Filthy Words: The Heterological and Linguistic Significance of Bataille’s Story of the Eye

Cunt, Cock, Fuck, Jizm, Piss. Such are Georges Bataille’s favorite words in Story of the Eye, where filthy language is the privileged mode of expression. The most shocking and reviling moments in Story of the Eye are undoubtedly those that center these word-images of filth: Bataille and his characters find orgiastic delight in excreting these words from their mouths, soiling the tabula rasa of each page with a word vomit of repugnant images. While the prudish reader might reduce Bataille’s fascination with filthy words to mere perversion or a lack of sophistication, I instead argue that Bataille’s employment of obsceniities is a sophisticated linguistic act of rebellion against society’s normative assumptions about what characterizes a literary text. The core of my argument launches off this point, where, blending diachronic (philology) and synchronic (structural) linguistics, psychoanalysis, and narratology, I will demonstrate that Bataille’s fascination with language is intrinsically related to his theory of Heterology—the science of the Other, the wasted, the accursed. Insofar as Bataille’s words are imagistically of waste, they are also linguistically both wasted and wasteful. Story of the Eye thus textually constitutes Bataille’s heterological endeavor to reach into the annals of verboten language and bring back to light a fistful of aborted pleasures.

Bataille defines the heterogeneous world as that which practically “includes everything resulting from unproductive expenditure,” which “consists of everything rejected by homogeneous society as waste or as superior transcendent value” (“Heterology” 375). Heterology is therefore the study of that which homogeneous society has deemed to be untouchable and worthless excrement, brushed under the carpet, and concealed under the nebulous cloak of “Other.” Heterology in turn reaches into the waste-bin and displays whatever it finds there—in this sense Heterology is always a grand reveal (and reclamation) of the excrement homogeneous society has tried to forget, and much heterological interest lies in the waste secondarily produced from reactions to that very waste: “heterogeneous elements will provoke affective reactions of varying intensity, and it is possible to assume that the object of any affective reaction is necessarily heterogeneous” (375). Bataille enumerates several other examples of heterogeneous matter: cadavers, vermin, trash, body parts, etc. Wedged between these examples is a vital addition: “words…having a suggestive erotic value” (375). The word is an essential waste product to Heterology: it is the device by which Heterology enters articulation in the first place, but it also upholds the pillars of Heterology by its excretive operation and circulation of waste. That is, words are excreted onto the page, making a waste-text that is in no way productive by itself; these words are then sifted through by other readers, who delight in appropriating the creative waste of another. In reading Story of the Eye, one is not just reading about excrement—the images of piss, shit, blood, ejaculate, and the sort—but rather, one is consuming, through language, Bataille’s textual excrement; in entering the text, one is entering the shithouse.¹

While all words are waste(d)—at least, as Story of the Eye invites us to consider—not all words are marked as “waste.” This title is reserved for a distinct landfill of profanities, those “curse words” that are reserved for locker-room talk and are never expected to be found in abundance in literature of any real merit. It is for this very reason that these words are Bataille’s favorite: unlike those common-place words that have been consequently deprived of their meaning through flippant overuse, words like “piss,” “jizm,” and “fuck” are radioactive. They retain the volatile electric charge of their meaning, ready at any moment to electrocute the prudish reader out of their judgments of what a literary text should be. Indeed, “[h]eterogeneous reality is that of a force or shock [that] presents itself as a charge, as a value, passing from one object to another…in the judgment of the subject” (“Heterology” 375). By choosing such filthy words, Bataille is bringing the reader’s attention to the heterogeneous nature of the word itself. In particular, Heterology is founded on an interest in a specific heterogeneous word that has been of much interest in anthropology and psychoanalysis: that of the sacred.

