Eberhard-Karls Universität Tübingen
Seminar für Englische Philologie
PS II: The Ethics of Reading

WS 2003/04

Transgression in Cyril Tourneur’s
A Revenger’s Tragedy: an analysis according to George Bataille

von

Andreas Glombitza

Magister: Rhetorik / Englische Linguistik
Fachsemester 05 / 20. 04. 2004

1. Introduction

Vindice, the protagonist of A Revenger’s Tragedy, is not easy to judge. When it comes to the question whether to condemn, applaud or pity him, we are caught within conflicting emotions. Undoubtedly, he and his brother commit acts of horrible violence – they nail down the dukes tongue with a dagger, force him to see his wife commit adultery with his own ‘bastard son’ and finally kill him. But nevertheless, and not without an uncanny after-taste, Vindice also inspires our sympathy.

The surrealist philosopher Georges Bataille has, within the frame of his integral work on life itself, worked out a theory of the social function of taboos and the necessity of their very definition by transgression. It is a concept of temporary permeability of inviolable borders which could provide an interesting and helpful framework for a closer examination of Vindice’s behaviour and its results.

After getting familiar with some of Bataille’s most basic concepts and particular features of his thought, we will try to determine the role Bataille attributes to the concept of taboo and transgression within society. A brief look at Michel Foucault’s discussion of this concept will complement to this. After having considered some complications concerning the Christian tradition, we should be able to concern ourselves with an according analysis of the play. A few introductory observations about plot, protagonist and underlying ideas will be necessary until we can finally try to employ the concept of transgression as our guide through the labyrinth of revenge.

2. Analysis

2.1 An outline of George Bataille’s theory of transgression

If there is a centre of gravity around which George Bataille’s work revolves, it is certainly the paradox. All of his observations seem to somehow stem from and end in paradoxical propositions that are necessarily never fully graspable by reason. Life as such, for Bataille, grounds on a principle of paradox; on the irreconcilable, but still in-terconnected and interdependent fields of life and its proliferation and the discontinuity of individual death – the line of intersection being in the violence of eroticism. “For Bataille, human experience is an experience of limits and these limits are defined by the fact that the condition of life for human beings is the recognition of death”¹. We always have to bear in mind that his theories are not meant to be completely ‘understood’ in a traditional sense. Knowledge itself, in his frame, is a highly elusive and paradoxical thing: the more we know, he argues, the more knowledge tends to slip through our fingers, creating slippage itself in its accumulation. ”[…] [Bataille] believed that a genuine knowledge needed to recognise its own essential incompleteness and the fact that it had to be completed through the embrace of a complementary ‘non-knowledge’ […]”² – “truth”, for him, therefore, “lay not so much in knowledge itself, but in the margin between knowledge and non-knowledge”^{3 4}. Pairs like this “knowledge and nonknowledge”, which would at first glance seem binary, can be found everywhere in his works. But we have to be careful – neither is a mechanism of Hegelian dialectics at work here nor do we have simple dualisms (or binarities, or complementarities, or antagonisms) ⁵. A concept similar to, but not the same as dialectics – a relationship between a positive and element of some ′entirely other′, which is still in some miraculous contact with this positive, though not in the sense of an antithesis and without a following “Aufhebung” - will be crucial for our observations.

When it comes to the relationship of the individual to the collective, to what we may call society, Bataille’s attitude is quite radical: the individual as such, separated from all social relations, is non-existent.

[....]

1 Richardson, Michael. Georges Bataille p. 98

2 Richardson, Michael. Georges Bataille p. 40

3 Richardson, Michael. Georges Bataille p. viii

4 the way Richardson puts it somewhat poetically – “[...] knowledge needs to be recognised as what it is: a momentary gleam in the night that fades in the moment it is born“ – reveals striking resemblance to Arthur Koestler’s concept of ‘bisociation’ (‘dual association’; two mental ‘operative fields’ momentarily intersecting;) which seems to be of a similar nature and is, according to Koestler, the “characteristic feature of any original creative process, whether in art or in discovery”;

5 cp. Gasché, Rodolphe. The Heterological Almanac p. 159