An Analysis of George Bataille's The Story of the Eye

An Analysis of George Bataille's The Story of the Eye

...awareness of the impossibility opens consciousness to all that is possible for it to think. In this gathering place, where violence is rife, at the boundary of that which escapes cohesion, he who reflects within cohesion realizes that there is no longer any room for him (Theory of Religion 10).

When Georges Bataille first published The Story of the Eye in 1928, anonymously and "in a limited edition of 134 copies" (Lechte 118), he had been at the Bibliothèque Nationale in the department of numismatics for nearly six years. Bataille was thirty-one at the time of publication, and it was not his first or the most violent piece. "The Solar Anus" which preceded it actually looks ahead to the serious ethnographic articles, albeit often of a scatological nature, which Bataille wrote for Documents, a short-lived journal which he edited and founded in 1929. Active in surrealist and avant-garde circles, Bataille courted the radical left of the political and aesthetic arenas, although his professional work compelled him to function within rigid systems.

While The Story of the Eye is often dismissed as adolescent writing (Bataille himself calling it juvenile in a preface to a later edition), I offer here a reading of The Story of the Eye in the context of his profession as a librarian and of his work as editor and writer for Documents, a journal that consolidates his reflections as antiquarian, literary artist, and amateur ethnographer. To read Bataille's fiction in concert with his sociological and critical writing elevates the radical negativity of its violent transgression to a positive value. The text of this novel contains, in an embryonic stage, the basic theories which...

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...F. Bouchard. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977. 29-52.

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Hollier, Denis. "The Use-Value of the Impossible." Bataille: Writing the Sacred. 133-53.

Lechte, John. "Surrealism and the practice of writing, or The 'case' of Bataille." 117-32.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morals. Trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. Ed. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, c1967, 1989.

Richardson, Michael. Georges Bataille. New York: Routledge, 1994.

Stoekl, Allan. Introduction. Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939. Georges Bataille. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1985. ix-xxv.

Suleiman, Susan Rubin. "Transgression and the Avant-Garde: Bataille's Histoire de l'oeil." On Bataille: Critical Essays. Ed. and trans. Leslie Anne Boldt-Irons. Albany: SUNY P, 1995. 313-33.