Blue of Noon     by Georges Bataille, Translated by H Matthews Original title: Le Bleu du ciel Original language: French Published by Boyars, Marion Publishers, Limited UK Pub. Date: 2002 Format: Paperback, 162 pages Dimensions: (in inches): 0.39 x 7.74 x 5.10 ISBN: 0714530735 List Price: $14.95 Buy online from Amazon.com for $10.47 Published by Paladin Pub. Place: UK Format: Paperback, 155 pages Not available for ordering Published by Boyars Pub. Date: 1986 Pub. Place: UK Format: Hardcover, 155 pages List Price: £13.95 Not available for ordering Published by Boyars Pub. Date: 1986 Pub. Place: UK Format: Paperback, 155 pages List Price: £6.95 Not available for ordering

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Blue of Noon describes a short period in the life of the intelligent, rich and debauched Troppmann, whose Franco-German name means ‘too much a man’. Manic, often suicidal and almost always drunk, Troppmann is consumed with self-loathing and obsessed with thoughts of violence and corruption. At a Parisian gathering he slams a fork into his neighbour’s thigh; later he takes pleasure in telling the same girl that he once almost had intercourse with a corpse.


Troppmann is estranged from his wife and sways between the influence of two women; Lazare, an eager Young Communist, and Dorothea or ‘Dirty’, a vulgar libertine associated, from the novel’s opening sequence where she drunkenly defecates in her clothes in a London hotel room, with filth and death.


Bataille was writing Blue of Noon at a politically ominous time, and the novel is set against the backdrop of General Strike in Spain and nascent German Nazism. Jean-Paul Sartre later was to issue a decree ordering all French intellectuals to join the Communist Party; Bataille answered that the task in hand is not the replacement of political power but the replacement of God. This particular ideological stand-off is rehearsed in Blue of Noon by a scene where Troppmann, hung over, listens to Lazare and her stepfather discuss the future of the proletariat. Troppmann pointedly enquires where the toilet is, then asks why he should care about the proletariat. They answer that we must always side with the downtrodden; our own redemption lies in this. Hearing this, Troppmann sees them as less revolutionaries and more like closet Christians and is filled with nausea.


If Lazare embodies the politically committed activist, Troppmann represents the nihilistic dreamer. Lazare ponders war because she thinks it will speed on the revolution; Troppmann just ponders images of war for no particular reason. Lazare trains herself to withstand pain in case she is tortured for information; Troppmann holds his finger over candle flames because he feels like it. While Lazare plans jailbreaks, Troppmann wanders around the sun-drenched Barcelona streets waiting for Dirty to arrive and imagines a black fly drowning in a bedpan full of milk. When he sees Lazare beneath some trees, she seems to him the most humane human being he had ever seen, and at the same time a monstrous rat.


Lazare is both, and Blue of Noon doesn’t answer the political questions that it poses. Troppmann eventually leaves for Germany with Dirty, who wears a dress the colour of blood and swastikaed flags. They copulate in a graveyard, then watch in horror a band of Hitler Youth playing ugly marching songs, the children’s eyes hallucinating the endless fields where they would one day advance, laughing in the sunlight, leaving the dead and the dying behind them. These haunting final images give the novel the force and atmosphere of a nightmare, dreamed on the eve of Europe’s greatest catastrophe.

‘When I was a boy I loved the sun; I used to shut my eyes and let it shine redly through my lids. The sun was fantastic — it evoked dreams of explosion. Was there anything more sunlike than red blood running over cobblestones, as though light could shatter and kill? Now, in this thick darkness, I’d made myself drunk with light...My eyes were no longer lost among the stars that were shining above me actually, but in the blue of the noon sky. I shut them so as to lose myself in that bright blueness.’ p107