THE SYMBOLISM OF MEANS OF TRANSPORTATION IN GEORGES BATAILLE

par Wafa Ghorbel

At first glance, means of transportation constitute only accessory elements among so many others in Georges Bataille's novelistic work. They allow, in accordance with usual practice, the movement of characters in space, their walks, their journeys, while favoring their encounters and separations. However, careful observation allows us to detect the important and considerably symbolic place that these Bataillean vehicles occupy within their fictional universe. Public or private, collective or individual, mechanical or natural, terrestrial, maritime, or aerial, they exceed the framework of their original utilitarian functions to assume much more abstract and inconstant roles according to the fictional situations that occasion their appearances. Horses, bicycles, automobiles (cars, taxis, fiacres, coupés, hearses, vans), trains, boats (skiffs, yachts), and planes fill the work with arrivals and departures, reunions and ruptures, hope and disappointments, pleasure and suffering, love and death. They allow undertaking, parallel to movement in space, a perilous yet liberating journey into the characters" inner universe, a pilgrimage to the temple of the dark depths of their being, of their obscure unconscious. This journey would be equivalent to a spiritual quest for self, a series of preparatory trials for Bataillean initiation, an existential progression having as its ultimate station, as its final goal, the realization of the Nietzschean "superman."

Let us observe these different uncommon means of transportation and try to grasp, behind their conventional material tasks, the esoteric dimension of their presence, their metaphorical value as images of the self, as reflections of the various aspects of inner life.

Separations and Reunions

Arrivals and departures, often occasioned by the movement of vehicles, rhythm the lives of Bataillean existences and decide their encounters or ruptures, isolation or company, abandonment or irruption. The car plays a decisive role in the relationship of the Troppmann-Dirty couple in Le Bleu du ciel. In Vienna, the latter takes it without saying a word (p. 408), abandoning her lover to his solitude and pain. In Spain, the latter uses it to reconnect with his mistress and reconcile with his desires. He takes it to go fetch her at the airport, anxious about missing once again his appointment with pleasure: "I rushed, sick at the thought that someone might have sabotaged the car. No one had touched it. A quarter of an hour later, I arrived at the airfield. I was an hour early" (p. 469).

In this same work, the train's movement brings Xénie irrevocably closer to Troppmann, on the physical level: "In principle, Xénie was on the Barcelona train and, rapidly, was approaching me: I imagined the speed of the train brilliant with lights in the night approaching me with a terrible noise." (p. 450), he says. The train is, indeed, a public means of transportation whose trajectory, schedules, and speed escape the will of its users who must submit to them according to their designs. Fixed on rails, immutable, it figures in its rectilinear movement the fatality of life with all its components: rapprochement, solitude, waiting, death. The screeching produced by the vehicle, in Henri's head, presages the confrontation that will soon take place between him and the traveler occurring inevitably at the wrong moment. Thus, physical rapprochement does not necessarily induce affective rapprochement. The train signs a psychic evolution, a taking of consciousness that leads the character toward a new choice: that of abandoning Xénie for the other passenger coming by plane (Dirty), lighter, freer.

This same train introduces a threat of delay implying a wait difficult to bear for Troppmann who nevertheless dreaded the inevitable arrival of his friend. "The train was late, (he says). I was reduced to going back and forth in the station" (p. 466). Moreover, the station where the wait takes place resembles the "Galerie des Machines' of his nightmare, which accentuates the malaise in the face of Xénie's unwanted coming and the delay of her train.

The train is, moreover, the vehicle that Dianus uses to rejoin his lover B., in L'Impossible (p. 125-126) and that Julie takes, in Julie (p. 57), to reconcile with her former lover: "(she) hoped to rejoin Henri the next day, by the six o'clock train." (p. 69).

