Story of the Eye by Georges Bataille, translated by Joachim Neugroschel
George Bataille's Story of the Eye is a short piece from 1928, which details the adventures of the male narrator and his two female accomplices, Simone and Marcelle, from their early sexual explorations to a murderous denouement.
The story employs the fetishisation of certain objects – eggs and eyes particularly – as it builds toward its climax.
It concludes with Bataille's own brief explanation of the autobiographical background to some of the subject matter – memories of a cataract-blinded father struggling to piss, for instance, seem to provide the basis of the obsession in the book with eyes and urination.
It's difficult to imagine anyone finding the book erotic – in which case, it's concomitantly difficult to label it as pornography, since the primary role of porn is to arouse.
So what does it do? Does it stretch limits? Well yes, although generally it all seems pretty pointless. Only right at the end does Bataille come close to the anger of Sade and finds a point, in a burst of anti-clericism. Otherwise, it manages to be shocking and rather tame all at once.
It's well written in terms of language. The plot, from a perspective of traditional story-telling, is thin, but what Bataille does is to carry a series of ideas and images through the book, in a way that owes much to the Surrealism that he was interested in. Eyes and eggs and sexual organs (the 'eye' at the end of the penis) and piss and liquidity and blood. The sun, for instance, mirrors those, and hangs, at one point, in a sky that is described as being liquid. Thus the main characters in the book are less the triumvirate of sexual explorers and more these objects (the title of the book, does, of course, provide rather a big hint to this – but we tend to see things in books in a more traditional way).
So in that sense, it has an interest level once you start to see the picture.
The Penguin edition comes with an article about the book by Roland Barthes, which does help understand some of these 'signs'.
What is far more interesting is the accompanying essay (at 30-odd pages, a lengthy one) by Susan Sontag on The Pornographic Imagination.
Sontag does not, herself, particularly like porn. She makes that clear. However, what she's concerned to do is show:
• that porn can be literature/art;
• that it is discounted from such because of attitudes toward sex;
• that such transgressive works can be powerful and dangerous;
• that porn is less harmful to society than a great many other things that we don't generally object to (genocide on TV every night, therefore becoming entertainment, is a specific example);
• that censoring porn is about censoring knowledge. That knowledge – all knowledge, including sexual knowledge – is dangerous.
She uses a basic examination of 20th century literature to show the fallacy of such arguments as porn lacking plot, that the use of first-person narrations are 'bad' etc. In other words, she exposes the hypocrisy about porn, by showing that such criticisms set different criteria than are used when assessing any other form of literary endeavour.
Indeed, she goes further in examining sex as an extreme experience, the validity of art recording extreme experiences, and the role of the artist in having those extreme experiences to report back for the rest of the world. Ideas of artists as mad, of genius as bordering on madness, are common. And as Sontag points out, nobody thinks anything less of Van Gogh's work because of his mental state – he's not banned from 'proper' galleries because he was mad. So the downplaying of, for instance, Sade's work, on the grounds that his madness is seen as directly related to sex, is specious and hypocritical.
And it is born out of a fear of sex – not least when it is transgressive sex: ie sex that is perceived as outside the norm, and not for purely procreative purposes.
Sontag provides quick and interesting analyses of classic porn texts, from Sade to this Bataille story to The Story of O.
It is a provocative and fascinating piece of work. And does make you look at the Bataille story in a new light.
George Bataille's Story of the Eye is a short piece from 1928, which details the adventures of the male narrator and his two female accomplices, Simone and Marcelle, from their early sexual explorations to a murderous denouement.
The story employs the fetishisation of certain objects – eggs and eyes particularly – as it builds toward its climax.
It concludes with Bataille's own brief explanation of the autobiographical background to some of the subject matter – memories of a cataract-blinded father struggling to piss, for instance, seem to provide the basis of the obsession in the book with eyes and urination.
It's difficult to imagine anyone finding the book erotic – in which case, it's concomitantly difficult to label it as pornography, since the primary role of porn is to arouse.
So what does it do? Does it stretch limits? Well yes, although generally it all seems pretty pointless. Only right at the end does Bataille come close to the anger of Sade and finds a point, in a burst of anti-clericism. Otherwise, it manages to be shocking and rather tame all at once.
It's well written in terms of language. The plot, from a perspective of traditional story-telling, is thin, but what Bataille does is to carry a series of ideas and images through the book, in a way that owes much to the Surrealism that he was interested in. Eyes and eggs and sexual organs (the 'eye' at the end of the penis) and piss and liquidity and blood. The sun, for instance, mirrors those, and hangs, at one point, in a sky that is described as being liquid. Thus the main characters in the book are less the triumvirate of sexual explorers and more these objects (the title of the book, does, of course, provide rather a big hint to this – but we tend to see things in books in a more traditional way).
So in that sense, it has an interest level once you start to see the picture.
The Penguin edition comes with an article about the book by Roland Barthes, which does help understand some of these 'signs'.
What is far more interesting is the accompanying essay (at 30-odd pages, a lengthy one) by Susan Sontag on The Pornographic Imagination.
Sontag does not, herself, particularly like porn. She makes that clear. However, what she's concerned to do is show:
• that porn can be literature/art;
• that it is discounted from such because of attitudes toward sex;
• that such transgressive works can be powerful and dangerous;
• that porn is less harmful to society than a great many other things that we don't generally object to (genocide on TV every night, therefore becoming entertainment, is a specific example);
• that censoring porn is about censoring knowledge. That knowledge – all knowledge, including sexual knowledge – is dangerous.
She uses a basic examination of 20th century literature to show the fallacy of such arguments as porn lacking plot, that the use of first-person narrations are 'bad' etc. In other words, she exposes the hypocrisy about porn, by showing that such criticisms set different criteria than are used when assessing any other form of literary endeavour.
Indeed, she goes further in examining sex as an extreme experience, the validity of art recording extreme experiences, and the role of the artist in having those extreme experiences to report back for the rest of the world. Ideas of artists as mad, of genius as bordering on madness, are common. And as Sontag points out, nobody thinks anything less of Van Gogh's work because of his mental state – he's not banned from 'proper' galleries because he was mad. So the downplaying of, for instance, Sade's work, on the grounds that his madness is seen as directly related to sex, is specious and hypocritical.
And it is born out of a fear of sex – not least when it is transgressive sex: ie sex that is perceived as outside the norm, and not for purely procreative purposes.
Sontag provides quick and interesting analyses of classic porn texts, from Sade to this Bataille story to The Story of O.
It is a provocative and fascinating piece of work. And does make you look at the Bataille story in a new light.
