touches upon the reader’s whole experience of his humanity—and his limits as a personality and as a body. Actually, the singleness of pornography’s intention is spurious. But the aggressiveness of the intention is not. What seems like an end is as much a means, startlingly and oppressively concrete. The end, however, is less concrete. Pornography is one of the branches of literature—science fiction is another—aiming at disorientation, at psychic dislocation.
In some respects, the use of sexual obsessions as a subject for literature resembles the use of a literary subject whose validity farfewer people would contest: religious obsessions. So compared, the familiar fact of pornography’s definite, aggressive impact upon its readers looks somewhat different. Its celebrated intention of sexually stimulating readers is really a species of proselytizing. Pornography that is serious literature aims to “excite” in the same way that books which render an extreme form of religious experience aim to “convert.”
3
Two French books recently translated into English,
Story of O
and
The Image
, conveniently illustrate some issues involved in this topic, barely explored in Anglo-American criticism, of pornography as literature.
Story of O
by “Pauline Réage” appeared in 1954 and immediately became famous, partly due to the patronage of Jean Paulhan, who wrote the preface. It was widely believed that Paulhan himself had written the book—perhaps because of the precedent set by Bataille, who had contributed an essay (signed with his own name) to his
Madame Edwarda
when it was first published in 1937 under the pseudonym “Pierre Angélique,” and also because the name Pauline suggested Paulhan. But Paulhan has always denied that he wrote
Story of O
, insisting that it was indeed written by a woman, someone previously unpublished and living in another part of France, who insisted on remaining unknown. While Paulhan’s story did not halt speculation, the conviction that he was the author eventually faded. Over the years, a number of more ingenious hypotheses, attributing the book’s authorship to other notables on the Paris literary scene, gained credence and then were dropped. The real identity of “Pauline Réage” remains one of the few well-kept secrets in contemporary letters.
The Image
was published two years later, in 1956, also under a pseudonym, “Jean de Berg.” To compound the mystery, it was dedicated to and had a preface by “Pauline Réage,” who has not been heard from since. (The preface by “Réage” is terse and forgettable; the one by Paulhan is long and very interesting.) But gossip in Paris literary circles about the identity of “Jean de Berg” is more conclusive than the detective work on “Pauline Réage.”One rumour only, which names the wife of an influential younger novelist, has swept the field.
It is not hard to understand why those curious enough to speculate about the two pseudonyms should incline toward some name from the established community of letters in France. For either of these books to be an amateur’s one-shot seems scarcely conceivable. Different as they are from each other,
Story of O
and
The Image
both evince a quality that can’t be ascribed simply to an abundance of the usual writerly endowments of sensibility, energy, and intelligence. Such gifts, very much in evidence, have themselves been processed through a dialogue of artifices. The somber self-consciousness of the narratives could hardly be further from the lack of control and craft usually considered the expression of obsessive lust. Intoxicating as is their subject (if the reader doesn’t cut off and find it just funny or sinister), both narratives are more concerned with the “use” of erotic material than with the “expression” of it. And this use is preeminently—there is no other word for it—literary. The imagination pursuing its outrageous pleasures in
Story of O
and
The Image
remains
In some respects, the use of sexual obsessions as a subject for literature resembles the use of a literary subject whose validity farfewer people would contest: religious obsessions. So compared, the familiar fact of pornography’s definite, aggressive impact upon its readers looks somewhat different. Its celebrated intention of sexually stimulating readers is really a species of proselytizing. Pornography that is serious literature aims to “excite” in the same way that books which render an extreme form of religious experience aim to “convert.”
3
Two French books recently translated into English,
Story of O
and
The Image
, conveniently illustrate some issues involved in this topic, barely explored in Anglo-American criticism, of pornography as literature.
Story of O
by “Pauline Réage” appeared in 1954 and immediately became famous, partly due to the patronage of Jean Paulhan, who wrote the preface. It was widely believed that Paulhan himself had written the book—perhaps because of the precedent set by Bataille, who had contributed an essay (signed with his own name) to his
Madame Edwarda
when it was first published in 1937 under the pseudonym “Pierre Angélique,” and also because the name Pauline suggested Paulhan. But Paulhan has always denied that he wrote
Story of O
, insisting that it was indeed written by a woman, someone previously unpublished and living in another part of France, who insisted on remaining unknown. While Paulhan’s story did not halt speculation, the conviction that he was the author eventually faded. Over the years, a number of more ingenious hypotheses, attributing the book’s authorship to other notables on the Paris literary scene, gained credence and then were dropped. The real identity of “Pauline Réage” remains one of the few well-kept secrets in contemporary letters.
The Image
was published two years later, in 1956, also under a pseudonym, “Jean de Berg.” To compound the mystery, it was dedicated to and had a preface by “Pauline Réage,” who has not been heard from since. (The preface by “Réage” is terse and forgettable; the one by Paulhan is long and very interesting.) But gossip in Paris literary circles about the identity of “Jean de Berg” is more conclusive than the detective work on “Pauline Réage.”One rumour only, which names the wife of an influential younger novelist, has swept the field.
It is not hard to understand why those curious enough to speculate about the two pseudonyms should incline toward some name from the established community of letters in France. For either of these books to be an amateur’s one-shot seems scarcely conceivable. Different as they are from each other,
Story of O
and
The Image
both evince a quality that can’t be ascribed simply to an abundance of the usual writerly endowments of sensibility, energy, and intelligence. Such gifts, very much in evidence, have themselves been processed through a dialogue of artifices. The somber self-consciousness of the narratives could hardly be further from the lack of control and craft usually considered the expression of obsessive lust. Intoxicating as is their subject (if the reader doesn’t cut off and find it just funny or sinister), both narratives are more concerned with the “use” of erotic material than with the “expression” of it. And this use is preeminently—there is no other word for it—literary. The imagination pursuing its outrageous pleasures in
Story of O
and
The Image
remains
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