Story of the Eye (Penguin Modern Classics)

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Originally published in France in 1928 and here translated from its original French by Joachim Neugroschel. While mildly amusing at times for its sheer outrageousness, this comes across as a rather pointless exercise, painfully juvenile even. It’s always the same repetitive theatrics in these books: sex in this orifice, sex in that orifice, put this object into this orifice, place that object into that orifice. Thus, I realized: This incredibly violent, disgusting, and seemingly pointless book nonetheless was bursting with some kind of energy that spoke to something… Sick? Barthes' analysis focuses on the centrality of the eye to this series of vignettes, and notices that it is interchangeable with eggs, bulls' testicles and other ovular objects within the narrative.

Here, sex is a primal need and this book seems like a broom that sweeps away the strewn around inhibitions that accumulated on the floor of my conservative childhood.Ours was a devout Catholic in a way so we did not feel that our parents encouraged us to ask questions about sex. The old definition of “obscene” was that sexually explicit material had a “tendency to deprave and corrupt” the reader. For a long time, we were parked a few yards beyond without getting out, fully absorbed in the sight of the corpse. With this in mind, perhaps the most important character is Marcelle; certainly she is most important to the narrator and Simone, dominating their thoughts and playing a central role in their relationship. As Granero is impaled by a bull and his right eye is ripped out of its socket, Simone sticks one of the raw testicles up her vagina and has an orgasm at the same moment El Granero dies.

We did not lack modesty – on the contrary – but something urgently drove us to defy modesty together as immodestly as possible. So, in the novel, Bataille achieves a transformation, an exchange, a substitution, pursuant to which deformity becomes lewd, and lewdness becomes deformed. Don’t get me wrong, prude I am not; I love my erotic writing, sexual investigations, the Freudian truths, and sexual fantasies too, speaking of which, this is a twisted sexual fantasy overwhelmed by its own craziness and charged with an assemblage of layered symbolism, wherein a range of fetishes explode into a shocking act of sex-fueled brutality, culminating in our lead protagonist’s, one sixteen-year-old Simone, wanting to scoop out the eyes of living people to sate her desire. Our resources are crucial for knowledge lovers everywhere—so if you find all these bits and bytes useful, please pitch in.

At least, not until after devouring the extensive supplementary material ( the author’s afterword, two excellent essays by Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes), and reserving some time to digest it all while laying alone on my back in a placid pool at 7 am, staring in quiet rumination at a bloody red sun. The site's critical consensus reads: "Featuring wooden performances and minimal scares, The Eye is another tedious remake of an Asian horror film".

Bataille’s first novel, published under the pseudonym ‘Lord Auch’, is still his most notorious work. So that we can focus on both objects that are close to us and objects that are far away, the lens adjusts the focus so that a clear image is formed on the retina.In the movie Weekend Corrine, the female lead, recounts an orgy she participated in, many of the details of which are derived from the first two chapters of Story of the Eye.

Je maintenais les cuisses de Simone ouvertes : l’urine brûlante ruisselait sous l’œil sur la cuisse la plus basse. The light, which has already beenrefracted by the cornea, is then directed towards the retina, at the back of the eye, by the lens where it forms a clear image. Dennis Harvey, reviewing Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye in Variety said the film was “A punk-pornocopia equivalent to Last Year at Marienbad. If you enjoyed Story of the Eye, you might like Anaïs Nin's Delta of Venus, also available in Penguin Modern Classics. Indeed, staring oneself blind on them would form a quite superficial reading of the text, and does it quite the disservice to my mind.May contain markings such as bookplates, stamps, limited notes and highlighting, or a few light stains. And Susan Sontag, whose 1967 essay included here appear to celebrate them all, or at least redesignate them as literature. It’s not just eyes that are the focus of sexually perverse obsession here, but really any globular object, such as an egg or a bull’s testes, which are to be fondled, inserted in various orifices, digested. Most recently, the Icelandic pop singer Björk Guðdmundsdóttir cites Story of the Eye as a major inspiration: she made a music video that alludes to Bataille's erotic uses of eggs, and she plans to read an excerpt for an album.