[STUDY 2: BOYHOOD BANALITY OF THE BATILLEAN “EYE”]
Georges Bataille (1897-1962) was a man entrenched reverence dictates deference to as “writer and philosopher,” though “Man” seems plenty suitable, whose work I confess to reading extensively during a period in my life when I was basically an idiot. By which I mean during my phase of being an adolescent girl who, engulfed in self-disgust, did not want to grow to be a woman but clung to the male voice I knew as the voice of the artist as if I could be real like Him instead. As a wannabe Bad Boy I studied Bataille to internalize the blood-black rapture of his rhythms and I would cite him among my influences if anyone asked, grasping after the ephemeral cool of carnal dissidence he cast as aura, to make it mine. Always with latent unease, since my love affair with Bataille was complicated by the fact that I considered him for the most part to be full of shit. No doubt I treasured his style but as re: his ideas, I tried to ignore them. Unlike his writing his ideas were ugly. The ideological surmise that rules Bataille’s writings is this, in brief: the body dies and in dying drags with it into darkness the (male) mind, meaning that all experiences which immerse the mind in bodily feeling, as with sexual arousal, are tainted in their proximity to the nonstop decay which is the body’s true nature, as substance – degeneration being nature’s true nature – and since patriarchy assigns heterosexuality as convention it is a woman imagined as the male mind’s object of sexual desire, the female is anxiously transmuted to meat-entity whose material reality dooms the male “I” to suffocate inside his own flesh he senses decomposing in her company, women thus are hollowed as vessels for death and sex, fused to a single force that exists to overthrow the male//mind; a physical being with physical needs despite himself the man cannot extinguish the body’s sensibility wholly and so he longs for the femme-death of sexual release even as he is repulsed by the ruin it promises, thus sexuality becomes a trauma, and horror its incitement: sex is ghastly, as an abyss which burbles stench and roils, a crisis, dissociated from all emotion but abject dread + disgust; when man stands at the precipice of sexual putrefaction to salvage himself he submits a sacrifice to the churn, and that sacrifice of course is the female body, an object uncannily akin to the abyss itself: it belongs there. And her death spasm will be sublime. If this brutal neurosis sounds familiar to you, good, because it is an approach to eros Bataille shares w/ BDSM’s # 1 Daddy, the Marquis de Sade, the subject of the last study in this series, and w/ the pornographic ethos in general.
Bataille read Sade and loved him and was perhaps the principal force in establishing the artistic + philosophical “value” of Sade’s works in the 20th century, I’ve read him termed “neo-Sadean”—this alone should cue our bile rising. In his 1930 essay “The Use-Value of D.A.F. Sade (An open letter to my current comrades)” Bataille disparaged the Surrealists as sapless for idolizing Sade in such a way that isolated his violence to the theoretical realms of art and literature. Bataille meanwhile aspired to put into practice what he saw as Sade’s call for “revolution” against morality, giving life to Sade’s theory, tasting the blood siphoned through his own teeth, sinking rapturous into the smolder of anti-ethical entropy, et cetera, et cetera. Bataille often appeals to Sade’s authority as culture-arbiter to defend his own assertions that sex is fundamentally a violent force, linked to sadism and squalor, culminating in murder. That sex is exciting despite being disgusting because it’s criminal. As in Sadean eroticism, supposed deviance (apparently the sole course to freedom) replaces sensuality as the pleasure of sex. Like Sade, Bataille identified “sovereignty” in the reduction of other beings, particularly women, to victim-objects. So, in his veneration of Sade and the marriage of sex to death Bataille comes into focus as a predictable misogynistic creep, marked conventionally masculine by his nihilistic self-involvement and fetish for cruelty, supremacy, and sex murder. Bataille wrote more beautifully than Sade, point conceded, but philosophically he has equally nought to offer us if we want not to be vectors of cultural virulence. This was made clearest to me when I read Bataille’s Erotism: Death and Sensuality the first time and as I was reading I could not stop rolling my eyes over Bataille’s fan-boy obedience to the dominant ideology of sex as disgusting. He took sex’s filthiness for granted as fact. I did not. I did not believe him that to be entangled intimately with the body of another was necessarily a scene for the slaughterhouse, involving maggots and the collapse of consciousness into squelching feculence, a disintegration with which I (were I allowed an “I” as a woman) was to have an ambivalent relationship: is it ecstasy or is it agony, this loss of control? I thought: who cares about control? Nor did I believe sex and death, sex and violence, to be linked inextricably. Nor that my role as a woman was to sprout dripping tentacles from the cavernous maw between my legs and haul some boy through a pile of manure so that fifteen minutes later he might righteously slay me, thereby reasserting the power of culture(man) over nature(woman). I did not accept that we as creatures had no responsibility to one another, that our only salvation lay in total destruction, that we could never heal. These premises struck me as obviously problematic. They still do, and as I have encountered more of men’s so-called “transgressive” literature, lately Bataille’s conclusions also strike me as boring, at times they even succeed in rousing a mild sadness in me for their author, consumed as he was by fear of the vital materiality of living & hatred of the body (his body), my engagement with his texts increasingly resembling that of a concerned therapist reading through the diaries of a depressive delusional psychiatric patient.
