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Art and Torture in Farabeuf: Elizondo's Rereadings of Barthes, Bataille, and Baudelaire

ABSTRACT The article discusses Salvador Elizondo's novel Farabeuf, o la crónica de un instante (1965), and the comparison it draws between torture and art—specifically, the shared function of both torture and art (particularly photography) as prolongations of the finite instant. The novel is grounded conceptually in the work of three French theorists: Roland Barthes, Georges Bataille, and Charles Baudelaire. The first two—Elizondo's contemporaries and contributors to Tel Quel magazine—become especially important as concerns the question of photography. The novel is centered on a real photograph of torture (borrowed by Elizondo from Bataille's Les Larmes d’Éros), which may be understood as an enactment of Barthes's ideas on the body in Camera Lucida. Finally, Baudelaire—a contemporary of the novel's storyline, in which he briefly appears—informs a discussion of eroticized violence as a refusal of the natural, a recurring theme in his aesthetic writing, and one that Elizondo explores throughout Farabeuf.