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A review by kinbote4zembla
Story of the Eye by Georges Bataille
3.0
It's a nice book, Georges Bataille's Story of the Eye (1928). Or, okay, maybe not nice, but, certainly, all right. A pornographic rendering of the kinky relationship between cousins, a better title for this novel would be How Many Ovoids Can Simone Put in Her Vagina?
What begins without penetration between these young people becomes overwhelmingly sexual as rape and murder and mutilation become integral to the young couple's sexual repertoire.
I wonder what Bataille was suggesting with this work. Sartre offers in a blurb on the back of my copy that Bataille has committed a "holocaust of words," effectively "destroying all literature." But I'm not buying that. Just because it is anarchically sexual, I just don't see some visionary deconstruction of literature. I think it's simply a nervy, pervy excursion into the taboo.
But let's take a second to talk about those ovoids. What the fuck. The first ovoid is an egg, the second is a testicle, and the third is an eyeball. Each of these objects is eventually inserted into Simone, the narrator's partner — "lover" seems like the wrong word. The first two objects fit the novel, since both are sexual in function. And maybe Bataille is suggesting that the third is, as well. An orgy of aesthetics.
"I stretched out in the grass, my skull on a large, flat rock and my eyes staring straight up at the milky way, that strange breach of astral sperm and heavenly urine across the cranial vault formed by the ring of constellations: that open crack at the summit of the sky, apparently made of ammoniacal vapors shining in the immensity (in empty space, where they burst forth absurdly like a rooster's crow in total silence), a broken egg, a broken eye, or my own dazzled skull weighing down the rock, bouncing symmetrical images back to infinity."
That's the best line in this book. And it is also the novel's most beautiful expression of its world.
Yeah. It's cute.
3 Happy Endings for the Perverts out of 5
What begins without penetration between these young people becomes overwhelmingly sexual as rape and murder and mutilation become integral to the young couple's sexual repertoire.
I wonder what Bataille was suggesting with this work. Sartre offers in a blurb on the back of my copy that Bataille has committed a "holocaust of words," effectively "destroying all literature." But I'm not buying that. Just because it is anarchically sexual, I just don't see some visionary deconstruction of literature. I think it's simply a nervy, pervy excursion into the taboo.
But let's take a second to talk about those ovoids. What the fuck. The first ovoid is an egg, the second is a testicle, and the third is an eyeball. Each of these objects is eventually inserted into Simone, the narrator's partner — "lover" seems like the wrong word. The first two objects fit the novel, since both are sexual in function. And maybe Bataille is suggesting that the third is, as well. An orgy of aesthetics.
"I stretched out in the grass, my skull on a large, flat rock and my eyes staring straight up at the milky way, that strange breach of astral sperm and heavenly urine across the cranial vault formed by the ring of constellations: that open crack at the summit of the sky, apparently made of ammoniacal vapors shining in the immensity (in empty space, where they burst forth absurdly like a rooster's crow in total silence), a broken egg, a broken eye, or my own dazzled skull weighing down the rock, bouncing symmetrical images back to infinity."
That's the best line in this book. And it is also the novel's most beautiful expression of its world.
Yeah. It's cute.
3 Happy Endings for the Perverts out of 5