Lure of the Fallen Seraphim: Sovereignty and Sacrifice in James Joyce and Georges Bataille

Abstract

For Georges Bataille, sovereignty and sacrifice are inextricable. The passage to sovereignty requires overcoming the fear of death and a transgressive accession to the un-knowledge (non-savoir) of being.1 Joyce's Finnegans Wake allegorizes a simi lar transgression, with the reviving Finnegan rising from his bier and demanding whiskey for himself, in the impossible ontological maneuver of drinking to his own demise. For Bataille, in one of his only references to Joyce, the ritualized revelry of the wake is paradig matic both of that gaiety-in-armihilation that distinguishes the sover eign and of the need to confront death while remaining conscious: In order for man to be revealed to himself he must die, but he must do it while living (12:336). I contend that the blithe demise of Finnegan is but the final, though greatest, term in an ethos of sovereignty and sacrifice that spans Joyce's entire oeuvre, from the first pages of Dubliners to the final lines of Finnegans Wake, whose consonance with Bataille's mythology of loss furnishes an interpretative tool for understanding the Irishman's artistic trajectory. Although Bataille claimed that Joyce had no influ ence on his work (8:615), the contiguity of their artistic motifs and thematic concerns is sufficient to justify a comparative investigation into their respective texts. Beyond the passing references to the Wake, Bataille's formalized ethos of sovereignty is too close to that of Joyce to ignore. Indeed, it is easy to speculate on the early historical and biographical parallels that might be behind this. As young men, for example, both considered the priesthood. Joyce questioned and final ly abandoned his faith at the same age that Bataille converted. Both men carried with them a profound and unorthodox religious sensibil ity and a debt to Thomas Aquinas, which found repeated expression through their work. It is highly unlikely that the two writers ever met, but both were in Paris during the 1930s?the son of the blind madman with an abortive career in medicine, on the one hand, and the older, near-blind ex-medical student with the schizophrenic texts and a mad daughter on the other2?forging their own artistic praxis along