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.