It might come as a shock that the sacred—that which is commonly defined as an absence, or a transcendence, of filth—is heterogeneous. Yet, a closer inspection into its etymology reveals that entangled in the root of sacred (“sacer”), there is the dual, disparate meaning of “soiled as well as holy” (“Heterology” 376).² By definition, the sacred is heterogeneous: it is composed of two semantic “elements that are impossible to assimilate” (Visions 140). That the “soiled” half (which may also be translated “unclean” or “accursed”) of the sacred has been lost, repressed by man of time immemorial, is only further proof of the immense social effort put into homogenizing the Word. It suffices to say that homogeneous society has done an incomparable job of rewriting the cultural past: this was mainly exercised through the deployment of taboo to ward off the mana-carrying phantoms of the sacred, conducted at levels as minute as the word’s etymology.³ These social prohibitions aimed to restrict the expulsion of mana at the level of speech itself: if the “soiled” never entered language upon the utterance of the “sacred,” the “holy” could be preserved and freed of its infected counterpart. Repressed, what was once etymologically heterogeneous could be reduced to homogeneity. A similar process was conducted on the level of taboo itself. In “Taboo and the Ambivalence of Emotions,” Freud introduces taboo as “a Polynesian word, the translation of which provides difficulties for us because we no longer possess the idea which it connotes” (821). What follows, however, should come as no surprise, considering the etymological history I have just delineated:

It was still current with the ancient Romans: their word “sacer” was the same as the taboo of the Polynesians […] On the one hand [“taboo”] means to us, sacred, consecrated: but on the other hand it means, uncanny, dangerous, forbidden, and unclean […] Our combination of “holy dred” [sic] would often express the meaning of taboo. (821)

It turns out that, ironically, the repressive mechanism deployed by homogeneous society to institute a sacred/accursed division has been heterogeneous all along. Taboo, by the very act of its deployment, erased its own etymology simultaneously with that of the sacred, and has feigned ignorance ever since, making no claim to its “primitive” correspondence with the unclean.⁴ The taboo “then became an autonomous power which has detached itself from demonism. It becomes the compulsion of custom and tradition and finally the law” (Freud 826). It tracks that, paradoxically, it was through a cycle of heterogeneous division that the homogenizing operation of the taboo could be conducted and maintained; that is, it was through a mitosis of meaning that the taboo homogenized itself as both Law and its enforcer, but it first had to touch its excremental counterpart in order to sequester it to the locus of Other. Through and in spite of taboo, homogeneous society divided and polarized the “sacred” into a set of binary oppositions—the sacred and profane, the pure and the impure. Such society sequestered its “unclean” cousin to the devalued waste-category of the profane and stripped the taboo of its mystical essence, eventually culminating in the homogeneous sanctification of religion.⁵

At its foundation, then, Heterology springs from linguistic concern and is principally driven by a desire to excavate the excluded part [la part maudite] that man has culturally repressed over time, at the level of the word.⁶ This resurfacing is performed through the reintroduction of all the taboo words homogeneous society has tried to repress, and largely explains the profusion of curse words in Story of the Eye. Far from being “profanities” (the erroneous title that has been assigned them and which Heterology abandons), these words are sacred in the original meaning of sacred/soiled. They might be accurately equated in function to the Quebec French sacres, that distinct group of gros mots which soil the sacred upon utterance—Sacrament! When the narrator of Story declares, “this name [i.e., cunt]…is, I think, by far the loveliest of the names for the vagina” (4), his utterance carries a similar significance. Radically reversing the dominant homogeneous order, in the ideal heterogeneous society of Story, it is the refusal to use words like cunt that is profane, since this reticence capitulates to the norm, homogenizes one’s language, and lacks the “holy dread” that is intrinsic to the sacred.

Now that Bataille’s theory of Heterology has been properly explicated, it is time to deal with the text of the novella, which I argue serves as Bataille’s prototypical attempt, linguistically, to construct a heterogeneous world. Indeed, it is the word that is the genesis of Story of the Eye. From it spring the narrator (the “I”) and Simone, two lovers who participate in progressively more perverse activities, starting with Simone sitting in a saucer and urinating on eggs to excite herself and the narrator, and ending with the murder and enucleation of a priest in a chapel, whose eye Simone pisses on, bringing things full circle. But the common denominator of all these actions is that it is primarily through language that the couple explores the sexual and the existential. Take, for example, Bataille’s postulation that:

