Georges Bataille's THE STORY OF THE EYE was first published in 1928 under the pseudonym Lord Auch (a vulgar French pun, meaning "Lord to the S___house") and was banned numerous times for obscenity. Long-considered pure pornography, the novel would become a staple of underground and subversive literature, and eventually received academic acclaim from such critics as Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag. Unsettling, surreal, and aggressively debased, the novella's narrator is a sexually deviant teenage boy who finds a perfect partner for debauchery in Simone, an equally perverse teenage girl. Their sexual acts include fornicating in front of Simone's mother; ravishing one of their innocent young friends, Marcelle, to such an extreme that she goes insane; and inducing an orgy that scandalizes their small town. The two eventually flee to Spain where under the care of a depraved aristocrat, their trespasses eventually expand to include sacrilegious acts and murder. Throughout the book, Bataille creates bizarre erotic equations between eyeballs, peeled eggs, the sun, and the raw testicles of a bull that Simone eats while in Spain. The narrator is so obsessed with transgression that he finds normal sex completely unsatisfying, a concept that would appear in Bataille's later critical writing on the nature of the erotic (EROTISM: DEATH AND SENSUALITY, and THE TEARS OF EROS).