under the worst of signs. The name Lord Auch [pronounced osh] refers to a habit of a friend of mine; when vexed, instead of saying 'aux chiottes!' [to the shithouse], he would shorten it to 'aux ch'.' Lord is English for God (in the Scriptures): Lord Auch is God relieving himself. The story is too lively to dwell upon; every creature transfigured by such a place: God sinking into it rejuvenates the heavens.
To be God, naked, solar, in the rainy night, on a field: red, divinely, manuring with the majesty of a tempest, the face grimacing, torn apart, being IMPOSSIBLE in tears: who knew, before me, what majesty is?
The 'eye of the conscience' and the 'woods of justice' incarnate the eternal return, and is there any more desperate image for remorse?
I gave the author of W.C. the pseudonym of Troppmann.
I jerked off naked, at night, by my mother's corpse. (A few people, reading Coincidences, wondered whether it did not have the fictional character of the tale itself. But, like this Preface, Coincidences has a literal exactness: many people in the village of R. could confirm the material; moreover, some of my friends did read
What upset me more was: seeing my father shit a great number of times. He would get out of his blind paralytic's bed (my father being both blind and paralytic at once). It was very hard for him to get out of bed (I would help him) and settle on a chamber-pot, in his nightshirt and, usually, a cotton nightcap (he had a pointed gray beard, ill-kempt, a large eagle-nose, and immense hollow eyes staring into space). At times, the 'lightning- sharp pains' would make him howl like a beast, sticking out his bent leg, which he futilely hugged in his arms.
My father having conceived me when blind absolutely blind), I cannot tear out my eyes like Oedipus.
Like Oedipus, I solved the riddle: no one divined it more deeply than I.
On November 6, 1915, in a bombarded town, a few miles from the German lines, my father died in abandonment.
My mother and I had abandoned him during the German advance in August 1914.
We left him with the housekeeper.
The Germans occupied the town, then evacuated it. We could now return: my mother, unable to bear the thought of it, went mad. Late that year, my mother recovered: she refused to let me go home to N. We received occasional letters from my father, he just barely ranted and raved. When we learned he was dying, my mother agreed to go with me. He died a few days before our arrival, asking for his children: we found a sealed coffin in the bedroom.
When my father went mad (a year before the war) after a hallucinating night, my mother sent me to the post office to dispatch a telegram. I remember being struck with a horrible pride en route. Misery overwhelmed me, internal irony replied: 'So much horror makes you predestined': a few months earlier, one fine morning in December, I had informed my parents, who were beside themselves, that I would never set foot in high school again. No amount of anger could change my mind: I lived alone, going out seldom, by way of the fields, avoiding the center, where I might have run into friends.
My father, an unreligious man, died refusing to see the priest. During puberty, I was unreligious myself (my mother indifferent). But I went to a priest in August 1914; and until 1920, rarely did I let a week go by without confessing my sins! In 1920, I changed again, I stopped believing in anything but my future chances. My piety was merely an attempt at evasion: I wanted to escape my destiny at any price, I was abandoning my father. Today, I know I am 'blind,' immeasurable, I am man 'abandoned' on the globe like my father at N. No one on earth or in heaven cared about my father's dying terror. Still, I believe he faced up to it, as always. What a 'horrible pride,' at moments, in Dad's blind smile!
[Preface to Story of the Eye from Le Petit: 1943]
Outline of a Sequel to Story of the Eye
After fifteen years of more and more serious debauchery, Simone ends up in a torture camp. But by mistake; descriptions of torture, tears, imbecility of unhappiness, Simone at the threshold of a conversion, exhorted by a cadaverous woman, one more in the series of devotees of the Church of Seville. She is now thirty-five. Beautiful when entering the camp, but old age is gradually taking over, irremediable. Beautiful scene with a female torturer and the devotee; the devotee and Simone are beaten to death, Simone escapes temptation.
She dies as though making love, but in the purity (chaste) and the imbecility of death: fever and agony transfigure her. The torturer strikes her, she is indifferent to the blows, indifferent to the words of the devotee, lost in the. labor of agony. It is by no means an erotic joy, it is far more than that. But with no result. Nor is it masochistic, and, profoundly, this exaltation is beyond any imagining; it surpasses everything. However, its basis is solitude and absence.
