The theme of the adolescent was a subject of interest for the most outstanding authors of the polemical group Acéphale, it is not surprising that among their analyses and readings of Sade and Nietzsche they saw in adolescence the pure essence of transgression.
From novels such as Story of the eye, Roberte ce soir, The Baphomet or My Mother, the main characters are adolescents who remain between the line of childhood and adulthood, which gives them a certain freedom to be able to satiate their darkest desires without restrictions.
It is worth noting that the works of these two authors have a religious aspect to them, due to the absence of God that they felt as a result of the world wars.
Pierre Klossowski in his book Sade my neighbour will show us that theological language is in essence evil, commenting that God is the original culprit who would have attacked man, before man attacked him, therefore to attack one is to fight the other, to which Sade insists on this point: “if I receive evil from others, I enjoy the right to return it to them, even the facility of doing it to them first: from then on evil is a good for me as it is for the author of my days. I am happy in the evil I do to others, just as God is happy in the evil he does to me.”[1]
Under this premise, Story of the Eye is an erotic novel that criticises different religious aspects with adolescent protagonists. The pseudonym chosen for this book is as provocative as the text itself. “Lord”, which means “God”, and “Auch” which refers to the phrase “aux chiottes” which could be translated as “fuck it” giving the translation of “Fuck God”. The Eye itself is also a way of alluding to God “the all–seeing eye” without leaving aside the endless relations between the testicles of a bull, the egg, the blood and the urine. Difficult times called for daring literature that challenged the traditional order of society.
In the eyes of the law, an adolescent does not carry as many legal problems as an adult, and it is mainly adults who are in the care of their parents. The protagonists of Story of the Eye are fully aware of this, and will do anything illegal with the simple intention of intensifying a sexual desire that will gradually increase from the most innocent to the most perverse.
The desire for freedom leads to destruction and self–destruction, that violence is an ingredient of sex and vice versa, that sperm sooner or later turns to blood. The desire for transgression, implicit in eroticism, which, taken to its ultimate consequences, leads to crime and death, runs through the story and is the spring that animates the sexual acts of the protagonists.
In the erotic novel Roberte ce soir, Klossowski tells the story of the enigmatic Roberte and her elderly husband Octave. Antoine, who, at the age of thirteen, was adopted by his uncle, an eminent professor of scholasticism who, according to Antoine, “suffered from his marital bliss like an illness”. To find relief, Octave decides to introduce a perverse Law of Hospitality into his life. Thus, instigated by her husband, Roberte becomes involved in the strange ritual of offering her beautiful body to any guest who wants it.
But is Roberte really just a body to be offered, an instrument of someone else’s will, a shared source of pleasure between an old voyeur and a young man excited by desire? Antoine, who lives a troubled adolescence in the rarefied atmosphere of this house and who feels a violent passion for his aunt, gradually introduces the reader to the mysterious ceremonies of a sexuality that lies beyond all prohibition, beyond all established morality, in the virgin terrain of eroticism in complete freedom. Antoine will learn from his uncle Octave, The Laws of Hospitality through a theological and pornographic aspect by which, through evil, it is possible to reach God, Octave’s spiritual quest leads him along the path of the flesh; only in this way, he understands, can good be found. The idea, in the same way as Blake, is that, through evil, through the perversion of the body, good can be attained. Since there is no longer a God to make theology possible, the body takes its place as the new temple, thus perverting the means by which the absolute is attained. Pornography and theology merge to form a new discipline, which is what Octave tries to teach his nephew Antoine by example and discourse.
In a similar case of ritual and incestuous exchange we find the novel “My Mother”, which narrates the ritual and sexual initiation of a seventeen–year–old boy who loses his vision of his mother when he learns by accident that his mother is the opposite of what he thought. The pure and holy mother as Pierre conceived her immediately becomes a different, unknown, evil mother.
The mother created by Bataille becomes the very incarnation of Evil, that Evil which, by dint of being all–powerful, turns whoever incarnates it into a God. Bataille convinces us that it is possible, despite everything and despite ourselves, to love evil, the evil that brings us closer to God. Young Pierre slips, then, between anguish and limitless pleasure, into the abyss into which his mother drags him, surrounded by her beautiful and diabolical friends Rhea, Hansi and Lulu, who will gradually initiate him to discover the sexuality that religion forbids so much. “I was horrified by this desire, although at times it became hallucinatory, I was aware of my deceit and my cowardice, there was never anything possible between her and me. If my mother had desired it, I would have loved the pain it would have caused me.”
Both Antoine in Roberte ce soir, Pierre in My Mother and the protagonists of Story of the Eye share an adolescence initiated by a sexual–criminal–theological rituality that through evil and transgression brings us little by little closer to knowing this evil God who is the reflection of each of us as human beings, at the beginning God made us in his image and likeness.[2]
[1] Hervé Castanet. Pierre Klossowski. La pantomima de los espíritus. Nueva Visión. Buenos Aires. 2007 pág. 29
[2] Georges Bataille. Mi madre. Tusquets editores. México. 2013. pág. 91
