Praise for Story of O
“That Pauline Réage is a more dangerous writer than the Marquis de Sade follows from the fact that art is more persuasive than propaganda.… Aiming only to reveal, to clarify, to make real to the reader those dark and repulsive practices and emotions that his better self rejects as improbable or evil, Pauline Réage succeeds in drawing us irresistibly into her perverse world through the magnetism of her own selfless absorption in it. Like some exquisitely balanced, gently undulating instrument, she carefully inscribes the cruel shocks inflicted on her heroine’s refined sensibility—and we believe.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“An ironic fable of unfreedom, a mystic document that transcends the pornographic and even the erotic … [it] is so horrifying, outraging cherished beliefs in the sanctity of the body and in personal freedom.… To give the body, to allow it to be ravaged, exploited and totally possessed, can be an act of consequence.”
—Newsweek
“The free publication of Story of O in this country is an event of considerable importance. It is a significant measure of how far we have come in lifting the restrictions on art and our responses to it. In brief, Story of O relates the progressive willful debasement of a young and beautiful Parisian fashion photographer, O, who wants nothing more than to be a slave to her lover, René. The test is severe—sexual in method, psychological interest here has precisely to do with the use not only of erotic materials but also erotic methods, the deliberate stimulation of the reader as a part of and means to a total, authentic literary experience.”
—ELIOT FREMONT-SMITH, The New York Times
“ ‘Bestseller’ hardly covers it. Story of O has sold millions of copies, and hasn’t been out of print in more than forty years. It has influenced numerous erotic fictions, been made into two … films and given shape to countless fantasy lives.… [This is] my tribute, recognition, thanks to [Réage] for showing me, and others, the way into the chateau. Or the ways—in the first pages of the novel O enters the chateau twice, once blindfolded, once not—take your pick, it doesn’t matter. Just as it doesn’t matter how we stumble in, stupidly, haphazardly, purposefully, sex-positively—the door will open to disclose our own half-forgotten, naively imagined visions waiting there for us. Just as [Réage’s] imagination waited for her to write this most serendipitous of masterpieces, this most inevitable of visions.”
—MOLLY WEATHERFIELD, Salon
“Story of O portrays explicit scenes of bondage and violent penetration in spare, elegant prose, the purity of the writing making the novel seem reticent even as it deals with demonic desire, with whips, masks and chains.… Fifty years on, Story of O remains a powerful text … still able to touch people viscerally.”
—The Guardian (London)
“Depending on your erotic wishes and habits, Story of O will disturb you, frighten you, make you angry, make you upset, confuse you, disgust you, or turn you on. Maybe everything at once. Decades after its publication, the novel has not lost its shock value.”
—Guernica
“I read Story of O and I think, you know, if you’ve read Story of O you’ve kind of read the ultimate.”
—J. K. ROWLING
“A rare thing, a pornographic book, well-written and without a trace of obscenity.”
—GRAHAM GREENE
Keep me rather in this cage, and feed me sparingly, if you dare. Anything that brings me closer to illness and the edge of death makes me more faithful. It is only when you make me suffer that I feel safe and secure. You should never have agreed to be a god for me if you were afraid to assume the duties of a god, and we all know that they are not as tender as all that. You have already seen me cry. Now you must learn to relish my tears.
Story of O is a work of fiction.
Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
2013 Ballantine Books eBook Edition
Copyright © 1965 by Grove Press, Inc.
Introduction copyright © 2013 by Sylvia Day
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
BALLANTINE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Originally published in Paris, France
Chez Jean-Jacques Pauvert in 1954, as Histoire d’O,
Copyright © 1954 by Jean-Jacques Pauvert
“A Note on Story of O” was published in Le Belvédère,
Paris, France, Bernard Grasset Editeur,
Copyright © 1958 by Editions Bernard Grasset
eISBN: 978-0-345-54840-5
www.ballantinebooks.com
Cover design: Victoria Allen
Cover photograph: Shutterstock
v3.1
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Translator’s Note
A Note on Story of O
Preface: Happiness in Slavery
Introduction
I The Lovers of Roissy
II Sir Stephen
III Anne-Marie and the Rings
IV The Owl
The Second Ending
About the Author
Translator’s Note
In July of 1954, one of the most curious—and mysterious—novels of recent times appeared under the imprint of a young French publisher, Jean-Jacques Pauvert: Histoire d’O [Story of O]. Its author was Pauline Réage, a name completely unknown in French literary circles, where everyone knows everyone. The work was greeted with considerable respect by the critics, who none the less clearly did not know what to make of this latter-day, female Sade. Part of their circumspection no doubt derived from the fact that Jean Paulhan, himself a leading writer, critic, editor, and now member of the august Académie Française,1 wrote a Preface to the book in the form of an essay entitled “Happiness in Slavery,” which, however sympathetic, hardly helped to clarify any of the mystery surrounding the work.
