Narrative and Eternal Recurrence in Bataille’s Story of the Eye

“The […] hero [of the quest narrative] is generally conceived of as going into the darkness to retrieve the light and achieve a meaningful existence,” claims modernist scholar Paul Sheehan (159). If that is true, then Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye (1928) reads like the quest narrative’s inverse: the unnamed narrator descends into filth, procuring an existence ostensibly devoid of meaning. Like monomaniacs, the narrator and his friend Simone stage a scene with similar elements—a white globular object and a luminous liquid—over and over again. Although the narrator and Simone appear to lack an objective, their story continually forges onward and thus has both motility and an underlying purpose. Critics have made a connection between Story of the Eye’s narrative and pornography (Boulter 153). However, Bataille’s narrative also issues from key philosophical problems—most significantly those posed by Friedrich Nietzsche, of whom Bataille was a prolific scholar and critic. Thus, a deeper evaluation of narrative form in Story of The Eye with respect to its philosophical theory is necessary.

Characterizing twentieth-century modernist writers’ experiments with narrative in Modernism, Narrative, and Humanism (2004), Sheehan calls serial forms of narrative “antinarratives,” which he brings to light through Nietzsche’s theme of eternal recurrence. Eternal recurrence, Sheehan argues, betokens a narrative based on “an intense, single-minded, self-willed surrender to each moment,” like an epiphany or an orgasm (50). Although Sheehan does not discuss Story of the Eye, this narrative form aptly describes the experiences of the narrator and Simone. Bataille’s novel resembles an infinite series of self-contained, dramatic bursts, rather than an orderly expansion of narrative dictated by temporality and causality. Narrative in Story of the Eye attempts to abide by eternal recurrence. In doing so, narrative seeks and procures a “non-meaning” that paradoxically imbues the characters’ existences with momentary significance. We can understand this non-meaning by likening it to Julia Kristeva’s semiotic chora—her conception of a pre-symbolic and pre-verbal origin that destabilizes yet simultaneously capacitates all meaning-making. If characters in conventional narratives are driven by a search for meaning in the symbolic sense, the characters of Story of the Eye are propelled by a desire to return to a non-meaning. The protagonists of Story of the Eye thus do not merely transgress social rules and institutions, as has been discussed sufficiently by previous scholars, but violate the teleological conventions of traditional narrative and unfold a pre-symbolic, elementary “meaning” in attempting to live an eternal present.

Story of the Eye wastes no time in describing the narrator’s and Simone’s first sexual escapade. We are told nothing about their pasts except that the narrator “grew up very much alone,” “was frightened of anything sexual,” and that he and Simone met at a beach in an unnamed city, their families “distantly related” (3). If traditional narrative links one’s origins to one’s ends, Story of the Eye’s narrator (disregarding the pseudo-Bataille voice in the “Coincidences” epilogue) seemingly has no desire to explain from where he came. This nondisclosure of the past gives us the sense that the protagonists have simply appeared in Bataille’s textual universe rather than having been born at a point in time before the novel’s beginning, as traditional forms of narrative tend to imply.

For psychoanalysts, the fact that humans are born from their mothers implies an infant’s intrinsic relation to the mother’s womb. This maternal bond, Jacques Lacan and his successors have argued, must be mitigated for a person to enter the symbolic order: the realm of language, law, and culture. Julia Kristeva posits in Powers of Horror (1982) that the severing of one’s ties to the mother is usually done through abjection: the action of casting an object to the margins of societal and subjective order. The abjected object becomes a taboo, evoking feelings of horror and disgust in the person encountering it (Kristeva, Powers of Horror 11). In Story of the Eye, however, the mother has not been and does not need to be abjected, because she is already insignificant. The narrator and Simone have no attachment to the mother of the social world. She is an annoyance, as when Simone’s mother walks in on the narrator’s and Simone’s activities; an object of amusement, as when Simone pisses on her mother from the rafters; and a helpmate: “Her mother was the one who brought us the eggs, but I didn’t even turn around, I assumed it was a maid” (39). This depiction resembles an ineffectual wet nurse, not the abjected mother. The lack of importance of the literal mother in the narrator’s and Simone’s lives deepens our sense that they have been neither born nor reared. Without an origin, the protagonists’ being has no temporal significance; their existences are no more than narrative fact.

