208
SUSAN SONTAG
the well-known states of the religious imagination, to take another
example, operate in the same cannibalistic way, engorging all materi–
als made available to them for retranslation into phenomena saturated
with the religious polarities (sacred and profane, etc.).
The latter example, for obvious reasons, touches closely to the
present subject. Religious metaphors abound in a good deal of modem
erotic literature (in Genet, among others) and in some works of
pornographic literature, too.
Story of
0, particularly, is filled with
religious metaphors for the ordeal that 0 undergoes. 0 "wanted to
believe." Her drastic condition of total personal servitude to those
who use her sexually is repeatedly described as a mode of salvation.
With anguish and anxiety, she surrenders herself; and "henceforth
there were no more hiatuses, no dead time, no remission." While
she has, to be sure, entirely lost her freedom, 0 has gained the right
to participate in what is described as virtually a sacramental rite.
The word "open" and the expression "opening her legs" were,
on her lover's lips, charged with such uneasiness and power that
she could never hear them without experiencing a kind of in–
ternal prostration, a sacred submission, as though a god, and
not he, had spoken to her.
Though she fears the whip and other cruel mistreatments before
they are inflicted on her, "yet when it was over she was happy to have
gone through it, happier still if it had been especially cruel and
prolonged." The whipping, branding and mutilating are described
(from the point of view of
her
consciousness) as ritual ordeals which
test the faith of someone being initiated into an ascetic spiritual dis–
cipline. The "perfect submissiveness" that her original lover, and then
Sir Stephen, demand of her seems to echo the extinction of the self
explicitly required of a Jesuit novice or Zen pupil. 0 is "that absent–
minded person who has yielded up her wiIl in order to be totally
remade," to
be
made fit to serve a will far more powerful and
authoritative than her own.
As
might be expected, the straightforwardness of the religious
metaphors in
Story of
0 has evoked some correspondingly straight
readings of the book. The novelist Mandiargues, whose preface pre–
cedes PauIhan's in the American translation just published, doesn't
hesitate to describe
Story of
0 as "a mystic work," and therefore
"not, strictly speaking, an erotic book." What
Story of
0 depicts
"is
a complete spiritual transformation, what others would call an
as-
