‘Making Bataille our own’: the paradoxes of New Narrative’s appropriation of Bataille

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article explores the importance of the French thinker and writer Georges Bataille by the New Narrative movement. By situating New Narrative readings of Bataille within the broader US reception of the French author, the article shows how important New Narrative was in popularising his work. But the New Narrative reading is paradoxical in many ways. As an apparently Catholic and gendered theory, it had to be both contradicted and furthered; as a theory of eroticism, it allowed New Narrative writers to contest dominant ideas about sexuality and the self, and provided a model of how to embrace theory while remaining non-theoretical. The essay considers Bataille’s influence in two New Narrative novels, Robert Glück’s Jack and the Modernist and Dodie Bellamy’s The Letters of Mina Harker, and argues that their engagement with Bataille went beyond mere palimpsest, instead offering a poetics of dissolution into what Bataille calls ‘the continuous’.