One Note: Brooks Sterritt
The two become interested in eggs, among other things...
In One Note, Gabriel Blackwell asks writers for just that: one note, a single paragraph, on what they’re reading right now.
Today’s note comes courtesy of Brooks Sterritt:
This sentence here is my attempt to avoid beginning a paragraph by stating “Bataille’s Story of the Eye is a good time.” The novella is far more than erotic (and more than pornographic) though it manages to both titillate and disturb. The plot circles the sexual exploits of the narrator and a character named Simone, both in their teens. The two become interested in eggs, among other things, as sexual props. Images of eggs often appear in conjunction with eyes, which are also compared to the testicles of a bull during a later bullfight scene. Decent people are also said to “have gelded eyes.” Bataille blends sex and violence in a way I suspect influenced Ballard and many others. After crashing their car into a cyclist, for example, “her head…almost totally ripped off by the wheels,” the lovers find the sight of bloody flesh beautiful, despite being horrified. The narrator lists the following items as connected to deep sexuality: “blood, suffocation, sudden terror, crime; things indefinitely destroying human bliss and honesty.” At this point I should say that this is the only work of Bataille’s I’ve read, and that I’m only glancingly familiar with Sade, an obvious precursor. Much of Story of the Eye is quite beautiful, if bizarre, such as a description of the milky way as “that strange breach of astral sperm and heavenly urine across the cranial vault formed by the ring of constellations.” The book itself, in its brevity and brilliance, could also be described as “a gunshot seen as light.”
Brooks Sterritt dinged a dodecahedron. He writes fiction but he also once combed a sailing warship for powder metallurgy. His website is www.magicmonads.com.
