ON PORNOGRAPHY
: 193
abundance of the usual writerIy endowments of sensibility, energy
and intelligence. Such gifts were surely present, but one is also
aware of the extent to which these gifts have themselves been pro–
cessed through a dialogue of artifices. The degree of somber seIf–
consciousness with which the narratives are executed could hardly be
farther from the lack of control and craft usually considered as ac–
companying the expression of obsessive lust. The fact is that, intoxi–
cating as is their subject (if the reader doesn't cut off "and find it
just funny or sinister), both narratives have more to do 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
0 and
The
Image
is firmly anchored to certain notions of the
formal
consumma–
tion of intense feeling, of procedures for exhausting an experience,
that connect as much with literature and recent literary history as
with the ahistorical domain of eros. And why not? Experiences
aren't pornographic; only expressions and representations-structures
of the imagination-are. This is why what a pornographic book can
make the reader think of, mainly, is other pornographic books, rather
than sex unmediated-and this not necessarily to the detriment of his
erotic excitement.
To take only one of many connections with the idea of literature
as such projected by
Story of
0: what resonates throughout the
book is a voluminous body of pornographic or "libertine" literature,
mostly trash, in both French and English, going back to the eighteenth
century. The most obvious reference is to Sade. But here one must
not think only of the writings of Sade himself, but of the reinterpreta–
tion of Sade by French literary intellectuals after WorId War II,
a critical gesture perhaps comparable in its importance and influence
upon educated literary taste and upon the actual direction of serious
fiction in France to the reappraisal of James launched just before
World War II in the United States, except that the French reap–
praisal has lasted longer and seems to have struck deeper roots. (Sade,
of course, had never been forgotten. He was read enthusiastically
by Flaubert, Baudelaire and most of the other radical geniuses of
French literature of the second half of the nineteenth century. He
was one of the patron saints of the Surrealist movement, and figures
importantly in the thought of Breton. But it was the writings after
1945 that really consolidated Sade's position as an inexhaustible point
