Denial of Blissful Love in My Mother

3.1. Denial of Blissful Love in My Mother

Bataille’s erotic novel My Mother describes a seventeen-year-old narrator named Pierre, who develops an incestuous lust for his mother. The story begins with

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the narrator’s description of festive expenditures he detested such as drunkenness, destruction and licentiousness. Pierre’s father was a raging alcoholic who, in his drunken states, on more than one occasion, was guilty of damaging furniture and smashing empty wine bottles. Afterwards, through the pictures left by his deceased father he learned that his father was a dissolute man who indulged himself in

promiscuous sex. These scenes terrified him. Because of this, the narrator, Pierre felt a strong sense of antipathy towards his late father.

I detested him so heartily that I took the opposite view to his on

everything. At that stage I had become devout to the point of imagining myself eventually entering the Church. My father was then ardently anti-clerical. Not until he was dead did I decide against a religious vocation in order to live with my mother, before whom I stood in blind adoration. I believed that my mother was what, in my foolishness, I supposed all women were, I believed that she was what only male vanity could prevent a person from being, attracted to religion. Did I not go with her to Mass on Sunday? My mother loved me; I believed that we

thought and felt alike, in a unison marred only by the presence of the intruder, my father. (My Mother 27-28)

The narrator Pierre loathed his father to the extent that he went out of his way to embrace everything which his father stood against. Pierre’s father was extremely averse to religion; therefore, Pierre devoted himself to the Church. In other words, it was his aversion to his father that made him dedicated to religion. Paradoxically, after his father passed away, he resolved to abandon a religious vocation so as to be his mother’s lover. It is noted that the seed of transgression started to grow in Peierre’s inner experience. Pierre was convinced that he and his mother thought and felt alike.

It revealed that Pierre and his mother were fascinated with the intense pleasure

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transgression brought. Throughout the novel, it is clearly seen that Pierre’s mother was a binge drinker and indulged herself in sexual pleasure. That is to say, drinking and sexual pleasure appealed to the narrator Pierre, but his dedication to “work”

rendered him unlikely to get access to these expenditures. The narrator maintained:

After dessert she went off and I remained behind, disappointed. Did she so much as care if I was vexed? My disappointment lasted through the following days. My mother never stopped laughing – and drinking – and above all going away. I stayed by myself and worked. I was at school at the time, I was studying, and, like someone who has taken to drink, I drowned myself in work. (My Mother 29)

As a result of his devotion to “work,” he had no chance to get access to alcohol and sexual enjoyment which were deemed by him detrimental to the ethics of work. At dinner, with his father gone to Brittany, Pierre told his mother how thrilled he was to be alone with her; to his amazement, his mother was greatly delighted by what he said.

Pierre’s mother promised to take him to a fine restaurant. His mother told Pierre that he was such a handsome creature that people in the restaurant would take him as her lover. Pierre was struck dumb because he could not believe his mother had uttered such words. He was soon to realize that his mother drank a lot. Later, much to his astonishment, he found that his mother was a licentious woman who did not merit his veneration. For Pierre, these expenditures and this image of his mother were

overwhelming to him. One day Pierre was told the bad news of his father’s sudden death. He simply asked his mother with equanimity of what his father died from; to his astonishment, his calmness about his father’s death irritated his mother.

I simply asked what my father had so suddenly died from. She answered me and then stood up. She made a helpless gesture. She was tired, a weight seemed to lie upon her shoulders, but of her feelings she said

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nothing apart from this: “If you speak to Robert or Marthe don’t forget that you are supposed to be borne down by grief. Our good servants consider that we ought to be in tears. There’s no need to weep but lower your eyes.” (My Mother 30)

Pierre could not conceal his jubilation at his father’s death because he wanted to see his mother set free from his father whom Pierre saw as her oppressor. However, Pierre could detect his mother’s anger from her sharp voice and stern gaze. In his mind, his mother was supposed to be overwhelmed with joy by her husband’s death. Much to Pierre’s perplexity however, his mother seemed to have been overwhelmed by the grief of bereavement. He told his mother he would not say anything against his deceased father. However, he told his mother that his father’s death was better for her because his father had made her life more difficult. “What do you know about it?” his mother retorted angrily. Pierre had no clue of his mother’s vileness and degradation because his father spared no effort to fashion his wife as a chaste wife and a good mother in the presence of his son. Since for Pierre’s father, a dissolute wife and a bad mother constituted prohibition, hence he managed to shape his wife as a respectable woman who earned his son’s respect. With this respectable image of his mother in mind, Pierre was obsessed with his mother’s solemnity. He had a blind adoration for his mother and venerated her as a saint. However, perpetuating the image of being decent was intolerable to Pierre’s mother after her husband passed away. She resolved to bring the falsehoods to light and led her son to seek the pleasure by transgressing the prohibition. Pierre stated:

Later she was to borrow a phrase from my father, “Just lay the blame for everything on me.” That was his wish, understanding that in my eyes

my mother was beyond reproach and must at all costs remain that way.

