Free Story of the Eye by Georges Bataille Page B

was led to discover a further, no less essential kinship between the general nature of my story and a particular fact.
    I was about fourteen when my affection for my father turned into a deep and unconscious hatred. I began vaguely enjoying his constant shrieks at the lightning pains caused by the tabes, which are considered among the worst pains’ known to man. Furthermore, the filthy, smelly state to which his total disablementoften reduced him (for instance, he sometimes left shit on his trousers) was not nearly so disagreeable to me as I thought. Then again, in all things, I adopted the attitudes and opinions most radically opposed to those of that supremely nauseating creature.
    One night, we were awakened, my mother and I, by vehement words that the syphilitic was literally howling in his room: he had suddenly gone mad. I went for the doctor, who came immediately. My father kept endlessly and eloquently imagining the most outrageous and generally the happiest events. The doctor had withdrawn to the next room with my mother and I had remained with the blind lunatic, when he shrieked in a stentorian voice: “Doctor, let me know when you’re done fucking my wife!” For me, that utterance, which in a split second annihilated the demoralizing effects of a strict upbringing, left me with something like a steady obligation, unconscious and unwilled: the necessity of finding an equivalent to that sentence in any situation I happen to be in; and this largely explains
Story of the Eye
.
    To complete this survey of the high summits of my personal obscenity, I must add a final connection I made in regard to Marcelle. It was one of the most disconcerting, and I did not arrive at it until the very end.
    It is impossible for me to say positively that Marcelle is basically identical with my mother. Such a statement would actually be, if not false, then at least exaggerated. Thus Marcelle is also a fourteen-year-old girl who once sat opposite me for a quarter of an hour at the Café des Deux Magots in Paris. Nonetheless, I still want to tell about some memories that ultimately fastened a few episodes to unmistakable facts.
    Soon after my father’s attack of lunacy, my mother,
at the end of a vile scene to which her mother subjected her in front of me, suddenly lost her mind too
. She spent several months in a crisis of manic-depressive insanity (melancholy). The absurd ideas of damnation and catastrophe that seized control of her irritated me even more because I was forced to look after her continually. She was in such a bad state that one night I removed some candlesticks with marble bases from my room; I was afraid she might kill me while I slept. On the other hand, whenever I lost patience, I went so far as tostrike her, violently twisting her wrists to try and bring her to her senses.
    One day, my mother disappeared while our backs were turned; we hunted her for a long time and finally found her
hanged
in the attic. However, they managed to revive her.
    A short time later, she disappeared again, this time at night; I myself went looking for her, endlessly, along a creek, wherever she might have tried to drown herself. Running without stopping, through the darkness, across swamps, I at last found myself face to face with her:
she was drenched up to her belt, the skirt was pissing the creek water
, but she had come out on her own, and the icy, wintery water was not very deep anyway.
    I never linger over such memories, for they have long since lost any emotional significance for me. There was no way I could restore them to life except by transforming them and making them unrecognizable, at first glance, to my eyes, solely because during that deformation they acquired the lewdest of meanings.

W.C.
[Preface to
Story of the Eye
from
Le Petit:
1943]
    A year before
Story of the Eye
, I had written a book entitled
W.C
.: a small book, a rather crazy piece of writing.
W.C
. was as lugubrious as
Story of the Eye
was juvenile. The