MOLLOY’S SILENCE Georges Bataille What the author ofMolloyis telling us is demonstrably the most outrageous of all truths: that there is nothing but inordinate fantasy, that everything is fantastical, extravagant, unquestionably repellent, but also that what is repellent is splendid. To put it more precisely,Molloyis repellent splendor incarnate. At the same time there is no narrative more necessary nor more convincing;Molloyshows us not merely reality, but reality in a pure state: reality at its most indigent and inevitable, the fundamental reality, which is always in front of us but which fear always separates us from, which we refuse to see and which we always strive to avoid being engulfed by, which is consequently known to us only under the elusive form of anguish. I myself would be Molloy if I took no notice of cold, or hunger, or the numberless discomforts that oppress a man given over to nature, to the earth and the rain, to the vast quicksand of the world. Yet even so I can testify that he is a figure both you and I have met; in the grip of a timorous craving, we have met him at street corners, an anonymous figure consisting of the ineluctable beauty of rags, apathy, and an indifferent gaze, the age-old swarm of ordure; at a loss, to be sure, as regards being, and, like us, a derelict as regards doing. In that reality which is the true depth or residue of being, in those utter vagrants that we have often encountered but immediately given up for lost, there is something so universal, something so intrinsically blurred, that we can imagine nothing more anonymous. So much so that the very wordvagrantthat I have just used dishonors them, thoughwretch,in spite of possessing the ostensible advantage of being less precise, would dishonor them equally. What we see is so very much the basis of being (though the mere phrasebasis of beingscarcely begins to circumscribe it) that we identify it immediately: We cannot give it a name, it is elusive, crucial, slippery, it issilence.…What we in our impotence callvagrantorwretch,which in truth isunnamable(though even unnamable is a word calculated to enmesh us), is no less dumb than death. We know in advance the futility of even trying to speak of this ghost who haunts the streets in broad daylight. Even if we were to know the precise circumstances and conditions of his life (?) and wretchedness it would be of little help: This man—or rather, this being to whom, in employing such a word, we attribute being (a word he at once epitomizes and, as it were, exhausts)—and hence language itself, suffers from an irremediable deficiency. No speech we could Core terms of use, available at.Downloaded from. Stockholm University Library, on 11 Jan 2018 at 06:41:13, subject to the Cambridge
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