Alongside the car and train, terrestrial vehicles, maritime means of transportation play a determining role in the characters' becoming. In the appendix of Divinus Deus, the skiff allows the narrator to emerge from his solitude by crossing Sainte and to penetrate through her the universe of sainthood:

I walked slowly: the sound of oars from a skiff surprised me. I stopped and the skiff stopped. The young woman in the skiff had just let go of her oars to the current. She said nothing, she was alone, a bit reclined in the skiff, her hands [remaining?] on the motionless oars: she seemed not to have seen me. I could barely see her, the skiff, painted with uneven stripes, white and green, had passed me but was no longer moving. (...) The skiff was drifting with incredible slowness. (...) It seemed to me that under her dress her legs must be opening as the head turned. In the long run, her reclined position seemed to me that of a body that abandons itself: her apparent decency had an immodesty that was becoming apparent.
When she had disappeared, the skiff at the foot of the trees in the dirty water left a doubtful memory. (...) Quickly, letting go of an oar, she signaled to me not to follow her. She had immediately straightened the skiff and moved away in the cadenced sound that oars make on still water. (p. 297-298)

This encounter allows the narrator an exit from cosmic dimensions. The "still water" of which he speaks is none other than his own stagnant life before the unexpected arrival of the skiff and its conductor. The "hands remaining on the oars' of the latter, while serving to advance the vessel, direct the surrounding existences, including that of the narrator.

The boat is, moreover, the space of love, complicity, intoxication of the senses, and lost happiness of Henri and his lover, in Julie. The latter "recalled the same sound, the same sky, at the entrance of a boat into the port of Newhaven. Julie and he, on the boat, laughed at having arrived. A line of pale cliffs marked England. (...) They had drunk on the boat: large glasses of whisky..." (p. 62). "The line of cliffs' would symbolize the dividing line between the blissful universe, the protective bubble represented by the boat's space, on one side, and the real world with its solitude, disappointments, and misfortunes, on the other.

As for the plane, an aerial navigation apparatus, it appears only in Le Bleu du ciel, perhaps precisely because, in its flight, it is the only means of transportation capable of embracing the celestial heights. It first emerges in Troppmann's premonitory reverie announcing the much-desired return of his lover. Its occurrence is therefore synonymous with hope, with the character's emancipation from his terrestrial self, with the excessiveness of his aspirations:

In the same way that would emerge, the next day, at the brilliant hour of day, first an imperceptible point, the plane that would carry Dorothea...I opened my eyes, I saw the stars above my head again, but I was going mad and I wanted to laugh: the next day, the plane, so small and so far that it attenuated nothing of the sky's brilliance, would appear to me like a noisy insect and, as it would be charged, in the glass cage, with Dirty's excessive dreams, it would be in the air, to my tiny man's head, standing on the ground—at the moment when in her the pain would tear more deeply than usual—what an impossible, adorable "fly of the privies' is. (p. 455)

Although Troppmann is not the one who takes the plane, he shares the same "excessive dreams' as Dirty, the same excessive ardor that allows him to escape his own inertia, to surpass historical conflicts (insurrection, war) and personal ones and to access inner harmony.

General Quest for Risk, Excess, Freedom

The quest for risk, excess, and freedom is inherent to any spatial displacement effected through vehicles, in Bataille. We will evoke it here in a general manner before revealing its particularities.

The car, in Le Bleu du ciel, inevitably conveys risk. It constitutes Troppmann's main link to the Catalan separatist insurrection. He indeed proposes to drive his revolutionary friend Michel in these "risky circumstances' (p. 448): "I did not want to get mixed up (in the troubles), but I had a car that a friend of mine, who was staying in Calella at the time, had lent me for a week. If (Michel) needed a car, I could drive him." (p. 448). The car, thanks to its mobility, ensures freedom of movement in space, despite the complexity of the situation. In this time of war, it puts at stake both the life of its user and the tranquility of his mind, especially when it comes to an uncommitted, carefree tourist, preoccupied solely by his personal pleasures. It represents a double danger: that of being caught as an accomplice of the insurgents, and that of finding oneself before Lazare, the emblematic character of war and death in this novel. Committing to help the insurgents by driving them in his car amounts to belonging to Lazare, to his ideologies and his commitment to the path of workers' struggle, of death: "I no longer doubted that, if Michel used my car, I would have every chance of finding myself before Lazare." (p. 449), explains Troppmann. He adds expressing his apprehension: "In the car, waiting for Michel, I clung to the steering wheel—like a beast caught in a trap. The idea that I belonged to Lazare, that she possessed me, astonished me..." (p. 454).

