"Doesn't that foreshadowing feel tacked on?"
Foreshadowing tends to sound like exposition the moment you use it to hint at an event.
So today's textbook is an unusual one: Georges Bataille's Story of the Eye. It came out in 1928 under a pseudonym, and it's a wildly transgressive novel.
"Wait, you're learning foreshadowing from an erotic novel?"
I get it. But this book runs on a completely different kind of foreshadowing. It doesn't hint with events; it hints with the shapes of things. Call it serial foreshadowing: a chain of look-alike objects that quietly tells readers where the story is headed.
You don't need to have read the book. I'll keep the plot summary to a minimum and touch the explicit scenes only as far as the technique requires. No need to worry.
Let's start with the egg.
Eggs, a Saucer of Milk, and an Eye — Look-Alike Objects Keep Coming Back
"So what's the story even about?"
In a nutshell: a boy narrator and a girl named Simone push their forbidden games further and further. The interesting part is the props.
First, a saucer of milk meant for the cat.
Next, eggs.
Then liquids like tears and urine.
Round things.
White things.
Fragile things.
And wet things.
Objects with similar shapes and textures show up again and again.
The decisive moment is an exchange in the book. The narrator asks Simone what comes to mind when she hears "egg," and she answers, "a calf's eye," because the white is the white of the eye and the yolk is the pupil. In other words, early on, the book slips the reader an equation, egg = eye, through a character's mouth.
Roland Barthes zeroed in on this in his 1963 essay "The Metaphor of the Eye." In his reading, the novel is the story of a single word, "eye," changing shape again and again: egg, bull's testicles, sun... Like a noun being declined in grammar, the eye keeps shifting its form.
Barthes goes further and pulls out two chains.
The first is a chain of round things.
Eye.
Egg.
Bull's testicles.
Sun.
In French, eye is œil and egg is œuf. They sound alike, and both are white and round. Sound and shape: two knots tie them together.
The second is a chain of liquids.
Tears.
Milk in the saucer.
The yolk of a soft-boiled egg.
Urine.
Every variation of "making wet" belongs here. In Barthes's reading, even the sun links up with the liquid side, because its glaring light is described as if it were liquid dripping from the sky.
Round things and wet things. These two lines run beneath the story the whole way through.
Why Does the Shape of a Thing Work as Foreshadowing? — Two Chains and Their Collision
"But it's just similar objects showing up. Does that really count as foreshadowing?"
It does. And a powerful kind, too.
Ordinary foreshadowing predicts an event: "There's a knife → someone gets stabbed." It's a line of cause and effect. But Story of the Eye doesn't predict events. What it predicts is the shape of things.
Every time an egg shows up, readers start to sense it: "This is going to become an eye someday."
The story's inevitability rests on resemblance, not causality. That's the heart of it.
No explanation needed.
No reasons attached.
The shapes alone are enough for readers to connect the dots.
That's why it never looks tacked on. Brilliant, right?
Swapping the Two Chains
What Barthes saw as Bataille's originality was the way he mixed the two chains.
French has two ordinary expressions: "break an egg" (casser un œuf) and "put out an eye" (crever un œil). Bataille swaps them to create twisted pairings: "break an eye" and "put out an egg."
Barthes called this metonymy and concluded that Bataille's eroticism is "essentially metonymic." Metonymy is a figure of speech that refers to something by substituting another thing closely related or adjacent to it.
Hmm, a bit tough? Put simply, a verb from one chain jumps over to a noun in the neighboring chain. That alone gives readers chills.
Barthes also says the chain has no "first word." You can't read it as "the real meaning is sexual, and the eye is its symbol." Every term is just a restatement of the others.
So, in Barthes's view, this isn't a "deep" work. No secret hides in its depths; everything is laid out on the surface.
The meaning never settles on a single answer. Instead, each repetition brings earlier scenes back to life. Readers end up experiencing a string of outrageous acts as a system, almost like a poem.
By the way, Susan Sontag also took the book seriously, as literature rather than pornography, in her 1967 essay "The Pornographic Imagination."
The Payoff — Granero's Right Eye
"So where does the foreshadowing pay off?"
Right here: a bullring in Madrid, late in the story.
The real-life matador Granero dies after a bull's horn pierces his right eye. This really happened in 1922, and Bataille wrote it into the novel. At that very moment, in the stands, Simone is using the testicles cut from that day's bull in a sexual game.
The eye line and the testicle (= egg) line. Two lines that have run separately since the opening converge at a single instant.
It looks like coincidence, doesn't it? But it's built into the structure. This scene is also a rehearsal for an even more decisive "eye" scene at the end of the book.
Designing Your Own "Chain of Substitutions"
"Okay, got it. But how do I do this in my own manuscript?"
Here are three key points.
First, build a chain of look-alikes.
Pick a small number of things alike in shape, color, or fragility, and build your story around one turning into the next.
Don't fix what the symbols "mean." Make the substitution rule itself the organizing principle. That's exactly why Barthes called the book a "metaphoric composition."
Second, cross it with a second chain.
Set up another chain running alongside your chain of solid things. Liquid, sound, light: anything works. Then let words from one chain jump into the other.
Third, collide them through simultaneity.
Put an event from the private chain and a big public event at the same moment. Turn coincidence into correspondence.
Of course, you don't need to write anything as extreme as Bataille.
Marbles.
Soap bubbles.
The moon.
The mechanism works just as well with a gentle chain like that.
A 5-Step Exercise for Today's Manuscript
- Choose the single most important "thing" at your climax (e.g., a hand mirror that shatters)
- List three things that resemble it in shape, color, or fragility (e.g., a pond's surface, glasses, thin ice)
- Bring each of the three in once (early, midway, and just before the end) without explaining them
- Somewhere, just once, let a character casually voice the connection ("Ice looks like a broken mirror, doesn't it?")
- At the climax, slam an event from the other chain into the same moment
You can plant foreshadowing without explaining it. If the shapes resemble each other, the reader's mind will connect the lines on its own.
There's probably an unnamed "egg" already lying around in your manuscript.