During the winter following its publication, Story of O became the talk of the French salons and cafés. Even in Paris, where scandal is slow to ignite, there was an element of shock in these exchanges—that such a book, such a total anachronism, could appear, full-blown, in the mid-twentieth century. But the real interest centered around the mystery: who was Pauline Réage? Until her identity was bared, people found it difficult to assume a reasonable stance vis-à-vis the work; if Pauline Réage was the pseudonym of some eminent writer, they would feel compelled to react one way; if she were a complete unknown, another; and if indeed she were a literary hack merely seeking notoriety, then still another.
The mystery entered a new phase when, in February, 1955, the book was awarded the Prix des Deux Magots—a prize established for and generally awarded to new works of an unconventional nature, which counted highly respected novelists Raymond Queneau and Antoine Blondin among its laureates. At this point, the newspapers seized on the book—and the mystery—and headlines blared the news to the general public. Inevitably, the sanctity of the general public being menaced, the police moved in. Although there was never any official notification that an investigation was under way, numerous personalities, including Messrs. Paulhan and Pauvert, were interrogated. But suddenly, as unofficially as it had begun, the investigation ceased. It is said that the desist order was sent down by a high government official, but this remains unsubstantiated. In any event, there have never been any further censorship problems.
To this day, no one knows who Pauline Réage is. In his Preface, Paulhan speculates that the author is a woman, citing
as evidence not only the uncommon attention to details of dress and make-up, but that telling scene in which O, abandoned by her lover, René, to the torments and tortures of his Roissy colleagues, still has the (feminine) presence of mind to notice that René’s slippers are worn and frayed, and to note in her mind that she must buy him another pair.
I have never met Pauline Réage, although, through questions of the translation, I have been in indirect communication (via the French publisher, Jean-Jacques Pauvert), and received the author’s comments. I trust I am not betraying a confidence, or appearing immodest, when I say that the author has gone out of her way to say how pleased she is with those portions of the translation she had read. I long puzzled over this unusual display of literary generosity on the part of an author concerning a translator, and only recently did I discover, or suspect I had discovered, the reason for it. There exists an earlier translation of O, made in Paris several years ago. I trust I shall not be accused of a corresponding lack of generosity if I say (and I am not the first, and far from the only one, to say it) that this earlier version is less a translation than an adaptation. It reads somehow as though the adapter-translator were in fact embarrassed by the work: certain parts are glossed over; whole descriptions, nonexistent in the original, are written in; and, indeed, much of the book is paraphrased rather than translated directly. As one who had read the work in French when it first appeared, and admired not only its contents but the extreme felicity of the style, what troubled me most about the earlier English version was its seeming disdain for this obvious style. Subsequently, I learned this translator was a man, and it seemed to me that this fact alone sufficed to explain both the embarrassment—male embarrassment—manifest in his version, and also why Pauline Réage had gone out of her way to comment favorably on mine: Story of O, written by a woman, demands a woman translator, one who will humble herself before the work and be satisfied simply to render it, as faithfully as possible, without interpretation or unwanted elaboration. Faced with a work such as O, male pride, male superiority—however liberal the male, however much he may try to suppress them—will, I am certain, somehow intrude. Like O, therefore, I have tried to humble myself, to remain as faithful as possible (although, if the reader will forgive, I have attempted to stop short of slavishness) to the intent and style of the author.
Story of O is the work of an original writer, who has dared to present us with certain truths, or intimations of truth, rarely found in literature. However much one may disagree with, or even profoundly dislike, these truths (or, if you will, these ideas), Pauline Réage has done what all good artists aim for and, when they are successful, accomplish: to arouse us from the lethargy of our set ways and routine lives, prick us into consciousness, provoke a reaction (whether positive or negative, it matters little) within us; in short, to make us think. That in itself is a rare enough occurrence so that we should be grateful indeed whenever we have the good fortune to encounter it.
M. Paulhan, in speculating about the book’s conclusion, suggests that the author may have permitted herself this one small indulgence—the end—with the thought in mind of one day continuing O’s adventures. To date, however, no sequel has been forthcoming, and the present work, with its many mysteries still unsolved, is all we have.2 For beyond the more or less general consensus that the author is a woman, nothing is certain about the work. And yet, perhaps there is a kind of virtue in this, for we are thus obliged to judge the book itself, uncluttered by any outside considerations. Like O before her judges, the work stands naked and alone.