There’s no way around the misogyny of Bataille’s work. It is scarcely more subtle or nuanced than the misogyny of less high-art pornography; you can’t obviate Bataille’s misogyny with jargon-dense academic re-interpretations claiming that he was actually saying blah blah blah, whatever, not that women were dead-meat-scum sucking men into dissolution down their (our) bleedy slits. To his credit Bataille wrote with a fierce clarity + so his misogyny is explicit. Yet rarely is horror of women that saturates his work problematized. In social circles to which I do not belong but which I orbit, self-exiled at the margins, Bataille is adored. Name-drop Bataille during mix-n-mingle chatter or in an interview if you have the chance and you are instantaneously dangerously fancy and intellectual and darling. To be caught reading Bataille in public constitutes an image enhancement. Maybe just carry the book around, tucked under your arm, at a show//gallery opening//cocktail party. Who says you have to read it? It’s best however if you can totter off a few words about your thoughts on Bataille, or if you can muster only one make sure it’s “taboo.” Voila, your social//cultural capital has exploded. Good for you—you’re cool. What is confusing to me is that I do not position myself at even the remotest outskirts of any social circles comprised of overtly woman-hating persons; most of the people I know smitten with Bataille would be insulted, also alarmed, to be accused of misogyny, as they imagine themselves progressive, radical, possibly even feminist (though there’s some confusion over what these terms mean if they mean anything at all at this point). Therefore one might expect that these progressive young people w/ feminist or at least “pro-woman” (again, whatever the hell that means) inclinations would be critical of the glaring denigration of women generally and the female body in specific that worms through the whole of Bataille’s body of work. But no, because “nonconformity”//”creativity” DID YOU KNOW acquits you of critical analysis. Critical thinking: how prudish! It is cool to call Bataille’s work “smut” and carry a thumbed-through copy of Le Bleu du Ciel around in your bag as an intellectual accessory (and sexual signifier, if you’re a woman). It is uncool to challenge the rightness or legitimacy of the established male authorities in your field (and a sexual turn-off, if you’re a woman) (and if you turn the boys off don’t expect to stay relevant, if you’re a woman).
Story of the Eye is so cool it hurts, so cool I could puke. The novella is Bataille’s first and best-known work, the must-read essential slotted for the personal libraries of every aspiring transgressive intellectual//artist, I assume because at under 100 pages in length it does not require especially much mental energy to ingest, so subversive types can earn their street cred with maximal efficiency. City Lights’ published an English translation of the novella which they pitch on their website as “disgusting and fascinating” and “packed with seemingly endless violations,” an “underground classic.”1 Susan Sontag proclaims it “the most accomplished artistically of all the pornographic prose fictions I’ve read”2, a text indicating the aesthetic possibilities of porno, while Playboy.com has approved its practical value as masturbatory material, deeming the text a “damn hot read.”3 (as an aside, once again we note the overlap in Susan Sontag’s tastes with Hugh Hefner’s—coincidence, or a pandering identification with patriarchy?) The overall impression one receives from a glancing review of the criticism devoted to Story of the Eye is that this is a special species of “dirty little book,” for the literary connoisseur: graceful in style, mystical in its eroticism. In case you’ve avoided the text until now I apologize I’ll have to speed you through the story:
our narrator is a teenage boy who whilst on summer vacation meets a teenage girl, Simone, dark-haired, who dresses in black, who has a proclivity for placing moist white food items, such as milk, such as eggs, in the vicinity of her vagina, a hot & murky zone the boy prefers to call her cunt, cunt being the word he feels most beautifully describes the vulva and its associated anatomy; both boy and girl find this application of dairy to genitals overwhelmingly stirring and commence a torrid affair. a critical incident in their relationship is when they are speeding in a car and mow down a pretty young girl on a bicycle. her head is severed, or almost, a sight which arouses the young couple to orgasm. the narrator pees on Simone, Simone pees on the narrator. together they molest a blonde girl, a shy, innocent acquaintance named Marcelle, during a thunderstorm, on the edge of a cliff overlooking the sea. Simone becomes obsessed A) with Marcelle and B) with breaking eggs in the cleft of her ass. Simone pees on her mother. the couple hosts a party to which they invite Marcelle and a number of other friends; everyone drinks champagne to dizziness, naturally an orgy follows, Simone pees on a tablecloth in front of everyone, and in the midst of tumult Marcelle traps herself in a wardrobe and masturbates until she urinates + then her mind snaps. Marcelle is institutionalized. Simone and the narrator fixate on fucking poor sweet pale Marcelle so they try to break her out of the asylum, a failed effort which ultimately results in Simone crashing her bicycle due to becoming overly sexually excited from the sensation of her cunt rubbing against the bicycle’s seat on the ride home. Convalescent Simone develops a new set of fetishes: tossing hard-boiled eggs into the toilet to watch them float, watching fresh eggs cracked by the narrator empty beneath her into the toilet and peeing on them, slurping eggs out of the toilet bowl. they fantasize various ways they might pee on or otherwise douse Marcelle, their imprisoned dream-victim. Simone and the narrator return to the asylum, which the narrator now imagines as a haunted castle, and this time Marcelle escapes. she kisses the narrator and wants to marry him; soon after, she hangs herself in the wardrobe where she had lost her sanity when she was driven to masturbate and pee on herself. Simone and the narrator cut down her corpse and fuck each other for the first time next to it. Simone pees on Marcelle’s corpse. Simone, the narrator, and Sir Edmond, an English aristocrat entranced by Simone, run away to Spain, where they enjoy public sex and bullfights. Simone especially likes to see the bait mares eviscerated and running around with their pink entrails spilling out onto the dirt. Simone is aroused watching a toreador impaled by a bull’s horns. she pops a bull’s testicle into her vagina. the toreador’s eye pops out of his head. Simone, the narrator, and Sir Edmond take a daytrip to a chapel in Seville where Don Juan is supposed to be buried. inside the chapel Simone goes into the confessional and masturbates while she confesses, confessing to the priest that she is masturbating as she confesses. she goes into the priest’s booth in the confessional and sucks the priest’s penis. Sir Edmond and the narrator carry the priest out of the confessional and strip him of his vestments, which Simone pees on. the priest is made to pee in the chalice and drink his own urine. Simone jerks him off so he ejaculates on the communion wafers. Sir Edmond and the narrator strangle the priest; Simone wants his eye and so Sir Edmond cuts it out of the dead priest’s head for her. Simone pops the eye into her anus. Simone pops the eye into her cunt. the narrator looks between her legs and sees the eye in Simone’s cunt as Marcelle’s eye, weeping urine. Simone pees. giddily the threesome go off to black Africa on Sir Edmond’s slave-staffed yacht.
the end.
