ADULTS ONLY! KIDS YOU STAY AWAY! take the sex act and strip away the burden of reality and what do you have?take two characters and make them fuck. you are the author and they are your puppets. they will do anything you want. does fucking equal life? can fucking be a form of transgression? so be it, make it so. add another character. a menage! subtract that character, the poor thing. have your characters fuck right next to her cold hanging corpse. they are fucking death! add another character, a sophisticated gent of the old school (the school of Salo, of course). now add a bullfighter and a bullfight. some bull testes. a dead bullfighter. a dangling eye. ok, now add a sexy young catholic priest. fuck blow him. then kill him! play with his eyeball. now run away! a happy ending?these are not spoilers. dear reader, you are dealing with abstractions. abstractions cannot be spoiled. you can look at them and your eye will see what it wants to see. when is a novel not a novel? when is a narrative an anti-narrative?when is an egg not an egg? an eye not an eye? when is urine a golden shower of life-affirming transgression?your surface is like glass, Story of the Eye. eye see right through it. the glass is fractured; the images are compartmentalized. the images become symbols and metaphors. symbols of and metaphors for... what? eye see a metaphor. i make it my own. i take it in my hands and turn it into whatever i please. i turn it into an egg. the egg is life and i fuck it. i fuck life with my great staring eye. the eye is a looking-glass and i turn it towards myself. your surface becomes a mirror, Story of the Eye. it asks me: what is pornography? a series of living symbols and metaphors, profane and sacred acts, bodies devoid of purpose beyond the violence of movement, the slap and tickle of separating and colliding, sex as a sublime sort of personalized violence? violence is sex with no happy ending? eye see a symbol. it is a testicle, a lonely testicle cast out from its body. what does it mean? does it mean transgression? it is a sphere, like an eye, like an egg, a delicious egg. i eat the testicle. Synesthesia, from the ancient Greek σύν (syn), "together," and αἴσθησις(aisthēsis), "sensation," is a neurological condition in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway."I realized there was a perfect coincidence of images tied to analogous upheavals... I was astonished at having unknowingly substituted a perfectly obscene image for a vision apparently devoid of any sexual implication."ha! apparently. do you think you are talking to a child? i went to a sex party on halloween. it was interesting watching people having sex in different costumes. who is who and what is what? is that even a real dick? in their minds were people imagining themselves as a vampire ballerina, and so trying to think like one? a hunky zombie? a werewolf biker chick? how do such things think, how do they fuck? were their costumes a projection of their inner selves and so now they were able to fuck like they fucked in their dreams? my costume: Nite Owl.after that sex party, we went to another one. hey, it was halloween and that is certainly a time for no regrets. this party was different. less classy and far more extreme. a hair-raisingly brutal s&m scene took place. degradation a-go-go. the debased miss was degraded beyond belief and i saw things that eye will never be able to un-see. belts and fists and spit and constant slapping and constant demeaning and sex = violence and it doesn't end there. the crowd was mesmerized. i wondered, what is happening in that girl's mind? is this sex performing some kind of function beyond my understanding? was her degradation something that somehow lifted her to her own private, transgressive heaven? was this public transgression somehow empowering? i looked at my male companion and he looked back at me; our eyes met and we both understood in that moment that we were seeing something that neither of us were equipped to understand. we were both deeply uncomfortable. or so i thought. but is that what he was really thinking? did he look at me and see weakness, perhaps even fear - the fear of the unknown, the fear of true transgression? his costume: Doctor Manhattan. i looked at my female companion. she was rapt; she did not see me; she did not return my gaze. was she seeing herself down on that floor? was the debased miss a living symbol of all that she had put away when she entered her rigid bourgeois existence? when she finally looked back at the two of us, did she see living shells of hollow men - or the means for further transgression? her costume: The Silk Spectre. a series of gruesome tableau! an accumulation of transgressions! le petit mort! vivre la vie! oh the banality of trangression! oh the profundity of banality! there is no there there! i see a church and eye burn it! i see my mother, my father, and they are symbols of all that i long to destroy! and other cliches! i take refuge in madness! these eyes have seen it all! they have seen nothing! she places the egg inside of her. it is a good feeling. the feeling of life? she places an eyeball inside of her. it is a good feeling. what does that eye see? does it see life, or living death? her opening is an opening; it is literal and figurative; she takes the transgression inside of her and becomes it.they thrust their sabers into the bull. they make an opening, more than one. the bull is enraged, engorged. colored pieces of cloth turn a blood sport into a swirling dance of death. and other cliches. the bullfighter's stiff steel finishes the dance; he makes a bloody cleft into living tissue. the crowd roars. what are they seeing? is this debasement, transgression, an atrocity, a holy thing? eye do not know. but i don't like it.you read the book but it is not a book, not really. it is a thesis. what is its purpose? to lay bare the world, i suppose. each act, each object, each symbol and metaphor... open to your own interpretation. come one, come all! cum! cum! cum! yawn. i know the world already. eye am a camera. overall the book was interesting. lots to contemplate. it took a while but eye was finally able to jerk off to it.
