Bataille says: Writing's always only a game played with ungraspable reality.
I dig this. A lot. Isn't writing--realist or not--an attempt to understand reality by creating another reality? Or rather: My writing is an attempt for me to understand reality by creating a non-reality, a non-realistic reality, a reality grounded not in the real but in truth, as I know it best.
Bataille says: I can't abide sentences... Everything I've asserted, convictions I've expressed, it's all ridiculous and dead. I'm only silence, and the universe is silence. / The world of words is laughable. Threats, violence, and the blandishments of power are part of silence. Deep complicity can't be expressed in words.
I am complicit, but even in stating my complicity is to undermine it. Make it less real. Then, when written, does the real become less real or more real? Or can the real ever be written? Would all realities written be nothing more than simulations--in Baudrillard's sense of the word--no matter how faithful to reality it is?
I have no real issue with this. I don't work in realism, but I wonder how realists would respond to this. Thinking in these terms, it all feels pretty futile.
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Some more Bataille:
ReplyDelete"The greatest, most certain love doesn't prevent you from being the butt of infinite laughter."
"The void frees me from what attaches me. In the void there is nowhere to stop. Creating the void ahead of me, I immediately sense the beloved there-- where there is nothing. What was I desperately in love with? A glimpse, an open door."
Thank god someone is engaging this massive body of thought... check out Jean-luc Nancy and Blanchot (one of Bataille's close friends) if you have not!!