Body count: 6 (+). Foremost the virgin and the priest, predictably, but also Granero the toreador, the bull, a prostitute drowned in pig manure, and the girl bicyclist partially decapitated at the beginning of the tale. Who knows how many gutted mares? Gallons of urine are splashed about across these pages. Eggs are smashed, eyes gouged, lightning strikes, semen pools. A rooster crows. A rooster is red, like a cardinal’s robes. Menstrual blood is also red, smells sickening like sisters and mothers and is like the moon, which is female (because she lives in darkness). Death is sex and sex is death is sex is a woman, is excretion, terror, insanity, natural disaster, the sacred (which must be dirtied), the profane (which must be devoured), fluidity, beastliness, desecration is sex is beauty is total destruction. I have read Story of the Eye four? five? times now and each time it vitiates to a new level of stupid in my mind. Honestly I’m embarrassed for Bataille it’s his most oft-read work, this puerile exercise in juvenile prurience and trite blasphemy, something art school boy scouts might pass around the bunks at summer camp and giggle over until it’s confiscated by a counselor who tsk-tks wistfully “boys will be boys.” It’s a stupid gross-out of a book, trussed up in the accessories of high art. Oh, what weighty symbolism! Check it out, this guy said “cunt”! WHAT A BADASS. Naturally I would love to dismiss Story of the Eye as stupid and move on with my life. Stupid as it may be, however, countless persons who may or may not be authentically stupid themselves love it and exalt it as a canonical piece of erotic aestheticism and celebrate it, rape and cruelty and pissed-on girl-corpse and charnel ugliness and all. Because so many people are convinced it is to be cherished, and because Story of the Eye is not merely stupid but explicit in its hatred for women as well as for the body and sexuality itself, dismissal is not an option. That we are willing to accept the image of eroticism Bataille presents in Story of the Eye without recoiling from the ammonia stench of its misogynistic carnage is a woeful indicator of how numbed the conditions of our world have made us to men’s violence against the female body//sexuality//the corporal self, a theme ubiquitous in art, “transgressive” or otherwise, and in the culture that produces and is produced + reproduced, in part, by art. That we celebrate its violence and anxious disgust as if it were a vision of sexual rebellion evinces how far masculinist rule has forced us from ourselves, particularly for those of us who are female and thus the horror-objects of Bataille’s pornography. But it represents a division and renunciation of self for the male as well. Nihilistic eroticism is an antagonism against all living bodies. It is the eroticism of fear and of self-rejection, of shame. It is the death of feeling and union. It should be noxious to us, yet having been induced to believe its morbidity is “cool,” and that “cool” – something like hardened, something like feelingless – is the pinnacle of cultural attainment, we scurry to lap it up, like dogs to antifreeze. A lifetime of deluded guzzling this poison is steady suicide. The heart ulcerates and rots. And everywhere all of the time women, transmuted en masse to Bataillean horror-objects, are destroyed, soul severed from body, both stomped to pulp, in service of men’s nightmares. For the sake of all women and our own hearts urgently we need to outgrow Bataille’s cruel stupidity, the pornographic vengeance of the terror-stricken boy-child. In what follows I stress the point. Bear with me.
I. Eye’s Vision of Woman
The masculinist imagination knows the female in two flavors: virgin and whore. The male’s treatment of the female depends on which type he is dealing with: if she is the virgin she is to be converted to the whore, by coercion or by force (fucking), and if she is the whore, she is to be killed. We see then that the virgin is only a pre-initiated state for the female – virgin as woman in larval form – because the lesson of pornography, from which men acquire their earliest understanding of the sexualized female, is that the virgin – a “good woman,” pure + true – is an impossible lie, that all women beneath their clothes or prim cosmetic veneers are in fact whores, in the bellies of whom boils a hunger for the fuck, a hunger which after a taste of cock heats to such carnivorous avaricious intensity that their vaginas are prone to grow teeth and gnaw off the lover’s organ, leaving the poor boy to hemorrhage on the duvet while the whoring bitch polishes her long nails cherry red. To prevent against such a tragedy the whore must be killed before she can eat the man. The whore is the eternal symbol of the anti-culture carnality that dizzies a man past self-control, within which the male “I” dissolves; she is animal existence and the threat inherent in being a body: mortality. “Nature is a whore.” In an endless cycle of degradation the virgin becomes the whore becomes a beast becomes a dead thing. This is the sexual process as delineated by pornography, to which Story of the Eye, as a pornographic work, adheres. In the novella Bataille introduces the virgin-whore dichotomy in the figures of Simone and Marcelle. Marcelle is the virgin. Simone is the whore. Bataille establishes each girl’s role with customary porno unsubtlety. We meet Simone first, and learn that she wears a black pinafore, black stockings, she has dark hair. She is fond of placing food into her vagina. Later, we are presented with Marcelle, who is a blonde, who demurely prefers white dresses, white stockings. She is shy, skittish, frail, pallid, described as “the purest and most affecting” of friends. In case somehow we missed the typology of the feminine our clever author has so deftly evoked through his female characters, Bataille clarifies for us: “Curiously, [Marcelle] was wearing a white belt and white stockings, whereas black-haired Simone, whose cunt was in my hand, was wearing a black belt and black stockings.” Aha! I think I am beginning to understand.
