Body Art: The Nature of Art, Vision and the Body in Sacher-Masoch and Bataille
While sexual aesthetics reign supreme in the relationships found in both Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs and Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye, the two texts approach the concept of vision and the body in quite different manners. While Severin demands theatrical copulation in an attempt to experience sex as art, the narrator of Bataille’s novella engages in exhibitionism in order to effectively act out his transgressions against laws and moral codes. In both Venus in Furs and Story of the Eye, visual perception of the body is imperative in achieving the aims of the characters, however radical or perverse they may be.
The importance of vision is evident from the beginning of Sacher-Masoch’s tale; Severin’s drive towards enslavement is inspired when he views a stone statue which he claims to love “passionately with a morbid intensity; madly as one can only love a woman who never responds to our love with anything but an eternally uniform, eternally calm, stony smile” (Venus). From this moment on Severin’s passion for art above life is obvious to the reader; his relationship with Wanda, stemming from his longing for this marble idyll, is essentially a manifestation of his desire to transform crude, ugly life into beautiful, refined high art. Severin characterizes himself as having an “excessively developed aestheticism” (Venus), which instigates his flight from modern society into the arms of Countess Wanda, who embodies both the physical perfection and the frigidity found in the marble statue.
Severin (whose name is changed to Gregor) and Wanda embark upon their master/slave relationship, in which their sex life “depicts the ritualistic enactment of an elaborately staged and costumed erotic drama; life is made art through a highly stylized and deliberately anachronistic relationship between mistress and masochistic slave that constantly comments on its own status as performance” (Felski, 1096). Therefore their relationship would be impossible without both Wanda’s physical resemblance to the statue of Venus and the performance aspect of their sexual encounters.
Sacher-Masoch further emphasizes the importance of vision in his constant mentions and descriptions of Wanda von Dunajew’s eyes, “whose power is so indescribable” (Venus). And even Wanda enjoys observing herself costumed and prop-laden during their theatrics more than the actual beating of Gregor; “It is not the sexual act that is portrayed as exciting but the elaborately posed image of the fur-clad woman; the woman torturer freezes into postures that identify her with a statue, a painting or a photograph. She suspends her gestures in the act of bringing down the whip or removing her furs; her movement is arrested as she turns to look at herself in a mirror” (Deleuze). In order for Severin to convert life into art, he must stage erotic tableaus involving elaborate costumes and scenery; he then immortalizes his art through a painting commissioned to a young German.
Severin tells Wanda that “the hand of an artist shall snatch you from thisâÂ?¦your picture must live, even when you yourself have long fallen to dust; your beauty must triumph beyond death!” (Venus). Severin’s aesthetic cycle causes him to idealize art, consummate that love in real life, and then transform life back into art once more for posterity. For Severin, without vision, the body is nothing, for without vision he can see no art.
Vision plays another role in Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye. While the scores of sexual encounters between the narrator and others are similarly staged, these characters perform for an external audience. The narrator and Simone use sexuality as a tool to offend at the deepest level in an attempt to abolish societal norms. By demonstrating the depths of humanity they aim to reveal its heights, and through this disclosure impose a change in the collective consciousness of civilization. Therefore, the narrator seeks to disrupt the conventional institutions of family, marriage, and the Church in order to revolutionize them.
For Bataille’s main characters, desire is violent, and there is no difference between sex acts and acts of violence. “We no longer thought it could be done without Marcelle, whose piercing cries kept grating our ears, for they were linked to our most violent desires. Thus it was that our sexual dream kept changing into a nightmare” (Eye 21). Their erotic experiences also require the vision of a third party who must be outraged or implicated. In order for the pair to fully transgress, then, both violence and an external eye are necessary.
For Bataille, vision of the body (and the infractions imposed upon it) is important because it enables the breach of social codes to occur. “Bataille’s conclusion to Story of the Eye uses transgressive sexualityâÂ?¦ and the final transgression of the novel is an assault on the Holy Trinity, disrupting the sanctity of holy fatherhood by desecrating the image of the Holy Ghost” (Johnson, 366). The narrator and Simone use sex as the ultimate weapon against the ultimate power, God, and the body is merely one part of the larger instrument of exhibitionist sex. As the narrator states, “My kind of debauchery soils not only my body and my thoughts, but also anything I may conceive in its course, that is to say, the vast starry universe, which serves merely as a backdrop” (Eye 49).
While vision and the body are both significant for the characters in Venus in Furs and Story of the Eye, they symbolize two highly different modes of thought. For Sacher-Masoch, vision allows sexuality to transcend life and transform itself into art. Bataille, however, uses vision of sexuality to contradict and transgress the moral codes of society. Yet whether the idea is to achieve the aesthetics of art or induce a radical change in the social order, vision is absolutely imperative.
