Castle of Communion     by Bernard Noel, Translated by Glenda George and Paul Buck Original title: Le Château de Cène Original language: French Published by Atlas Press Pub. Date: 1993 Format: Paperback, 140 pages Dimensions: (in inches): 0.41 x 8.26 x 5.32 ISBN: 0947757295 List Price: $14.99, £9.53 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £9.53 Buy online from Amazon.com for $14.99 Published by Atlas Press Pub. Date: 1993 Pub. Place: UK Format: Paperback, 110 pages List Price: £6.99 Not available for ordering

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Atlas Press have done English-speaking readers a great service by publishing Paul Buck and Glenda George’s brilliant translation of Le Château de Cène. More extreme in its erotic content than anything dreamt up by the Marquis de Sade, more powerfully subversive even than Michel Leiris’ Aurora (which Atlas also publish in translation), it leads us through an excessively violent landscape loosely based on Dante’s Inferno in search of a ‘consciousness which comes alight and sweeps the world clean.’


After being initiated into a pagan island society and chosen as the moon’s bridegroom, Noël’s protagonist sneaks over to a heavily-guarded nearby island ruled by the matriarchal Countess Mona, undergoes blood-curdling erotic torture at the hands (tongues) of dogs and is finally received (etc.) by the Countess and her pet sex-monkey, recruited as the image-maker for her project of creating a new awareness, a new language and new styles of pleasure that will together enable mankind to experience real love rather than common love which is no more than self-love.


Noël’s phantasmagoric imagery works in two ways. Firstly it effects a stripping away of the conventional scenery of reality, of the self and of language, paving the way for an ‘erogenous’ conception of the spirit. Secondly, it serves as a commentary on the French atrocities that were going on in Algeria as Noël wrote The Castle of Communion — events with which, he writes, he was ‘obsessed’ (one of the novel’s final images shows a colonial being cooked in the name of civilisation). By linking surrealist-inspired, ‘convulsive beauty’ with very real, contemporary horror, Noël musters an intensity even the Bohemian-German poet Rainer Maria Rilke with his ‘terrorising angels’ might have respected.

‘Then the black man strikes me, pushes me away, takes my place and he rapes Emmas eyes — the eyes of Emma which, entirely mine from farther away than the point where they had noticed me, had no doubt not even noticed the black man’s presence. Everything happens so quickly, the stupor of my body, Emma’s leap backwards, the black man’s laugh, that this instant cracks me into stars through which the breath of death passes.’ P 52-53