Simone as the whore, whose cunt we know is in a man’s hands (clutched, as a hand-puppet?), delights in destroying and rubbing dirt into whatever she touches, while Marcelle, the virgin, is in such turmoil over her inner whorishness, revealed to her through sexual contact with Simone, that she shatters into sad-animal-insanity, shrieking, incontinent, and then she commits suicide. Marcelle as the virgin of the tale is slurped up into the darkness of the whore in a similar manner as all of the eggs that Simone feeds her vagina. Simone is obsessed with Marcelle. Specifically, with the idea of defiling her, mucking her up—the whore will not suffer the virgin to exist; rather, she will endeavor to initiate the virgin into whoredom. If the virgin cannot be initiated, she will be eradicated, so that men will only have whores to fuck. “Fuck” is a substitute for “love.” The whore is incapable of love because of the demands of her cunt’s hunger, and she does not expect to be loved, but the virgin is a fool and falls in love: Marcelle loves the narrator; she wants to marry him. It is acknowledged that love is insipid, furthermore it is insanity: when Marcelle remembers the narrator as the bloodied man she called the Cardinal she blamed for locking her in the wardrobe with her whorishness, love is proven a delusion. But still Marcelle is too weak to accept she is a whore. To replace “love” with “fuck.” She hangs herself instead. Victorious, Simone pees on her corpse. Once the virgin is dead, and only the whore remains, Simone and the narrator are free to engage in intercourse. After fucking the whore, the narrator reports: “I no longer cared at all for either Simone or Marcelle.” At the close of the novel, Bataille presents us with the image of Marcelle’s blue eye (mystically transubstantiated from the eye of the priest, another virgin) peering out from Simone’s vagina: the pure child has been subsumed in the black mouth of the hole. Bataille calls it a “dreamy vision,” the virgin weeping piteously inside the whore. Her tears are urine. Love is dead.
The whore’s vagina is a treacherous place for all comers in the Bataillean universe. While the narrator is for the most part true to his devotion to that “loveliest of names” for female genitalia and we read primarily of Simone’s “cunt,” we are also treated to repeated descriptions of the place between the whore’s legs as “slobbery flesh,” sometimes “blood-red,” other times no color is given but we do have a location: “in the midst of her fur.” The cunt drools red, blood froth from the mouth of the sex-rabid animal that is woman. When an animal attacks, it must be destroyed. No remorse. The cunt is also a “cavern of blood”—evidently a site unfit to be explored by the faint of heart. “Abandon hope all ye who enter here.” It is a territory that in its inclemency elicits brutality rather than sympathy, thus the cunt is something to be exposed, shoved into, churned, gorged with come, to be grabbed at and pissed on and flooded. One must be merciless if one wants to get out alive. Since a woman’s vagina signifies nature at its most volatile, there is no sexual contact with a female that does not inhere risk of cataclysm. Thus of the “swampy regions of the cunt” Bataille writes: “nothing resembles them more than the days of flood and storm or even the suffocating gaseous eruptions of volcanoes, and they never turn active except, like storms or volcanoes, with something of catastrophe or disaster”.
From Bataille we learn that a woman’s genitalia is associated with tempests and “chaotic and dreadful landscapes”; it is shameless; it is most appropriately encountered in a “stinking shithouse”; it swells like fruit and can grab a whole hand in its greedy clutches, when excited. Often the cunt puts the whore at risk, for she is driven by its directives, its appetites, as if it were its own creature. When the cunt awakens, the woman is possessed by it: she has no control of herself. In this way the cunt is a parasitic entity, although it may be more the case that the whore herself only exists as a vector for the cunt, without any creaturehood of her own. We could say that woman is the ornamental outer husk of cunt. A force stronger than the woman’s consciousness, the cunt controls her. This subjugation of woman to genitalia is evident when the frenzy of Simone’s vagina while she’s bicycling naked causes her to crash, orgasmically: “she was literally torn away by joy, and her nude body was hurled upon an embankment with an awful scraping of steel on the pebbles and a piercing shriek.” An additional indicator of Simone’s subjection to her genitalia is her fixation on “feeding” it, her life arranging itself around the cunt’s consumptive whims. Milk, eggs, eyes—what the cunt wants, the cunt gets. Simone sees to it. She is a slave to it even as the orifice abuses her, as when, aroused by the collapse of a prostituted woman in a pigsty, Simone’s cunt sends her into convulsions: “Simone grabbed her behind in both hands and threw back her head, which banged violently against the ground; she tensed breathlessly for a few seconds…then tore herself away at one swoop and thrashed about on the ground like a headless chicken, hurting herself…her face was smeared with saliva and blood.” Bataille clarifies succinctly this perilous cunt-woman relation in his later work: “She is brusquely laid open to the violence of the sexual urges let loose in the organs of reproduction.”4 In that her cunt reduces Simone to self-injurious spasms, it is clear that the “slobbery flesh” has little concern for human life, not even that of its keeper (the whore). So, no one is safe.
Seeing how the cunt is a hazard to human civilization, there is no question that it must be annulled, an obviation of cultural apocalypse most readily achieved through the death of the whore. This is the conviction that underlies the sexual violence that the heroes of pornographic narratives perpetrate against women, as well as the sexual violence that men who internalize pornography’s values perpetrate against women in reality. And yet, in Story of the Eye, the whore Simone is permitted to live, cunt still securely in place. Indeed, by the end of the novel, as Simone’s cataclysmic lust reaches its murderous climax, the narrator is more in love with her than ever before. He is, in fact, so in love with her that he discovers himself, to his surprise, unable to “rape and fuck her in turn.” What are we to make of Simone’s survival, the glorification of her whoredom? I would propose two possible explanations: 1) Bataille allows Simone’s continued existence because as sadistic whore she incarnates his vision of nihilistic sexuality, thus it is her masculine lineage that saves her, or 2) Bataille never intended for Simone to live. In Story of the Eye Simone lives because she represents the male fantasy of female sexuality, as savage, devouring, and because she embraces male values: she, too, wants to see women hurt. Both identifications with masculinity aid her cause, survival-wise. The fantasy of female sexuality embodied in Simone is the anodyne or excuse that men invoke when they enact real violence against real women. They sputter, “But I had to, don’t you see? She was pure evil, the whore!” Simone lives to replace real women with a man-made image of woman, the nightmare image of what women might become if not contained rigorously in men’s cages, punished at intervals for the cunty drool that rusts their (our) chains. Secondly, women who chose to identify with men over women, and who participate in men’s victimization of women while still submitting their own female bodies to the fuck, knowing their place in the foodchain, are ever popular with the boys. The whore Simone is a prototypical Bad Bitch. Unfortunately for her, in the supplementary materials published as pseudo-epilogue to Story of the Eye, we find that no amount of male-identifying bad bitchiness is sufficient to disprove Simone’s femininity and save her from the inevitable fate of all whores, or women. For Bataille planned a sequel to his novella. In the outline of this sequel, we see Simone fifteen years later in a torture camp. She’s thirty-five now, her beauty eroded by the progress of old age “gradually taking over, irremediable.” We are promised descriptions of “torture, tears, imbecility of unhappiness,” to terminate when Simone is beaten to death: “she dies as though making love, but in the purity (chaste) and the imbecility of death: fever and agony.” Lucky girl! Her femininity fulfilled at last, before she could be consigned to wither into superfluity as a death camp spinster.