The protagonists’ lack of an origin suggests that their first sexual experience, which opens the novel, is in fact their first experience as narrated entities. With no prior experience to draw from, the narrator and Simone model their proceeding ventures on this sexual encounter. Every scene that follows depicts a similar configuration of items and playing out of events, as if the story is stuck in a loop. In Nietzsche’s invocation of eternal recurrence in Book IV of The Gay Science, he proposes the reader imagine that he is destined to repeat his life, exactly as it is occurring and has occurred, for eternity: “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more” (Nietzsche 273). Eternal recurrence creates repetition at the teleological level—as one’s life is ordained to repeat—and in quotidian experience—as each day or moment compels a repetition of the surrender to one’s fate. Thus, an eternally recurrent self derives value and integrity not from the culmination of progress but from the repetition of that momentary surrender, yielding a narrative based on seriality. Doomed to repetition, one has no choice but to experience each present moment as what Sheehan terms “an intense, nontemporalised immersion” (50). In Story of the Eye, the narrator and Simone experience every moment in the immediate present with little conception of intention or consequence, as though they believe the moment has already been fated to happen as it will. An action’s aims are often comprehended and spoken about after the action has already begun, and even in some cases long after it has been completed. Metaphorized in their endless trek on bicycles while fleeing from the sanatorium—their destination “X” framed as a figment of hallucination—the narrator and Simone exist in a cyclical story in which they are compelled nevertheless to “ride through the impossible” (Bataille 32).

Moreover, Nietzschean eternal recurrence involves a spatial axis which is often elided but is crucial to Story of the Eye’s narrative expansiveness. In an appendage to his original passage in The Gay Science, Nietzsche wrote, “you will have to live once more […] even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself” (273). “This spider and this moonlight” implies that under eternal recurrence one is not only compelled to say “yes” over and over to infinity, but must also say “yes” to everything. Because eternal recurrence guarantees that one’s life will repeat—hence, that the objects in the universe around one also will—eternal recurrence implies a macroscopic relation between all things. The interconnectedness of meaning in Story of the Eye enables the characters to associate an egg, an eye, a yolk, and a sun—semen, tears, milk, and the galaxy. In these semantic (which, for the purposes of the story, are objective) relations, differences in situational context are unimportant. Roland Barthes sums up this aspect of Story of the Eye by observing that “everything is given on the surface and without hierarchy, the metaphor is displayed in its entirety; circular and explicit, it refers to no secret: we have here a signification without a signified (or one in which everything is signified)” (232). This matrix of being also explains the cosmic aspect of the narrative’s telos. The narrator’s debauchery “soils not only [his] body and [his] thoughts, but also anything [he] may conceive in its course, that is to say, the vast starry universe” (49). For the narrator and Simone to succeed in living according to eternal recurrence, everything must be implicated and nothing must be left out.

The intensity and immediacy of experience warranted by eternal recurrence extend to the narrator’s and Simone’s constitution of their bodies. Narrative theorists have drawn comparisons between human bodily experience and the experience of narrative. As Sheehan characterizes this relationship, the “formal self-consistency [of narrative] also occurs within our experience of ourselves, in the self-narratives of human beings, linking origins with ends” (12). The human body can be a vessel for narrative, as it fluctuates and becomes marked with accumulated experience, signifying a personal history. The bodies of the narrator and Simone are uncanny precisely because they are not vessels for narrative. Although the text is brimming with descriptions of the characters’ every sensation, position, and convulsion, their bodies are markedly devoid of personal history. This lack is given by the absence of descriptions of bruises, blemishes, and signs of illness. Despite the protagonists continually exposing their bodies to harm and pollution—if not through dirtying themselves, during the multiple times they have sex in mud, then through aggressive sex acts—their bodies never show any sign of wear or rupture. In fact, the only description of bodily marks is at the end of the orgy scene, when the narrator reports that “shards of glass had left deep bleeding cuts in two of us”—but the vagueness of “in two of us” suggests these cuts may not belong to the narrator and Simone, whose fantasies are solely responsible for the narrative’s logic and motility (15). Thus, the narrator’s and Simone’s bodies remain pristine, immanent, and thing- like, not containers for self-development. When Simone falls off her bicycle during their ride away from the sanatorium, even though “her nude body was hurled upon an embankment” that we are told is littered with “pebbles,” the narrator remarks that “[n]o injury, no bruise marked the body” (33-34). Equally symptomatic of the narrator’s and Simone’s participation in eternal recurrence is their superhuman ability to have constant orgasms. Their bodies are perpetually erethic and erect; in a narrative dictated by eternal recurrence, there can be no recess without the shattering of narrative consistency itself.

