ON PORNOGRAPHY
209
cem."
But the matter is not so simple. He's right to dismiss an
analysis of O's state of mind in psychiatric terms that would reduce
the book's subject to, say, "masochism."
As
Paulhan says, "the
heroine's ardor" is totally inexplicable in terms of the conventional
psychiatric vocabulary. The fact that the novel employs some of the
conventional motifs and trappings of the theater of sadomasochism
has itself to be explained. But then, Mandiargues has fallen into an
error which is no less reductive and only slightly less vulgar. Surely,
the only alternative to the psychiatric reductions is not the religious
vocabulary. But that only these two foreshortened alternatives exist
can, perhaps, be explained as yet one more echo of the bone-deep
denigration of the range and seriousness of sexual experience that
still rules this culture, for all its much-advertised new permissiveness.
My own view is that "Pauline Reage" wrote an erotic book.
The notion implicit in
Story of
0 that eros is a sacrament is not the
"truth" behind the literal (erotic) sense of the book-the lascivious
rites of enslavement and degradation performed upon O-but, exactly,
a metaphor for it. Why say something stronger, when the statement
can't really
mean
anything stronger? But despite the virtual incom–
prehensibility to most educated people today of the substantive ex–
perience behind religious vocabulary, there is a continuing piety
toward the grandeur of emotions that went into that vocabulary. The
religious imagination survives for most people as not just the primary,
but virtually the only credible instance of an imagination working in
a total way.
No wonder, then, that the new or radically revamped forms of
the total imagination which have arisen in the past century-notably,
those of the artist, the erotomane and the madman-have chronically
tended to borrow from the prestige of the religious vocabulary. And
total experiences, of which there are many kinds, tend again and
again to be apprehended only as revivals or translations of the
religious imagination. To try to make a fresh way of talking at the
most serious, ardent and enthusiastic level, heading off the religious
encapsulation, is one of the primary intellectual tasks of future
thought.
As
matters stand, with everything from
Story of
0 to Mao
reabsorbed into the incorrigible survival of the religious impulse, all
thinking and feeling gets devalued. (Hegel made perhaps the grandest
attempt to create a post-religious vocabulary, out of philosophy, that
would command the treasures of passion and credibility and emotive
