Story of the Eye

Story of the Eye (1928)

Georges Bataille

I don’t want you to jerk off anymore without me.      

This book was for years sitting on my shelf waiting to be read. I constantly passed it over in favor of other books, for no good reason. I think I figured it would just be boring antique smut or trashy shock pornography, which it was in a way, or at least the sex scenes were, but it was also something different and quite interesting. When I finally sat down to read it a couple of days ago I went in expecting Fifty Shades of Grey for dorky intellectual types but it wasn’t like that at all. It was dirty and obscene, yes, but all of that is secondary to the book’s real point, which is about freedom and rebellion and inventing new ways of seeing the world. I haven’t read DeSade but I gather that DeSade and Bataille occupy the same sort of territory. And I understand that DeSade takes seven gazillion pages to say what Bataille says in eighty. You could read Story of the Eye in a short afternoon. Which is the perfect length for porno. Porno movies are a half hour, forty-five minutes long but nobody ever watches the whole thing. The book kind of reads as if one of the children from The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea grew up, read some Nietzsche, got a girlfriend and shoved a hard-boiled egg in her butt. Which sounds great. If that were a real I’d read it every day.

I don’t even know if I should discuss the plot or anything like that. Is it even important? It doesn’t matter in regular old porno, does it matter in 90-year-old French erotic fiction? The unnamed narrator and his girlfriend, a distant cousin named Simone, screw a lot, they urinate on each other, crack eggs on each other’s genitalia, a friend goes insane at an orgy so they break her out of the bug house and screw her and when she hangs herself they pee on her still warm corpse and screw next to it. They don’t want to get arrested (who does) so they flee to Spain, meet a depraved English gentleman who likes to watch, take in a bullfight, Simone inserts bull testicles into her vagina, they break into a church and sexually assault a priest, who basically enjoys it because under the cassock he is a depraved and sick creature, they kill him and pry out one of his eyeballs, which Simone puts in her butt, and then they all flee to Africa on a yacht crewed by negroes.

Even though this book was certainly dirty and pornographic it was surprisingly unsexy. Maybe it’s because my tastes don’t run towards eggs, eyeballs, urine or urinating on eggs but it didn’t arouse me one bit. When someone says “erotic fiction” I expect something that will really titillate but it wasn’t like that. I was kind of expecting innocent and naive racy smut. Something that would really shock a Victorian, I guess. It was instead filthy, degrading, violent. Which I imagine was sort of the point. It was also surprisingly funny. Bataille constantly uses the term “jerk off” to describe both masturbating the penis and what could more properly be termed “fingerblasting”. It’s probably just an archaic old usage that hasn't aged well. He also favors “cunt” and “beaver,” which is one of the funniest names for a woman’s cooter there is. There was one line that made me bust out laughing: “And she could also stick my cock in her mouth, and what not.” Shit man, this is a porno, you’re not supposed to leave it to my imagination. You’re supposed to tell me about cocks and mouths in detail, and what not.

As I said this book is all about transgression and rebellion. It’s about looking at the petrified social order and deciding to turn the other direction. And if you’ve ever sat down and had a good long think about what kind of ugliness happens on this benighted planet then maybe you understand that transgression against social conventions is one of the most noble goals a human being can have. Listen brother, this is a disgusting and hideous world where billions are kept destitute, enslaved and ignorant; where bigotry and oppression are the global pastime, where the use and abuse of human beings is perpetrated by some of the most awful criminal profiteers history has ever known and this profiteering occurs with the full support of the church and the state… not exactly a status quo with much value. Story of the Eye isn’t the sort of trashy low-grade juvenile transgression practiced by say, Sarah Silverman, the “look at me, I told a homophobic or racist joke” school of transgression, which isn’t really rebellious at all but merely a chance to make the privileged blush… this is the sort of rebellion that is about burning the old world to make way for the new. About smashing and destroying the decrepit, festering morality of previous generations and installing something never before seen. The characters in this book are teenagers and seem to be missing parents, which is basically what life is like… parents are for the most part useless, they selfishly give birth to a child who doesn’t ask to be born into this sickening world and are only there to indoctrinate the young into a society that is built on a foundation of slavery and warfare. The narrator has an “awful father” and Simone’s mother, when walking in on the narrator and Simone during a piss-soaked fuckfest has nothing to say… her own sins are worse.

The characters are perverse not because filthy degenerate sexuality is valuable on its own but because if this civilization is awful then the only recourse is to become perverse and whatever society labels as filthy and degenerate can’t be half bad. Nazi Germany occupied itself by organizing collections of what it called “degenerate” art, and it was all some of the best art Western Civilization has ever produced.

