Story of the Eye
1928 novella by Georges Bataille
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Story of the Eye (French: Histoire de l'œil) is a 1928 erotic novella by the French writer Georges Bataille. It was first published clandestinely in Paris under the pseudonym Lord Auch, in a limited edition illustrated with eight lithographs by André Masson. The narrative follows an unnamed adolescent narrator and Simone, whose sexual games progressively involve violence, death and sacrilege.[1]
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- Austryn Wainhouse (1953)
- Joachim Neugroschel (1977)
- André Masson (1928)
- Hans Bellmer (1947)
Cover of a French edition | |
| Author | Georges Bataille (as Lord Auch) |
|---|---|
| Original title | Histoire de l'œil |
| Translator |
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| Illustrator |
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| Language | French |
| Genre | Erotic fiction |
| Published | 1928 |
| Publisher | René Bonnel (uncredited) |
| Publication place | France |
Published in English | 1953 |
| Media type | |
The novella is commonly discussed in relation to Surrealism, although Bataille occupied a dissident and often antagonistic position toward the organized Surrealist movement. Its episodic narrative is structured by recurring associations among eyes, eggs, the sun, testicles and other round objects, accompanied by a parallel series of liquid images. Roland Barthes made these patterns the subject of his 1963 essay “The Metaphor of the Eye”. Critics have also emphasized the work's autobiographical materials, ritual transgressions, traumatic repetitions and black humour.[2][3]
The work circulated for several decades through clandestine, pseudonymous and falsely imprinted editions. A second edition illustrated by Hans Bellmer appeared in 1947 but bore the false imprint “Seville, 1940”; another clandestine edition, issued in 1951 with the false imprint “Burgos, 1941”, was judicially condemned. The novella did not appear under Bataille's own name until 1967.[4] The first English translation, by Austryn Wainhouse, was published in Paris in 1953 as A Tale of Satisfied Desire. A new translation by Joachim Neugroschel appeared from Urizen Books in 1977.[5][6]
Composition and publication
Composition and pseudonym
Bataille composed Story of the Eye while undergoing psychoanalysis with Adrien Borel. Scholars have consequently examined the book both as an experiment in Surrealist or psychoanalytic image-production and as an indirect transformation of autobiographical memories.[7]
In a later note titled "W.C.", Bataille explained that "Auch" abbreviated the vulgar French expression aux chiottes!, meaning approximately "to the shithouse", while "Lord" evoked God. He glossed the resulting pseudonym as "God relieving himself".[8]
In the autobiographical postscript "Coincidences", included in later editions, Bataille related the novella's recurring images to memories of his blind and paralysed father, his mother's episodes of mental illness and attempted suicide, and the death of the Spanish bullfighter Manuel Granero, which Bataille had witnessed. He nevertheless cautioned against identifying Marcelle directly with his mother, presenting the relationship as one of displaced association rather than straightforward portraiture.[9]
Publication history
The first edition was produced clandestinely in Paris in 1928 by René Bonnel, whose name did not appear in the book. It was issued under the name Lord Auch in a numbered edition of 134 copies and contained a frontispiece and seven plates by André Masson. The edition was seized by the authorities shortly after publication.[1][4]
Bataille revised the text for a second clandestine edition illustrated by Hans Bellmer. Although its title page claimed that it had been printed in Seville in 1940, it was actually produced in Paris in 1947. Bellmer supplied six photogravure illustrations subsequently worked with a burin. French authorities intervened at the printer's premises and destroyed approximately half of the edition.[10]
A third clandestine edition appeared without illustrations in 1951, although its imprint claimed that it had been printed in Burgos in 1941. The edition was condemned by the Tribunal correctionnel de la Seine on 8 May 1951. A 1967 edition published by Jean-Jacques Pauvert was the first to place Bataille's real name on the title page.[4]
The first English translation was published by the Olympia Press in Paris in 1953 under the title A Tale of Satisfied Desire. Bataille was identified as "Pierre Angélique", while the translator, Austryn Wainhouse, used the pseudonym "Jacques Audiart".[5] Wainhouse's translation was reprinted in the United States in 1968 together with his translation of Madame Edwarda, in a Brandon House volume titled The Story of the Eye and The Naked Beast at Heaven's Gate.[5]
Urizen Books published a new translation by Joachim Neugroschel in New York in 1977.[6] Neugroschel's version was subsequently reissued by Penguin, accompanied in later editions by critical essays by Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes.[11]
Plot
The unnamed narrator, who is nearly sixteen, describes his relationship with Simone, a girl of the same age whose family is distantly related to his. Their erotic relationship begins with an episode in which Simone sits naked in a saucer of milk and develops into a series of exhibitionistic games organized around eggs, urine and other recurrent objects and substances. They draw Marcelle, a shy and conventionally religious girl, into their activities. During a chaotic gathering at Simone's villa, Marcelle hides in a wardrobe and suffers a mental collapse. She is subsequently confined to a sanatorium. The narrator steals money and a revolver from his father, leaves home and moves in with Simone.[11]
Several weeks later, Simone and the narrator free Marcelle from the sanatorium and return with her to the villa. When Marcelle recognizes the wardrobe in which she had hidden, she relives her earlier terror and hangs herself. Simone and the narrator have sex beside her body. Fearing investigation over Marcelle's escape and death, they leave France and travel to Spain.
