There are parallels at several levels with Bacon: his love of the interior of the mouth, his paintings of carcasses, recalling Rembrandt, his defiant stress on the beauty of the colour of blood. But it is also in the materialist challenge Leiris deliberately poses here to the conventional values placed in human nature that an echo is found in Bacon. Leiris suggests that the only pledge man has that he is not alone in a glacial and strange "nature" is the existence of a "human nature," that is, human creatures other than ourselves; but it is not companionship or society that matter, but the physical fact of the body, the sight of which, whether one feels solidarity or enmity towards it, is what touches us most closely. "Masochism, sadism, and almost all vices in the end are only ways of feeling more human because of being in deeper and more abrupt relationship with the body."⁸ It is the body, entrails and all, that constitutes human nature.

In many different ways the bodies in BaconËs painting are pushed to an extremity: sometimes literally in the grip of a violent sensation, sometimes with internal organs exposed through x-ray, as in the central panel of Triptych 1976, sometimes through the pure manipulation of the paint. Particularly striking are those works where the brute fact of the body is brought into relation with the grandeur of ancient myth, as in the Triptych inspired by the Oresteia of Aeschylus (1981), where the headless, naked figure of Agamemnon in the center is not just naked but his interior is exposed. Here we might recall also George BatailleËs notion of debasement, of continual "bringing down in the world" of man in his aspirations. The oscillation between manËs elevation, erection, verticality and his fall, reduction to the earthly horizontal is often enacted in BaconËs paintings.

Although Bacon did occasionally, as in the Oresteia triptych, draw upon literature for his subject matter, it was never to draw out a narrative, to tell a story. Sometimes there is a spectator in the painting, watching a couple, as in Triptych inspired by T.S. EliotËs poem "Sweeney Agonistes." (1967) In EliotËs "Sweeney Agonistes," subtitled "fragments of an Aristophanic Melodrama," louche and menacing characters exchange threats and seductions against a background invocation of a paradise "crocodile isle":

"doris: YouËll carry me off? To a crocodile isle?

sweeney: IËll be the cannibal.

doris: IËll be the missionary. IËll convert you!

sweeney: IËll convert you! Into a stew.

A nice little, white little, missionary stew."⁹

There is nothing, Sweeney says, on this isle except three things: "Birth, and copulation, and death." He tells of a man who murdered a girl, and the final lines are a jazz age version of a Greek chorus, evoking a nameless hunted terror. BaconËs triptych in no sense illustrates the poem, but conveys a similar haunted world of couplings and annihilation. As Michel Leiris said in his 1983 study of Bacon, in his canvases there are "incandescant parts, seething with energy, in contrast to neutral parts where nothing is happening."¹⁰ In this triptych there are three concentrated centers of energy; in the right and left panels, two couples·one male, the other female·are contained on plinth-like supports within a cage set against virtually identical neutral spaces. In each, there appears to be a mirror, one of which reflects a casual observer, on the telephone. In the center, there is no mirror but a window open onto a void, behind a terrible mass of flesh and clothes. Bacon, like Eliot, transposes into the rhythms of the modern world·its language and imagery, the tragic impulses of Greek drama.

Despite his occasional references to mythological, religious or poetic subject matter, Bacon denied that he was affirming a traditional hierarchy, which placed history painting at the top, then portraits, landscape and finally still life. Agreeing that "as we are human beings, our greatest obsession is with ourselves," he suggested a different order, in which, as "things are so difficult, portraits come first." ¹¹