Erotic violence : pain and pleasure

Abstract

Literature is a field in which human characteristics related to violence, pain, and pleasure are embodied. The variety of concepts discussed within the folds of each written work emphasizes these three notions and the ways they collaborate. Embodiments of pain, pleasure and violence have been aestheticized by more than one theory in various fields of literature, politics, psychoanalysis and philosophy. The constant recurrence of representations of violence throughout the history of literature, dating from Greek Mythology up to postmodern literary arts and contemporary films, emphasizes the different aestheticized forms of violence leading to different representations of pain, which is the catalyst for transgressions towards ecstatic forms of pleasure. To show the links between aestheticized violence in the dichotomy of representations of pain and pleasure, the following texts will be used: The Bacchae by Euripides and Oedipus at Colonus by Sophocles, Venus in Furs by Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch, and two films The Piano Teacher (2001) and The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989). Framed by several theories of eroticism, primarily the works of Georges Bataille, Gilles Deleuze, Terry Eagleton and psychoanalytic texts by Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, this thesis will argue that the opposition between culture and nature in the novels and films creates a transcendent form of pleasure generated by pain induced from violence aligned with pagan women in Greek mythology. This connection reveals (i) perversions hidden in modern societies especially in those taking place in isolated environments, (ii) an idealization of romantic elements especially seen in the scenes related to eroticism, and (iii) metaphysical and mystical violence seen in lust transcending physical desire, in serene chanting, and in self-denial. These elements create in the protagonists violent outbursts leading towards two types of eroticism; the physical and the emotional. Transgressions, taboos and death intermingle with an erotic desire in the search for an ideology distorted by civility and its reality.