What Bataille exposes in extreme erotic experience is its subterranean connection with death. Bataille conveys this insight not by devising sexual acts whose consequences are lethal, thereby littering his narratives with corpses. (In the terrifying Histoire de l’Oeil, for instance, only one person dies; and the book ends with the three sexual adventurers, having debauched their way through France and Spain, acquiring a yacht in Gibraltar to pursue their infamies elsewhere.) His more effective method is to invest each action with a weight, a disturbing gravity, that feels authentically “mortal”.
Yet despite the obvious differences of scale and finesse of execution, the conceptions of Sade and Bataille have some resemblances. Like Bataille, Sade was not so much a sensualist as someone with an intellectual project: to explore the scope of transgression. And he shares with Bataille the same ultimate identification of sex and death. But Sade could never have agreed with Bataille that “the truth of eroticism is tragic”. People often die in Sade’s books. But these deaths always seem unreal. They’re no more convincing than those mutilations inflicted during the evening’s orgies from which the victims recover completely the next morning following the use of a wondrous salve. From the perspective of Bataille, a reader can’t help being caught up short by Sade’s bad faith about death. (Of course, many pornographic books that are much less interesting and accomplished than those of Sade share this bad faith.)
Indeed, one might speculate that the fatiguing repetitiveness of 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 becomes 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 his fictional alter egos regularly interrupted a bout of rape or buggery to deliver to their victims his latest reworkings of lengthy sermons on what real “Enlightenment” means—the nasty truth about God, society, nature, individuality, virtue. Bataille manages to eschew anything resembling the counter-idealisms which are Sade’s blasphemies (and which 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 non-interchangeable personages, instead of Sade’s operatic multiplication of sexual virtuosi and career victims. Bataille renders his radical negatives through extreme compression. The gain, apparent on every page, enables his lean work and gnomic thought to go further than Sade’s. Even in pornography, less can be more.
Bataille also has offered distinctly original and effective solutions to one perennial problem of pornographic narration: the ending. The most common procedure has been to end in a way that lays no claim to any internal necessity. Hence, Adorno could judge it the mark of pornography that it has neither beginning nor middle nor end. But Adorno is being unperceptive. Pornographic narratives do end—admittedly with abruptness and, by conventional novel standards, without motivation. This 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 encounters and chronically renewing encounters, is not some unfortunate defect of the pornographic narration which one might wish removed in order for the books to qualify as literature. These features 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 feature of Histoire de l’Oeil and, to a lesser extent, The Image, considered as works of art, is their evident interest in more systematic or rigorous kinds of ending which still remain within the terms of the pornographic imagination—not seduced by the solutions of a more realistic or less abstract fiction. Their solution, considered very generally, is to construct a narrative that is, from the beginning, more rigorously controlled, less spontaneous and lavishly descriptive.
In The Image the narrative is dominated by a single metaphor, “the image” (though the reader can’t understand the full meaning of the title until the end of the novel). At first, the metaphor appears to have a clear single application. “Image” seems to mean “flat” object or “two-dimensional surface” or “passive reflection”—all referring to the girl Anne whom Claire instructs the narrator to use freely for his own sexual purposes, making the girl into “a perfect slave”. But the book is broken exactly in the middle (“Section V” in a short book of ten sections) by an enigmatic scene that introduces another sense of “image”. Claire, alone with the narrator, shows him a set of strange photographs of Anne in obscene situations; and these are described in such a way as to insinuate a mystery in what has been a brutally straightforward, if seemingly unmotivated, situation. From this cæsura to the end of the book, the reader will have simultaneously to carry the awareness of the fictionally actual “obscene” situation being described and to keep attuned to hints of an oblique mirroring or duplication of that situation. That burden (the two perspectives) will be relieved only in the final pages of the book, when, as the title of the last section has it, “Everything Resolves Itself.” The narrator discovers that Anne is not the erotic plaything of Claire donated gratuitously to him, but Claire’s “image” or “projection”, sent out ahead to teach the narrator how to love her.
The structure of Histoire de l’Oeil is equally rigorous, and more ambitious in scope. Both novels are in the first person; in both, the narrator is male, and one of a trio whose sexual interconnections constitute the story of the book. But the two narratives are organized on very different principles. “Jean de Berg” describes how something came to be known that was not known by the narrator; all the pieces of action are clues, bits of evidence; and the ending is a surprise. Bataille is describing an action that is really intrapsychic: three people sharing (without conflict) a single fantasy, the acting out of a collective perverse will. The emphasis in The Image is on behaviour, which is opaque, unintelligible. The emphasis in Histoire de l’Oeil is on fantasy first, and then on its correlation with some spontaneously “invented” act. The development of the narrative follows the phases of acting out. Bataille is charting the stages of the gratification of an erotic obsession which haunts a number of commonplace objects. His principle of organization is thus a spatial one: a series of things, arranged in a definite sequence, are tracked down and exploited, in some convulsive erotic act. The obscene playing with or defiling of these objects, and of people in their vicinity, constitutes the action of the novella. When the last object (the eye) is used up in a transgression more daring than any preceding, the narrative ends. There can be no revelation or surprises in the story, no new “knowledge”, only further intensifications of what is already known. These seemingly unrelated elements really are related; indeed, all versions of the same thing. The egg in the first chapter is simply the earliest version of the eyeball plucked from the Spaniard in the last.
Each specific erotic fantasy is also a generic fantasy—of performing what is “forbidden”—which generates a surplus atmosphere of excruciating restless sexual intensity. At times the reader seems to be witness to a heartless debauched fulfillment; at other times, simply in attendance at the remorseless progress of the negative. Bataille’s works, better than any others I know of, indicate the aesthetic possibilities of pornography as an art form: Histoire de l’Oeil being the most accomplished artistically of all the pornographic prose fictions I’ve read, and Madame Edwarda the most original and powerful intellectually.