In Madrid they meet Sir Edmund, a wealthy English aristocrat who becomes their companion and facilitator. During a bullfight, Simone obtains the raw testicles of a recently killed bull. At the moment she uses one of them in a sexual act, the matador Manuel Granero is fatally gored through the right eye. The simultaneous events bring together two of the novella's principal recurring objects, the eye and the testicle.
The three later travel to Seville, where they enter a Catholic church and target a young priest named Don Aminado. A confession develops into an assault and a blasphemous parody of the Eucharist, ending in the priest's murder. Sir Edmund removes one of the dead priest's eyes, which Simone incorporates into a final sexual ritual with the narrator. The three disguise themselves, escape to Gibraltar and depart by yacht.[11]
Style and themes
Objects and metaphor
Roland Barthes's essay “La métaphore de l'œil” (“The Metaphor of the Eye”), first published in Critique in 1963, identifies two principal metaphorical series in the novella. The first links globular or circular objects, including the eye, egg, sun and bull's testicle. The second links liquids and semi-liquids, including milk, egg yolk, tears, urine, blood and semen. The narrative repeatedly crosses the two series, allowing an object from one chain to call forth a substance or event from the other.[12]
Barthes treats these substitutions, rather than the stable symbolic meaning of any single object, as the novella's organizing principle. An eye does not simply “stand for” an egg or a testicle; each object is displaced into the next by similarities of shape, colour, vulnerability and use. The plot consequently advances through analogical transformation as much as through conventional causality.[12]
Rina Arya likewise argues that the objects are active components of the narrative rather than decorative symbols. In her account, they provoke successive actions and reorganize the relations among the characters. The human figures are repeatedly subordinated to an autonomous circulation of objects, organs and substances.[7]
Ritual and transgression
The novella's successive episodes appropriate and invert recognizable social and religious rites. C. A. Lozier identifies its adolescent gathering, confinement and liberation of Marcelle, bullfight, confession and parody of the Mass as structures whose conventional meanings are repeatedly violated. Transgression therefore functions not only as subject matter but as a principle of narrative organization, disturbing ordinary relations between speech, action and social identity.[13]
The movement from adolescent play through violence, sacrifice and sacrilege anticipates Bataille's later theoretical conjunction of eroticism, death and the sacred. The church episode is not merely anticlerical satire: it transforms confession and communion into an inverted ritual in which sacred objects, bodily substances and death become indistinguishable.[13]
Autobiography and trauma
The “Coincidences” postscript retrospectively connects the novella's apparently arbitrary images with Bataille's childhood and family history. The father's blindness and bodily incapacity, the mother's crises, Granero's death and childhood associations among eyes, eggs and testicles supply autobiographical counterparts for the fictional motifs without reducing them to a single allegorical code.[9]
Jonathan Boulter reads the novella's repetitions and displacements as a literary enactment of trauma. He argues that the text parodies several recognizable forms—including the romantic quest, the Passion narrative and the psychoanalytic case history—while preventing any of them from providing a stable explanation or resolution. On this reading, the autobiographical postscript does not finally decode the story but adds another layer to its repeated transformations of traumatic material.[14]
Black humour
The work's comedy has been emphasized by Bataille's friend and collaborator Michel Leiris. In “Du temps de Lord Auch”, Leiris describes the novella as repeatedly coupling the terrible with the ridiculous, the dazzling with the nauseating and heaviness with sudden lightness. He characterizes its final movement as a comic-opera masquerade and compares the fugitives' adventures to the anarchic escapades of the French comic-strip characters Les Pieds Nickelés.[15]
