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SUSAN SONTAG
scribing an action which is really intrapsychic: three people sharing
(without conflict) a single fantasy, the acting out of a collective
perverse will. The emphasis in
The Image
is on behavior, which is
opaque, unintelligible. The emphasis in
Histoire de l'Oeil
is on fan–
tasy first, and then on its correlation with some spontaneously "in–
vented" act. The development of the book follows the phases of
acting out. Bataille is charting the stages of the gratification of an
erotic obsession, which haunts a number of commonplace objects
or things. The principle of organization is thus a spatial one:
a series of objects, arranged in a definite sequence, are tracked down,
used or used up in some convulsive erotic act. The obscene playing
with or defiling of these objects, and of people in their vicinity, is
the action of the novella. When the last object (the eye) is used up
in a transgression more daring than any preceding, the narrative
ends. There can be no revelation or surprises in the story, no new
"knowledge," only further intensifications of what is already known.
These seemingly unrelated elements really are related; in fact, all
versions of the same thing. The egg in the first chapter is simply
the first version of the eyeball plucked from the Spaniard in the last.
Each specific erotic fantasy is also a generic fantasy, of performing
what is "forbidden," which generates a surplus atmosphere of ex–
cruciating restless sexual intensity. At times the reader seems to be
witness to a heartless debauched fulfillment; at other times, simply
in attendance at the remorseless progress of the negative. Bataille's
works, better than any others I know of, indicate the esthetic pos–
sibilities of pornography as an art form.
Histoire de l'Oeil
is, in my
opinion, the most perfect artistically of all the pornographic prose
fictions I've read ;
Madame Edwarda,
the most original and powerful
intellectually.
To speak of the esthetic possibilities of pornography as an art
form and as a form of thinking may seem insensitive or grandiose
when one thinks of the acute misery of those afflicted in real life
with a full-time specialized sexual obsession. Still, I would argue that
pornography yields more than the truths of individual nightmare.
Convulsive and repetitious as this form of the imagination may be,
it does generate a vision of the world that can claim the interest
(speculative, esthetic) of those who are not erotomanes. Indeed, this
claim resides in precisely what are customarily dismissed as the
limits
of pornographic thinking.
