The Story of the Eye

This novella, published in 1928, tells of the deviant sexuality of two teenagers. The story is narrated by the young man. He was 15 when he first met the girl, Simone, a girl of the same age. Soon they involve their friend, Marcelle, in their sexual games. When an orgy is discovered, he flees home:
“I judged it prudent to decamp and elude the wrath of an awful father, the epitome of a senile Catholic general... I slept in a wood during the day and at nightfall I went to Simone's place.”

Georges Bataille (born 10 September 1897) was born in the Auvergne but grew up in Reims in northern France. He and his mother left home in August 1914 as part of the evacuation of the town ahead of German occupation. His father, a blind, syphilitic invalid, remained in Reims and died “in abandonment” in November 1915. Georges was conscripted to served in the army in 1916 but before he went to the front he was discharged in early 1917 having contracted tuberculosis. He remembered being “a sick soldier, imagining each day, amid the wounded and sick..., the hell to which I remained destined. My life, like that of the soliders among whom I lived, seemed enclosed in a sort of apocalypse.”

In a postscript Bataille refers to the novella as a “partly imaginary tale”. He maintains that he thought “at first... that the character speaking in the first person had no relation to [him]” but he reveals that he later was able to identify many subconscious influences of actual incidents in his own childhood and adolescence on his deviant imaginings.

Death is always close to the several incidents described by the narrator. He describes, for example, Simone and him attending a bull fight in Madrid in May 1922. The matador kills a bull:
“Simone... witnessed the killing with an exhiliration at least equal to mine and she refused to sit down again when the interminable acclamation for the young man was over. She took my hand wordlessly and led me to an outer courtyard of the filthy arena, where the stench of equine and human urine was suffocating because of the great heat... We stepped into a stinking shithouse, where sordid flies whirled about in a sunbeam... A bull's orgasm is not more powerful than the one that wrenched through our loins to tear us to shreds...” On returning to their seats, Simone is aroused by the return of the matador to fight another bull, mixing in her erotic imagination the testicle of the dead bull and the detached eye of the gored matador.