The Story of the Eye (1928)
In 1928, Georges Bataille published one of the most sexually disturbing and graphic novels of the twentieth century, and it is arguably one of the most shocking examples of erotica in the history of literature. In The Story of the Eye, the narrator and his lover, Simone, who has a fondness for inserting bulbous items into her body for sexual pleasure, indulge in multiple fetishes, such as exhibitionist sex, multiple partners, and orgies. Throughout the novel, the narrator describes his relationship with his girlfriend Simone and another woman, with their exploits becoming more and more depraved.
The callousness of the couple’s sexual exploits is enough to make the reader’s skin crawl. They have sex often in view of Simone’s mother. They include a mentally-ill woman in their relationship, who eventually loses her grip on reality. When she commits suicide, the couple has sex next to her dead body. Simone and the narrator leave the country, where they meet an English aristocrat who encourages their behavior. When the three visit a church, Simone seduces a priest and strangles him to death. The couple and the aristocrat escape to Andalusia where the aristocrat buys a yacht for them to continue their sexual debauchery.
Georges Bataille was an intellectual who explored the meaning of life and experience through his writing, incorporating constant themes of transgression and eroticism in his texts. While literary circles largely discredited his pornographic works in his lifetime, considered only for their inclusion of shocking sexual fetishes, later scholars have analyzed Bataille’s The Story of the Eye, as part of a twentieth-century literary movement called “literature of transgression.” The philosopher Michel Foucault used The Story of the Eye as a crucial work in the development of transgression as a literary device in his 1963 article “A Preface to Transgression.”
Transgressive themes are present throughout literature that provides social critique, especially in erotica that detail fetishes and sexual exploration. Characters in transgressive fiction feel trapped by society’s restrictions or codes of behavior, engaging in drugs, sex, or alcohol to rebel against these restrictions. Transgressive literature didn’t emerge as a particular genre until the twentieth century, fully reaching its height by the end of the century; it remains one of the most influential and commercially successful trends in literature today.