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SUSAN SONTAG
Sade's books is the consequence of his imaginative failure to confront
the inevitable goal or haven of a truly systematic venture of the
pornographic imagination. Death is the only end to the odyssey of the
pornographic imagination when it becomes systematic; that is, when
it comes to be focused on the pleasures of transgression rather than
mere pleasure itself. Since he could not or would not arrive at
his
ending, Sade stalled. He multiplied and thickened his narrative;
tediously reduplicated orgiastic permutations and combinations. And
he regularly interrupted a bout of rape or buggery to deliver to his
victims his latest reworkings of lengthy sermons on what real "En–
lightenment" means-the nasty truth about God, society, nature, the
individual, virtue. Bataille manages to eschew anything resembling
the counter-idealisms which are Sade's blasphemies (and thereby
perpetuate the banished idealism lying behind those fantasies); his
blasphemies are autonomous.
Sade's books, the Wagnerian music-dramas of pornographic
literature, are neither subtle nor compact. Bataille achieves his effects
with far more economical means: a chamber ensemble of noninter–
changeable personages instead of Sade's operatic multiplication of
sexual virtuosi and professional victims. Extreme compression is the
artistic means which Bataille chooses to render his radical negatives.
And it works. This is why Bataille's lean work and gnomic thought
go farther than Sade's. Even in pornography, less can be more.
Bataille also has offered distinctly original and effective solu–
tions to one of the perennial formal problems of pornographic nar–
ration: the ending. The most common procedure has been an end
which lay no claim to any internal necessity. Hence, Adorno re–
marked that pornography has neither beginning, middle nor end. But
it does. That the end is abrupt and, by conventional novel stand–
ards, unmotivated, is not necessarily objectionable. (The discovery,
midway in a science-fiction novel, of an alien planet may be no less
abrupt or unmotivated.) Abruptness, an endemic facticity of en–
counters and chronically renewing encounters, is not some unfortu–
natl'" defect of the pornographic narration which one might wish
remJved in order for the books to qualify as literature. These fea–
tures are constitutive of the very imagination or vision of the world
which goes into pornography. They supply, in many cases, exactly
the ending that's needed.
But this doesn't preclude other types of endings. One notable