I found this book far more personally affecting then I expected it to be. It really spoke to my own desire to shake things up, to erase my own sense of impotence and powerlessness. As a basically uneducated and poor absolute zero the curtailing of my will to power is something I am constantly aware of. The nobody, of which there are billions, arranged on a graduated spectrum of nothingness, is constantly reminded that he has no power over anything. Sometimes I want to grab the globe like a dice cup and shake it and see what numbers we get. Can’t be any worse than the numbers we’ve got now. And who hasn’t—when lonely and longing and tormented nightly by the sex-death urge—wanted to be dissolved and liquefied by a torrent of sex and violence, to be washed away in a river of vaginal secretions like a cheap shanty in a rainstorm? With a dark-haired and beautiful French teenager? To copulate violently and die beautifully like some doomed, glittering insect? Let the innocent among us stand and be counted.

Bataille’s writing is exquisite. His language is amazing, clear, lucid. Every word is a well-chosen bullet. I know that I previously accused H.G. Wells of pretentious diction when Georges Bataille uses similarly grand language. I don’t think fancy ten-dollar words are pretentious in and of themselves, but they certainly are when they don’t fit the story. They’re out of place in a pulp sci-fi novella about time travel but they’re fine in a bit philosophical erotica about French teenagers who disintegrate themselves and annihilate the world via fucking. I understand that Bataille was a big deal in the world of European philosophy, of which I know nothing about, but if the rest of his books are this beautiful and lucid I’d read the heck out of them.

I think I said everything I wanted to say about this book. Story of the Eye was the sort of story that is philosophical enough that I’m not entirely sure I comprehended it the way the author intended, that it went over my head, that I’m not smart enough and not well-read enough to get all the references that the author makes (though since it’s a slim and lean read there can’t be that much hiding in it), and that I, an intellectual featherweight, am punching far above my weight class, and to make it even more difficult the story is different enough in form from your usual novel that it takes a new sort of viewpoint to crack the code. One almost has to hold the book upside down to understand it. Hopefully I found the right angle. I’m going to quote a paragraph that I thought was very alluring (and contained within it a seed of beautiful revolution so precious it should be locked up in that seed vault buried under the Norwegian glacier) as a way to wrap this all up:

I stretched out in the grass, my skull on a large, flat rock and my eyes staring straight up at the milky way, that strange breach of astral sperm and heavenly urine across the cranial vault formed by the ring of constellations: that open crack at the summit of the sky, apparently made of ammoniacal vapors shining in the immensity (in empty space, where they burst forth absurdly like a rooster’s crow in total silence), a broken egg, a broken eye, or my own dazzled skull weighing down the rock, bouncing symmetrical images back to infinity.

The Time Machine

The Time Machine (1895)

H.G. Wells

            It’s been a long time since I’ve written about a book. The truth is the last few months in my life have been very hectic. I moved, which was way more complicated and stressful than it needed to be, and I’ve been working a lot, up to six or seven days a week sometimes. I’m also “working” on my “novel” (barf) and I have other things to do and since I can’t fit everything into one day I often have to choose one or the other. Unfortunately the ol’ book blog, and books in general, have often been the “other”. I was also briefly in jail (violence against cops) and hospitalized, for a spell, with a prolapse of the face. The surgeons had to staple it back on. And on top of that I’m constantly tired.

            In between reading The Third Reich and The Time Machine I wasted a bit of forever struggling to get halfway through one really awful book (To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf), which I had planned to write about here because I was really looking forward to reading it since it’s a really famous beloved classic but god, it was so horrifyingly bad. As bad as Pride and Prejudice. I tried and tried and eventually I had to move on. One day I’d like to finish it so I can tell the world about how shitty it was and is. Really drained me. I almost swore to never read another book again in my life, that’s the level of repulsion I felt. It was in a way like a really painful break-up. You feel murdered, betrayed and obliterated for a few months or so but then you realize you’ve got to pick up the pieces of yourself so you pour the bottle down the kitchen sink and take a long hot shower and put on some pants and go back outside.

            So to wash the taste of Virginia Woolf out of my mouth I read The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac and The Time Machine, which is the book I’m going to talk about first, mostly because I feel like it was more the medicine I needed, and I just finished it last night, so it’s still fresh in my head, and because I feel like I have more to say about it.

            I’m really ashamed of myself for not reading this book when I was in middle school. When I was thirteen. There was an overlong and tragic period in my life (years 10-15, probably older really) where I was into painfully sad and dorky nonsense like Dungeons and Dragons and trashy fantasy novels. I was obsessed with knights and castles and troll-slaying and all the other trappings of the really awful trashy fantasy novel. I suppose that I was enamored with the idea that somewhere out there was a world that was more fantastic and heroic than this real world, hostile and pitiless, that I found myself imprisoned in. Which is how it felt at the time. All those years wasted trapped indoors brain-damaged by escapist fantasy books with embossed lettering and an elf on the cover. So many hours of pointless unhappy teenaged masturbations spent friendless doing nothing but sitting on my stupid ass. I never had the fortune of having a guide to tell me to read this and don’t read that, an older friend or brother to hold my hand and make sure I don’t make bad choices. Those are only in movies, I guess. Of course my parents were no help, but that’s another story for another time.