Moreover, the car in its movement figures the incessant quest for truth, and all that it implies as risk, in La Maison Brûlée. Indeed, Anne drives it in all the stages of her search for the true criminal: it is while driving in her "convertible cabriolet" (p. 121) (open to the freedom and deliverance that truth offers) that she meets the accused Antoine for the first time and almost runs him over. It is in this same car that she crosses the "narrow streets' of the city, metaphor for the narrow-minded and dogmatic spirits that inhabit it, and that she "reaches Marthe's house" (p. 121), the true criminal. It is also in this vehicle that she engages with Antoine on the path of searching for the culprit: "Anne in the car comes to pick up Antoine on the road where they spoke to each other." (p. 132). At the end of the scenario, "She takes the car and the road going to Mauronnes' house and Antoine sees her from afar." (p. 147). It is this last station that allows her to finally lift the veil on the murderer and access the truth long camouflaged. This local displacement ensured thanks to the car's mobility is finally a journey within oneself, a spiritual progression allowing access to the unknown, the inaccessible, the mysterious, the dark.

It is the same type of journey undertaken by the priest, in L'Abbé C., on the day of high mass. The latter is seized with a malaise both physical and spiritual corresponding to his decision to emancipate himself from the hegemony of the Church that reigns over his soul. It is the doctor's car that is charged with materializing this passage from the sacred world to the profane world: "The usher and I carried my brother to the church door, where the doctor's car was waiting. (...) I asked the doctor to drive Robert home." (p. 294)

Moreover, like the horse and unlike other means of transportation, the bicycle is an individual vehicle moved, not by a foreign force, but by the person who rides it. The latter, alone, can mount it, determine its forward movement, decide its direction, and ensure its balance. It corresponds to the need, even the requirement for autonomy[1] and freedom that the adolescent couple of Histoire de l'œil demonstrates. Indeed, the bike accompanies one of their most excessive experiences: that of the liberation of their friend Marcelle interned by their fault in a psychiatric establishment. "One evening finally, well informed, we left by bicycle to go to the sanatorium where our friend was locked up. In less than an hour we had covered the twenty kilometers that separated us from a sort of castle surrounded by a walled park, isolated on a cliff overlooking the sea." (p. 27), recounts the narrator. These twenty kilometers covered at night, by bicycle, correspond to an important portion of the initiatory path that the two adolescents should cover throughout the narrative.

In L'Abbé C., similarly, the bicycle helps Robert to free himself from the religious norms that have always structured his life and to radically modify the course of his existence, as when the cyclist decides to turn the handlebars to change direction. His brother reports: "Four or five times, he left the room at night: he was making love with Rosie, to whom he finally asked to rejoin Raymonde while waiting for me. He then went out by bicycle and did not return until much later." (p. 328-329) "His bicycle (which) was missing" (p. 327) the day of his disappearance marks, parallel to his local progression, his spiritual evolution from submission to action, from stagnation to effervescence followed by emancipation.

Alongside terrestrial vehicles, the boat and yacht favor escape from the world of norms and floating, gliding toward a universe that obeys no rules, that of transgression and excess. In Histoire de l"œil, after Marcelle"s death provoked by their perversion, "It was not difficult (for the two adolescents) to steal a boat, to reach a remote point on the Spanish coast and to burn the boat entirely with the help of two gasoline cans." (p. 48). By fleeing their city X., they begin their perilous navigation toward the world of sovereignty. At the end of the narrative, "the Englishman bought a yacht in Gibraltar and we set sail toward new adventures with a crew of negroes", recounts the narrator (p. 69). The yacht is an open door to other outrageous adventures.

Eroticism

Eroticism is one of the most recurrent symbolics of means of transportation in Bataille. Horses, bicycles, cars, and trains, while favoring spatial displacement, constitute the seats of an intense libidinal transport. Natural, animal, the horse is not a means of transportation like the others. It is "the mount, the vehicle, the vessel, and its destiny is therefore inseparable from that of man. Between them intervenes a particular dialectic, source of peace or conflict, which is that of the psychic and the mental."[2] In Bataille, the steed and the rider are intimately united. The first corresponds perfectly to the personality and expectation of the second and the second is totally sensitive to the impulses, impetuosity, and ardor of the first.