But perpetuating that convention became intolerable after his death. And

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in the upheaval which followed it she yielded to the temptation to display her awfulness to me, as she liked to do every time she lost her grip. (My Mother 33)

Pierre added:

Finally, and it was after a struggle, she brought out the rest almost in a gasp. “I could have spared you all this, gone on lying, I could have treated you like a simpleton. I am an evil woman, I am rotten and I drink, but you are not a coward. It took courage to tell you what I did. Think of that. If I’ve been drinking all night it’s because I needed help and

perhaps it was to help you.” (My Mother 34-35)

Pierre’s mother wanted her son to know the fact that she deserved no respect because she was a revolting woman. His mother’s confession brought about Pierre’s stabbing confusion. He felt bewildered because he was perplexed by the paradoxical

coexistence of repulsion and attraction. He venerated his mother as a saint; however, he was attracted by her vileness. Apparently, it is the violation which excited him. The narrator was at loss about his predicament.

It was harder than ever to become indignant about it; in fact, I never ceased to worship my mother, to venerate her as a saint. I might admit that all basis for that veneration was gone; I was none the less unable to refrain from it. And so I lived in an unappeasable torment from which only death and the crowning misfortune could release me. If I gave way to horror at the thought of the debauchery I now knew was the delight of my mother’s life, then the respect had for her would immediately make of me, and not of her, an object of horror. And, no sooner returned to my worshipful attitude, I would be forced to the realization that her debauchery nauseated me. (My Mother 39)

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Characters like nuns frequently appear in the erotic can help readers better understand Pierre’s inner experience.¹⁶ Nuns have long been deemed as pure women who are similar to the concept of an asexual mother; accordingly, dissolute nuns are marked as prohibition. Once the prohibition is set, transgression is always lurking behind. Men develop a strong desire to deflower pure women because the act of transgression brings them intense pleasure.

After his father passed away, his mother got him to clean his father’s study. He used the keys his mother had given to him to open the glass-fronted bookcases.

Coming upon a heap of photographs, he found some of which were repulsively obscene. He blushed and planned to get rid of them before his mother’s return.

Frantically, he stacked them and formed them into piles. However, he piled them too high and they fell and scattered on the carpet. The photos were so disgusting that he could not remove his gaze. At the same time, his half-naked mother flung herself into his arms. Eventually he resolved to process into vileness and degradation. As he said,

“I wrapped myself in the dust and took off my trousers” (41). He commented on the pictures:

Interwoven joy and terror strangled me within. I strangled and I gasped from pleasure. The more those pictures terrified me, the more intense was my excitement at the sight of them. . . . It was my inevitable fate: my joy was all the the greater since, with regard to life, I had long since

entrenched myself in an attitude of suffering, and now, in the throes of delight, I progressed even farther into vileness and degradation. I sensed that I was dammed, I defiled myself before the filth in which my father – and perhaps my mother too—had wallowed. It well became the swine I        

16  In Ragionamenti, Pietro Aretino (1492-1556) used nuns as his licentious heroines to tantalize his readers.  

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was going to turn into, born of the coupling of the boar and the sow.

(My Mother 41) Pierre commented that most of the figures in the pictures in fact delighted him but those which exhibited repulsive postures quickened his delight even more (My Mother 41). In other words, he admitted that the more those pictures appalled him, the more intense his excitement was at the sight of them (My Mother 41). As far as Pierre is concerned, his joy was all the greater because he had been entrenching himself in an attitude of suffering as well as resisting. To put it another way, his intense sense of enjoyment was aroused by the intense suffering inflicted on him. Pierre sensed that he was dammed because he could not help but get enjoyment from suffering, vileness, and degradation; what was worse, the more resistant he was to these sensations, the more intense the pleasure he derived from them.

Pierre blamed his father for corrupting his mother. He was convinced that it was his father that had made his mother process to degradation; he also accused his father of demoralizing him. As far as Pierre was concerned, it was his father that was to blame for their deterioration. Eventually, Pierre came to realize that although

prohibition caused terror, it also produced pleasure when it was transgressed. Despite the fact that his father set prohibitions on both his mother and him, they derived their pleasure from transgressing it. Pierre maintained:

To me my mother seemed calm, I admired, I loved her self-mastery, that coolness had a profoundly soothing effect upon me. Never had I loved her more. Never had my devotion to her been so great, the more so and the madder for the fact that, united now in the same malediction, we were divorced from the rest of the world. Between her and me a new bond had formed; moral decline and cowardice were its sinews. Far from regretting having succumbed in my turn, I saw that my sin had given me access to

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what appeared to me my mother’s misfortune, which must eventually lay her low as it was laying me low, but which, I later understood, by

torturing us, provided it tortured us, was to prepare us for the one happiness that is not meaningless, since we become its prey when in the grip of misfortune. (My Mother 48)

