Abstract

This dissertation studies the differences between the erotic, on the one hand, and the pornographic and obscene, on the other, in the works of Henry Miller and Georges Bataille. Miller, who was frequently censured, and Bataille, who hid behind pseudonyms, both crossed from eroticism to pornography, but neither deserves to be labeled by his excesses. Western society is ambivalent about the legal acceptance of obscenity, often permitting it in popular literature and entertainment, but rejecting it in "serious" literature. ;Pornography, obscenity and eroticism have in common the transgression of a taboo. The more one is aware of a prohibition, the greater is one's desire to transgress it. If there is no awareness of a violation, the sexual act is purely physical, i.e. pornographic. If the transgression involves no risk--and just "happens," as in the obscene--it will rapidly "lose" its erotic tension. Bataille defines eroticism as a maintained tension between consciousness and loss of consciousness. ;Miller and Bataille are both aware of the necessity to plunge in the "low"--"obscene" and "scatological"--spheres of reality, and, in so doing, to resolutely violate the canons of literature, and in particular, of surrealist literature, which contrary to its claims, ignores such spheres. Taking the risk of being obscene they are both erotic, but at different levels. ;The comparison will show that eventually Miller tends to deflate the erotic tension by transgressing, without limitations, the linguistic taboos . In Bataille, by sharp contrast, such a tension is maintained simply because the subject, faced over and over again with the irreducible limitations that the linguistic medium imposes on the one who wants to represent the ecstatic moments in which the beings plunge into the unknown, has no other choice than to torture himself in a practice of the impossibility of representing such moments--a practice that produces the strongest erotic effects