II. Neurotic Semiotics // Progressive Forms of the Fetish “Eye”
“Woman” – as virgin and whore, sex, death, and the feral severity of nature all squeezed into one nubile victim-body – is a primary entry in the semiotic lexicon of Story of the Eye, but she is not alone. This slender volume is bloated with symbols, oozing portentously. I think people are excited and/or impressed by Bataille’s symbolism because of its air of thick-slathered obsessive esotericism. Isn’t it bizarre? Isn’t it poetic? Much like Simone febrile on her sickbed, Bataille’s readers free-associate: “She played gaily with words, speaking about breaking eggs, and then breaking eyes, and her arguments become more and more unreasonable.” And the analysis stops there; the reader is satisfied from the presence of these symbols that what they’ve got in their lil paws is a pure poetry. It is enough that the symbols be “meaningful.” The meanings themselves need not be interrogated. But since concealing cruelties and brute idiocy under layer after layer of intricate obfuscation is a patriarchal strategy to be sure, internalized and implemented by Bataille as a member of the Brother//Fatherhood, I submit it as a worthwhile undertaking to pay closer attention to Story of the Eye’s woozy symbology, lest we find ourselves mucking cluelessly about in masculinism’s moats. Again. As always.
The first thing to understand is that there is not so much a multiplicity of symbols to be decoded in Story of the Eye as there is one single symbol, a fetish, which through successive iterations emergent over the course of the narrative congeals toward its truest meaning. The essential characteristics of this fetish are: whiteness, viscidity, trembling, pale sheen, a frail membrane, a wet interior, fluid firming into orb. Bouncing along this white blob leaves a slime trail. We’ll follow it:
MILK
Now in the corner of a hallway there was a saucer of milk for the cat. “Milk is for the pussy, isn’t it?” said Simone. “Do you dare me to sit in the saucer?”
& of course she sits right down in it, the milk cooling her “burning buttocks” and her “pink and dark flesh” then dripping down to her stockings, so the narrator cannot but furiously masturbate himself into exhaustion. it is this coy treating of pussy to milk that introduces us to Simone’s whoredom. from her use of milk we know what kind of woman she is. milk symbolizes purity, mother-made, to nourish. the whore corrupts mother’s milk as she spurns the mother, bland sacred cow of womanhood, pornography’s most reviled female figure. a mother’s milk contains the lie of mother’s love. there is no good woman. the taboo associated with this sex act is identified in its imagined violation of the Catholic interdiction against non-procreative sexuality: milk signifies sexual reproduction, in that it feeds the offspring, but here it sustains lewdness alone; it is wasted. meant to nurture an infant the milk spoils in the mouth of the cunt. there is no pure woman. to loathe the mother, her milk, is also a rejection of generative sexuality itself, not merely to break the Catholic taboo but to repudiate the possibility that sex could be creative rather than destructive. that it could produce life, rather than a man’s death. love is dead. the nutritive potential of the feminine subverted and lowered again to the level of filth: the thirsty pussy, meat on her breath. (later, Simone will pee on her own mother) (in a later novella entitled My Mother Bataille conjoins the mother to the whore as one monster)
MILK→EGG
She would sit for a long time, gazing at the eggs. Then she would settle on the toilet to view them under her cunt between the parted thighs; and finally, she would have me flush the bowl.
the egg falls into our lap as milk thickened, a second product of the mother-body. egg: the iconic emblem of creation. what could have been born from this egg? the egg is the germ, the origin. it glows with infinite potentiality. yet these are eggs-as-food, they have not been fertilized, they are fallow. domesticated, their creation-power, thus their threat, is overriden. the hen is the mother in a state of consummate exploitation. she is mother-as-machine. still, Simone as porno heroine must silence whatever murmurs of the mother (the liar) surface, an execution innately pleasurable to her whorish nature: it is an erotic act to smash the promise of the egg in the “deep crack” of her ass (the ass invoked here to suggest sodomy, another non-generative sexual mode, so we see Bataille shaking his fist at Catholicism once again, naughty boy), as it is erotic to pee on the eggs, and to sink them in the toilet. Simone asks her lover if he will shoot the eggs; they also discuss setting a warm gun to her nipples. the whore’s excremental sexuality will permit no life to blossom. beneath her cunt, the whore watches the world drown.
EGG→EYEBALL
She made me come over to the corpse: she knelt down and completely opened the eye that the fly had perched on.
“Do you see the eye?” she asked me.
“Well?”
“It’s an egg,” she concluded in all simplicity.
“All right,” I urged her, extremely disturbed, “what are you getting at?”
“I want to play with this eye.”
the egg does not hatch; instead it evolves, its inner substance firming, and blood vessels form, scarlet threads in the glaire; vision is a nerve is the yolk: the gaze, knowledge, the all-seeing eye is the active eye so we see that this glossy orb is the male “I”—the subject, in his nascency. it has clotted, yes, less likely to crack now than when it was closer to mother but it could be burst, couldn’t it, ruptured, when the whore rolls it across her skin, if she squeezed it too hard in her hand. Simone commands Sir Edmund to “put it up her ass” and the eye is thrust into darkness, goes blind. Bataille implies in the autobiographical afterward to Story of the Eye that the blindness of the whore-eaten eye is that of his father, sightless from syphilis, but for the boy the father is the very image of the male “I”, the self, so the boy becomes the father and fears the father’s blindness will become his own. the eye engulfed in the vagina or anus as a dark cave (“cavern of blood”) is the “I” endangered.
