Unfucking real.
I started and finished Story of the Eye tonight and I fucking loved it.
French. Erotica. Bataille. Orgasms, urine, semen, blood, eggs, eyes, bullfighting, churches, murder, Simone. A lot of peeing. Maybe too much peeing.
And yet.
What got me wasn’t simply how extreme it is. It was the specificity of the desire. The complete lack of interest in making these wants respectable or explaining them away. Bataille takes sexuality and fetish into places that are strange, grotesque, frightening and sometimes ridiculous, but he doesn’t flinch. And I wasn’t embarrassed by any of it.
There is an urge here. An edge. A willingness to follow desire past the point where it is supposed to stop. It’s aggressive too.
And I admired the hell out of that.
Oh and Simone and the narrator’s match. THIS. THEM. (And dear Marcelle.) Their sexuality isn’t something one of them has to translate into acceptable language for the other. They understand the same strange impulses. Right from the start. They want what they want together. Things that might otherwise remain hidden because of shame… are met.
That hit. I loved it. Beautiful. Artful.
Frick, my whole life I’ve wanted that kind of match. Someone who understands my needs and my sexuality and the things I have never said out loud. Not necessarily someone who wants every single thing I want, but someone who can hear it without recoiling from it. Feeling weird about it. Someone who understands that desire can be strange and specific and difficult (and terrifying) to explain.
(Did I mention I’m a Scorpio?)
It’s easy to read Story of the Eye as transgressive erotica, cuz it absolutely is. But underneath all the fucking madness is another familiar thing I noticed: the desire to find another person with whom you don’t have to hide. Ugh. Felt.
Bataille gives the characters a bit of terrifying freedom to follow the thing they want.
He doesn’t sanitize it. Clearly.
No pretending it isn’t there. It’s full on exposure of himself, his characters.
No shame-induced retreat back into normality.
Just: I want this.
And then the other person says, essentially:
Me too.
God.
What a fucking Monday night read.
This one goes on the shelf.
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