Alexander Irwin's Saints of the Impossible is a thorough, engaging book, at once sympathetic to the authors under discussion - Bataille, Weil - but also critically independent of them. I think that it is this independence that troubles me, since they are authors, as Irwin shows us, who sought not only to communicate a message, but to 'be the message: to put into reader's hands a text consubstantial with the writer's own self, to live a life crafted as a vehicle of poetic, spiritual and political meaning'.
To be the message - to write, for that message to be 'revolt', in Weil's case, and never, she says 'the exercise of power'; like Bataille, she realises what Irwin calls a 'literary sainthood' - transmitting an attitude, a 'style of existence, an orientation that perhaps cannot be precisely verbalised, but whose emotional atmosphere the "addressee" absorbs (by "contagion", as Bataille would have it) though the hagiographic text'.
To write as a saint - to consecrate one's life in writing - both writers call on their readers to do something similar; both write, then, the equivalent of Ignatious's Spiritual Exercises. Inner Experience is a kind of self-martyrdom, a 'written performance of the text', as Irwin calls it, but it is essential to understand that it aims at results - at a kind of conversion of the reader that can happen only insofar as the reader in turns lives the experience the book incarnates.
How extraordinary that this book, Bataille's first full length publication by a major publisher, comes out in the early years of the war! 'The date on which I begin to write (September 5, 1939) is not a coincidence. I am beginning because of the events, but not in order to talk about them': the first line of Bataille's Guilty, which followed Inner Experience into print. What, then, does he talk about? Mystical experience, apparently - a kind of inner war (even if the notion of interiority is called into question), wherein Bataille writes 'with my life', keeping open what Irwin calls 'a laceration of consciousness' - a 'wound' Bataille offers others 'as the basis of an obscence and "intoxicating" communication'. And it is this wound that he offers as an alternative to the civilisation that has revealed itself in the real war around him. A wound - a style of living, of writing, a 'mystico-literary self-stylisation', as Irwin calls it, whose writing has taught him, 'I am not a philosopher, but a saint, maybe a madman'.
A saint, a madman - it would take such a non-philosopher to show how the war was also a response to this wound (not Bataille's, of course, but one that constitutes human existence); that what appears to be politics has, in fact, a religious and aesthetic dimension. All this Irwin explores these topics thoroughly and fair-mindedly; I read the book greedily, all at once, but I remained troubled, too by the author's very ability to situate Bataille and Weil within a tradition.
Irwin writes of a long French tradition in which the writer is upheld as an exemplar - as 'sacred'. The example of Pascal, for example, whose work underwent a revival in the 1920s, Iwrin tells us, particular by way of Bataille's friend Chestov, combines literary brilliance with a quest for salvation. The post-Romantic avant-garde had comprised its own tradition of holy figures - Rimbaud, of course, as both poet and seer, but also Sade, in whose work several of Bataille's friends were interested, as well as Poe, Baudelaire and others. At the same time, in the 20s and 30s, the Surrealists produced books like Nadja and Paris Peasant, in which they presented their own meanderings around Paris, their encounters and experiences as a kind of template of Surreal existence.
Literary self-stylisation, then, was a commonplace in the Paris in which Bataille and Weil wrote. In the same period, it was assumed quite widely, and in very disparate camps that political turbulence had spiritual roots; religious and aesthetic discourse were immediately relevant to the concerns of interwar France. Come the second world war, and Bataille's retreat to 'mystico-literary self-stylisation', to a solitary written performance after a turbulent decade working alongside others in various avant-garde groups, does not seem, in this context, so surprising.
His work issues from a tradition; the revival of Pascal, the avant-garde canonisation of Sade and Rimbaud, the minutely rendered accounts of their life by prominent Surrealists - but why does this trouble me? There are writers I would like to think cannot merely be contextualised by their times, but seem to contextualise it in turn; writers who do not simply belong to history, to the great procession of events, but who send history strangely off course. Writers, then, that come at me from another angle - that are not part of the world and the account of the world I recognise.
It is as if they spoke from a higher, wilder place - that, from some promontory above the storms they write by the light of the most distant stars. And that they reach me - that their books found me, that I came across them, one after another, as stepping stones that would lead to a place behind the world, as though you could pull open a curtain and disappear. And I have felt that to read them was always secret, sacred - that their books demanded to be kept apart and away from others.
But from Irwin I understand that I am only a convert - or that what I want is to be converted, for reading to also become a kind of self-stylisation. And that I stand in a long line of those who want to be converted - reader-believers, and readers who want to believe most of all in a power of a certain kind of writing ... and that, like them, I share the great naivety that there is an importance to writing beyond that of writing - that, as Bataille thought, his inner war made him the most qualified of all to understand the secrets of the outer one that raged about him.
It is difficult not to conclude that, beyond its challenge to specific forms of political oppression, Weil's and Bataille's cultivation of sainthood marks a virulent contestation of the human condition as such. That such a generalised feeling of outrage could surge up among people living an 'epoch deprived of a future' is stil perhaps understandable.
But we, who hope to have a future still before us, may judge the 'attraction to the impossible' celebrated by Bataille and Weil as sheer romantic hubris. We may see here an effort to cloak with exalted words what is at bottom a puerile refusal to soil one's hands with the inevitably messy, frustrating business of merely 'possible' politics and ordinary, 'unsacrificeable' existence.
And yet, and yet ... Why is it I think Bataille and Weil should be approached only by another writer-saint? Why do I dream idly of a book written at the level of their thought, their life, their writing?