In Ma Mère, Hélène takes example from her "beast of the woods' (p. 227), from her horse, throughout her life as a woman and mother. "In the woods, I went on horseback, (she says to her son), I undid the saddle and removed my clothes. Pierre, listen to me, I launched the horse into the woods..." (p. 220). The horse, while taking her to the woods, helps her penetrate her inner self, to become aware of her body, of her excessive desires, of the rage of excess that inhabits her, animates her, and determines her way of life, her attitudes. "But alone, I writhed on the horse, I was monstrous and..." (p. 221), she adds. Thus undressed on her animal, she transforms into a centaur with a woman's face and whose body merges with that of the instinctive, unleashed horse, the mount of the gods in mythology. She is also Pegasus, winged, ethereal, transported on the back of her passion, her voluptuousness, her excessiveness, her delirium, toward the spheres of weightlessness, those of freedom, of the impossible. Ecstatic, transfixed, delighted on the saddle of her bestial partner, she finds in these paroxysmal moments more orgastic intensity than with her spouse: "I fled him, (she says speaking of the latter). I went to the woods. I left on horseback and never, as I was wary, did he catch up with me." (p. 221). Indeed, this man, despite his link to the milieu of excess and debauchery, remains external to the spontaneity, naturalness, passion, and original fury, both spiritual and sexual, of the horse and his rider Hélène, his perfect human replica.

This woman continues to maintain a privileged relationship with the equine species in all stages of her life. She takes her son by horse-drawn carriage (p. 212) to his first appointments with debauchery. This means of transportation remains, in her eyes, the most effective for any initiation. In Charlotte d'Ingerville, Pierre's deceased mother resurges, through her niece's memories, as well as her animal vehicle. Charlotte describes these past moments of harmony to her cousin: "One day aunt Madeleine was dressing to go horseback riding. There were no horses at Ingerville, but your mother came there by carriage, she had two fast horses and always a young coachman. Your mother had had a costume made for me to accompany her. We dressed together. She was all the more indecent as the coachman, under the pretext of helping her, attended part of the scene (...). We left on horseback in the direction of the woods of Estoiles." (p. 288). Thus, once again, the horse accompanies outrageous adventures and erotic initiations (here, Charlotte's). "The smell of horses, leather saddles, and woods intoxicated me." (p. 288), explains the latter while reliving, through the images of her memory, these unique moments of enjoyment, this sensual journey toward the beyond.

The bicycle, in Histoire de l'œil, also favors the uncontrolled boiling of the senses. The two adolescents mount their bicycles to attempt to liberate their friend Marcelle interned in a sanatorium. The choice of vehicle reveals, parallel to their determination to emancipate themselves by taking their destiny in hand, their will to perpetuate their intensely erotic visual dialogue, this privileged communication that they maintain tirelessly, even in moments of action, as when they were preparing to flee the sanatorium after their debauched behavior. The bicycle in fact does not have the metallic shell that other vehicles possess and which would have prevented the delectation of the gaze in the face of the "seductive" disorder and filth of the spectacle that the drivers exhibit mutually: "Soon we had found our bicycles and we could offer each other the irritating and theoretically dirty spectacle of a naked and shod body on a machine; we pedaled rapidly without laughing and without speaking, strangely satisfied with our reciprocal presences, one like the other in the common isolation of immodesty, lassitude, and absurdity." (p. 33), reports the narrator. These moments on bicycle correspond to the suspension of banal life and momentary access to the universe of the impossible: "The time since we had abandoned the truly real world, that which is composed solely of clothed persons, was already so far that it seemed almost out of reach. Our particular hallucination was developing this time without more limit than the complete nightmare of human society for example, with earth, atmosphere, and sky" (p. 33), adds the narrator while pedaling beside his friend to retrace their steps toward home, toward the real world.

