STORY OF THE EYE

A pair of teenagers fall in love and have a series of pornographic and increasingly violent adventures including teen orgies, blood-letting, the stuffing of hardboiled eggs into various orifices, golden showers, beating and strangling priests with their own holy implements, watching matadors get gored by bulls, and eyeballs. A genuine love story.

First Sentence:
“I grew up very much alone, and as far back as I recall I was frightened of anything sexual.”


[from a magazine article: http://www.tu-harburg.de/rzt/rzt/it/ork.html]

Rachtman asks Björk the name of that weird book she kept talking about the last time she was on. It was Georges Bataille's Story of the Eye. "I might just make it my mission to make everyone in the world read this book," Björk declares. "It says you do whatever you want, even if it's morally incorrect."

Like what? wonder the "Loveline" team. "For instance," she explains, "if you feel like a train is running through your head, it is. And if you feel like putting eggs inside your bottom, you should." The "Loveline" hosts find this a little much, but she persists.

"There's no such freedom in the world," she says, "that you can pick anything you want and put it in your butt." A caller is put through. Perhaps she will join in this debate. "Björk, I think your accent is really cute." Perhaps not.

BJÖRK READ THE STORY OF THE EYE WHEN SHE WAS SEVENTEEN. She was working at a fish factory, standing there from seven in the morning until seven at night, cutting fish and pulling out worms with tweezers, sadly, quietly watching fellow workers who were spending their whole lives doing this. It really got to her. "I was still very shy," she explains. "I was all hairy and wet on the inside, not saying anything, double double shy." Her boyfriend gave her the book. "It was one of these books that proved to me that I was not insane."

Written in 1928, it is a short novel, but it packs into its few pages almost endless violations. There are rapes. There is a murder. Eggs and the testicle of a freshly killed bull disappear up various orifices. At the book's climax, the eyeball of a murdered priest is used instead. "It's not to be taken literally," Björk tells me. "It's a mind thing. You know when you wake up in the morning, and you've dreamed you are Elvis Presley? Do you know what I mean?"

Well, I never have actually dreamed I was Elvis Presley, but... "No, not me either. I'm just saying. It's about all the things that you think about, even though they don't happen in real life. With that sort of freedom, you can play games with your mind and feel quite healthy about it. It was very good for a seventeen-year-old to read that book."

So it didn't make you think, "Oh wow, maybe it would be fun to stick an egg up my bum....?"

"No. Honestly, I didn't."

She reads the book once in a while and gives it to new people she really likes. I ask her about the video Venus as a Boy, in which she suggestively fondles an egg while singing explicitly about copulation. In the video the egg is eventually fried. This touches off a slightly sore spot for Björk. She gave Sophie Muller, the video director, a copy of Story of the Eye a couple of days before they filmed the but didn't insist that she read it. Muller didn't have the time.

"She kept going on about it being fried," sighs Björk with exasperation. "I was saying, `No way is that book about a fried egg! I'm sorry. Poached? Okay. Boiled? Okay. Raw? Okay. But not fried."

And a fried egg is unsuitable because......?

"Because it's too hard. It's rough and it's greasy, It should be about being sort of liquidy and wet and soft and open....."

After the video was finished, Sophie called Björk. She had read the book. Now she agreed with Björk: Fried was the wrong egg.