STORY OF THE EYE
by Georges Bataille
o
What the fuck did I just read?
I blame the written endorsements of Susan Sontag and Jean Paul Sartre who led me to believe that I was to experience in STORY OF THE EYE a philosophically illuminating work of transgressive erotica. It is not that at all. It's just gross and disturbing. In one of the earlier chapters, you do get a sense that you may be in for something of a proto-CLOCKWORK ORANGE ride; kids being delinquents in response to some greater social impasse. There is little to no social contextualization to speak of. It's just a couple of kids doing really atrocious shit. It seems to start off with just an interest in sex, but then very quickly devolves into an obsession with urine and boiled eggs and eyeballs and raw bull intestines and eventually the dead bodies of priests. And there's no rhyme or reason to any of it, it's just a bunch of vile shit strung together in less than 85 pages and called a novel.
The edition I have, from City Lights Books, contains a kind of afterward by Bataille in which he details a series of childhood memories that are meant to explain the subconscious correlations he made between urine, eyeballs, boiled eggs, and ecstasy. I assume that this is what is supposed to make what was written into the novel as somehow “profound”. I'm afraid it doesn't help. There is nothing in this book that is at all meaningful. It's all shit.