This displayed nudity on this open vehicle, like that already observed on the horse's back, can only provoke a scene of high libidinal tension:

Thus a leather saddle stuck to the hair under Simone's ass who was inevitably masturbating while moving her legs on the turning pedals. Moreover, the rear tire disappeared indefinitely to my eyes, not only in the fork, but virtually in the crack of the cyclist's naked behind: the rapid rotational movement of the dusty wheel was moreover directly assimilable both to the thirst of my throat and to my erection, which must necessarily end up plunging into the depths of the ass stuck to the saddle. (...) I realized that she was masturbating with an increasingly strong abruptness on the saddle that she was tightly gripping between her buttocks. (p. 33-34).

This carnal jubilation is followed by the driver's fall and loss of consciousness, her entry, for a few moments, into the elitist universe of death. Nevertheless, there is still a path to cover before definitive access to the Impossible.

In Bataille, the car also leads toward pleasure, debauchery, eroticism. In Le Bleu du ciel, it transports Troppmann from one place of depravity to another, from Francis's (p. 415), where he meets Xénie and begins a doubtful relationship with her, to Fred Payne's ("Everyone piled into two cars." (p. 416). In Charlotte d'Ingerville, it is to the brothel that the dying heroine wants to be taken by taxi (p. 293). In Sainte, the narrator takes the prostitute, by taxi, "to a dark bar where (they) swallow(ed) whisky without speaking." (p. 305). The taxi, although not belonging to the travelers, nevertheless obeys their desires and allows them to access the desired places of space and their being.

In Madame Edwarda, the car is equivalent to a brothel. It parks under the prostitute's orders ("She stopped the car by knocking on the window and got out." (p. 28), after a nocturnal walk in the dark streets, and becomes the seat of her provocative nudity, her exorbitant exhibitionism, her overflowing libido:

Calm and slow, Edwarda untied the ties of her domino which slipped, she no longer had a mask; she removed her bolero and said to herself in a low voice: -Naked as a beast. (...)
She approached until she touched the driver and said to him:
-You see... I'm naked... come.
The motionless driver looked at the beast: moving away she had raised her leg high, wanting him to see the crack. Without a word and without haste, this man got down from the seat. He was solid and coarse. Edwarda embraced him, took his mouth and searched his pants with one hand. She made the pants fall along the legs and said to him:
-Come into the car.
He came to sit beside me. Following him, she mounted him, voluptuous, she slid the driver into her with her hand. (...) I lit the car's interior lamp. (p. 28-29)

Thus, contrary to all expectations, Edwarda usurps the driver's role and appropriates his charge of deciding the car's movement, symbolizing her ascendancy over the destinations, both material and spiritual, of her two partners (the driver and the narrator).

In Ma Mère, also, the car is a place of pleasure. Its reduced space favors the rapprochement and entanglement of bodies. "In the coupé, we were on top of each other. My mother's arm around Réa's waist, Réa was nibbling her shoulder. Réa who had taken my hand was pressing it as high as she could on the nudity of her leg." (p. 213), reports Pierre while describing the circumstances of his first appointment with Réa, his mother's lover. This vehicle will be inseparable from libidinal debauchery, sensual disorder. Its appearance will rhythm the panting breath of the unleashed bodies and spirits that it transports: "Let's prepare ourselves, (says Hélène to her son). Let's drink! The car has gone to fetch Réa. Now, I drink with you, but when I hear the car, I will go put on my most beautiful dress." (p. 220). She adds, impatient, when she hears the motor's buzzing, imitating the boiling of her senses: "-Let's go down (...), the car is here. In the coupé, the great disorder began (according to Pierre). Mad laughter burst out. Réa was unleashed. When she got out, she no longer had a skirt." (p. 228). The dialogue of the flesh always takes precedence over verbal exchanges, in this Bataillean automobile: "We exchanged, in the open car, only few words. I have not forgotten the horse's trot, the whip's crack, the immense animation of the boulevards furnishing a marvelous silence." (p. 244-245), says the narrator. This phrase echoes a second one from Madame Edwarda: "We remained a long time in silence, Mme Edwarda, the driver and I, motionless in our places, as if the car were rolling." (p. 28), and a third from Ma Mère: "The noise of the fiacre, finally that of the train, fortunately allowed us to remain silent." (p. 183). The silence adopted by the travelers generally allows the installation of visual then bodily communication.