Interestingly, the few moments of rest and introspection the protagonists take following acts of extreme emotional and physical damage do induce breaks in the eternally recurrent narrative. These breaks happen after the orgy scene—when the narrator walks along the beach and “really cried for a long time on the sand”—and after the first trip to the sanatorium, where the narrator “lay down next to Simone’s body […] and soon […] drifted off into vague nightmares” (19, 34). Notably, each of the traumatic moments that motivate these breaks feature Marcelle. Marcelle is an ontologically unassimilable figure to the narrator and Simone, to the point of forcing ‘stops’ in the narrative, because she is the only character who attempts to live outside of eternal recurrence: she is afraid of consequence, affected by her past, and compliant with the symbolic order. Her suicide expresses the disquieting notion that it is possible to die, and to not ‘go on forever like this.’ Attempting to blot out what Marcelle represents, yet simultaneously testing the possibility of finitude she demarcates by committing dangerous acts, the narrator comments that Marcelle was “the embodiment of the fury and terror that kept driving our bodies to endless debauchery” (31). The character of Marcelle, as well as the scenes where the narrator and Simone take a break from the demands of living an eternal present, reveal a second, suppressed narrative beneath the dominant eternally recurrent narrative: a story of human bodies with origins and ends.

I have henceforth shown that the overall narrative of Story of the Eye, down to its characters’ bodily experiences, is ordered according to the principle of eternal recurrence. This framing can help shed light on the unconventional form ‘meaning’ takes in the novel. In one sense, the narrator and Simone are intent on the destruction of meaning. They take symbolically suggestive items—eggs, eyes, and testicles—and reduce them to objects of child’s play. These objects are fully interchangeable, resulting in inanity, not only on the level of plot—the priest’s eye connotes the eggs that Simone inserts into her vagina—but also in the character’s speech: “[Simone] played gaily with words, speaking about breaking eggs, and then breaking eyes, and her arguments became more and more unreasonable” (39). By treating these signifiers as interchangeable, the characters affect their non-meaning: the novel’s eggs are, speaking parabolically, empty.

Additionally, the narrator and Simone are set on defiling institutions and practices that generally bring meaning to people’s lives, for instance through their perverse recreation of a Christian communion. The narrator and Simone are uninterested in adopting, and are actively antagonistic towards, symbolic manifestations of meaning. That being said, although the novel can be described as an “antinarrative,” it still has inherent propulsion and order. Barthes interprets Story of the Eye’s narrative form as purely a vehicle for the poetic proliferation of metaphoric images linking one egg-like and one viscous object; he concludes that the novel is therefore in no way “profound” (242). However, this account provides sufficient explanation neither for the particular sequence in which these images are delivered (what may be called “plot”), nor for the more philosophical motivation of the novel’s formation, besides that it “is connoted by [Bataille’s] very being,” which we take to mean that the novel supplies its author with a self-affirming pleasure (247). Rather than discounting the profundity of the narrative entirely, we ought to consider that there remains some meaning to—or that some meaning is pursued in—the characters’ actions. The narrator himself admits that although he “managed to lose any sense of words like hope and despair […] life had to have some meaning all the same, and would only have one if only certain events, defined as desirable, were to occur” (18). Conceiving of meaning at all in the non-symbolic register requires a consideration of, to adapt a term from Kristeva, the semiotic element of the narrative.

Building off of Lacanian theory, Kristeva introduced the concept of the semiotic in Revolution in Poetic Language (1984) as a subterranean, pre-verbal field comprising the fissures and prosody of language: what disrupts the syntactic and structural aspects of signification. Kristeva links the semiotic, envisioned as the Greek chora, to the rhythm and tone of the mother’s uterus, enveloping a child before birth and well before the Oedipus complex and imposition of the Father’s Law. The protagonists of Story of the Eye are after a meaning that is closely related to Kristeva’s semiotic, as opposed to the symbolic. If, like Kristeva, we conceive the semiotic as thriving in the space of the mother’s womb, it becomes relevant to note that although the characters in Story lack, or at least belittle, mother figures, they do express an underlying desire to be reunited with the maternal womb. Detesting the symbolic and not yet attuned to the semiotic mode of acquiring meaning, the narrator and Simone exist in limbo between the mother’s internal space and the world, as though in a prolonged miscarriage. They are neither apart from the mother—thus not warranting her abjection—nor intrinsic to her, enabling their aspiration to return.

