Ralph Webb

Like La Châtelaine Gentiane, regarded as the first text produced by Bataille, Ralph Webb was written between 1920 and 1922, while the young Bataille was a student at the École des Chartes.

The story seems to have been written after his return from a trip to England, where he had carried out research at the British Museum on chivalric romances before traveling to Quarr Abbey, on the northeast coast of the Isle of Wight.

At the end of his second year at the École des Chartes, Bataille was entirely absorbed by the fantastic, religious Middle Ages he was then exploring. The story takes place in one of those “black castles” that would go on to haunt Bataille’s fiction: here, a manor house in the Dorsetshire countryside, facing the Isle of Wight he had just visited. The name of its hero, over which Bataille hesitated, is Ralph Webb — he had successively considered Ralph Watson, Holborn, and finally Webb.

Everything here foreshadows the later texts that would come to be known, in Bataille’s work, as the “récits de mort” (death narratives), characterized by concentrated action and the absence of character description. Ralph Webb is the first fictional text belonging to this category.

Long thought lost, it was first published in the Pléiade edition of the Œuvres complètes, Romans et récits, in 2004. It has never appeared in any other form.