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SUSAN SONTAG
of several machines in collaboration with each other-seems mainly
designed to make possible an endless, nonculrninating kind of ulti–
mately affectless activity. In contrast, there is a definite movement
in
Story of
0; a logic of events, as opposed to Sade's static principle
of the catalogue or encyclopedia. This plot movement is certainly
abetted by the fact that, for most of the narrative, the author tolerates
at least a vestige of the unit of "the couple" (0 and Rene, 0 and
Sir Stephen)-a unit generally repudiated in pornographic literature.
And, of course, the figure of 0 herself is different. Her feelings,
however insistently they adhere to one theme, have some modulation
and are carefully described.
If
0 is passive, she is scarcely like those
ninnies in Sade's tales who are detained in remote castles to be
tormented by cliques of pitiless noblemen and satanic priests. And 0
is represented as active, too; literally active, as in the seduction of
Jacqueline, and more important, profoundly active in her own pas–
sivity. Only superficially does 0 resemble her predecessors in Sade's
writings. There is never any personal consciousness, except that of the
author, in Sade's books. But 0 does possess a consciousness, from
which vantage point her story is told. (Although written in the third
person, the narrative never departs from O's point of view or
understands more than she understands.) Sade's effort is to neutralize
sexuality of all its personal associations, to represent a kind of im–
pe~nal-or
pure-sexual encounter. But the narrative of "Pauline
Reage" does show 0 reacting in quite different ways (including love)
to different people, notably to Rene, to Sir Stephen, to Jacqueline
and to Anne-Marie.
Sade, of course, is more representative of the major conventions
of pornographic writing. So far as the pornographic imagination tends
to make one person interchangeable with another and all people
interchangeable with things, it's not functional to describe a person
as 0 is described-in terms of a certain state of her will (which she's
trying to discard) and of her understanding. Pornography is mainly
populated by creatures like Sade's Justine, endowed with neither
will, intelligence nor even, apparently, memory. Justine lives in a
perpetual state of astonishment, never learning anything from the
strikingly repetitious violations of her innocence. After each fresh
betrayal she gets in place for another round, as uninstructed by her
experience as ever, ready to trust the next masterful libertine and