In the beginning, Pierre was not able to embrace the confusing idea that intense tortures preceded and often resulted in intense happiness. He stated that “I could not accept this secret marriage of heaven and hell” (My Mother 48). He added that “it was, after all, painful to feel that my mother delighted in the misery I knew she was condemned to” (My Mother 48). Noticeably, through the experience of his

involuntarily being tempted by the obscene pictures left by his late father Piere learned that repulsive things not only appalled him but appealed to him. In addition, he came to realize that his mother shared his predicament. He maintained:

She believed in the fragile enchantment of delight, with its insidious power to silence deep suffering. And even now we were both of us soaring on the wings of the playfulness that was conveying us back to this world of pleasure where amidst thorns and in frenzy my mother had early

discovered her divine way. At that moment my irony, the gentle stirring of irony in me, lent me strength to confront what would formerly overcome me and now induced this voluptuous trembling in me, the trembling which thereafter would always make me smile. (My Mother 75)

Taking advantage of his mother’s absence, one day Pierre reentered his late father’s study in order to procure the other repulsive photographs which had appealed to him.

From the episode of Pierre’s revisiting the study, it is clear that his relapse into degradation was an inevitable fate because the more repulsive the degradation was, the more attractive it became. Ceaselessly haunted by the anguish of his resuming

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depravity, he thought of confessing his irremediable sin to the priest. After great mediation, he gave up the idea because he knew what the priest would say to him. “I knew in advance just what language he would employ” Pierre thought to himself (My Mother 50). Pierre knew that the priest would admonish him saying that happiness stems from goodness rather than vileness and that self-denial is the only way to quell the trembling within. Symbolically, the representative patriarchal figures, father and priest, are compromised; the long-held authority tumbles down. However, self-denial would fail to do anything but put him deeper into the abyss of degradation. The more he denied the repulsive, the more temptation that denial gave rise to. Willing to accept the mutual conditioning of opposition, Pierre no longer blamed their depravity on his father. Pierre said:

The most stupid part is that, notwithstanding the evidence, I went right on accusing my father and him alone. My father, whose impudence told of an appalling inner confusion, my father who, I was sure of it, had got my

mother into the habit of drinking and had finally managed to corrupt her, my father whose filth had , after his death, warped me in my turn.

(My Mother 49) He added:

Then I recalled my father, his drunkard side. I had cursed him

unthinkingly, now at last I began to doubt my right to do so: through him I belonged to drunkenness and aberration, to everything bad that the world contains, from even the very worst of which God never turns his face away. My father, that the dead-drunk clown the police sometimes picked up out of the gutter, the thought of my father suddenly touched me to tears. (My Mother 51)

Throughout the novel, readers can detect that what really fascinated Pierre’s mother

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was the mixture of anxiety and pleasure transgression brought. It is agreed that licentious women are marked as prohibition. Therefore, a woman’s unconscious dreaming of being raped is somehow is marked as taboo because it is the very

emblem of a dissolute woman.¹⁷ In Bataille’s remarks, “But transgression is not only objectively necessary to this freedom . . . Many women cannot reach their climax without pretending to themselves that they are being raped” (DS 107; emphasis mine).

For Pierre’s mother, dreaming of being raped is one of her ways of transgressing the taboo. As a consequence, Pierre’s mother told him that his father had no part in the story of her transgression, for any man’s intrusion is just meant to gratify her crave to transgress the prohibited. Pierre’s mother told him that:

It was when you were conceived. But as far as I am concerned your good-for-nothing father had no part, or practically no part, in the story. I preferred being alone, I was alone in the woods, I was naked in the woods, I was naked, I rode horseback,naked to the skin. I was in a state . . . I shall die without ever recapturing the state I was in. I had forebodings, dreamt of girls or of fauns; I knew they would have got in my way. Your father got in my way. But when by myself I would twist on the horse, writhe, I was monstrous and— (My Mother71)

While Pierre’s mother was being raped by his father, she was extremely defiant against his violent raping. Tooth and nail she fought against the raping by digging her nails into his face, but then she gave up her resistance, succumbed to his violent raping. His mother described the state of her being raped. She describe, “I didn’t want him, I didn’t want that, I was bad-tempered. When he found me naked he raped me, but I got my nails into him, I tried to claw his eyes out. I wasn’t able to” (My Mother        

17  In My Secret Garden, Nancy Friday asserts that rape plays an significant role in female sexual fantasy.

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71). However, Pierre’s father misinterpreted the ambivalent reaction of Pierre’s mother to his raping. He thought that her initial defiance was out of a shame of enjoying being raped. In addition, he thought that her giving in to his advances was due to her affectionate love for him. As a result, Pierre’s father was determined to marry her. Marriage, for Pierre’s father, was a way of showing his love and

responsibility for his lover, while for Pierre’s mother it was an indispensable element to her libertine life style. Since engaging in extramarital affairs is marked as a taboo, her being privy to such acts is a lot more thrilling than paying for sex because the former involves the element of prohibition. Because of this, Pierre’s mother was

responsibility for his lover, while for Pierre’s mother it was an indispensable element to her libertine life style. Since engaging in extramarital affairs is marked as a taboo, her being privy to such acts is a lot more thrilling than paying for sex because the former involves the element of prohibition. Because of this, Pierre’s mother was