The
Cradle of Humanity: Prehistoric Art and
Culture
by Georges Bataille; trans. by Michelle
Kendall and Stuart Kendall
Zone Books, New York, 2005
210 pp. Trade, $28.95
ISBN: 1-890951-55-2.
Reviewed by Allan Graubard
2900 Connecticut Ave., NW, Washington,
DC 20008, USA
a.graubard@starpower.net
"
for
the animal, being essentially mans
double, had something of the divine, the
very thing he no longer attains except
in the prodigious effervescence of festival."
(p. 177)
With this, Georges Bataille makes bold
a suggestion that, along with several
others, clarifies a means to comprehend
prehistoric art and cultureas
much as it existed for them, our Paleolithic
ancestors, as for us. But that, of course,
is characteristic of Bataille. His research
into the formative complexities of culture
is also a means to inspire, as it seems,
a desire we share across epochs, and which
because of its vitality eschews any notion
of nostalgia.
It is something we call the marvelous.
What then did the birth of art mean 40,000
to 50,000 years ago? How did it mark the
emergence of human culture; what
are its ties to the community of hunter-gatherers,
who embraced equally the animals they
ate and used for clothing; and where does
it link with the otherness of deathtraits
in whole or in part that distinguish sentient
beings and cultures?
Such are the questions that Bataille struggles
with in these 10 texts and appendix, written
over a 30-year period (1930 to 1960),
and which, despite their sometime brevity,
captivate a sensibility at work in the
aftermath of two World Wars, during other
more local conflicts, and when the possibility
of global atomic catastrophe first bore
an immanence that we have yet to resolve.
We should not forget that Bataille visited
the cave at Lascaux in 1952, which he
describes in A Visit to Lascaux.
He notes the magical character of the
drawings, the differences in depiction
between animal and manthe
former rendered with startling acuity,
the latter as a rudimentary sign in an
animal maskand the exceptional
qualities of the place. Then in the last
paragraph he returns to a history we know
as our own, and which begins with a form
of slavery: the subjugation to work.
In this light it seems less important
to test Batailles accounts by way
of their scientific truth as by what we
gain and lose in our reading of them,
a value that underlies much of his work
and which also enabled him to conflate
his research on prehistoric man with three
aptitudes: a philosophers skill
in suspending judgment, an anthropologists
need for specificity in observation, and
a poets desire to reveal existential
qualities perhaps previously unknown but
which, when recognized, gain precision
by virtue of our assent to their immediacy.
We find this, most notably, in the text
Unlivable Earth, which also concludes
the work prior to the Notes for a Film
in the appendix. For here, Bataille
writes with a conviction that surprise
infects with astonishment. In Les Trois
Frères, our ancestors have depicted
"all jumbled up [in] an immense crowd
of animals" the emergence of "figures
half-human, half-animal" that "lead
to a musical tumult, a dance of deliverance
into intoxication." Bataille continues:
"the straightforward animal figures
were those of the hunt, but these strange
human yet animal figures
were in fact divine, for the animal
"
And we return to the excerpt at the start
of this review.
In matters of concern to art and poetry,
philosophy, and science, George Bataille
is a provocateur. That his studies inevitably
turn to tracking the rapport between them,
as he wrote and when we read, are why
we greet them with the attention they
deserve.
The current book of 210 pages does not
fail us in this respect.