…[w]ith respect to men, their existence is language. Each person imagines, and therefore knows of his existence with the help of words. Words come to him in his head loaded with the multitude of human­ –or non-human–existences with respect to which his private existence exists. (“Language” 27)

The developmental process of coming-into-being is achieved through language. Such has been mostly the purview of psychoanalysis, but I believe much can be gained from introducing Heterology into a psychoanalytic framework, in the following manner: It is likely that early infancy (the pre-Symbolic period) is typically spent in a sort of heterogeneous reality, where all ids/desires/sexual objects are unrestrained and where excrement is of particular interest, whereas the Symbolic and its imposition as the predominant social/linguistic force is that of homogeneous society, where taboo is instituted and transgression is punished. Bizarrely, and paradoxically, the characters Story of the Eye are psychically located in the former, and yet in age (sixteen) they are far past the intrusion of the Symbolic.

That is to say, the way that the narrator and Simone investigate the sexual, and how they reconcile it with language, is strikingly similar to that of children. They demonstrate the same playfulness with language, and ignorance of its taboos, making linguistic connections such as the following:

Upon my asking what the word urinate reminded her of, she replied: terminate… (Story 38).
She played gaily with words, speaking about broken eggs, and then broken eyes, and her arguments became more and more unreasonable. (39)

Here, the narrator and Simone are shown molding and testing the limits of their own heterogeneous language system, which is carried out through linguistic play. As if using clay or play-dough, they shape and reshape words through signifying chains (urinate → terminate; eyes → eggs), to see how far they can stretch them past their original meaning. And like clay or play-dough, which works as a symbolic substitute for a child’s excrement so as to socialize them away from their own waste, words are a malleable form of excrement that amplifies their playfulness with non-symbolic excrement.⁷ In their heterogeneous world, the narrator and Simone have transcended taboo, perhaps even regressing to a state prior to its imposition as a significant social force, and are thus free to transgress. This transgression of homogeneity is concomitant with a transgression of language, for, as Barthes notes, “the transgression of values—that declared principle of eroticism—corresponds to (if it does not indeed establish) a technical transgression of the forms of language” (246). Hence, we witness words like “cunt,” “cock,” “piss,” and the like thrown around, much like how a child might repeat words that they have observed provoke a reaction among adults. This constitutes a kind of linguistic play in the form of a negativistic game, a veritable jeu de mots. It is through this playfulness and pleasure with language that the narrator and Simone come to construct and understand their heterogeneous world.

Throughout Story of the Eye, there is another trend: before an action is performed, it must first enter the order of language and be uttered. Nothing goes without saying. The first example of this is when Simone asks the narrator, “Do you dare me to sit in the saucer?” which elicits the command, “I dare you” (Story 4). Later, this elevates to “I want to have [the balls] before me on a plate” (56), which effectively results in the action being initiated. Perhaps the most striking example, however, is when Simone performs confession in the chapel—“The worst sin of all is very simply that I’m jerking off before you …[i]f you don’t believe me, I can show you” (73)—and when Sir Edmond, one of the friends Simone and the narrator pick up along the way, tells a story to the priest about men ejaculating when garroted, right before commanding Simone to strangle him (79). Bataille, through the language of Simone and Sir Edmond and the setting of the chapel, is literally bringing the soiled back into the definitional terrain of the sacred. For Bataille’s sadists, it seems pleasure can only be derived on the condition that the erotic image or action is first processed through language, spat out and commanded to the object or other sadist-subject. It is the exchange of waste—first wasting words through dialogue, then wasting through urination, sex, murder, etc.—that maintains the heterogeneous, sadistic reality of Bataille’s characters. Thus, language is pivotal for the pleasure of the Bataillean sadist, especially language that performs. While this is not unique to Bataille’s sadism—as Deleuze notes, Sade’s “The One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom hinges on tales told to the libertines by ‘women chroniclers’” (18), which directly precede each act of perversion—Bataille is unique in that his sadism operates almost exclusively along a linguistic, heterological axis. Where language in Sade is characterized by “pure demonstrative, instituting function” (23) and always “exhaust[ing] an erotic combination” (Barthes 246), the language of Bataille is playful, double, circular, and heterogeneous.

