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SUSAN SONTAG
of departure for radical thinking about the possibilities of the human
condition. The well-known essay of Beauvoir, the indefatigable schol–
arly biography undertaken by Gilbert Lely and writings as yet untrans–
lated by Blanchot, Paulhan, Bataille, Klossowski and Leiris constitute
the most eminent documents of the postwar reevaluation which
secured this astonishingly hardy modification of French literary sen–
sibility. The quality and theoretical density of the French interest in
Sade remains virtually incomprehensible to English and American
literary intellectuals, for whom Sade is perhaps an exemplary figure
in the history of psychopathology, both individual and social, but
inconceivable as someone to be taken seriously, in an ahistorical con–
text, as a "thinker.")
But it's not only Sade, and both the problems he raised and the
ones raised in his name, that stands behind
Story of
O. There are
also the conventions of the "libertine" potboilers written in nine–
teenth-century France, such as those which take place in a fantasy
England populated by brutal aristocrats with enormous sexual equip–
ment and violent tastes, along the axis of sadomasochism, to match.
The name of O's second lover-proprietor, Sir Stephen, is clearly a
reference, a kind of homage, to this highly period fantasy, as is the
Sir Edmond of
Histoire de l'Oeil.
What's important to note is that the
allusion to a stock type of pornographic trash stands, as a literary
reference, on exactly the same footing as the anachronistic setting
of most of the action, which is lifted straight from Sade's books.
The narrative opens in Paris with 0 joining her lover Rene in a car
and driving around, but most of the subsequent action is removed to
more familiar if less plausible territory: that conveniently isolated
chateau, luxuriously furnished and lavishly staffed with servants,
where a group of rich men congregate and to which women are
brought as virtual slaves in order to be the objects, shared in com–
mon, of the men's brutal and inventive lust. There are whips and
chains, masks worn by the men when the women are admitted to
their presence, great fires burning in the hearth, unspeakable sexual
indignities, floggings and more ingenious kinds of physical mutilation,
several lesbian scenes when the excitement of the orgies in the great
drawing room seem to flag. In short, the novel comes equipped with
some of the creakiest items in the repertoire of pornography.
How seriously are we to take this? A bare inventory of the plot
might give the impression that
Story of
0 is not so much pornography
