Ce que la littérature doit au mal: une étude stylistique du mal chez Bataille et Bernanos by Sarah Lacoste (review)

In her thoughtful and carefully argued study Sarah Lacoste challenges a longstanding critical orthodoxy by comparing two authors from the same era — the conservative Catholic Georges Bernanos, and the subversive atheist Georges Bataille — who, aside from their first name, are generally considered to have nothing in common. According to Lacoste, however, both men share a sustained concern for the topic of evil, a topic with which they engage, both explicitly and implicitly, via the discourse of mysticism. What Lacoste defines as ‘la mystique’ is not the normative, speculative language about evil that is rooted in the linear, rational theological discourse of the logos, but rather the metaphorical, fragmentary, and allusive language of evil that gives embodied form to the very essence of le mal within the materiality of words themselves. Where the first, discursive type of language has traditionally demanded a reader who is empathetic, the second, constitutive langue du mal requires one who is hermeneutic: a reader, who, like the original mystics themselves, adopts an intuitive, visionary approach that entails delving beneath the horizontal surface of texts so as to uncover their deeper ‘vertical’ meanings. The recovery of such meanings often hinges on recognizing ruptures, ‘brèches’, or narrative and grammatical incongruities within the essays of Bataille and the novels of Bernanos, all of which bear the imprint of, and offer clues to, the contaminating presence of evil, a contamination that is figured via such recurring tropes as ‘souillure’, ‘blessure’, water, darkness, and nightmares. At the same time, following the sacrificial and redemptive tradition of mystical texts with their frequent focus on the martyrdom emblematized by Christ’s passion, readers are invited to revalorize evil as a positive and revealing presence. Lacoste gives particular emphasis to the mutually beneficial relationship between evil and literature: the former is given fixity and meaning by the latter; while literature is able to harness the suggestive power of evil to its quest for authenticity and truth (values largely eroded by the First World War) by reacquainting modern humanity with that essential, lost dimension of the sacred. Lacoste’s intrinsic, stylistic approach to evil is rigorously and meticulously carried out: she is at her best in the later chapters in drawing attention to the pivotal role of paradox and so-called ‘mots leviers’ (p. 247), individually charged words such as ‘cri’, that give living, embodied form to evil in ways that encourage more subtle performative readings that bypass our conventional rational modes of interpretation. Some will no doubt feel that Lacoste overstates the role of mysticism in Bataille and Bernanos, thereby closing off important discussion of some of their more speculative and historically grounded reflections on evil: for instance, Olivier’s comparison of Charlemagne’s Christian warfare with bureaucratized twentieth-century mass slaughter in Bernanos’s Journal d’un curé de campagne, or, in La Littérature et le mal, Bataille’s sustained polemic with Sartre’s existentialism concerning Baudelaire’s transgressive recuperation of evil as an antidote to bourgeois utilitarianism. But the patient specialist reader will find much of value in this book, not least in the alternative hermeneutical approach it proposes and its compelling rapprochement between two important authors rarely studied in parallel.