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Popular Culture Review
our view of Lolita. She is dead to him when she grows up and once this happens
his reason for living vanishes. And thus Nabokov takes the view of captives,
reflected from a story of an animal in a cage and brings the raped girl into
modernity where she is turned into a villain before she can get old enough,
strong enough, or smart enough to deny the charge. We may see through
Humbert’s word games, but our view of Lolita is tarnished from start to end and
our view of her is familiar to us. And this effort would fail unless somewhere
inside the reader an image of such a girl resides or this girl’s story would not
shine through so fiercely.
George Bataille creates Marcelle to serve more poignant intentions, but he
still muzzles her and makes her complicit in her abuse. She is introduced from
the beginning as a misty figure, “the purest and most affecting” (Bataille, 5) girl.
Marcelle stumbles upon her friends and becomes a passive victim. She falls to
the ground, is immediately undressed, and while she sobs but willingly submits,
her “friends” molest her, according to a narrator who has wandered so far into
the realm of disgusting that it is hard to believe all he says. Passive to the point
that we never hear her speak, Marcelle is an empty hole who gets filled with her
friends’ pain; she shrieks or cries, first in horror and then maniacally, but she
does not speak. She completely succumbs, losing herself by becoming a
featureless piece of the mental dissolution that overtakes her assailants. For a
while the trio morphs into a single entity, descriptio ns of sex between these
characters present more like a melding of elements than a mixing of individuals.
A liquid flow adds to this view, they fiick in a wash of mud, spit, piss and blood
that runs between the bodies and creates a connected whole so devoid of selves
that when someone breaks a glass and all are cut, no one notices until the scene
is finished. Bataille has the image of gross parents to overcome. In reaction, he
makes his characters wallow inside a mucky nightmare where individuality is
overwhelmed. A storm is the main character of one scene. It is not the girl or her
rapists but the lightening, the thunder, the flashes, and the mud that we know in
terms of the assault. It is not the people but the pieces, the mouths, the cock, the
cunts, the ass, the balls, and the soil-covered legs that we see. Bataille’s narrator
and his lover (Simone) will separate from the scene and recover themselves,
Marcelle will not. Once Bataille has faced his demons in the shape of the
helpless girl he will eradicate them. Marcelle is ashamed. She blushes at the
memory of her “participation.” She avoids her rapists until they find her again,
get her drunk, and drag her into another orgy; and this time the experience is so
profound that Marcelle must be committed to an insane asylum as a result. She
is an object without a voice. “The sight of Marcelle blushing completely
overwhelmed us . . . and we were certain that from now on nothing would make
us shrink from achieving our ends” (Bataille, 7). She is a pawn, a means. Made
to feel guilty for an inability to overcome stronger partners, she slips away in her
mind in order to escape. Bataille’s purpose is the search for dissolution. Seeking
the moment when self slips away, Bataille locates this abyssal occasion in the
mind of a girl who has been destroyed by extreme debauchery. And as he