The café garden of St. John the Baptist Cathedral in Norwich
It feels very thrilling to drink earl grey tea in the garden of the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist — the center of Roman Catholic life in a small English city called Norwich — while reading a chapter from Georges Bataille’s stunningly revolting novella The Story of the Eye. The rain has slowed to a drizzle, the undead flowers swell with autumnal pride, and our loathsome heroes are wandering around sunny Seville. Marcelle, their sometimes friend and sometimes half-willing lover, is dead by suicide. It’s a pity, but Simone and our unnamed narrator don’t seem to care. They’re taking shelter from the sun at a corrida, watching an enraged bull charge a matador. Simone sits on a pair of freshly excised bull testicles procured by Sir Edmund, her wealthy English sex patron, and wiggles around. The narrator’s gaze shifts between Simone and the matador, the dead bull’s balls and the live bull’s horns, the blazing sun and the waning shade, the men in the stands, the deafening sounds and silences, the unbearable thirst, the intolerable sun…back and forth until, mercifully (for we were just about to vomit from motion sickness), he stops to contemplate a moment of enticing symmetry: the bull gouges out the matador’s eye — “one horn plunged into the right eye and through the head” — just as Simone climaxes and flings herself to the ground, nose bleeding and legs trembling uncontrollably.
Gross, right? And this is one of the less disturbing orgasm scenes in Bataille’s 100ish page sexvella (my word for a novella about sex) tracing the violent misadventures of two deviant young lovers. If I were a literature PhD student given to discoursing on libidinal economies and hermeneutics of sadomasochism and the like, I’d probably say that The Story of the Eye is a novella about the erotic potentialities of the dual triads of eggs, eyes, and testicles, and eggs, semen, and urine. Or maybe that it’s a meditation on nonpenetrative modes of psychosexual violence, or a Sadian hymn to the possibilities of a phallogodecentric erotic praxis. If you’ve read the book, you know what I mean (maybe). If you haven’t, a few words of advice:
DON’T READ THE BOOK.
Really, don’t. It is disgusting in the extreme and deeply offensive to even the most dulled sensibilities and has little to recommend it by way of style or plot or structure. And it could permanently ruin eggs for you.
Too late for me to heed that advice. As I said, I’m sitting in the garden of this stunning cathedral that looks like it was built in the 12th century but turns out to have been finished in 1910 and delighting in how downright subversive and obnoxious I am. Our hellbound protagonists have now stumbled upon a Spanish priest administering confession to a young woman at a local church. The violent orgy that ensues will involve a nauseating amount of blasphemy, wickedness and, of course, urine. Why urine? Bataille devotes a few paragraphs in the postface to this question. His working hypothesis (because not even writers themselves can plumb the depths of their own work) involves an erotic association between his syphilitic, bedbound father and the chamber pots into which he (the syphilitic father) relieved himself. Go figure.
Reading The Story of the Eye in the garden of a place holy to a billion plus people is a cheap thrill, and cheap thrills never last for long. It’s a bit like throwing a Styrofoam cup out the window while driving down the highway, only to stop and find that the wind smeared the coffee dregs all over the car door. Or like turning up the rock music in your headphones as you walk, imagining that you’re the protagonist in a movie about redemption and glory, only to arrive at the lecture hall and take out your headphones and sit down next to dozens of people who were just doing the same thing. The clouds gather and threaten rain. The breeze carries my wooden stirrer away. A café worker approaches and informs me that they’re closing in ten minutes and would I mind putting my tray on the rack inside and closing the umbrella before I leave. He’s both polite and cold in the way that the English often are. This conjunction of civility and standoffishness crosses wires in the American mind. We’re used to assholes and sweethearts, but not to whatever lies between. (It turns out that ‘English service workers’ are what lies in between.) I say yes, of course, and begin to pack up my belongings. For a moment, the book lies face up on the table between us. I shove it quickly into my backpack, but the café worker is already gone. He didn’t even look at it once. Goddamnit.