Pierre, after his first appointment with Hansi, his mother's second lover, incapable of disciplining his unfulfilled impulses (in opposition to the symbolism of the driver characterized essentially by self-mastery), he "stop(s), to return home, another car. I was suffering, (he says), my stomach twisted, I was becoming ridiculous and nevertheless, I was at the end of excitement." (p. 245). By having himself driven home, he shows the non-accomplishment of his liberation from constraints, unlike his mother or his cousin totally free on their horses and absolute mistresses of their destinies. The latter, in Charlotte d'Ingerville, dying in a taxi, wants to be taken to the brothel (p. 239)

Moreover, the reduced space of a train compartment can favor high-tension impulses both affective and libidinal between passengers. Dirty, in Le Bleu du ciel, takes advantage of the narrowness of the moving place, like her impulses, to approach the narrator and "squeeze his arm very hard." (p. 483) while speaking to him in a sensual voice. In Ma Mère, the train could symbolize incest in motion. Transporting Pierre and his mother toward Vannes where his father's remains will be buried, it announces the perverse relationship of the couple that will be woven throughout the novel. The obstacle that constituted the father finally eliminated, the son will be able to plunge back into his genitrix to fulfill his desires. Moreover, the train, a closed, cramped, warm, hollow, and progressive place would metaphorize the mother's entrails ready to reintegrate the ejected fetus. Although the mother-son sexual rapprochement does not take place there, their physical proximity and their mutism in this vehicle foreshadow the becoming of their relationship.

Death

After orgastic death (the "little death"), real Death is the final station of Bataillean vehicles. In Histoire de l'œil, six weeks after the first attempt to liberate Marcelle, the two adolescents retrace their steps "by bicycle to the sanatorium" (p. 40) where their friend is interned, and succeed, this time, in liberating her and leading her, once again, by bicycle, to her death, her suicide. Thus, behind their handlebars, they do not decide solely their own fate and direction but, also, those of Marcelle deprived of the emancipatory tenacity that animates them.

The automobile is, similarly, associated with death in Bataille's fictions. In Le Bleu du ciel, Troppmann exposes this liaison by describing a scene to which he had been witness: "I recalled having seen pass, around two in the afternoon, under a beautiful sun, in Paris—I was on the Carrousel bridge—a butcher's van: the headless necks of skinned sheep were sticking out of the canvases and the blue and white striped blouses of the butchers were bursting with cleanliness: the van was going slowly, in full sun." (p. 455). The procession of this solar bloody vehicle metaphorizes the redoubtable machination of the war announced throughout the novel. This association between the car and death resurges when Dirty makes her reappearance in the narrator's life: "I installed her in the car, says the latter. Seated in the car, she looked at me. (...) Dorothea was now a waste, life seemed to abandon her." (p. 470). Displacement by car would be a progression toward death, an emancipatory enterprise from suffocating and mutilating terrestrial constraints.

In Madame Edwarda, "in the back of the taxi", the narrator, the prostitute, and the driver abandon themselves to a "long wait for death..." (p. 31), following the panting coupling of the latter two. The vehicle, although parked, leads its travelers toward the other shores of existence: orgastic death and real death merge. In Le Mort, "The count glimpsed the two hearses following going to the cemetery at a walk... The cars were going alone across the plain." (p. 51). It is here the last crossing undertaken by Edouard and Marie, from the world of the living. The hearses are the vehicles of ultimate emancipation.

The train is, similarly, intimately associated with sinister ideas of separation and death. Its pre-established trajectory imitates the fatal progression toward misfortune. It is in its compartment that Dirty, in Le Bleu du ciel, conjectures the carnage of the coming war by saying to Henri: "There will soon be war, won't there?" (p. 483). Moreover, "standing, motionless, under a faint light: she (...) frightened' (p. 485) her lover. Still physically present, she was "absent, lost in a horrible dream." (p. 485). Her absence will not delay in taking a material form, first by her spatial departure in a train, then by her sepulchral departure sensed by Troppmann. The last journey undertaken by the couple, within the train, takes, from this fact, a funereal dimension. References to death multiply:

