Story of the Eye (14 page)

We are left with the question whether the rhetoric we have been describing can account for
all
eroticism or whether it is peculiar to Bataille. A glance at Sade's eroticism, for example, suggests an answer here. It is true that Bataille's
narrative
owes a great deal to Sade, but this is mainly because Sade laid the foundation for all erotic narrative in so far as his eroticism is essentially syntagmatic in character. Given a certain number of erotic loci, Sade deduced
all
the figures (or conjunctions of persons) capable of bringing them into play. The prime units are finite in number, because there is nothing more limited than erotic material. Yet they are sufficiently numerous to lend themselves to apparently infinite combinations (the erotic loci combining in positions and the positions in scenes) whose profusion is the beginning and end of Sadian narrative. In Sade there is no appeal to metaphorical or metonymical imagination, his eroticism being purely combinatory; but probably this very fact gives it a quite different direction from Bataille's. Using metonymical interchange, Bataille drains a metaphor, which although double is by no means saturated in either chain. Sade on the other hand explores very thoroughly a field of combinations that are free of any kind of structural constraint; his eroticism is encyclopaedic, sharing the same accounting spirit as prompted Newton or Fourier. For Sade it is a question of tallying erotic combinations, an undertaking that (technically) does not involve any transgression of the sexual. For Bataille it is a question of exploring the tremulous quality of a number of objects (a modern notion of which Sade knew nothing) in such a way as to interchange from one to another the functions of obscenity and those of substance (the consistency of the soft-boiled egg, the bloodshot, pearly colouring of the raw balls, the glassy quality of the eye). Sade's erotic language has no
connotation other than that of his century: it is writing. Bataille's has the connotation of the man's very being and is a style. Between the two something is born that transforms all experience into language that is
askew
(
devoyé
, to borrow another Surrealist word); this is literature.

1.
“En hommage à Georges Bataille”, in
Critique
, nos. 195–6, August–September 1963.

2.
These terms, taken from linguistics, are now common currency in French literary criticism. Syntagma means the plane of concatenation and combination of signs at the level of actual discourse (e.g. the
line
of words); paradigm means, for each sign of the syntagma, the fund of sister—but nevertheless dissimilar—signs from which it was selected.

3.
I refer here to the antithesis established by jakobson between metaphor as a figure of similarity and metonymy as a figure of contiguity.

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Story of the Eye first
published in France
as Histoire de l'Oeil
1928
The Pornographic Imagination
first published by Martin Seeker & Warburg Ltd in
Styles of Radical Will
1967
The Metaphor of the Eye
first published in France as
Le Métaphore de l'Oeil
in
Critique
1963

First published in this edition by Marion Boyars Publishers Ltd 1979
Published in Penguin Books 1982

Story of the Eye
copyright © J.-J. Pauvert, 1967
This translation copyright © Urizen Books, 1977
The Pornographic Imagination
copyright © Susan Sontag, 1967
The Metaphor of the Eye
copyright © Roland Barthes, 1963
This translation copyright © Marion Boyars Publishers Ltd, 1979

All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-141-91367-4