>If the "dark side" really is a "dark side", and if it is really there, then
>one should know about it by all means but also seek ways to defeat it or
>tame it or circumvent it. If it's something you can just learn to live with,
>then it isn't really all that "dark", is it?
Choose the Dark Side, Luke...
Dom, there's little need to go over how much I disagree with you. My
point is that it is impossible to understand the Good, if we are to use
such crude dichotomies - and why not? - if we do not understand the Evil:
and that to evolve a morality requires a complex understanding of both of
them, or settle down to the crude moralising we label "bourgeois", but
which these days is really the province of daytime tv and soundbite
politics. And if there's anywhere these things can be explored, it's
literature, which as Coleridge says, is a way to develop the moral
imagination.
Bataille makes quite a good fist of arguing it in Literature and Evil.
The writers he talks about as having specifically Sadean evil (which he
defines in a particular sense, and yes, indeed, he places literature in
the realm of the child) are Emily Bronte, Genet, Blake (what about The
Marriage of Heaven and Hell and poor old Milton being of the Devil's
party?), Proust, Kafka and of course Sade himself. And of Sade he says:
"Let us be clear: nothing would be more fruitless than to take Sade
literally, seriously. From whatever angle we approach him, he
disappears." And then he quotes Sade himself in a letter: "O man! Is
it for you to say what is good and what is evil? ... You want to analyse
the laws of nature and your heart ... your heart on which they are
engraved is an enigma you cannot solve."
The turbulent desert Sade delimits is hardly a place of "naive
enjoyment". Is self obliteration that easy to contemplate?
Bataille misses talking about Dostoevski, who is suspected also of
heinous crime (rape, in fact, and in worse circumstances than Sade).
Burn him too?
Best
Alison
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