            The Time Machine would have been such a great gift for a lonely, unhappy and angry teen such as the one I was for a lot of reasons, not the least of which being that it would have lifted me up from the ghetto of fantasy and into the paradise of science fiction. Though I wasn’t savvy enough to think of it at the time I’ve developed a pretty good working idea on why the science fiction genre is superior to the fantasy genre, and why I think it’s better for our society in general. Indulge me for a moment here while I talk about what is quite possibly the least important topic in the history of humankind. It’s pretty simple: fantasy promotes fascism and sci-fi does not. This is not to say that all fantasy is fascist and all sci-fi isn’t but I think it’s generally true. Fantasy is about characters who are empowered by their birthright with mystical abilities or portentous destinies and who have to use these gifts to save the world on behalf of the little ones, the uninteresting and faceless peasants (so basically exactly like racial nationalism). As a whole it's very romantic and unintellectual and mostly a mess of lamely fascistic wish-fulfillment power worship that preys on the weak minds of the lonely, unhappy, powerless and disenfranchised who wish that they, in whatever fashion possible, could one day be a person of consequence instead of what they are, which is a nobody, a zero. I have a roommate who is addicted to that terrible Game of Thrones television show. He watches it all the time and sometimes I hear it when I’m in the kitchen or otherwise puttering around. From what I can tell the show is about two things: objectifying women (by showing some tits so a nerd can beat off or by having the characters engage in really demeaning sex) and searching for newer and more appalling ways to glorify the military and warfare in general. As if the military didn’t get enough congratulations. Game of Thrones not only sucks the military’s dick, it also lets the military cum on its face and probably sticks a tongue up the military’s asshole too, it’s called analingus and it’s something you only do to someone you really like. There are more than enough hawkish cheerleaders out there (a disgustingly large and vocal number really) but you know what doesn’t have enough friends in this world? Liberty, equality and fraternity, that’s what. I also think that Harry Potter is a terrible thing to expose children to.

            A good deal of sci-fi is pro-military and fascist (Orson Scott Card and Starship Troopers I’m looking at you) but the best of it is not. Science fiction is a lot like punk rock in one respect, in that they are both at their core anti-establishment. And if it’s not anti-establishment then it’s not punk rock. Likewise with sci-fi. There is a sort of anti status quo spirit that’s really important to sci-fi. I think a good thing to compare something like Game of Thrones to would be the original series of Star Trek. Game of Thrones is a world where the protagonists are depraved militaristic aristocrats who command armies to burn and pillage and the common man is just a powerless, voiceless plaything in the dramas between the vain and power-hungry elite. And these are the people you’re rooting for! You are literally asked to arbitrarily pick one violent slave owner over another. Just flip a fucking coin. So in that respect it’s exactly like the real world, and the viewer is being brainwashed and preconditioned into seeing one fascist autocrat as his buddy, instead of some other fascist autocrat. In Star Trek, by contrast, the crew of the USS Enterprise live in a democratic utopia where technology, science and rationality have ameliorated the physical and material needs that keep so many today in poverty and want. Everyone is educated and nobody is exploited. The society is completely equal. One of my favorite things about the original series is that nobody on that ship is drawing a paycheck. Everyone in Starfleet is there because they want to be there, on a mission of exploration, to expand the borders of the knowable, to show us back here on the merciless and inhospitable Earth what exactly the human spirit is capable of. It would be a good standard for our species to hold itself to. A nice, reasonable and completely realistic set of goals. The polar opposite is something like Harry Potter where technocrats who are born better than us save the day.

            Back on topic: I was really impressed by The Time Machine. I adored it. It isn’t really a fantastic work of art by any stretch of the imagination but I don’t think that things like plot, characterization or more technical aspects of writing are especially important when talking about sci-fi. What’s important in sci-fi is the clarity of future vision. And ho boy does Herbert “Groovy” Wells ever have a clear future vision. The Time Machine is about a future where the class system (a very real and pervasive problem right here today) is a tumor that has gone unaddressed for so long that in the intervening years humanity has undergone radical speciation. It’s a world where the upper and lower classes have devolved into semi-intelligent animals that prey on each other in some form of mutually symbiotic class cannibalism. It’s fantastic. When talking about sci-fi it’s important to know the difference between “hard” and “soft” science fiction. “Hard” sci-fi is more grounded in the materialistic and mechanistic realities of the universe. “Soft” sci-fi is more often about society and the organisms that make it up. I like both but I’m definitely more in love with the latter. I’m less interested in how the space rocket gets to Mars than in what happens to us when we get there. I was surprised by how soft The Time Machine was. Since it’s a book about a Victorian Brit building a time machine, which will never be possible in Victorian Britain or anywhere else, I suppose that I shouldn’t be at all surprised. I guess I think of hard sci-fi as being more traditional or old-fashioned, though I don’t think that’s really true at all. The Time Machine like a socialist pamphlet with a thin veneer of science fiction, which is more than all right in my book. In fact I’d prefer to read much more of this sort of thing during my lifetime if at all possible.

