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Tuesday, September 4, 2007

Sublimating Sex to Story: “Writer of O”

filed under: Pomoerotic by Melissa Gira

I spent the night in bed with Writer of O, which is a sort of triple narrative: the revelation of the novel’s author, Dominique Aury, as a prominent intellectual, of her affair with another member of the literary establishment, and of how a novel can — sometimes — be a love letter.

“The mystery of sex is dwarfed by the mystery of what French intellectuals are talking about.”
- Kyle Smith, New York Post, in his review

The reviews were as mixed as a sex film can get, though, as some of the critics themselves complained, there’s not so much sex in this film as the story of sex.

Anaïs Nin appears briefly, just a glimpse lifted from Robert Snyder’s 70’s-era “Anaïs Nin Observed,” and provokes this quote I had just read in Noel Riley Fitch’s biography of this other mythic, erotic figure:

“I believe that because of Anaïs I learned that the journal creates me as much as I create the journal.”
- Leah Schweitzer

We do not conduct sex in isolation of how it is: to be remembered, to be retold. (And it needn’t be so grand as all that. A girlfriend offered that her chat transcripts and sent messages box had started to feel like her diary.) We are each our own historians of sex. Though there may be more of us conducting that investigation publicly than there ever has been before, what stirs one to do so has not changed that much over time.

Now we have benefit of sidebars, links, and backmatter. Now we have infinite time and slightly less infinite freedom to provide context to our sex. We aren’t — generally — as criminal for speaking and writing sex as Dominique Aury, who herself wrote as a private act…

‘…lying on her side with her feet tucked up under her, a soft black pencil in her right hand… the girl was writing the way you speak in the dark when you’ve held back the words of love too long and they flow out at last. For the first time in her life, she was writing without hesitation, without stopping, rewriting or discarding; she was writing the way one breathes, or dreams… she was still writing when the street cleaners came by at the first touch of dawn.’ (”La Fille Amoureuse,” Dominique Aury on writing “L’historie d’O”)

… never intended for anyone but her lover, Jean Paulhan, who later wrote the preface, “Happiness In Slavery,” when it was published.

Beyond literary sexual acts that can endure, just as this love letter loosed has, what persists is the practice of framing such acts as the telling of the truth of sex, as, we believe, the most true sex to be the sex we have. Even if, as in Aury’s case, the sex she tells was the sex of her fantasies, of her longings. Even if it is clear that she need never have been bound herself to inspire thousands to seek the same. And for, of course, the writing to be as taut and perfect as someone who had lived it. In fact, perhaps even more so.

So, then, is the truth of sex possibly more universal — if there is such a thing — when it must be veiled and protected for release? Or might we do well with our freedom and be as precise and faithful to the story, that it might live more completely beyond our own? Or maybe, as Nin’s student offers, is it in the writing of sex that we change ourselves? And if so, is there any way to relate the story of sex without changing sex, too?

More: Guardian UK: “I wrote the Story of O”; Salon: “The mother of masochism

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