In his essay “The Metaphor of the Eye,” Barthes examines the functions of language in Bataille through a semiotic lens, namely through an analysis of the chain of metonymic associations through which each object-metaphor cycles. Barthes identifies Story of the Eye to be largely a “metaphoric composition”, evoking Jakobson, where the narrative is propelled by an exchange of semantic similarity between selected objects (eggs, eyes, balls), while conversely identifying the eroticism of Bataille to be “essentially metonymic” (240, 245). That is, the predominant object-metaphors are structurally rearranged and related based on contiguity rather than similarity. Barthes, however, in focusing exclusively on metaphor and metonymy, overlooks the heterogeneous element of language, which, while not inherently semiotic, is vital to a complete linguistic understanding of the text. Barthes keeps his writing clear of profanity, skirts around the lexical landmines that populate Story of the Eye. Not once are the words “cunt” or “cock” mentioned in Barthes’ essay, never mind the panoply of other obscenities omnipresent in Bataille’s writing. Such literary Puritanism is not just unfaithful to the text, but willfully overlooks the purpose of the inclusion of these words. There is significance in Barthes’ silence: his refusal to speak of piss, shit, or jizm—and his adoption of their safe substitutes—is evidence enough that these excremental object-metaphors possess real semantic power in the text and are worth consideration. Barthes never talks about piss for piss’ sake, and only refers to its cousin urine as part of a significant metonymic chain (tears → urine → yolk); piss is indeed something Other, considered unproductive in the dominant metonymic economy of the novella. Yet, upon closer inspection, it is apparent that the metonymic chains of Story of the Eye foundationally abide in an economy of waste; that is, through the seemingly endless production of metaphors, essentially as each image evolves (egg → testicles → eyes), the prior metaphor is wasted, deposited into the text of the former page. There follows from this a process of reconsumption, a molding of the metaphor-excrement into a new form, and a preservation of this waste by the very structure of the novella, which suffers the reader to consume it again and again.

Therefore, to return to (and reconsume) the beginning, I assert that Story of the Eye starts with a sentence and, narratively, is always trying to get back to that point. In retrospect, the narrative of Story goes nowhere and likewise, as Barthes observes, “the paradigm begins nowhere” (242); instead, it sits in a trash heap of words that exponentially rises toward infinitude but essentially has no trajectory. The plot of the story ends on the start of a voyage, as the narrator “set[s] sail towards new adventures” (85). One might ask oneself, after reading a story with no resolution and which some might reduce to a “pornography without plot”: has my time been wasted? What is its narrative purpose if it is nothing but a spherical recapitulation of waste? A glance at the Coincidences section, which was appended later to the story, helps elucidate the reason for the bizarre narrative structure of Story of the Eye.

Coincidences opens with a new “I,” ostensibly Bataille, remarking upon the process of writing the novella and hypothesizing what might have psychologically induced its inception. The Bataille of Coincidences (whom I will refer to as pseudo-Bataille), traces the causal event to when in his youth he overheard the following imprecation shouted by his syphillic father: “Doctor let me know when you’re done fucking my wife!” Pseudo-Bataille comments on this:

“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.” (94-5, emphasis added)

Story of the Eye is hardly about content or narrative; rather, it is about, as Barthes correctly points out, style (247). And what belongs more to style than choice of language itself? What drives Bataille to write in the way that he does, feather-teasing each word until it horripilates, filling each line with the grossest of obscenities and most vulgar of expressions, is a desire to return to the first sentence that altered his life, the sentence that constitutes his being, his linguistic origin. Through bizarre syntactical creations, littered with filthy words of the same extremity as the “fuck” his father issued, he is tracing back to the unconscious, which, as Lacan famously explains, is “structured like a language.” As Barthes notes: “Bataille’s erotic language is connoted by Georges Bataille’s very being” (247). Bataille affirms this: “It suffices for a short time to follow the trace, the repeated course of words, in order to perceive, in a sort of vision, the labyrinthine constitution of being” (“Language” 27). The ontological is the linguistic, and the linguistic is the heterological. For Bataille, to discover one’s being is to trace back the wasted words of one’s past and, in doing so, produce new abominations, until one finally circles back to the syntagmatic unity of the sentence. Story of the Eye is simply a quest to return to the first sentence of the unconscious—“I grew up very much alone, and as far back as I recall I was frightened of anything sexual”—and is, by nature of the structure of the sentence, a return to the Original word of the novella: “I” (3). The Story of the Eye is thus no more than the Story of the I.

