea if illustrated properly, which it is not. Proust is addressed even more summarily, and Cornille even seems aware of this, commenting that he is only offering us 'indices' in this case (p. 67). The section on L'Abbé C, including references to Bataille's 'autotextualité' (p. 87), is competent, but ultimately uninteresting, except for when Cornille unwittingly attacks his own style when complaining of those who would only spot influences or references and think that the spotting sufficed (p. 103). Apart from trudging through some comparisons between Bataille and Klossowski, the rest of the book consists of truisms about literature and French literature's self-referentiality and its widespread reference to other works. Although what we have is a set of articles (already published elsewhere), the book forms a coherent whole. It is, however, neither adequate scholarship nor a performative exploration of a quirky element of Bataille's writing. [End Page 548] Cornille has also bravely provided us with a list of his reading, which is somewhat limited. It is this absence of reading, at all levels, that most clearly categorizes Cornille's text.

Paul Hegarty
University College Cork
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