EGG//EYEBALL→TESTIS
…when we arrived at our places next to Sir Edmund, there, in broad sunlight, on Simone’s seat, lay a white dish containing two peeled balls, glands the size and shape of eggs, and of a pearly whiteness, faintly bloodshot, like the globe of an eye: they had just been removed from the first bull, a black-haired creature, into whose body Granero had plunged his sword.
the eye-ball becomes the sperm-ball: a pubescence: our precious “I” is growing up, a man now, with a man’s virility, potency, but still fragile; the testicular “I” so easily stomped or severed. even the bull, massive as he is, cannot retain his balls. he dies and is castrated for Simone, who desires the organs as amulets. his balls on a plate. served raw. what she wants is to sit on them, as she sat in the saucer of milk, since her cunt wants to eat them. the cunt is nature’s castration apparatus. a woman’s mouth is another hole and also dangerous: Simone bites one ball, the other she inserts between her vulvar lips. at the instant the ball is swallowed the bull – virility – gouges the eye of the bullfighter from the handsome boy’s head; the eye dangles out externalized as a testicle swings between the legs; the boy is blinded, naturally he also dies. in contact with woman the man is his animal body and will destroy knowledge, his mind: the “human eye” the male “I” avulsed by the crushing weight of meat and black fur. man is doomed.
EGG//EYEBALL//TESTIS→THE SUN
In this way, we kept disappearing all through Andalusia, a country of yellow earth and yellow sky, to my eyes an immense chamber pot flooded with sunlight, where each day, as a new character, I raped a likewise transformed Simone, especially towards noon, on the ground and in the blazing sun, under the reddish eyes of Sir Edmund.
the alchemical symbol for the sun is a circle with a mote at its center (☉), like an egg with its yolk, or the eye with its black pupil. the sun therefore is the yolk of an eye, still the male “I”, now ascendant, redeemed, resurrected in the firmament. the sun symbolizes male energies (woman is the moon, milk-pallid in darkness), nature’s most perfect power, sacred fire, the solar lion, the bull as “solar monster,” the solar father: he is cleansed. the solar-orb is the soul-ball, the form in which the “I” is sanctified. flesh (the burden) burns away; illuminated it runs off, Bataille infers, as urine. the sun blazes. the body of the father not blind but blinding overhead, a red eye. in the “combined intensities of light and heat” the man overcomes himself. exalted by the scald of his own radiance at the zenith he is free at last to rape the whore without fear to plunge into the dark zones for he is the bright one, golden boy, the chosen son.
[ the image ignited by our hunt to the root of fetish is a frightened boy-child shrieking for daddy from the depths of maternal embrace. he tells himself he will escape her, this woman he needs, his body’s needs, the soft and needing in him the mother tends. he blames her for bearing the soft body (his, hers). the boy will harden it and punish mother. love is dead. ]
III. S&M // Simone&Marcelle // Murder, Suicide
Story of the Eye may be less immediately obvious as a work of sadomasochistic pornography than Sade’s novels since it is lacking in the accustomed accessories of the genre. There are no whips in Story of the Eye, no chains, no leather harnesses or complex death-dealing contraptions suspending sobbing tween girls over cesspools. Such trimmings are superfluous for Bataille since he insists that eroticism’s quintessence is a violent impulse towards total destruction, and that sadism is a trait inherent to all men, bringing man into greater harmony with nature, ontologized as female, as in “nature herself,” a whore whose nasty personality produces a “ceaseless and inevitable annihilation of everything that is born.”5 So an orgasm becomes something that “[wrenches] through our loins to tear us to shreds” and we can speak of an orgy as a “brutal onslaught of cunts and cocks.” In Erotism, Bataille defines sex as a “process of dissolution” wherein an active partner, the male, dissolves his partner, the female. Male desire is sadistic, while female desire – if such a thing can be said to exist – is masochistic in so far as women “put themselves forward as objects for the aggressive desire of men.”6 Based on these statements we can conclude that Bataille viewed sexuality sufficiently sadomasochistic in itself to make the shopworn BDSM signifiers redundant. Anyway Bataille preferred “natural” maybe we should say “organic” metaphors for the assailant-victim dynamic of eroticism. Namely, women’s bodies. Thus we return to Simone and Marcelle. Simone is the whore, but she is also S: the sadist; while virginal Marcelle is M for masochistic. Can the initials possibly be coincidence?
S: Sexually, Simone likes to smash things (e.g., eggs) and pee on people. The sadism of “smashing things” requires no explanation, but the fixation with peeing is less obviously sadistic, until we consider that urination is linked to sadism via its association with the body and the body’s processes as a source of humiliation. “Pissing” as people like to say becomes sexual only in the context of masculinist-somatophobic ideology’s transmutation of the body into an excremental zone, a sad alchemy performed by the anti-carnal assumption that all bodily functions, and especially those associated with urgency, are base and debasing, as forfeitures of conscious control. Yet anyone who has peed or orgasmed must recognize that the release experienced in urination is qualitatively different from that experienced in sexual pleasure; pleasure and the excretion of waste are not one and the same; the two are conflated only when the body is shamed. Simone as the sadist is obsessed by urine because her sexuality – which is Bataille’s – has its premise in revulsion of the body. All the body does is dirty and since to be dirty is the pleasure in sex, all the body does becomes sexual. This is also why Simone’s sexuality can be used to disgrace the priest, her pleasure in sucking his penis in the confessional not a function of the act itself but of the way in which it morally + mortally degrades the pious man. Through her sexual assault on the priest, she denudes him, brings him down to her level which is the lowliness of the body. When she pees on his clothes he is exposed as a body; he cannot hide the foul truth of his nature any longer, so he is defeated. Naturally sadistic Simone is the agent of his desecration.
Simone was tall and lovely. She was usually very natural; there was nothing heartbreaking in her eyes or her voice. But on a sensual level, she so bluntly craved any upheaval that the faintest call from the senses gave her a look directly suggestive of all things linked to deep sexuality, such as blood, suffocation, sudden terror, crime; things indefinitely destroying human bliss and honesty.