The humour arises partly from disproportion: each episode responds to the previous outrage by producing a still more literal, elaborate or improbable variation upon it. Ritual solemnity, aristocratic etiquette and the narrator's largely unmodulated tone continue even as the events become increasingly grotesque. The recurring eye–egg–testicle sequence consequently functions both as a poetic system and as a series of visual and narrative callbacks. In “W.C.”, Bataille himself recalled writing the book with “fulminating joy”, indicating that its laughter and exhilaration were integral to its conception rather than incidental relief from its violence.[8]
Reception and influence
Barthes's “The Metaphor of the Eye”, published one year after Bataille's death, became one of the principal formalist readings of the novella. Rather than attempting to determine what its images ultimately symbolize, Barthes analysed the rules governing their movement and substitution.[12]
Susan Sontag discussed Story of the Eye in her 1967 essay “The Pornographic Imagination”. She treated it as a test case for the proposition that pornography could become literature when it created an autonomous and formally coherent imaginative world rather than functioning solely as an aid to arousal. Sontag situated Bataille alongside writers such as the Marquis de Sade and Pauline Réage, while distinguishing literary pornography from psychological realism.[16] Sontag's and Barthes's essays were later included with Neugroschel's translation in widely circulated English-language editions.[11]
Feminist assessments have frequently questioned the novella's presentation of women, sexual coercion and the male gaze. Chris Vanderwees argues, however, that its destruction, displacement and feminization of the eye complicate an interpretation of the book as an uncomplicated reproduction of phallocentric fantasy. In his reading, the eye ceases to function as a stable position of masculine visual mastery and instead becomes vulnerable, detachable and interchangeable with other bodily objects.[17]
Natalya Lusty classifies the novella as a Surrealist anti-Bildungsroman. Rather than depicting adolescence as a process of accommodation to society and mature identity, it follows characters whose development intensifies their estrangement from social, moral and narrative order. Lusty also traces the form's later reworking in the fiction of Kathy Acker.[2]
Cultural references
- In Jean-Luc Godard's film Weekend (1967), Corinne recounts an orgy in a long monologue. Many of its details derive from the first two chapters of Story of the Eye.[18]
- In Richard Linklater's film Before Sunrise (1995), Céline, played by Julie Delpy, is reading Story of the Eye when Jesse, played by Ethan Hawke, first notices her on a train. The published screenplay likewise introduces Céline as reading Bataille's book.[19] The appearance of the book has been interpreted as anticipating the film's interest in transgression, resistance and erotic discomfort.[20]
- The American indie-pop band of Montreal explicitly mentions Bataille and Story of the Eye in “The Past Is a Grotesque Animal”, from the 2007 album Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?. The song's narrator recalls meeting a woman who appreciated Bataille and discussing the novella with her at a Swedish music festival.[21]
- Elias Bender Rønnenfelt, vocalist of the Danish punk band Iceage, identified Story of the Eye as an influence on his writing for the band's 2013 album You're Nothing. He said that its combination of bizarre events with “beauty and ecstasy” had stimulated his interest in both reading and writing.[22]
- Björk has repeatedly expressed admiration for Story of the Eye, which she first read at the age of seventeen. In a 1994 interview, she said that the book had helped convince her that she was “not insane” and praised the imaginative freedom of its treatment of fantasy and desire.[23] Before the filming of the music video for her 1993 single “Venus as a Boy”, Björk gave director Sophie Muller a copy of the novella. The finished video shows Björk handling and cooking eggs in a kitchen, invoking one of the book's principal recurring objects. Björk later joked that frying the egg was inconsistent with the soft and liquid qualities emphasized in Bataille's narrative.[23]
Adaptations
- Simona (1974), written and directed by Patrick Longchamps, is an Italian–Belgian film loosely based on the novella.[24]
- George Bataille's Story of the Eye (2004), directed by Andrew Repasky McElhinney, is an 81-minute American experimental feature based on the book.[25]
- In 2022, Brazilian director and performer Janaína Leite premiered História do Olho – Um Conto de Fadas Pornô-noir (History of the Eye – A Porn-noir Fairy Tale), a loose theatrical adaptation combining Bataille's fiction with testimony and material developed by its performers.[26]