Free Story of the Eye by Georges Bataille Page A

when, realizing the kinship between the story and myown life, I amused myself by introducing the description of a tragic bullfight that I had actually witnessed. Oddly enough, I drew no connection between the two episodes until I did a precise description of the injury inflicted on Manuel Granero (a real person) by the bull; but the moment I reached this death scene, I was totally taken aback. The opening of the priest’s eye was not, as I had believed, a gratuitous invention. I was merely transfering, to a different person, an image that had most likely led a very profound life. If I devised the business about snipping out the priest’s eye, it was because I had seen a bull’s horn tear out a matador’s eye. Thus, precisely the two images that probably most upset me had sprung from the darkest corner of my memory—and in a scarcely recognizable shape—as soon as I gave myself over to lewd dreams.
    But no sooner did I realize this (I had just finished portraying the bullfight of May 7) than I visited a friend of mine, who is a doctor. I read the description to him, but it was not in the same form as now. Never having seen the skinned balls of a bull, I assumed they were the same bright red colour as the erect cock of the animal, and that was how they were depicted in the first draft. The entire
Story of the Eye
was woven in my mind out of two ancient and closely associated obsessions,
eggs
and
eyes
, but nevertheless, I had previously regarded the balls of the bull as independent of that cycle. Yet when I finished reading to him, my friend remarked that I had absolutely no idea of what the glands I was writing about were really like, and he promptly read aloud a detailed description in an anatomical textbook. I thus learned that human or animal balls are egg-shaped and look the same as an eyeball.
    This time, I ventured to explain such extraordinary relations by assuming a profound region of my mind, where certain images coincide, the elementary ones, the
completely obscene
ones, i.e. the most scandalous, precisely those on which the conscious floats indefinitely, unable to endure them without an explosion or aberration.
    However, upon locating this breaking point of the conscious or, if you will, the favourite place of sexual deviation, certain quitedifferent personal memories were quickly associated with some harrowing images that had emerged during an obscene composition.
    When I was born, my father was suffering from general paralysis, and he was already blind when he conceived me; not long after my birth, his sinister disease confined him to an armchair. However, the very contrary of most male babies, who are in love with their mothers, I was in love with my father. Now the following was connected to his paralysis and blindness. He was unable to go and urinate in the toilet like most people; instead, he did it into a small container at his armchair, and since he had to urinate very often, he was unembarrassed about doing it in front of me, under a blanket, which, since he was blind, he usually placed askew. But the weirdest thing was certainly the way he looked while pissing. Since he could not see anything, his pupils very frequently pointed up into space, shifting under the lids, and this happened particularly when he pissed. Furthermore, he had huge, ever-gaping eyes that flanked an eagle nose, and those huge eyes went almost entirely blank when he pissed, with a completely stupefying expression of abandon and aberration in a world that he alone could see and that aroused his vaguely sardonic and absent laugh (I would have liked to recall everything here at once, for instance the erratic nature of a blind man’s isolated laughter, and so forth). In any case, the image of those white
eyes
from that time was directly linked, for me, to the image of eggs, and that explains the almost regular appearance of urine every time
eyes
or
eggs
occur in the story.
    After perceiving this kinship between distinct elements, I