            I’ve also developed a system for cataloging sci-fi, a system of my own invention, which I think works out great. I draw a distinction between what I call “kinky” and “non-kinky”. Non-kinky sci-fi asserts that our future is basically bright and that through cooperation we can conquer the outer and inner spaces, that good things are in store for us and that technology will make us better men, et cetera. Think Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov and 2001. Kinky sci-fi sees our civilization as a sham, sometimes our whole reality as a sham, and our species as barely intelligent predators who will eat each other alive if given half a chance. William S. Burroughs (though as I’ve said before fuck that guy), Thomas Pynchon, Phillip K. Dick, Neuromancer and Mad Max are all kinky. One is not superior to the other and both have their merits, mountains and valleys and all that. One is just more cynical, but given the sort of person I am (given to long bouts of pessimism and misanthropy, mostly work-induced) I more often feel myself drawn to the kinky kind. It also tends to be a bit more avante garde, experimental and over all better written than the non-kinky sort. Maybe a good way of summarizing it is that non-kinky sci-fi is for ideas and kinky is for feelings. One is the brain and one is the heart. Or the gut. Whichever you prefer. I was pleasantly surprised by how kinky The Time Machine was. The last few chapters are reminiscent of a really lurid H.P. Lovecraft story, where under the dark red light of a bloated and dying sun all that remains of life on Earth is foul lichens and sinister crustaceans that graze on the shores of a black and motionless sea. It’s a very cynical view of our future. I wasn’t at all expecting that.

            I was also struck by how bad of a writer H.G. Wells is. He’s sort of a gifted storyteller and passionate future prophet but an awful writer. Phillip K. Dick is a poor writer too but in neither case do I feel that the author’s clumsiness at all detracts from my enjoyment. When I read this kind of book I don’t worry about plot or consistency or poetry or anything, I just strap myself in and enjoy the ride. I will say that the one thing that really grated on me about this book is that H.G. Wells writes as though someone gave him a thesaurus as a birthday gift and he up and decided to marry the fucking thing. One of my least favorite things that writers do is when I can very physically sense that they looked up fancy-pants words to season their writing with when older and simpler words would probably go down much easier. Here’s a selection of painful ten-dollar words from the very first paragraph: expounding, recondite, incandescent, trammels, paradox, and last but not least, fecundity. Jesus Howard Christ. At no point in The Time Machine does his infatuation with the thesaurus ever abate. There's a paragraph towards the end of The Temple of the Golden Pavilion by Yukio Mishima where Mishima or his translator decided to use the word "adumbrate" or some derivation thereof about a thousand times. It's not a long paragraph but man does it hurt like a kick in the teeth. "Adumbrate" is a word with several different meanings, all of them poetic and flavorful and simpler on their own so why not just go with one of those? Faulkner does it too, and both Mishima and Faulkner are a thousand times better prose writers than H.G. Wells so I guess it's a mistake even a master is capable of, and I suppose what do I know, they're writers who are immortalized in culture and I'm just some dork sitting in his tiny room thinking about the stutter steps of more interesting writers than I'll ever be.  It’s not a deal-breaker but in my sort of clumsy mental manifesto about writing I envision writing as an Occam’s Razor where the simplest and most soulful is the best and there isn’t anything simple about “fecundity” or “recondite”. The goal isn’t to dazzle me with pretentious diction. The goal is to sear my balls off with your irradiated and lysergic vision of the future where in the shadow of the crumbling ruins of human civilization our brain-damaged and mutated descendants barely cling on to whatever meager, pitiful shreds of their humanity remain.

            So to wrap this puppy up I guess what I’m trying to say is that I really love the science-fiction genre and I wish that I had understood why I like it and why it is good earlier in my life. It plays all the right notes for me. Could talk about it for days, and believe me, if you get me going I will. Sometimes I feel bad for my poor coworker, who is also a book reading type, and has to hear about this sort of shit all day long. Poor guy. I was so happy when they landed that one-ton metaphor on Mars just a while back. If something had gone wrong I would’ve cried.