Story of the Eye by Georges Bataille Page A

set foot in school again. No amount of anger could change my mind: I lived alone, going out rarely, by way of the fields, avoiding the centre, where I might have run into friends.
    My father, an unreligious man, died refusing to see the priest. During puberty, I was unreligious myself (my mother indifferent). But I went to a priest in August 1914; and until 1920, rarely did I let a week go by without confessing my sins! In 1920, I changed again,I stopped believing in anything but my future chances. My piety was merely an attempt at evasion: I wanted to escape my destiny at any price, I was abandoning my father. Today, I know I am “blind”, immeasurable, I am man “abandoned” on the globe like my father at N. No one on earth or in heaven cared about my father’s dying terror. Still, I believe he faced up to it, as always. What a “horrible pride”, at moments, in Father’s blind smile!

Outline of a Sequel to
Story of the Eye
    After fifteen years of more and more serious debauchery, Simone ends up in a torture camp. But by mistake; descriptions of torture, tears, imbecility of unhappiness, Simone at the threshold of a conversion, exhorted by a cadaverous woman, one more in the series of devotees of the Church of Seville. She is now thirty-five. Beautiful when entering the camp, but old age is gradually taking over, irremediable. Beautiful scene with a female torturer and the devotee; the devotee and Simone are beaten to death, Simone escapes temptation. She dies as though making love, but in the purity (chaste) and the
imbecility
of death: fever and agony transfigure her. The torturer strikes her, she is indifferent to the blows, indifferent to the words of the devotee, lost in the labour of agony. It is by no means an erotic joy, it is far more than that. Butwith no result. Nor is it masochistic, and, profoundly, this exaltation is beyond any imagining; it surpasses everything. However, its basis is solitude and absence.
    (from the fourth edition, 1967)

THE PORNOGRAPHIC IMAGINATION
Susan Sontag
THE METAPHOR OF THE EYE
Roland Barthes

The Pornographic Imagination
    No one should undertake a discussion of pornography before acknowledging the pornograph
ies
—there are at least three—and before pledging to take them on one at a time. There is a considerable gain in truth if pornography as an item in social history is treated quite separately from pornography as a psychological phenomenon (according to the usual view, symptomatic of sexual deficiency or deformity in both the producers and the consumers), and if one further distinguishes from both of these another pornography: a minor but interesting modality or convention within the arts.
    It’s the last of the three pornographies that I want to focus upon. More narrowly, upon the literary genre for which, lacking a better name, I’m willing to accept (in the privacy of serious intellectualdebate, not in the courts) the dubious label of pornography. By literary genre I mean a body of work belonging to literature considered as an art, and to which inherent standards of artistic excellence pertain. From the standpoint of social and psychological phenomena, all pornographic texts have the same status; they are documents. But from the standpoint of art, some of these texts may well become something else. Not only do Pierre Louy’s
Trois Filles de leur Mère
, Georges Bataille’s
Histoire de l’Oeil
and
Madame Edwarda
, the pseudonymous
Story of O
and
The Image
belong to literature, but it can be made clear why these books, all five of them, occupy a much higher rank as literature than
Candy
or Oscar Wilde’s
Teleny
or the Earl of Rochester’s
Sodom
or Apollinaire’s
The Debauched Hospodar
or Cleland’s
Fanny Hill
. The avalanche of pornographic potboilers marketed for two centuries under and now, increasingly, over the counter no more impugns the status as literature of the first group of pornographic books than the proliferation of books of the caliber of
The