Footnotes

1. Hence Bataille’s choice to use the nom de plume “Lord Auch” [aux ch’iottes], literally meaning “to the shithouse” (Story 98). ↩︎
2. In the notes of “The Use Value of D. A. F de Sade,” Bataille suggests the substitutive term agiology for heterology, which he says “would perhaps be more precise, but one would have to catch the double meaning of agio (analogous to the double meaning of sacer, soiled as well as holy)” (Visions 102). ↩︎
3. Mana, like taboo, is a Polynesian word that “designates the mysterious and impersonal force possessed by individuals such as kings and witch doctors” (Visions 141). That which carried this mana was considered an accursed contagion that haunted sacred things (for example, totem animals and corpses). In other words, mana was the “unclean” energy linked to the sacred, and this explains why words like “taboo” or “sacred” could mean both the consecrated and the accursed. Freud hypothesizes that this ambivalence of meaning was needed to describe an ambivalence of emotion, where, such as in mourning rituals, “primitive” man was pulled by two divergent drives: that of love (desire) and that of aggression (hate). This emotional ambivalence was later repressed, marking the emergence of the new meaning taboo took on as social prohibition. And with the repression of emotional ambivalence followed the concomitant repression of the semantic ambivalence of “taboo” as sacred/soiled. ↩︎
4. There is a fundamental error in the anthropological approaches of Freud and Bataille in that they treat indigenous populations such as the Aboriginal Australians to be living “primitive” vestiges of “modern” man’s psyche. It is important to understand that the anthropological tradition within which they were working was still founded on the Haeckelian axiom of “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,” and thus suffered from a central paradox of wanting to understand and uncover the complexity of the traditions of other cultures while simultaneously treating the people of these cultures to be intellectual inferiors, caricaturizing them to be “savages” with little control over their impulses. To underscore the inaccuracy and the epistemically racist history of a term like “primitive,” I have put it in scare quotes. (What’s more, I realize that the notion of other—as in “other cultures”—is also problematic; Western culture is never portrayed as other.) ↩︎
5. “But in general one must take into account the fact that religions bring about a profound separation within the sacred domain, diving it into a superior world (celestial and divine) and an inferior world (demoniacal, a world of decomposition); now such a division necessarily leads to a progressive homogeneity of the entire superior domain (only the inferior domain resists all efforts at appropriation). God rapidly and almost entirely loses his terrifying features, his appearance as a decomposing cadaver, in order to become, at the final stage of degradation, the simple (paternal) sign of universal homogeneity” (Visions 96). ↩︎
6. It is for this reason that Bataille claims that a heterogeneous reality is “identical to the structure of the unconscious,” (“Heterology” 375). Bataille expounds this further, claiming:
   The exclusion of heterogeneous elements from the homogeneous realm of consciousness formally recalls the exclusion of the elements, described (by psychoanalysis) as unconscious, which censorship excludes from the conscious ego. The difficulties opposing the revelation of unconscious forms of existence are of the same order as those opposing the knowledge of heterogeneous forms. (Visions 141)
   The heterogeneous—and, reversibly, language in the Lacanian reformulation—is structured like the unconscious since it dwells in the darkest, most primitive, and most repressed part of cultural memory. In this way, Heterology penetrates the anus of society: it permits the irruption of the ids of the unconscious that are always bubbling, threatening to burst through its repressive mechanisms like a psychical diarrhea. ↩︎
7. I thank Dr. Wendy Graham for bringing play-dough’s socializing implications to my attention. ↩︎