Simone is aroused by the death of animals, as in the mares she thrills to watch the bulls penetrate as foreplay preceding the noble carnage of the bullfight. Bataille writes of how a mare, “ludicrous” and “raw-boned” after her belly is gored by the bull, sacrificial victim to whet his & the audience’s appetite, would run through the arena with her entrails (“in the most dreadful colors”) hanging out between her legs, and Simone would watch. And Simone was most excited when the mare’s bladder would rupture and spill its weight of urine to the sand below. The pathetic mare cannot contain herself, her death is a humiliation (deserved, surely, destined) and through this scene of dying mares the erotic trinity of the sadist crystallizes: the body torn to abjection, excrement, death.
Simone, the whore, laughing wildly as anguish drops us to our knees before her. Her hands between her thighs. Her soaked dress through thin tissues of which we see the meat condensing like to monster-form. It is not only mares she sacrifices…
Simone…no longer viewed the hot, acrid come that she caused to spurt from my cock without seeing it muck up Marcelle’s mouth and cunt.
“You could smack her face with your come,” she confided to me, while smearing her cunt “till it sizzles,” as she put it.
M: Wan little Marcelle, frail virgin, is described as having an “unusual lack of will power,” so we know she is the passive type. She barely speaks. Instead she communicates by begging; she howls, she sobs. Like Simone, urination is her principal sexual mode, but for her there is no sense of the raucous bliss of “pissing” Simone derives from the act. It is not release for Marcelle but incontinence, her body tossed to chaos, and she cannot bear it. But she has no choice: “…we could hear Marcelle dismally sobbing alone, louder and louder, in the makeshift pissoir that was now her prison.” Incontinent she voids herself running out to psychosis between her legs and in weeping; reduced to a dazed and vacant animal she becomes a favored sexual object for Simone, sadist, and the symbol-ravaged narrator, who delight in the fact that she has no idea what’s going on. In Erotism, Bataille writes that the sexual state is one of madness, an oblivion into which women in particular descend violently to the point of death. This is Marcelle’s highly fuckable condition: she is sickness and silence, then she is absence. Bataille writes that, in sex, the woman’s personality “for the time being is dead.” Since Marcelle never had a personality she is wholly sexual in life and then in death, despite herself, with scarce difference. For underlying the deliquescent spasm of her excremental sexuality that shames her is her more fundamental sexual mode, toward which she creeps from the moment we meet her on the cliff’s edge and which climaxes when she hangs herself in the closet where she first experienced her incontinence. So Marcelle’s sexuality is suicide and this is masochism for Bataille: the consent to non-being. It is standard for a woman, the only means by which she can access sexual satisfaction. Referring to Erotism once more we read Bataille’s assessment of female sensuality: “the return of the personality would freeze her and put an end to the sensual delight she abandoned herself to.”7 It is inevitable that Marcelle should die, her predestined denouement; assuredly it is not a tragedy. Which is why one scholar in analyzing Story of the Eye can say that in Bataille’s work “the abject” (the animal body, its fluids) is “celebrated” without “triggering off any tragic consequences.”8 No one mourns Marcelle. Her dead body is an object of some erotic curiosity to the narrator and Simone. Simone, for her part, pees on the corpse. The narrator gets a hard-on and philosophizes over how strange it is that all he can feel in response to the dead girl is the blankness of a remote, serene boredom.
The death of the masochist cannot be tragic because it is a pornographic death and the purpose of pornography is to deaden feeling. So we will not grieve our loss of one another: the death of the closeness that could have been ours. Thus murderers are made. “And it struck me that death was the sole outcome of my erection…”
(oh but boy who taught you this was all there is for us, i think, and i’m looking at my sister’s body, i still feel her, and i cannot understand why we’re loyal to the boys and we’re dying for them—)
//
When sexuality is conceived as a violent force, irrevocably linked to death, anguish, horror, torture, pain, debasement, degradation, humiliation, sadism, dissolution, as it is in Story of the Eye and throughout Bataille’s work, the consequence is a metastasizing numbness to the reality of men’s sexual violence, framed as it is as inexorable. If the defining quality of sexuality is this violence like a natural disaster that cannot be controlled, like madness, a descent into the savage state allotted “the animal,” then of course there will be victims. These victims will be women, of course again, eternally “of course,” because women exist as ciphers for sex in the masculinist mind. A woman is found dead gagged with her own stockings in a hotel room. A girl-child is abducted on her way home from school and then raped and then dismembered. A man rapes dozens of prostituted women one after the other and murders them; when they die the man feeds their razed bodies to his pigs. But that’s life, we are led to believe—that’s nature. It is a fool’s game to think we could ever change it.
Bataille and his brothers in porno-production further obscure the real sexual violence that is their pastime in a gauze of unreality through the sex-death connection they insist is natural because whenever a woman is injured or murdered her wound or her death is sexualized and since whatever is sexualized is a soiled thing, desecrated, dissolved of its value or “personality” as Bataille describes the content of woman that spews out of her body in sex to render her temporarily dead – “The woman in the hands of her assailant is despoiled of her being”9 – she is so unlike us now, so extremely nothing we’d say “sub-human” this victim of sex, that we cannot bring ourselves to feel anything for her, though we do note there is something sexy about the Thing she has become. In rigor. Just lying there. The woman in pain or the dead woman is placed on the pedestal as a pornographic idol, evocative of the shame and the horror of being a body that can be wounded, beneath the blood- and semen-splattered iconography of whom women’s pain and women’s deaths disappear into shadow. Think Marilyn Monroe, suicided in her bed. The tabloids scream she was FOUND IN THE NUDE. Think that long lingering shot of blood dribbling sticky scarlet down the dead girl’s thigh in the slasher flick. Do we ache for her? Did we ever want to save her?
From a safe distance Bataille looks down at her dead body and smirks as the phallus swells.
He says: “That’s nature.”
