Story of the Eye: A Nasty, Thought-Provoking Hit on the Head
Written: Dec 26 '02 (Updated Jan 25 '09)
Product Rating:
Pros: A classic of Surrealist literature (1928); some memorable images and philosophical sequences.
Cons: Its pornographic and violent themes will offput most everyone.
The Bottom Line: Bataille is celebrated for his work on death and eroticism; this book is his earliest effort on the subject. It is definitely not for all tastes. See review.
trust12345's Full Review: George Bataille - Story of the Eye
Written in 1928 in French by Georges Bataille (1897-1962), Histoire de l’oeil (Story of the Eye) is not merely "erotic" fiction. It is pretty much out of the mold of Bataille’s countryman and closest progenitor, the Marquis de Sade. If you haven’t read de Sade, you probably at least know that his name begets our word, ‘sadism.’ De Sade is writing at the turn of the 18th Century, but his work is far more shocking than anything you’d ever find in a video store (adult or otherwise), and Story of the Eye is akin to de Sade’s work. So, in respect of this site and its panoply of readers, here is a quick barometer to tell whether you should even consider glimpsing this book:
If you are offended by explicit sexual depictions, FORGET IT. If the idea of sex before marriage upsets you, DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT IT. If you are religious, and offended by blasphemous imagery, NO WAY, JOSE. If the juxtaposition of sex, death, and violence bothers you, ABSOLUTELY THE WRONG BOOK FOR YOU.
It’s not that I am for everything in this book. Much of it, I myself find repulsive and horrific. Nevertheless, I believe that so long as there are any redeeming qualities to an artwork, no matter how repugnant some of its themes, then it has potential value as a key to understanding darker aspects of the human psyche. Obviously, it may also have additional aesthetic strengths, or at the very least, historical value as an example of how the perennial subjects of sex and death were handled in other cultures and eras.
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Brief Synopsis: Story of the Eye is a novella (85 pages) centering on the sexual awakening of two 16 year olds, an unnamed narrator (male) and his beloved Simone. They live in a town known simply as ‘X’ (Bataille may be suggesting that they could be anywhere in the world.) They seem to have well-to-do parents, and are not obligated to go to work or school (the hot sun and beach settings suggest summertime.) They quickly become physical, though they stave off intercourse for a while; in the meantime, the narrator recounts their increasingly depraved exploits, beginning with Simone’s squatting naked onto a bowl of milk. Their passionate trysts, many of which happen to take place in full view of their parents, friends, and unwitting strangers, have the morbidity, sadness and loneliness that mark lovers trapped in amour fou —a "crazy love" that knows no boundaries and seems hell bent for destruction.
Simone, dark haired, aggressive, and wildly perverse, often leads the way for the lovers. Early on in the book, she becomes fascinated with eggs and everything egg-shaped, at one point (to name a comparatively mild episode), placing eggs in every orifice and then urinating on them in the toilet. Simone and the narrator’s passion soon become triangulated when they encounter the beautiful blonde innocent, Marcelle, also 16. Simone and narrator try to seduce Marcelle into their debauchery; in fact, after a while, they become obsessed with her, and cannot successfully achieve orgasm without her present in body or spirit. During a spontaneous orgy that gets severely out of hand, Marcelle locks herself in a dresser, simultaneously excited and disgusted by the proceedings. She urinates on herself in the dresser while masturbating, effectively goes insane, and is transported to an asylum. The narrator and Simone attempt to rescue her from the asylum, a kind of phantasmagoric castle always surrounded by rain and wind. They fail on their first attempt, but eventually help her escape on bicycle.
I won’t give away much more, for one, because it could spoil it for those interested in delving into this tale; and for another, because the book becomes so ludicrously obscene and awful that a synopsis would unfairly depict the book as a series of lurid episodes, when what links these and makes them merit our interest is the exposition— the cataloguing of ambivalent feelings— that haunt the narrator, and provide a running (philosophical/psychological) commentary on the exploits.
Sex and Death: Historical Background There is a long tradition linking sex and death. And I don’t mean Hollywood, though its history is rife with examples. On a face value, the two are opposite: sex begets life, death negates it. But there are numerous ways, even in our daily speech, that we blend the two. The French (always the French) sometimes call an orgasm "Le Petit Mort," or the little death. It is unnecessary to drudge up Freud’s discounted principle of Thanatos (a hypothesized death drive to counter the libido, or sexual drive) to understand that there can be a morbid, not entirely healthy or creative side to sex. Instances whereby one side (whether sex or death) mentally or associatively slips to the other, are rife throughout history, and underscore a universal impulse to unite the two, if only in fear.
Egon Schiele, the Austrian painter, depicted a woman carrying Death in her womb. The sculptor Hans Bellmer and photographer Cindy Sherman blend sexuality and death in discomfitting ways. Some Spanish women and men achieve erotic excitement at the killing of the bull in a bullfight (a major theme in Story of the Eye). Guns and swords, instruments of death, have long been parodied for their simultaneously phallic properties. The reverse similitude— that a penis is like a sword or gun— also works. Samuel Beckett wrote that we are born "astride the grave." The Hindu god Shiva destroys and creates, and is depicted in either prototypical pose of sexual creation or deathly destruction.
The 14th Century is replete with "danse macabre" iconography linking nubile women and men and imagery of the grave (skeletons, cadavers, worms). David Cronenberg’s Crash (based on the book by JG Ballard) fetishizes death from car crashes. Some cultures punish sexual "misbehavior" with death, and others envision death as gateway to sex (whether it be with one’s beloved, or 44,000 promised virgins.) The Victorians fetishized the tubercular death, and in a literal sense, incurable STDs throughout history, including HIV/AIDS, inexorably link these curious bedfellows. Serial killers and their ilk conflate the two to disastrous effect. The list goes on and on.
