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SUSAN SONTA6
about situations of violence. The same principle is at work in
all
pornography. It's not that the characters in pornography cannot
conceivably possess any emotions. They can. Still, the principles of
underreacting and frenetic agitation make the emotional climate
self–
canceling, so that the basic tone of pornography is affectless, emo–
tionless.
However, degrees of this affectlessness can be distinguished.
Justine is the stereotype sex-object figure (invariably female, since
most pornography is written by men or from the stereotyped male
point of view): a bewildered victim, whose consciousness, as I have
said, is never changed in the slightest by her experiences. But 0 is an
adept; grateful, whatever the cost in pain and fear, for the oJ>
portunity to be initiated into a mystery. That mystery is the loss of
the self. 0 learns, she suffers, she changes. Step by step she becomes
more what she is, a process identical with the emptying out of her–
self. In the vision of the world presented by
Story of
0, the highest
good is the transcendence of personality. The plot's movement is not
horizontal, but a kind of ascent through degradation. 0 does not
simply become identical with her sexual availability, but wants to reach
the perfection of becoming an "object." Her condition, if it can
be
characterized as one of "dehumanization," is not to be understood
as a by-product of her situation of enslavement to Rene, Sir Stephen
and the other men at Roissy. It's exactly the point of her situation,
something she seeks and eventually attains. Her achievement is rep–
resented in the last scene of the book when she's led .to a party,
mutilated, in chains, unrecognizable, costumed (as an owl) -so con–
vincingly no longer human that none of the guests even thinks of
speaking to her directly.
O's quest is neatly summed up in the expressive letter which
serves her for a name. "0" suggests a cartoon of her sex, not her
individual sex but simply woman; it also stand for the void, a vacuity,
a nothing. But what
Story of
0 unfolds is a spiritual paradox, that
of the full void and of the vacuity that is also a plenum. The power
of the book lies exactly in the anguish stirred up by the continuing
presence of this paradox. "Pauline Reage" raises, in a far more
organic and sophisticated manner than Sade does with his clumsy
expositions and discourses, the question of the status of human
personality itself. But whereas Sade is interested in the obliteration
of personality from the viewpoint of power and liberty, the author
