His Heart Is a Lute Held Up Poe and Bataille
Robert Glück is a central figure in “New Narrative” writing, along with Kathy Acker, Dodie Bellamy, Bruce Boone, Dennis Cooper, and Kevin Killian. These writers borrow from the resources of genre fiction, sensational novels, tabloid gossip, and pornography to address questions of gender and sexuality. Their early work coincided with the emergence of gay and lesbian (later, queer) identity politics in the late 1970s and 1980s, while they often criticized what they saw as the formalism of language-centered writing. The “turn to narrative” undertaken by Glück and his friends was in part a response to the “turn to language” of contemporary poets, especially the Language writers (even as some, like Carla Harryman and Steve Benson, had similar concerns with narrative, gender, and sexuality). For Glück and the New Narrativists, questions of sexuality, subjectivity, and community circulate around primary human questions of love and being with others. In “His Heart Is a Lute Held Up,” Glück undertakes a reading of passages from two very different Gothic fictions: Edgar Allan Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher” and Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye. The result of Glück’s essay on narrative is a powerful study of disarranged (if not deranged) subjectivity that argues for the intelligence (though not necessarily intelligibility) of sex and the senses.
During the whole of a dull, dark and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. (Edgar Allan Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher” [1839])
This first sentence ends basso profundo “House of Usher.” Since the House is a symbol, complexity, mystery, and resonance devolve on it; descriptions move toward it like metal shavings to a magnet. In a recent schlock made-for-TV “House of Usher” the narrator (and his wife!) urge unwilling peasants to drive them at dusk through the wasteland to the House. This theft from the vampire myth is apropos—the undead (Roderick, Madeline, Dracula) are cultivated, barren, and old blood—really really old. In both stories there is an overriding sexualization of death and a corresponding reordering of the senses.
To the degree that they use genre, Poe and Bataille have an understanding with us—we consent to receive pleasure, nonproductive, nonimproving. Then it’s Poe’s show, he trundles out the Gothic trappings with the proviso that his lute be our sensibility. Like gossip, this pleasure is based on a manipulation/ transgression of shared codes and a continuum of experience. That’s why Truth in fantasy usually reverts to public absolutes—Good and Evil, God and Devil, etc., just as porn likes “types,” the cat burglar, the sailor.
Like much of nineteenth-century American prose (Hawthorne, Melville), Poe’s is “warmed over,” awkward and arty. It’s distant from the center of power; you have to work at detail if you are far from the informing idea. “It was the misfortune of Mr. Pickney to have been born too far south…. We pardon his hyperboles for the evident earnestness with which they are uttered” (“The Poetic Principle”). We get to like Poe’s overproduced rhetoric. It lets us know we’re in for a rather full-blown experience—it’s all worked out: the elegiac bell of “dull, dark and soundless,” the memorial “autumn of the year” and “shades of evening.”
I know not how it was—but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit.
The eye of the story enters the impressionable realm—the spirit is invaded with a glance, that is, through the eye.
I say insufferable; for the feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible.
We rely on the narrator to organize time and space for us, and to render the intangibles—“I say insufferable.” What traits create high perception? Poe had a formula: in the “Purloined Letter,” a detective story, visual acuteness is based on an impulse toward order—“ratiocination”—along with an equally high ability to sustain ambiguity. A detective’s intelligence is exemplary and beyond us. Our narrator is cut from the same cloth but we understand past him—we triangulate with Poe (a three-way?).
For example, the narrator says the House is not poetic, not pleasurable. This is a strategy, because we are poetic, receptive. This tease helps to pin down the reality of subsequent marvels, and it prepares us for one of horror’s delicious moments: the opaque doubter, our most atheistic self, joins us and is converted. The conversion and the pleasure are religious; terror, a secular awe.
Horror asks for faith beyond the social conventions in order to acknowledge a more inclusive humanity—“the dark side.” Pornography is also religious—“I am a beast!” It says that a human picture must accommodate this transgression. Because they diffuse boundaries, this awe and sexuality are guilty pleasures; formerly they may have been part of a ceremony but now they are sold to us.
I looked upon the scene before me—upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain, upon the bleak walls, upon the vacant eye-like windows, upon a few rank sedges, and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees—with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-image of the reveler upon opium; the bitter lapse into everyday life, the hideous dropping off of the veil.
All this bric-a-brac in one short space shows the Gothic conventions as established and at hand. Poe writes thirty or forty years after the first Gothic rush; his story is an auteur version, less vulgar, less energetic, but more penetrating. He adds symbolism, analysis, and psychology. Psychology, like our narrator, will try to undermine fantasy by positing Science as the larger myth. Poe is one stop on the train from Gothic fairy tale to case history of the criminally insane. Symbolism (meaning becomes problematical) and analysis (the resistance of the materials) will become deconstruction in Bataille—he will complete the modernist quote marks around genre.
The narrator invokes that criminal of the senses, the addict. (Shades of Roderick’s “morbid acuteness of the senses”—enclaves of body knowledge.)
There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart, an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime.