Story of the Eye Among the countless ways that sex and death can be seen as forming an unholy bond, Bataille’s Story of the Eye figures as an apotheosis of amour fou. Other examples in the tradition are Duras’ The Lover, Bertolucci’s film, Last Tango in Paris, and Oshima’s In the Realm of the Senses. When I say there can be philosophical underpinnings and redeeming exposition to a work that might otherwise be purely offensive to some, here is what I mean. In a sequence when the narrator and Simone are riding naked on a single bike, fleeing the asylum at night, the voice tells us:
And it struck me that death was the sole outcome of my erection, and if Simone and I were killed, then the universe of our unbearable personal vision was certain to be replaced by the pure stars, fully unrelated to any external gazes and realizing in a cold state, without human delays or detours, something that strikes me as the goal of my sexual licentiousness: a geometric incandescence (among other things, the coinciding point of life and death, being and nothingness), perfectly fulgurating (33).
There is something poignant and pathetic about the young narrator’s grandiose attempts to attain universal bearing in his sexual undertakings (pun intended). He is a summit of contradictory behaviors, at once extremely sensitive and caring, and elsewhere given to the most violent tendencies. Simone goes further into depravity than her lover, and we see in their union a curious comfort of countercurrents running together for as long as they can before blowing up. Their sexual experimentation is, on one level, a scream against bourgeois complacency and the religious and societal strictures of Church and Family.
In short, Story of the Eye is a thunderbolt of violent, Surrealist literary pornography. Scandalous masterpiece. From France. Underage freeforall. One boy. Two girls. Cat’s milk. Naked squatting. Amour fou. Dispassionate passion. Urine-soaked. Unto death. Eggs, eyes. Enter Marcelle. Hapless naïf. Goes mad. Enters asylum. Dies horribly. Road trip! Spanish bullfights. Bull’s balls. Peeled, eaten. Catholic Mass. Monstrous blassphemy.
For all the explosive and extreme hardcore vulgarity, the public cumshots, bondage, rape, peeing frenzies, teen orgies, schoolgirl experimentation, voyeurism, mutual masturbation, cum-swapping, and lesbian sex, one might wonder whether there is also anything in the way of fisting, throatjobs, rope bondage, spanking, foot and breast fetish, bukkake showers, gang-bangs, transvestites, hentai cartoons, strap-ons, and costume play, or for that matter descriptions of nude celebrities such as Sophia Germain, Tanya Streeter, Elisha Cuthbert, Josephine Kablick, Amy Davidson, Yulia Tymoshenko, Elizabeth Bragg, Alexis Bledel, Sybilla Masters, Elodie Bouchez, Mary Astell, Leelee Sobieski, Catherine Cockburn, Anna Ohura, Lolita Davidovich, Andrea Bujtko, Ruslana Korshunova, Chu Mei-Feng, Merilyn Sakova, or Catherine Macaulay; naked Asuka Hitomi, Eliza Luca Pinckney, Zuzana Domai Drabinova, Aneli Domai, Felicity Fey, Hanne Klintoe, Raquel Pacheco, Candy Morrison, Darlene Grey, Arlene Bell, Ann Austin, Rinko Kikuchi, Jenene Swenson, Dean Ackerlund, Chloe Vevrier, Mami Katagiri, Emeline Becuwe, Karina Lombard, Mia Kirshner, Jeanne Villepreux-Power, or for that matter, any hot videos or photos of Jessica Pare, Elizabeth Blackwell, Nawa Shibari, Fernanda Tavares, Izabel Goulart, Chiasa Aonuma, Ellen Page, Mandy Moore, Aiste Miseviciute, Luba Shumeyko, Regina Nemni, or Scarlett Johansson? Alas, no. How about galleries and free pics of Veronica Varekova, Miki Sawaguchi, Rosina Revelle, Nika Movenka, Benny Hinn, Saaya Irie, Emily Roebling, Linnea Quigley, Portia DeRossi, Paris Hilton, Alyson Hannigan, Celia Grillo Borromeo, Ben Silverman, Williamina Fleming, Lilli Xene, Izumi Hasegawa, Ines Cudna, Sofia Kovalevskaya, Kim Clijsters or Milena Velba? Nary a one.
It is misguided to search for the ordinary motivations driving plot and character in this work, since Georges Bataille abandons these with violent force. He works more on the level of symbols (eggs, eyes, and testes are significant motifs) and allegory, and thus the tale, told in generally realistic tones, takes on the aspect of fantasy and dream. Bataille has been aligned with the Surrealists, and for good reason. Jean Paul Sartre writes that his "… exhibitionism aims at destroying all literature. He has a holocaust of words. Bataille speaks about man’s condition, not his nature. His tone recalls the scornful aggressiveness of the surrealist." As such, the narrator’s and Simone’s deeply transgressive behavior serves as a battle cry for freedom. As with the Italian Futurists, however, who sought freedom via destruction of the past, their fight is doomed from the outset.
Story of Eye was written when Bataille was in his early 30s. It has a youthful imagination and power, and carries a huge punch for its brief length. Bataille comes back to treat these themes with considerably more nuance and philosophical rigor in works such as Erotism (1957), first translated in English as Death and Sensuality: A Study of Eroticism and the Taboo. Bataille has had an enormous influence on contemporary thought about sexuality and death, and Story of the Eye is an early hint of his greater work on the subject. It is translated well by Joachim Neugroschel, whose blend of simple language and occasionally curious word choices captures the brusque and heady charm of the original.
In 1928, Georges Bataille published this first novel under a pseudonym, a legendary shocker that uncovers the dark side of the erotic by means of forb...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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