Although Georges Bataille's Histoire de l'oeil includes several named characters and the narrative of their erotic adventures, he certainly does not give us the story of Simone, Marcelle, or the narrator…. Histoire de l'oeil is actually the story of an object. How can an object have a story? No doubt it can pass from hand to hand (thereby occasioning insipid fictions like The Story of My Pipe or Memoirs of an Armchair); it can also pass from image to image, so that its story is that of a migration, the cycle of the avatars it traverses far from its original being, according to the tendency of a certain imagination which distorts yet does not discard it: this is the case with Bataille's book.
What happens to the Eye (and no longer to Marcelle, Simone, or the narrator) cannot be identified with ordinary fiction; the "adventures" of an object which simply changes owner derive from a novelistic imagination content to arrange reality; on the other hand, its "avatars," since they must be absolutely imaginary (and no longer simply "invented") can be only the imagination itself: they are not its product but its substance; describing the Eye's migration toward other objects …, Bataille makes no commitment to the novel, which accommodates itself by definition to a partial imaginary world, derivative and impure (i.e., polluted by reality); he proceeds, quite the contrary, only within what is essentially an image system. Must we call such compositions "poems"? No other name seems available to set in opposition to the novel…. (pp. 239-40)
