Something I have noticed here is that every woman has black nail polish. It’s as uniform as the diamond ring encircling the ring finger of every woman of a certain age at the studio. I find myself wanting this black nail polish, a pedicure. I know that Chanel introduced the nail polish shade Vamp a long time ago, and the color has now probably trickled down to small town manicurists in the Midwest.
Once a hag, no longer a muse, no longer useful for vampirism. One grows bored with her so easily. Like Breton growing tired of Nadja and not even visiting her once she is put away.
When the madwoman loses her charms, she is laughed at, vilified, Vivien(ne), Bertha, Frances. Charcot’s Saturday parade of working-class women at La Salpêtrière.
At the Akron Art Museum, I am standing in front of two sculptures by the Fluxist artist Yayoi Kusama, two armchairs covered in Kusama’s trademark phallic shapes. Kusama was once intimates with the Surrealist assemblage artist Joseph Cornell, who lived with his mother in upstate New York. Both artists of absolute obsessiveness, Cornell trapping images of his actresses and ballet dancers into his boxes. Kusama with her penises and polka dots. I used to have a poster on my wall of Kusama naked like a nubile porn star on a couch, surrounded by dots from her MOMA show. Now she lives in a mental hospital in Japan. Two women wearing shorts are giggling at the silver penises. She’s a very great artist, I intone, impatient. Are you friends with her? they ask. I pause. Yes, yes I am. In a way. Yes, I say.
“We like nothing so much as youthful hysterics,” André Breton and Louis Aragon write in their manifesto praising the “invention of hysteria,” and its 50th anniversary, glorifying the practice of med students fucking the female mental patients. Charcot would stage his pretty nubile hysterics in a series of posed seizures in his photographs, sometimes through hypnotic suggestion. (They were so suggestive.) Augustine was the best at striking these poses of attitudes passionelles—mockery, anger, eroticism, ecstasy, surprise. These women became celebrities, the first supermodels, reality stars.
So many brilliant girls in Surrealism who catalyzed books and artworks — they were the empty lovely receptacles he could fill with his own spirit. They are clairvoyantes, with their lovely receptive skin, they who can intuit and make quippy his brave thought.
In Nadja, Breton recounts his temporary street-muse describing an image perfectly from a philosophical treatise he has been reading. (She doesn’t need to read, that would spoil her, although she craves books, she asks for books.) She who embodies his theories. Breton who writes of Nadja in a footnote: “Does this not approach the extreme limit of the surrealist aspiration, its furthest determinant?” She is so PURE (this is what Bataille writes again and again about Colette Peignot, what does this mean? That she somehow lives his untainted philosophy?).
In the collection of writings of the woman he now calls Laure — which Bataille himself edits — he meditates on and mythologizes this sort of channeling with Colette Peignot. He claims they never spoke about intellectual matters, although they lived together and belonged to various political groups together, including Acéphale, a secret society centering around theories of eroticism and sacrifice. Even though she published texts in journals (sometimes under the pseudonym Claude Araxe), he says he did not know she wrote, or wrote so seriously, that she had accumulated so much material. But when she is on her deathbed dying of consumption, in absolute agony, she tells him to look in her purse and in her papers, to find the small white folder that bore the name “The Sacred.” Part of the fragmented philosophy on the scrap: “The poetic work is sacred in that it is the creation of a topical event, ‘communication’ experienced as nakedness.” This is the moment of clairvoyance for Bataille, that he will later mythologize, as he had just been writing, he says later, the same identical sentence. (They share the same mind, or he shares hers, that is how HE the modernist genius views his muse, Fitzgerald who wanted Zelda to be a “complementary intelligence.”)
Despite her expressed ambivalence about being published, Bataille publishes this text “The Sacred” in an underground edition in 1939. This reminds me of Simone Weil giving Gustave Thibbon her notebooks: “Now they belong to you.” The fragments being handed over, the ambivalence about publishing. Simone Weil depicted as the virginal activist in Blue of Noon, another sort of criminal, yet radically opposed to Dirty (although Colette Peignot and Simone Weil in reality were friends). Michel Leiris and Bataille themselves curate and archive Colette Peignot’s writing, with their extensive footnotes, a way to legitimize perhaps. In the City Lights Laure: The Collected Writings there is almost as much of Bataille’s writing as there is of hers, like his brief biography of her (which ends as soon as they begin to live together, as soon as he uses her as a character in his fictions, so another biography plays out in the novels, yet we are supposed to ignore that). Yet she is still seen as more mystic, a debauched Simone Weil figure, than as an author. Her fragments serving as raw material for Bataille’s more complex theories which he later works out, in his memoirs and theories (while not mentioning her).
The women supply their spiritual autiobiographies, for others to use (often in letters, for letters are read as illegitimate, they do not grant her an author’s rights). Her writing her character to be better understood. Scott with Zelda’s journals, Bataille with Colette P’s fragments. The Baroness wrote letters to her imprisoned novelist-husband, tales of herself as a young libertine, fodder to fictionalize, mirroring the other, more famous Colette writing the schoolgirl Claudine novels for Willy (he had already written the bildungsroman Fanny Essler, about Colette’s adolescence). Later, in letters, the Baroness narrated her memoir for Djuna Barnes to use for her planned biography that was never finished (instead, she was turned into a character). Louise Colet supplying Flaubert detailed letters about what she was like as a young girl, providing the basis for Emma Bovary’s brief period of mysticism at the convent. The Baroness writing her own story of her childhood while isolated in Kentucky (never published).
Colette Peignot writing her early childhood, a text that Bataille and Leiris name (“Story of a Little Girclass="underline" Sad Privilege or a Fairy Tale Life”). It reads like a confession or case study — the death of a father, a young girl’s trauma, the pedophilic priest, like a surreal fairytale, like Unica Zürn’s Dark Spring or Anna Kavan’s Sleep Has Its House. Bataille situates “Story of a Young Girl” and “The Sacred” as testimony that “bears witness to a lived experience,” examples of “communication” felt as “nakedness.” Yet there is an illuminating footnote (Bataille’s?) at some point during Colette’s memoir piece, which we are told is unfinished. We are told that “[starting here, the typewritten copy, which served as the basis for the text, no longer has the same finished character as what proceeds].” The aesthetic of the “unfinished,” which is that of the notebook, of the diary, of fragments (not the novel, which is supposed to be cultivated, worked over, finished). What follows is actually a spirited political rant — which I actually prefer to what precedes, which feels more staged, more sensational.
Reading Laure: The Collected Writings I am struck how these modernist men, with their finished, worked-over texts didn’t really know these women they write of so ecstatically. The Acéphale society, with its alleged Dionysian rituals in the forest — Bataille and Colette P., both craving to be the first human sacrifices. The symbol was a headless man. These women, although they are portrayed as cruel, sadistic, were often masochists in their relationships, they were the ones who lost their heads, by their mad love, the sparks of their relationship catalyzing his writing and often destroying her. Colette Peignot’s letters show an emotional bind, and absolute devastation at Bataille’s infidelities. She was the sacrificial victim on whom he meditated. Colette Peignot becomes the elliptical ghost of Bataille’s Guilty, his emotional, agonizing document of intense grief and personal crisis, a meditation on the extremity and excesses of mystic as well as erotic experience. She is obviously everywhere, ghosting the text, these meditations began at the year-anniversary of her death. Yet in the original manuscript he scratches out her name, and in the final version she is omitted, a sacrifice for transcendence.