The Cradle of Humanity: Prehistoric Art and Culture (review)

"For the animal, being essentially man's double, had something of the divine, the very thing he no longer attains except in the prodigious effervescence of festival"

(p. 177).

With this assertion, along with others, Georges Bataille seeks to interpret prehistoric art and culture. But such is characteristic of Bataille. His work on the formative complexities of culture is also a means to inform a sensibility we seem to share across epochs, and which because of its vitality eschews any notion of nostalgia.

It is something we call the marvelous; a desire for the marvelous.

What, then, did the birth of art mean 40,000 to 50,000 years ago? How did it mark the emergence of human culture; what are its ties to the community of hunter-gatherers, who embraced equally the animals they ate and used for clothing; and where does it link with the otherness of death-traits that in whole or in part distinguish sentient beings and cultures?

These are the questions Bataille struggles with in these 10 texts and appendix, written over a 30-year period (1930 to 1960) and which, despite their sometime brevity, also respond to his time, which is ours with its real and potential savagery: from the two world wars and intervening colonial conflicts to the Holocaust and the sudden emergence of the atomic age with the U.S. attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Bataille's Visit to Lascaux (1952) thus seems, in retrospect, a matter of urgency. He enters the cave he has previously discussed to test his ideas and to experience their capacity to refract art's first flowering. He notes the exceptional qualities of the cave, the magical resonance of the drawings and the differences in depiction between animal and man: the former rendered with acuity, the latter as a rudimentary sign in an animal mask. Then in the last paragraph he returns to a history he identifies as our own, which begins with a form of slavery: the subjugation to work.

Are the cave and its drawings a tonic to this mention of work or a concise recognition of a development that calls for further study? Bataille does not say.

In this light it seems less important to test Bataille's accounts by way of their conclusiveness than by way of what we gain and lose in our reading of them, a value that underlies much of his work and that also enabled him to conflate his research on prehistoric man with three aptitudes: a philosopher's skill in suspending judgment, an anthropologist's need for specificity in observation and a poet's desire to reveal qualities perhaps previously unknown but that, when recognized, gain precision by virtue of our assent to their immediacy.

We find this, most notably, in the text Unlivable Earth, which concludes the book. For here Bataille writes with a conviction infected with astonishment. In Les Trois Frères, our ancestors have depicted "all jumbled up [in] an immense crowd of animals" the emergence of "figures half-human, half-animal" that "lead to a musical tumult, a dance of deliverance into intoxication." Bataille continues: "the straightforward animal figures were those of the hunt, but these strange-human yet animal-figures were in fact divine, for the animal," and we return to the excerpt at the start of this review.

In matters of concern to art and poetry, philosophy and science, George Bataille is a provocateur. That his studies inevitably turn to tracking the rapport between them, as he wrote and when we read, why we greet each addition to his oeuvre in English with the attention it deserves.

The Cradle of Humanity: Prehistoric Art and Culture, with its few but precise illustrations, contains perspectives that compel. It will interest readers of Bataille, and those more generally fascinated by how we interpret our origins in the art left to...