Story of the Eye     by Georges Bataille, Translated by Joachim Neugroschel Original title: Histoire de l’oeil Original language: French Published by City Lights Books Pub. Date: 1988 Format: Paperback, 103 pages Dimensions: (in inches): 0.45 x 8.04 x 5.51 ISBN: 0872862097 Edition: 1st City Lights ed List Price: $9.95 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £9.50 Buy online from Amazon.com for $9.95 Published by Penguin Pub. Date: 1982 Pub. Place: UK Format: 127 pages List Price: £5.99 Not available for ordering Published by Marion Boyars Pub. Date: 1982 Pub. Place: UK Format: Hardcover, 127 pages List Price: £12.95 Not available for ordering

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This book was first published in 1928, but its subsequent history — a number of somewhat amended versions have appeared — and the critical acclaim which it has received demand a review. The American critic Susan Sontag described the work as ‘terrifying’, but this doesn’t convey the weight of the book. It’s regarded as a classic of erotic literature, but as Sontag says it is much more too because in this book Bataille, produced an ‘erotics of agony’.


The story follows the first sexual fumblings of a young couple, Simone and the narrator, as they explode into an unabashed world of mutual masturbation and hallucinatory lust. They play out fanciful erotic charades involving eggs, milk and any bodily fluids which come to hand. Simone is quite beyond her parental control and even when she enters her bedroom the games continue. Eventually though a shadow passes over their lives. Their friend and lover Marcelle is left in a wardrobe during a champagne orgy, becomes severely traumatised and is sent away to a sanatorium. By this stage the narrator is living permanently in Simone’s bedroom and the two friends seek to bring Marcelle, who they have rescued from the sanatorium, back here. But she is too deeply disturbed to understand the world around her and talks only of her need to be protected from ‘the Cardinal’. In a moment of lucidity she realises that the Cardinal, the man who locked her in the wardrobe, is the narrator himself. This discovery drives her over the brink and she hangs herself in the same wardrobe.


On the run, to escape any police investigations, they flee to Spain where they mysteriously meet up with the ‘fabulously rich Englishman’ Sir Edmund. In Spain the sexual fantasies become even more complex (and blasphemous). In Spain the theme of the bullfight comes to prominence and a critical point made by Sontag takes on its full meaning. Simone gets aroused by the gory spectacle of the bullring and demands that Sir Edmund obtain the testicles of a bull for her. Duly a plate is delivered ‘containing two peeled balls, glands the size and shape of eggs, and of a pearly whiteness, faintly bloodshot, like the globe of an eye...’ Sontag says that Bataille realises a subtle point about the real nature of pornography, that it is not about sex at all but about death. While he parodies the form and characters of much 18th and 19th century French pornographic literature, (the aristocratic English sado-masochist is a stock figure of such books), he takes it far beyond the mechanical motions of de Sade’s imagination. Pornography, for Bataille, is the vehicle for his own surrealist experiments into the nature of images and memory which explains the complex association of eggs and eyes with the world of the sexual, an association which stems from his own childhood and certain memories of his blind, syphilitic father. Until the writing of Story of the Eye these painful memories had somehow died. In order to recreate them he has to make them unrecognisable. In this process of deformation, he says ‘they acquired the lewdest of meanings’. The Story of the Eye may well be a classic of erotic fiction, but it is also much more.

‘In general, people savour the «pleasures of the flesh» only on condition that they be insipid. But...for me: I did not care for what is known as «pleasures of the flesh» because they really are insipid: I cared only for what is classified as «dirty». On the other hand, I was not even satisfied with the usual debauchery, because the only thing it dirties is debauchery itself, while, in some way or other, anything sublime and perfectly pure is left intact by it. My kind of debauchery soils not only my body and my thoughts, but also anything I may conceive in its course, that is to say, the vast starry universe, which merely serves as a backdrop.’ p42