For the third time the narrator asks us not to consider the sublime, but to see the House as prodeath (vacant eyes, etc.). Roderick and Madeline are barren, nonproductive; their embrace concludes in death. The “atmosphere” manifests itself in the change in Roderick’s senses—hearing, taste, touch become more important. So on one hand there’s the narrator (living, analysis) and on the other the House (dead, sensation). To assign death and sensation to the same roster is not so odd if we factor in the transcendent, the sublime, which we do despite, and because of, our narrator’s objections.
Reordering the senses challenges accepted boundaries, so naturally it is associated with Evil and with Death, those other challengers. Later, there’s Rimbaud’s déreglement de tous les sens and a whole Axel’s Castle full of sensual experimentation in out of the way locales. The sublime in our time, the late sixties, also transgressed by reordering priorities and elevating pleasure.
Our narrator is good at seeing. Seeing interested Poe—it’s the basis of the detective story and it corresponds to analysis. Our narrator draws his visual conventions from the Picturesque: a cultural expression of the primacy of sight and perspective when mastering nature, our corresponding further remove from nature (once you name nature it goes from being you to yours).
What was it—I paused to think—what was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher?
Poe inters character after character, but what activity does justice to the mental atmosphere of suffocation and horror? There is a disjunction between meaning and activity; the symbolic takes up the slack.
It was a mystery all insoluble; nor could I grapple with the shadowy fancies that crowded upon me as I pondered.
From now on the realistic and the supernatural will keep bracketing each other, making the story impossible to “understand” though sponsoring an “elasticity of mind,” which is useful at the conclusion of “The Mad Trist” when Roderick and Madeline embrace in a blaze of crossed circuits and overloaded fuses; the House divides and recombines (like the sister and brother?) in the tarn: the narrator is expelled and death, sex, Madeline, Roderick, and the House become one in that collapse.
I was forced to fall back on the unsatisfactory conclusion, that while, beyond doubt, there are combinations of very simple natural objects which have the power of thus affecting us, still the analysis of this power lies among considerations beyond our depth.
The problem of fantasy: what can a true map of the world look like if this landscape is an example? Still, his atomic theory (combinations) doesn’t tell the whole story because he can’t see why it works.
It was possible, I reflected, that a mere different arrangement of the particulars of the scene, of the details of the picture, would be sufficient to modify, or perhaps to annihilate, its capacity for sorrowful impression; acting upon this idea, I reined my horse to the precipitous brink of a black and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled luster by the dwelling, and gazed down—but with a shudder even more thrilling than before—upon the remodelled and inverted images of the grey sedge, and the ghastly tree-stems, and the vacant eye-like windows.
It’s odd that someone riding all day—fatigued—at the urgent request of his friend—hurried—would conduct an experiment with sensibility and perspective—the Picturesque. He looks at the House mirrored in the lake—no, still ghastly. Its image isolates the terror. The House will end up in the lake, one with its image. The business of the two views carries an analytical meaning but the horror subverts the analytical. The narrator uses his eyes, the House is blind; he tries a different view, still blind. He must see imaginatively, but the House will be beyond his scope.
I grew up very much alone, and as far back as I recall I was frightened of anything sexual. (Georges Bataille, Story of the Eye, trans. by Joachim Neugroschel [New York: Urizen, 1977; originally published in France in 1928])
Bataille’s first paragraph breaks into three distinct beginnings. The first sentence presents an “I”; we are given a psychological fact abstracted from its surroundings, a sense of psychological data. We recognize a writer, a personality. We don’t realize right off that his sensibility is merely an urge toward transgressive sexuality, toward Evil.
First person presupposes the encompassing context of a personality. Evil accompanies human potential in Bataille; he sets equal signs between sex, death, evil, and (replacing Poe’s nature) the unconscious. Since this counters the human models of our “crass machine age,” the Evil becomes utopian, an enclave against. But historically personhood is on the way out; on its way to becoming a text, merely one more element to factor into a story. In his deconstruction of the narrative, if not the narrator, Bataille dismantles the individual with disjunction and banality, with a cold treatment of genre and a free-for-all of literary codes. Romantics saw nature as separate, as subject matter; the moderns see individuality in the same way (name it and it’s lost—owned). Bataille’s decentering rejects on a formal level a discrete “I.” This modernist rejection is also an enclave against.
“I have always been afraid.” (Actually angoissé, anguish or anxiety, more ambivalent.) People who write about sex internalized society’s moral dictums—they never recovered from the shock of sex itself; they communicate their amazement. The writing is aggressive, something of a revenge. Naive and adolescent, everything is visual. First-hand information from the other senses tends to normalize and diffuse the surprise of sex.
This story, like much of porn, like most of Sade in fact, is about education; it’s a Bildungsroman. The first sentence sets up the anxious hero who will learn. The book concludes with his participating in the defilement of a priest. After Sade, who could take the defilement of yet another priest with complete seriousness? Bataille’s heroes are reduced; instead of Juliette’s Sherman’s March through Europe we have the narrator’s and Simone’s tireless little legs pumping always pumping on their bicycles, and later their modest trip to Spain. In any case, isn’t there something farcical about the Adonis who guards his precious pearl against the onslaught of Venus? When the priest succumbs, or better, converts—Yes! Yes! I want and need and crave!—we feel he’s come over to our side (present company excepted, naturally).