From Coblenz, we took a train to Frankfurt, where I was to leave Dorothea. While we were going up the Rhine valley, a fine rain was falling. The Rhine banks were gray, but bare and wild. The train ran alongside, from time to time, a cemetery[3] whose graves had disappeared under heaps of white flowers. With the coming of night, we saw lit candles on the crosses of the graves. We were to part a few hours later. At eight o'clock, Dorothea would have a train to the south in Frankfurt; a few minutes later, I would take the train to Paris. (...)
I suddenly thought, lost with anguish at the idea that she would leave me in a few hours: she is so avid that she cannot live. She will not live. I had under my feet the noise of wheels on rails, of those wheels that crush, in the crushed flesh that bursts.
The last minutes, on the platform, were intolerable. I did not have the courage to leave. I was to see her again in a few days, but I was obsessed, I thought that before, she would die. She disappeared with the train.
I was alone on the platform. (p. 483-485)

The view that the train gives in its uncontrollable movement is highly significant: the cemetery with its graves, flowers, crosses, and candles is the ultimate, irrevocable, and near station of the parallel existences of Dirty and Europe. Abandoned to his solitude, after the departure of his lover's train, Troppmann will finally take his own "train (which) did not delay in leaving." (p. 487), thus marking the change of direction, the beginning of a new life, a new path. His own death will wait still.

Finally, it is under a train that Henri of Le Bleu du ciel thinks of throwing himself (p. 405) to put an end to his life after Dirty's departure and because of the unexpected train journey that Julie undertakes toward Geneva that Henri of Julie attempts suicide. The unrealized death is a station momentarily not served. There is still a path to cover before accessing it.

*

Means of transportation thus constitute an important generator of images in Bataille. Terrestrial, maritime, or aerial, they describe in their movement, determined or undetermined, an incessant quest for self, for the beyond, for truth, for pleasure, a spatial displacement doubled by a spiritual and existential progression, an expedition into the hidden spheres of being. Contrary to the sociological or psychological acceptations that one can have of them, the space of Bataillean transport is not "disqualified'[4]. Characters preserve their proper status there, even develop it: Edwarda remains a prostitute on a taxi seat, Xénie, an idle bourgeois in her sleeping car, Dirty, a sensual and macabre being in a train compartment, Hélène, an untamed existence on her horse, in a car or in a train, Simone and her friend, two delinquent, outrageous adolescents, on bicycle, on a stolen boat or in the rich Englishman's yacht. The reduced space of the vehicle, while economizing real space[5], only condenses characters and activities. It is not a question of moving linearly from one point to another in a neutral shuttle, but of covering an inconstant and decisive route inseparable from that of life.

Thus, a priori anodyne, displacement on horseback, by bicycle, by car, by train, by boat or by plane is intimately linked to various forms of transport: affective, spiritual, carnal, existential, transport being, according to Littré, a "violent movement of passion that puts us outside ourselves'. Parallel to the vehicle's movement, the being is in permanent mobility, both exterior and interior.

    1 — . Jean Chevalier, Alain Cheerbrant, Le Dictionnaire des Symboles : mythes, rêves coutumes, gestes, formes, figures, couleurs, nombres, Robert Laffont/Jupiter, Paris, 1982, p. 122. ↩

    2 — . Ibid., p. 223. ↩

    3 — . It is we who emphasize the terms relative to death, each time. ↩

    4 — . "Displacement is characterized by indifferentiation and loss of status: because the space of transport is by essence "disqualified", it prevents those who traverse it from preserving their proper status. In the metro, one is no more than an anonymous among others: a user of the network. This appellation is not by chance: it is a question of being nothing other than a user of the network.", Thierry Moreau, "Le quartier sous la ville", Recherches sur la ville contemporaine : ville et voyage, trajectoires urbaines, groupe de travail interdisciplinaire, Ecole Normale Supérieure de Saint-Cloud, Didier Erudition, Paris, 1986, p. 13. ↩

    5 — . "Simulator of landscapes, the automobile can go as far as making the economy of real space." Henrik Reek, "En hommage à la ville du futur antérieur. Ville et vitesse dans l"œuvre de Paul Virillio", ibid., p. 74. ↩