ON PORNOGRAPHY
201
O's project enacts, on another scale, no more than what's
performed by the existence of pornographic literature itself. What
pornographic literature does is precisely to drive a wedge between
one's existence as a full human being and one's existence as a sexual
being-while in ordinary life one hopes to prevent such a wedge
from being driven. Normally we don't experience, at least don't want
to experience, our sexual fulfillment as distinct from or opposed to our
personal fulfillment. But perhaps in part they are distinct, whether
we like it or not. Insofar as strong sexual feeling does involve an
obsessive degree of attention, it surely does contain experiences in
which one can feel one is losing one's "self." The literature that goes
from Sade through Surrealism to these more recent books precisely
capitalizes on that mystery, isolates that and makes the reader aware
of it, invites him to participate
in
it.
This literature is both an invocation of the erotic in its darkest
sense and, in certain cases, an exorcism. The devout, solemn mood
of
Story of
0 is fairly unrelieved; an example of a work of mixed
moods on the same theme of a journey toward the estrangement of
the self from the self is Bufiuel's film
L'Age d'Or.
Perhaps it would
be worth positing that pornography as a literary form works with
both a pattern equivalent to tragedy (as in
Story of
0) in which
the erotic subject-victim heads inexorably toward death and an
equivalent to comedy (as in
The
Image)
in which the obsessional
pursuit of sexual exercise is rewarded by a terminal gratification,
union with the uniquely desired sexual partner.
IV
Bataille is the writer who works with a darker sense of the
erotic, its perils of fascination and humiliation, than probably any–
one. His
Histoire de l'Oeil
(first published in 1921) and
Madame
Edwarda
(1941)
,2
qualify as pornographic books so far as their
theme is sexual quest, an all-engrossing quest which annihilates every
consideration of persons extraneous to their roles in the sexual drama–
turgy,
and the fulfillment of this quest is depicted graphically. But
2. It's unfortunate that the only translation available in this country of what
purports to be
Madame Edwarda,
that included in
The Olympia Reader,
pp.
662-673, published by Grove Press two years ago, gives just half the work. Only
the
recit
is translated. But
Madame Edwarda
isn't a
rlcit
padded out with a
preface also by Bataille. It is a two-part invention-essay and
rlcit-and
one part
is
almost unintelligible without the other.