Socialized as we are to take men’s claims seriously under patriarchal reign we believe the man, Bataille, when tells us the nature of the world is atrocity. We subscribe to his theories because, yes, this is a Man’s World, and we live in it as if within his nightmares, out of which he has scaffolded this fraught and phobic culture. Bataille’s vivid avowals of the violence of eroticism feel real in our bodies because it is the masculinist mind – to which Bataille’s psyche was faithful, even in its excesses – that has shaped our reality and modes of relating to our own bodies, the bodies of others, the entwinement of these bodies in sexual contact. We are living our bodies as seen through the lens of the male eye.
Sensuality is sensed as insanity, perdition in dumb flesh,
Empathy as vulnerability, a reminder of mortality,
So we create distance, cultivating a detachment from others. Stop caring.
The pose of the sadist is foremost one of desperate insensitivity. Stop feeling.
Bataille tells us that care for the other dilutes sex, renders it “insipid,” since if you loved the other you could not kill her. He writes:
“If erotism leads to harmony between the partners its essential principle of violence and death is invalidated…Communion between the participants is a limiting factor and it must be ruptured before the true violent nature of eroticism can be seen…The man subject to no restraints of any kind falls on his victims with the devouring fury of a vicious hound.”10
(he slanders dogs and he slanders himself and he slaughters me)
My body responds: “It’s unnatural.”
It is not nature that condemns us to sexual violence, but instead men’s pathological vision of nature. He is horrified by nature because it threatens his “sovereignty” by which he means his mind’s control over matter, and his horror sullies all the substance he disowns as “natural.” Nature and the body that is the nightmare of nature in microcosm become cruel, loathsome, clinging as rot-scented cerement to the mind, the male; all that denies him total control is violence to him. He has an erection: it is violence, because he did not will that rising. In his fantasy it is nature as it boils in the foul body of the female has coerced it – his desire – in order to humiliate him. He who is humiliated by the substance of his being never needed me and my woman’s body to shame him – the boy genius is the inventor and origin of his own misery – but someone must be punished for how the boy has been bullied, so a victim-body is created: a woman. She is raped and once he comes the whore is dead to him. With her death he imagines himself the body’s master.
And this is all Bataillle offers, all that men have left for us: love is dead.
But does it have to be, or could we choose not to believe Bataille and therefore cease surrendering our bodies our eroticism to colonization by masculinist-pornographic terror and contempt, instead stripping the husk of hardening and recovering via our naturally sensitive bodies revitalized a sensuality which does not drive us apart or drive the nail into my sister’s coffin but draws us close again?
We could choose to re-discover a sexuality which is not a shudder, not a swamp, not a manure-asphyxiated prostitute in a pigsty, not a rabid whore with gaping drooling hole, not a gutted mare, not a man with his eyes gouged from his skull, not a toilet, not the drone of flies, not a larval squirm, not a woman reduced to absence, not a man reduced to a serial killer, not a trial, not a persecution, not an execution, not the mind decaying…but the body alive, and sacred in itself, not for how it can be dirtied…or we can settle for the agony of Bataille’s “erotism,” the ugliness and disgust and boredom of it, disguised as intensity, that is so much more familiar to us as we wade nerveless nervously through existence in the chronic living-death that Bataille and the rest of the pornographers have crafted for us from their own self-loathing. But its familiarity does not mean it is natural. Because it has been this way as long as we can remember does not mean it must remain this way forever. And why would we choose to settle for so little? Men like Bataille are celebrated for bravely delving to the devastating truth of sadism at the core of human sexuality because the world has been molded to reflect their ugly image of it, male rule has made it painful to be a living feeling breathing bleeding creature and we are conditioned to revile ourselves and others, what is vulnerable in us, but such is not our nature and we need not accept men’s fear and hatred as the lens through which we experience our bodies, cheated into embracing the “coolness” of a deadened heart. There is another truth: I trust my body I do not trust Bataille. If I see my sister fall I feel her I run to her. I do not let miserable men make a whore or a corpse of her. She has never been foul so I will not fear her. I refuse to believe our desire to be close necessitates her death, or mine. Every dirty story the male “I” has spun to spook us is an ugliness to overcome if we are to reclaim this world from the boys, for if we believe them we are as doomed they say we are. Is there any other choice?
//
Having disburdened ourselves of misplaced regard for the sadomasochistic non-transgression of men like Bataille and Sade, exposed as emissaries of the unsustainable status quo, we can henceforth proceed to addressing the troubling matter of avant-garde women’s appropriation of BDSM as artistic theme. There is an idea that circulates which supposes that for a woman to embrace manifestly male supremacist systems is by default transgressive as a “gender switcheroo” type of move but this explanation is too easy to be compelling. I’m naked and bruised I say I dreamed I’d be naked and bruised someday say I’ve gotten to appreciate being naked and bruised in some sense I’m transgressive, because I am supposed to say STOP. As a woman I subvert male power if I am unsqueamish enough not to squawk against its atrocities like some mewling girl. For a woman, then, is transgression “manning up” to her own abuse? What I wonder is: if women have been granted no apparatus for nor history of voice so we’re left to wring ours out of men’s vomit, is it fate we’ll speak the stale and soured reflux of the father-tongue? Seeking an answer, trauma-queen sometime-sister//sometime-traitor (she loved Bataille) Kathy Acker will be the subject of next installment’s inquisition.
NOTES:
[1] http://www.citylights.com/book/?GCOI=87286100615750
[2] Sontag, S. “The Pornographic Imagination.” Styles of Radical Will. New York: Picador USA, 1993. 35-73.
[3] http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/story-of-the-eye-georges-bataille/1101158842#productInfoTabs
[4] Bataille, G. Erotism: Death & Sensuality. 1957. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1986.
[5] Erotism, 185.
[6] Erotism, 131.
[7] Erotism, 106.
[8] de La Torre, JM. “The Smeared Metaphor: Viscosity and Fluidity in Bataille’s Story of the Eye.” Bodies and Voices. Eds. Borch, MF, Rask Knudson, E, Leer, M & Ross, BC. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007.
[9] Erotism, 90
[10] Erotism, 167
* Bataille, G. Story of the Eye. 1928. San Francisco: City Light Books, 2001.
