Story of the Eye (Georges Bataille)
The centerpiece of the Surrealist movement's erotic literature, Eye was published in 1928 anonymously and follows the sexual awakening of a young man as he quickly discovers that only those acts which can be described as "dirty" are worthy of his attention. Fortunately, he finds Simone, a woman who shares his appetites and knocks down more boundaries than the young man knew existed. Shocking even by '90s standards "Bataille denudes himself, exposes himself, his exhibitionism aims at destroying all literature. He has a holocaust of words. The tale speaks about man's condition, not his nature. His tone recalls the scornful aggressiveness of the surrealist.
The tale has survived the death of God. In him, reality is conflict." -Jean Paul Sartre
"Bataille's work...indicated the aesthetic possibilities of pornography as an art form: 'Story of the Eye' being the most accomplished artistically of all pornographic prose I've read." -Susan Sontag
Nadja (Andre Breton)
Originally published in France in 1928, Nadja is the first and perhaps best Surrealist romance ever written, a book which defined that movement's attitude toward everyday life. The principal narrative is an account of the author's relationship with a girl in the city of Paris, the story of an obsessional presence haunting his life. The first-person narrative is supplemented by forty-four photographs which form an integral part of the work -- pictures of various "surreal" people, places, and objects which the author visits or is haunted by in Nadja's presence and which inspire him to mediate on their reality or lack of it.The Nadja of the book is a girl, but, like Bertrand Russell's definition of electricity as "not so much a thing as a way things happen," Nadja is not so much a person as the way she makes people behave. She has been described as a state of mind, a feeling about reality,k a kind of vision, and the reader sometimes wonders whether she exists at all. yet it is Nadja who gives form and structure to the novel.