I was nearly sixteen when I met Simone, a girl my own age, at the beach in
X. Our families being distantly related, we quickly grew intimate.
This second beginning—the furniture of 19th-century narration. The inspired X invokes the 19th-century struggle toward the “effect of the real.” (Poe also used initials to give his stories an air of docu-drama.) Bataille “imports” this packaging; his stilted prose advances the plot and at the same time puts quotation marks around plot itself, inviting us to relish its patina as one more refinement of pleasure. It’s nostalgic—it’s Poe’s furniture. That is, it’s a museum. The strangeness of subject matter now extends to the narrative style. The disjunction, the quotation marks around storytelling emphasized by multiple beginnings, gives us notice: to the degree this story is about being a story, it’s not a story. The first paragraph is not an example of “reframing,” which develops an idea while placing it between the audience and writer; it simply heads out three different times, parallel, evoking three traditions—hence its boldness and startling energy.
The narrative itself disappoints in the same way as pornography, or Poe’s horror, because it’s not equal to the meaning:
But on a sensual level, she so bluntly craved any upheaval that the faintest call from the senses gave her a look directly suggestive of all things linked to deep sexuality, such as blood, suffocation, sudden terror, crime; things indefinitely destroying human bliss and honesty.
It’s the task of Horror and Porno to constantly replace image with image, each more intense than its predecessor, but what visual could equal the intensity of this quotation?
In 1839 the trappings of Evil, the little people who make it all possible, were a stage company devoted to the starring figure, Sensibility. For Bataille, sensibility is just another actor in the troupe, and subjectivity has retreated to tone. (One imagines a tonal coherence, the echo of high monotone, as in Corneille.) Fifty years later, the trappings are commodified, evil is commodified, the tone is commodified, subjectivity is commodified; they call to each other again and the story continues in, say, the work of Dennis Cooper and Kathy Acker.
Three days after our first meeting, Simone and I were alone in her villa. She was wearing a black pinafore with a starched white collar. I began realizing that she shared my anxiety at seeing her, and I felt even more anxious that day because I hoped she would be stark naked under the pinafore.
The third beginning is Porn: Simone’s black pinafore and starched white collar suggest a nun’s habit but more likely it’s a school uniform. In any case it invokes the rather formal tradition of porn and uniforms, of nasty pictures: “I hoped she would be stark naked.” Porn wants structures, roles, in order to transgress. The effect will be complete when the characters abandon their boundaries and the dos and don’ts of life’s starched collars.
If Poe’s story is about Death and Bataille’s is about Sex, it’s that particular sex and death, twins who live in a single breath. The sex in Bataille is situational—it’s about obsession and power, disconnected from the body. It’s at the far pole of the erotics of the self, the manipulations of image, distanced and objectifying. Death in Poe is the result of heightened sensation—death that brings us close to the body. The world becomes sensually intimate for Roderick—a pre-language of the senses. Language (narration, analysis) fails on approaching what directly pertains to us, the working of our senses. It’s none of its business. Language wants to monitor what happens between us and the world; at either side of the negotiation it’s silent. The old ballad supplies the voice that Roderick lacks. In Story of the Eye, the ultimate image is an eye (distance, analysis) inserted in a cunt—sexual seeing, reordering the senses.
PUBLICATION: Close Reading (1982), 2:67–70.
KEYWORDS: New Narrative; sexuality; genre; negativity.
LINKS: Robert Glück, “Baucis and Philemon” (PJ 5), “Fame” (PJ 10), “Truth’s Mirror Is No Mirror” (PJ 7); Steve Benson, “Personal as Social History: Three Fictions” (PJ 7); Kathy Acker, “Ugly” (Guide; PJ 7); Dodie Bellamy, “Can’t We Just Call It Sex?: In Memory of David Wojnarowicz” (Guide; PJ 10); Bruce Boone, “Kathy Acker’s Great Expectations” (PJ 4); Laura Moriarty, “Sex and Language” (PJ 8); Bernard Noël, “Poetry and Experience” (PJ 3); Larry Price, “Harryman’s Balzac” (PJ 4); Leslie Scalapino, “Aaron Shurin’s Elsewhere” (PJ 8); Aaron Shurin, “Orphée: The Kiss of Death” (PJ 10).
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY: Glück, Andy, a Long Poem (Los Angeles: Panjandrum, 1973); Family Poems (San Francisco: Black Star, 1979); Jack the Modernist (1981; New York: Serpent’s Tail, 1995); Elements of a Coffee Service (Bolinas, Calif.: Four Seasons, 1983); Reader (San Francisco: Lapis, 1989); Margery Kempe (New York: Serpent’s Tail, 1994); Denny Smith (Astoria, Ore.: Clear Cut, 2004); with Bruce Boone, La Fontaine (San Francisco: Black Star, 1982); with Mary Burger, Camille Roy, and Gail Scott, eds., Biting the Error: Writers on Narrative (Toronto: Coach House, 2004).