Van Gogh as Prometheus

Author(s): Georges Bataille and Annette Michelson

Source: October, Vol. 36, Georges Bataille: Writings on Laughter, Sacrifice, Nietzsche, UnKnowing (Spring, 1986), pp. 58-60
Published by: The MIT Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/778550
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Van Gogh as Prometheus

How is it that towering figures, reassuring in their power of persuasion,

emerge among us? How is it that within the chaos of infinite possibility certain
forms take shape, radiating a sudden brilliance, a force of conviction that excludes doubt? This would seem to happen independently of the crowd. It is
quite generally agreed that once one stops to linger in contemplation of a painting, its significance in no way depends upon anyone else's assent.
This view stands, of course, as a denial of everything that obviously transpires in front of canvases placed on exhibition; the visitor goes not in search
of his own pleasure, but rather the judgments expected of him by others.
There is, however, little point in stressing the poverty of most viewers and
readers. Beyond the absurd limits of present custom and even through the rash
confusion that surrounds the paintings and the name of Van Gogh, a world can
open- a world in which one no longer spitefully waves the crowd aside, but our
own world, the world in which, at the arrival of spring, a human being discards, with a joyous gesture, his heavy, musty winter coat.
Such a person, coatless, drifting with the crowd-more in innocence than
in contempt-cannot
look without terror upon the tragic canvases as so many
as
the
perceptible trace of Vincent Van Gogh's existence. That
painful signs,
person may, however, then feel the greatness that he represents, not in himself
alone: he stumbles still at every moment under the weight of shared miserynot in himself alone, but insofar as he is, in his nakedness, the bearer of untold
hopes for all those who desire life and who desire, as well, to rid the earth, if
necessary, of the power of that which bears no resemblance to him. Imbued
with this wholly future greatness, the terror felt by such a man would become
even, the ear, the brothel, and "Vincent's" suicide; did
laughable-laughable,
he not make human tragedy the sole object of his entire life, whether in cries,
laughter, love, or even struggle?
He must perforce marvel to the point of laughter at that powerful magic
for which savages would, no doubt, require an entire drunken crowd, sustained clamor, and the beating of many drums. For it was no mere bloody ear
that Van Gogh detached from his own head bearing it off to that "House" (the

troubling, crude, and childish image of the world we represent to others). Van
Gogh, who decided by 1882 that it was better to be Prometheus than Jupiter,
tore from within himself rather than an ear, nothing less than a SUN.
Above all, human existence requires stability, the permanence of things.
The result is an ambivalence with respect to all great and violent expenditure of
strength; such expenditure, whether in nature or in man, represents the
strongest possible threat. The feelings of admiration and of ecstasy induced by
them thus mean that we are concerned to admire them from afar. The sun corresponds most conveniently to that prudent concern. It is all radiance,gigantic
loss of heat and of light,flame, explosion;but remote from men, who can enjoy in
safety and quiet the fruits of this great cataclysm. To the earth belongs the
solidity which sustains houses of stone and the steps of men (at least on its surface, for buried within the depths of the earth is the incandescence of lava).
Given the forgoing, it must be said that after the night of December '88,
when, in the house to which it came, his ear met a fate which remains unknown
(one can only dimly imagine the laughter and discomfort which preceded some
unknown decision), Van Gogh began to give to the sun a meaning which it had
not yet had. He did not introduce it into his canvases as part of a decor, but
rather like the sorcerer whose dance slowly rouses the crowd, transporting it in
its movement. At that moment all of his painting finally became radiation,explosion, flame, and himself, lost in ecstasy before a source of radiantlife, exploding,
inflamed. When this solar dance began, all at once nature itself was shaken,
plants burst into flame, and the earth rippled like a swift sea, or burst; of the
stability at the foundation of things nothing remained. Death appeared in a
sort of transparency, like the sun through the blood of a living hand, in the interstices of the bones outlined in the darkness. The flowers, bright or faded, the
face of depressingly haggard radiance, the Van Gogh "sunflower"- disquiet?
domination? - put an end to all the power of immutable law, of foundations, of
all that confers on (many) faces their repugnant aspect of defensive closure.
This singular election of the sun must not, however, induce absurd error;
Van Gogh's canvases do not-any
more than Prometheus's flight-form a
tribute to the remote sovereign of the sky, and the sun is dominant insofar as it
is captured. Far from recognizing the distant power of the heavenly cataclysm
(as though only an extension of its monotonous surface, safe from change, had
been required), the earth, like a daughter suddenly dazzled and perverted by
her father's debauchery, in turn luxuriates in cataclysm, in explosive loss and
brilliance.
It is this that accounts for the great, festive quality of Van Gogh's painting.
This painter, more than any other, had that sense of flowers which also reprewhich burst, beam,
sent, on earth, intoxication, joyous perversion-flowers
and dart their flaming heads into the very rays of that sun which will wither
them. There is in this deep birth such disturbance that it induces laughter; how
can we ignore that chain of knots which so surely links ear, asylum, sun, the

60

OCTOBER

feast, and death? With the stroke of a razor Van Gogh cut off his ear; he then
brought it to a brothel he knew. Madness incited him, as a violent dance sustains a shared ecstasy. He painted his finest canvases. He remained for a while
confined within an asylum, and a year and a half after cutting off his ear, he
killed himself.
When all has happened thus, what meaning remains for art or criticism?
Can we even maintain that in these conditions, art alone will explain the sound
of crowds within the exhibition halls? Vincent Van Gogh belongs not to art
history, but to the bloody myth of our existence as humans. He is of that rare
company who, in a world spellbound by stability, by sleep, suddenly reached
the terrible "boiling point" without which all that claims to endure becomes insipid, intolerable, declines. For this "boiling point" has meaning not only for
him who attains it, but for all, even though all may notyet perceive that which
binds man's savage destiny to radiance,to explosion,toflame, and only thereby to
power.
1937