THE STORY OF THE EYE
ANGELIQUE, Pierre [Georges BATAILLE, Pseud.]; Audiart [Austryn WAINHOUSE,Trans.] A tale of satisfied desire. Paris: The Olympia Press.1953.
8vo., white card wraps with integrated mustard yellow dustwrapper, printed with text and decorative borders in black and white; pp. [xi], 12-105, [vii]; a very good indeed copy, slightly rubbed and creased at edges, particularly so along the spine; internally very clean, with a couple of small marks to gutters.
First English language translation, translated by Audiart [Austryn Wainhouse], who was at the time well known for his translations of the Marquis de Sade into English. This book printed in July 1953 by Impr. Richard.
Georges Bataille was born in 1897, and briefly considered a career in the priesthood before becoming a writer and philosopher. Taken under the wing of the existentialist Lev Shestov, Bataille’s early studies were strongly influenced by the works of Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky
and Plato, but due to his leanings towards mysticism and eroticism, he was scorned by many of his contemporaries, including Jean-Paul Sartre, and his writings were relatively unknown during his lifetime.
First published as L'Histore de l'Oeil (‘The Story of the Eye’) clandestinely published by Bataille in 1928 under the pseudonym 'Lord Auch', A Tale of Satisfied Desire was the author’s first novel. It tells the retrospective story of a young man looking back on his sexual exploits, and is told a series of increasingly perverse vignettes which include various fetishisms, suicides, orgies, deaths and one of the earliest depictions of omorashi in Western Literature. The original pseudonym translates literally, as Lord "to the shithouse",
with ‘auch’ being an abbreviation of ‘aux chiottes’, slang for telling somebody off by sending him to the toilet. Immediately banned upon publication due to its highly graphic and pornographic nature, the work over time began to be read from a philosophical point of
view, and as a standalone piece of transgressive, surrealist literature. In a postscript, the author reveals that the character of Marcelle was inspired by his own mother, who suffered from bipolar disorder. “To complete this survey of the high summits of my personal obscenity, I must add a final connection I made in regard to Marcelle”,he writes. “It was one of the most disconcerting, and I did not arrive at it until the very end. It is impossible for me to say positively that Marcelle is basically identical with my mother.”, For this 1953 edition, the title was changed by the owner of the Olympia Press, Maurice Girodias, who was keen to obscure any connection between this book and Bataille's heavily prosecuted original work.
An important edition of this shockingly transgressive piece of literature.
“My kind of debauchery soils not only my body and my thoughts, but also anything I may conceive in its course, that is to say, the vast starry universe, which merely serves as a backdrop.”
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