Signaling the moment’s significance with an unusual tone of affection, when the narrator and Simone pedal back to the sanatorium, the narrator remarks that he “felt at bottom as if [he] were going home” (42). The magnitude of the sanatorium can be understood through a psychoanalytic interpretation of its topology, a method that Freud practiced in analyzing the surfaces and objects encountered in people’s dreams. With this lens, the sanatorium resembles Kristeva’s conception of the mother’s womb not only in its appearance—it has an opening, the “empty glowing window,” and is carpeted—but also in its encasing of the semiotic (29, 42). The space inside the sanatorium is the site of non-meaning. When the narrator enters it, he forgets his objective and loses the ability to integrate sensory cues: “I could not distinguish anything, I did not get anywhere, the rooms were not numbered” (25). (We are told a page earlier that Marcelle was in Room 8.) As the narrator and Simone have sex on the floor next to Marcelle’s corpse, the narrator says that “understand[ing]” was “impossible” and that he and Simone felt “blind […] very remote from anything [they] touched, in a world where gestures have no carrying power, like voices in a space that [was] absolutely soundless” (51-52). Despite the moment’s incomprehensibility to the characters, this scene is far from insignificant. The total calm and hopelessness, the boredom and absurdity the protagonists experience in the sanatorium, beget an unspeakable value; they have attained complete, momentary, antimetaphysical oneness.

This oneness might be clarified through a consideration of the legacy Kristeva inherited from Plato and the Western philosophical tradition in her conception of the semiotic chora, which also relates its function to Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence. Kristeva adopted the idea of the chora from Plato in an attempt to reengage the philosophical problem of “the Beginning” (Margaroni 79). While Western logocentric thought has often posited the “Word” at the beginning of all being, the chora is an attempt at apprehending a motile origin before the imposition of language. Importantly, the chora is not “the forgotten past itself” but rather a passage which opens up the speaking subject to the traces and marks that make up the pre-verbal ‘origin’ before the Beginning (Margaroni 87). Hence, in the uterine abyss, the narrator and Simone felt they were “like voices in a space that [was] absolutely soundless,” in contact with the drives that promulgate language but themselves non-signifying (52).

Contact with the semiotic chora begets a similar experience to the life demanded by eternal recurrence: the chora is the nurse of becoming that enables the being of things just as the will to eternal recurrence is the will to “become what one is” (Nehamas 171). As a person under eternal recurrence continually submits herself to her fate, she does not (and cannot) experience “becoming” in a progressive sense, but instead experiences an infinite becoming in each moment of her being. Thus, an eternally recurrent narrative requires a self-willed, repeated return to that “becoming” that precedes and is entangled in all being. Bataille’s scene in the sanatorium and his implicated scene of Marcelle’s death marks the characters’ achievement of an instance of total becoming, accounting for its pivotal significance: “the contradictory impulses overtaking [them] in this circumstance neutralized one another, leaving [them] blind” to the being of things (51). As if having already realized its purpose, Story of the Eye’s narrative subsequently is an imitation of an eternally recurrent life—for instance, in its depiction of Simone’s single-minded passions—but lacks the essence of one: it is neither atemporal nor cosmically expansive. The narrative’s lack of a telos accounts for the tonal gap that occurs between the sanatorium scene and the following chapter. The narrator, as if thrust back into the symbolic realm, interjects, “To avoid the bother of a police investigation, we instantly took off for Spain” (53).

The narrator and Simone, through their pursuit of becoming what they are, imbue their lives with significance and what one may call ‘meaning’—though not in the usual sense. The meaningfulness of their existences is further justified by the necessity of their aims, which also establishes the novel’s aesthetic component. Although the narrator and Simone commit acts of over-the-top obscenity, their actions are, in the world of Bataille’s novel, necessary to their self-becoming: “I could keep going only by accepting or feigning to imagine a fantastic compromise that would confusedly link my most disconcerting moves to theirs,” the narrator proclaims (18, emphasis added). To say “yes” to eternal recurrence (or “becoming”) then is both to recognize necessity and to master it. For Nietzsche, this embracing attitude towards necessity involved a sense for beauty: as a New Years’ resolution in The Gay Science, he expressed, “I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful” (157). That which is “necessary in things” is to live the chaos of one’s existence, to throw oneself into the shock of one’s own being, which is, we have demonstrated, to surrender to one’s becoming. Therefore, in order to follow the necessity of becoming themselves, the characters of Story of the Eye must find acts that are necessary beautiful; they must realize that to see something, however unpleasant, as beautiful is to make beauty. The ultimate aim of Story of the Eye is therefore an aestheticizing aim, though without the aesthetic appurtenances of narrative convention. It is for this reason that the narrator—despite or, perhaps, in gratitude towards the traumatization he must undergo as a non-becoming self to become a becoming self—confesses: “I would nevertheless still be prepared to start all over again” (49).