To speak of the aesthetic possibilities of pornography as an art form and as a form of thinking may seem insensitive or grandio
se when one considers what acutely miserable lives people with a full-time specialized sexual obsession usually lead. Still, I would argue that pornography yields more than the truths of individual nightmare. Convulsive and repetitious as this form of the imagination may be, it does generate a vision of the world that can claim the interest (speculative, aesthetic) of those who are not erotomanes. Indeed, this interest resides in precisely what are customarily dismissed as the limits of pornographic thinking.
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The prominent characteristics of all products of the pornographic imagination are their energy and their absolutism.
The books generally called pornographic are those whose primary, exclusive, and overriding preoccupation is with the depiction of sexual “intentions” and “activities”. One could also say sexual “feelings”, except that the word seems redundant. The feelings of the personages deployed by the pornographic imagination are, at any given moment, either identical with their “behaviour” or else a preparatory phase, that of “intention”, on the verge of breaking into “behaviour” unless physically thwarted. Pornography uses a small crude vocabulary of feeling, all relating to the prospects of action: feeling one would like to act (lust); feeling one would not like to act (shame, fear, aversion). There are no gratuitous or non-functioning feelings; no musings, whether speculative or imagistic, which are irrelevant to the business at hand. Thus, the pornographic imagination inhabits a universe that is, however repetitive the incidents occurring within it, incomparably economical. The strictest possible criterion of relevance applies: everything must bear upon the erotic situation.
The universe proposed by the pornographic imagination is a total universe. It has the power to ingest and metamorphose and translate all concerns that are fed into it, reducing everything into the one negotiable currency of the erotic imperative. All action is conceived of as a set of sexual exchanges. Thus, the reason why pornography refuses to make fixed distinctions between the sexes or allow any kind of sexual preference or sexual taboo to endure can be explained “structurally”. The bisexuality, the disregard for the incest taboo, and other similar features common to pornographic narratives function to multiply the possibilities of exchange. Ideally, it should be possible for everyone to have a sexual connection with everyone else.
Of course the pornographic imagination is hardly the only form of consciousness that proposes a total universe. Another is the type of imagination that has generated modern symbolic logic. In the total universe proposed by the logician’s imagination, all statements can be broken down or chewed up to make it possible to rerender them in the form of the logical language; those parts of ordinary language that don’t fit are simply lopped off. Certain of the well-known states of the religious imagination, to take another example, operate in the same cannibalistic way, engorging all materials 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 on the present subject. Religious metaphors abound in a good deal of modern erotic literature—notably in Genet—and in some works of pornographic literature, too. Story of O makes heavy use of religious metaphors for the ordeal that O undergoes. O “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, O 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 internal 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 discipline. The “perfect submissiveness” that her original lover and then Sir Stephen demand of her echoes the extinction of the self explicitly required of a Jesuit novice or Zen pupil. O is “that absent-minded person who has yielded up her will 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 O has evoked some correspondingly straight readings of the book. The novelist Mandiargues, whose preface precedes Paulhan’s in the American translation, doesn’t hesitate to describe Story of O as “a mystic work”, and therefore “not, strictly speaking, an erotic book”. What Story of O depicts “is a complete spiritual transformation, what others would call an ascesis”. But the matter is not so simple. Mandiargues is correct in dismissing a psychiatric analysis of O’s state of mind that would reduce the book’s subject to, say, “masochism”. As Paulhan says, “the heroine’s ardour” 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 theatre of sadomasochism has itself to be explained. But Mandiargues has fallen into an error almost as 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 testifies once again to 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 Réage” wrote an erotic book. The notion implicit in Story of O 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 incomprehensibility to most educated people today of the substantive experience 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, the left revolutionary, and the madman—have chronically borrowed 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 O 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 appropriateness that were gathered into the religious vocabulary. But his most interesting followers steadily undermined the abstract meta-religious language in which he had bequeathed his thought, and concentrated instead on the specific social and practical applications of his revolutionary form of process-thinking, historicism. Hegel’s failure lies like a gigantic disturbing hulk across the intellectual landscape. And no one has been big enough, pompous enough, or energetic enough since Hegel to attempt the task again.)
And so we remain, careening among our overvaried choices of kinds of total imagination, of species of total seriousness. Perhaps the deepest spiritual resonance of the care
er of pornography in its “modern” Western phase under consideration here (pornography in the Orient or the Moslem world being something very different) is this vast frustration of human passion and seriousness since the old religious imagination, with its secure monopoly on the total imagination, began in the late eighteenth century to crumble. The ludicrousness and lack of skill of most pornographic writing, films, and painting is obvious to everyone who has been exposed to them. What is less often remarked about the typical products of the pornographic imagination is their pathos. Most pornography—the books discussed here cannot be excepted—points to something more general than even sexual damage. I mean the traumatic failure of modern capitalist society to provide authentic outlets for the perennial human flair for high-temperature visionary obsessions, to satisfy the appetite for exalted self-transcending modes of concentration and seriousness. The need of human beings to transcend “the personal” is no less profound than the need to be a person, an individual. But this society serves that need poorly. It provides mainly demonic vocabularies in which to situate that need and from which to initiate action and construct rites of behavior. One is offered a choice among vocabularies of thought and action which are not merely self-transcending but self-destructive.
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But the pornographic imagination is not just to be understood as a form of psychic absolutism—some of whose products we might be able to regard (in the role of connoisseur, rather than client) with more sympathy or intellectual curiosity or aesthetic sophistication.