This may be a short read: a novella composed of only 103 pages of letters printed using big font. Definitely a short read. However, it is full-packed with explicit and sickening sex scenes so this is not for readers who are squeamish when it comes to sex. Also, this is not a book to titillate readers. The sex scenes are so disgusting I did not feel anything that made we want to have sex. Rather, the internal stirring I had while reading this came due to George Bataille's (1897-1962) deep philosophical musings and the effective use of symbols. I grew up in a family where sex was not discussed in the open. Ours was a devout Catholic in a way so we did not feel that our parents encouraged us to ask questions about sex. We learned sex in school, media or with our peers. In school, we were taught that masturbation can make us blind, it was immodest not to wear shorts inside the church, lip kissing in public was inappropriate and sex was only to be done in private and within the sanctity of marriage. I remember that I was scared whenever I had to please myself as a teenage boy with raging hormones because of this passage in the Bible (Matthew 5:30) saying that "And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away." I remember that I felt guilty after each time I did it and I always looked at my hands and could not imagine parting with them only to stop what I could not stop doing.This book has lots of disgusting sex scenes and they are desensitizing and in a way, liberating. First, Bataille showed sex as nothing different from our other usual daily activities. Then the narrator and his lover Simone do the act in the presence of Simone's mother. Then they do it with eggs and get stimulated with body fluids, then they do it with their friends, then they do it in the presence of their friend's corpse, then they do it at a bullfight stadium, then they do it with a Catholic priest, they just do it without care. They just pleasure themselves in total abandon and without any inhibitions.For me, this is mind-boggling but it sends a clear message contrary to what I grew up with, that sex should be done in private because it is shameful almost like saying that sex is dirty. 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. It does not show that sex is beautiful and a religious act. Rather, it shows that sex is pleasurable as it unabashedly denounces hypocrisy. That scene with the priest is the zenith of this denouncement. It shocked me as I still saw it sacrilegious. However, it was like the final straw that had to break the remaining bondage of wrong images that permeated my mind when it comes to the nature of sex. Bataille seemed to have it as the ultimatum to strongly send his message across and he, who denounced Catholicism at the age of 20, used the Catholic religion as a sacrificial lamb. At the end of the book, George Bataille's (1897-1962) explained the symbolism he used: his paralyzed blind father who could not stand to go to the toilet so he had to do it while in an armchair. Whenever he urinated, his pupils very frequently pointed up into space, shifting under the lids. This became the inspiration for the use of the "eye" in the story and the presence of urine, along with other body fluids, in many of the scenes in the story. Since his father was invalid, the mother was suspected to having an affair with Bataille's doctor and thus became the inspiration for Marcelle's character. Again, this is not book to everyone. I thought I would give this a 5-star rating due to Bataille's strong and compelling message and adept handling of the sensitive theme. However, I would not want my conservative friends to get an impression that I am peddling a pornographic book. This can be pornography to others and I would not blame them if they think so. It's just that I saw this before in Marquis de Sade's 100 Years of Sodom when I gave it a 1 star (I didn't like it!) only to realize later that I made a bad judgement of that classic book by totally missing its message.I know better now.
What do You think about Story Of The Eye (2001)?
George Bataille's brief Sade-esque novella is a mordantly brilliant dip into the post-Nietzschen world modernity. The Story of the Eye is a pornographic disintegration of the Western ethical code. It is both magnificent and foul; a more daring and original work than his later philosophy/anthropology. A seminal piece of 20th century literature; although it was published well before the cultural abominations of our current nihilism, we are still not ready for this bleak and punkish work of literary debauchery.
—Mr.
Batille, on this story resets your mind with a punkish pornographic disjoint of the morally correct.I agree with Joselito that the following passage is one that could best portray this story:"But as of then, no doubt existed for me: I did not care for what is known as 'pleasures of the flesh' because they are really insipid; I cared only for what is classified as 'dirty.' On the other hand, I was not even satisfied with the usual 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.Not recommended for: The titillate reader.
—Pablo
This book can be read in about 30 minutes. Sadly, I imagine it must have taken slightly longer to write. The same things happen over and over, which you’d imagine wouldn’t be such a bother since the previous book I read was ‘Replay’ by Ken Grimwood, except in Story of the Eye the scenes aren’t particularly moving, interesting, or even necessary. Come to think of it, Story of the Eye pretty much sucked. tI got this based on some online recommendations; some dude on Amazon had a ‘Listmania’ entry which contained several books I enjoy, and I figured this guy’s taste couldn’t be that bad. Then again, I have been fooled before.tThere are very few things actually going on in Story of the Eye, and they are: masturbation (occurs on every page, male and female), rape (transpiring once per five-page chapter), urination or defecation (accompanying each masturbatory incident), and eggs, eyeballs, and corpses (almost always being pissed on or used as a crude implement to reach a self-induced climax). That’s about it. I’m not passing judgment on the time-honored rite of extracting an eye from a cadaver and pissing on it after frigging oneself, but let’s face it, that gets pretty boring. Someone sticking an egg in their ass and smashing it by contracting the buttocks is only entertaining so many times. Might as well write a story about a guy priming his pud while surfing Goodreads for all the literary merit involved.tI’m sure there will be a handful of people that unwaveringly claim this story is a great achievement in surrealistic prose, and maybe I’m missing the point, but when something as brief as Story of the Eye fails to captivate and hold my attention, that’s problematic. Occasionally something within struck me as remotely funny or absurd, but on the whole, this book just didn’t manage to entertain.tOn a side note, publisher City Lights apparently continues to hopelessly churn out anything which might be seen as ‘offensive’, if only for the sake of cheap shock value. Also, it seems as though the ability to use the word c*nt three times per page is about the only measuring stick they have to gauge a writer's ability over at City Lights.
—Chris
