Litlove’s wonderful post on Bataille via Random Thoughts’s blog.

For instance, [Bataille] became particularly entranced by the photographic image of a Chinese man undergoing torture. By concentrating on this photo to the point of being almost hypnotised by it (much as a mystic would concentrate on biblical scripture), Bataille felt he could actually share this man’s pain, and such an act of communion he termed ‘inner experience’. Bataille wanted to claim a political dimension to this act, an ethical form of engagement that I think reveals to some extent his awful guilt at not being able to fight in two world wars because of ill-health. But it’s also part of the French understanding of politics as comprising an extremely important conceptual dimension; revolution only comes about by changing how people think, not just how people act. But let’s turn this around once again: Bataille’s act, however compassionate and politically motivated it may be, can do nothing for the man who actually suffered, in fact, it could seem almost parasitic upon his pain. There’s a complicated web of interpretations to be spun around this kind of mental engagement, and at the heart of it a difficult, unwieldy truth that Bataille wants us to acknowledge. Inner experience of this nature – intense, excessive, debilitating, overwhelming, is completely resistant for Bataille to significance.

See Georges Bataille and Death by a thousand cuts.

Digression: See also Litlove’s post on plotness (plot-driven) vs plotless (character-driven) American novels.

“My understanding of plot comes from a particular source: a very good (American) critic by the name of Peter Brooks, who wrote a very good book called Reading for the Plot. Now if anyone out there is critically-minded, Brooks’s works are a real treat: big ideas that enliven any kind of reading and all written in an admirably clear and accessible style. Brooks suggests that what we understand by plot is the initial moment in a narrative when a fundamental enigma or problem is posed to the reader, and we recognize that the remainder of the story will be put to elucidating the enigma or solving the problem. It’s easiest to see this happening in a detective story, where the first corpse sets the machinery of narrative in motion. Hence, I imagine, humanity’s fascination with stories, for they seek to provide solutions to all kind of problems, and to return order and meaning to situations that have become confused and chaotic. “

And via the book Modernism and the Culture of Market Society (John Xiros Cooper, 2004, see entry on low modernism) comes this:

“Brooks sees Flaubert [Madame Bovary] as marking a turning point in the history of the novel. He writes that “any discussion of plot … needs to confront Flaubert, since his relation to traditional uses of plot can only be described as perverse. His mature work is indeed carefully structured by a systematic perversion of plot as a central system of narrative organization and meaning” (Reading, 171) “

See plot