S. d’E.
1 There is a story, perhaps apocryphal, that when M. Paulhan was nominated for l’Académie Française, opponents to his candidacy placed a copy of the yellow-covered volume of O on the chair of each of the Academy members. Another version has it that the copies were so placed by members promoting his candidacy, who claimed that his discovery of and Preface to O constituted another proof of his literary acumen. Whatever the truth, M. Paulhan was promptly elected as one of France’s forty immortals.
2 Or, to be exact, almost all. A year or two after O appeared, Miss Réage wrote the preface to another somewhat mysterious work entitled l’Image, by Jean de Berg, which was published in 1956 by Les Editions de Minuit, the publishers of most of the avant-garde fiction in France since World War II. Since then, however, she has not been heard from again.
A Note on Story of O
By André Pieyre de Mandiargues
Apropos of Story of O (the object of a notoriety which its author, Madame Pauline Réage or whoever is hiding behind that mask of a perfect little girl—and she is most assuredly a woman—doubtless neither expected nor desired), people are going about—both those who have read the book and those who have as yet been unable to find a copy of the yellow-jacketed work—trying to outdo one another by asserting that it is an “erotic” book. The formula is familiar, too quickly and too easily employed. It would not be a bad idea, in this case as in others, to consider it from the vantage point of time, which is a convenient position when one finds oneself in the uncomfortable situation of having to judge an object so close at hand and so unusual that it tends to blind you.
Now, it seems fairly obvious that the time of a work of fiction, both in plot and continuity, is always a kind of past, whether or not the author likes it, whereas the time of (physical) love is specifically the present. If we accept the fact that the art of lovers, as the saying goes, is to make pleasure last as long as possible, then it is a question of a multitude of splendid and excruciating moments with neither past nor future, quite independent of one another, although they all are rather alike. The rough comparison between an alternating and a direct current is not to be discarded. Making allowances for the florid language, one might also say of lovers that they cull pleasure like a string of pearls. And when a novelist, or a writer of fiction, attempts through his narrative to re-create the fleeting intensity of these precious moments, to set them squarely before the eyes of the reader in order to arouse his senses, if his work is truly erotic it will unfold as a series of repetitious sequences punctuated here and there on rare occasions by sudden shifts of fortune which have nothing to do with the central, sensual fact, but without which the work would be unreadable. Most of the novels of Sade, and the Grandiose Trois filles et leur mère by Pierre Louÿs, are examples of this sort.
Faced with these or with other more recent works whose purpose, whether avowed or not, is fairly obvious, since everything, from plot to language, contributes to the goal of voluptuousness—Story of O is not, strictly speaking, an erotic book. In fact, of the two planes on which it is constructed, that of the mind (or rather: the soul) ruthlessly dominates that of the flesh. The picture that the four long chapters give of the modern world, the action, the characters, are all extraordinarily vivid; above all, they are not dependent upon the sensual fire as they would be in an erotic book. Here we are dealing with a genuine novel, one we should not hesitate to categorize as a mystic work. For, beneath the guise and methods of eroticism, the subject is the tragic flowering of a woman in the abdication of her freedom, in willful slavery, in humiliation, in the prostitution imposed upon her by her masters, in torture, and even in the death which, after she has suffered every other ignominy, she requests and they agree to.
It was rightly said of Sade that his is the work of a moralist. Erotic books are almost all alike in this respect: either they are working toward the elaboration of a revolutionary morality, or they echo the morality of their age, against which they are protesting. But women are little given to these Aristotelian speculations. And Pauline Réage is as completely devoid of morality as is the Portuguese Nun or Saint Therese of Avila.
The reader may be surprised by our use of the term “flowering.” Is the term apt? I think it is. In any event, what we are shown in Story of O is a complete spiritual transformation, what others would call an ascesis. Madame Réage, who has a good knowledge of English and does not mind showing it, could have entitle
d her book: A Woman’s Progress.
That this book, which is anything but vulgar, owes a debt to the sort of productions commonly found in catalogues of vile pornography, is indeed surprising; but it is also true. In the same way that Julien Gracq, in his preface to Au Château d’Argol, declaring that all battles are won or lost according to the same plans, voluntarily limited his instruments of terror to the arsenal of the Gothic novels of the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century, so Madame Réage used the tried-and-true formulas of more than a hundred volumes sold under the counter. The black leather, the little waspwaisted corsets, the whips and riding crops, the rooms sound-proofed to muffle the cries, the brandings with a red-hot iron, the intimate rings and chains: there is nothing here so original that we have not already encountered it in Unwilling Slaves, Infernal Voluptuousness; in Sonia the Domineering or Sonia Defeated; in Slavery, in The Ardent Tutelage, in Hot Days, or in the Slaves of John Krissler.… And if Pauline Réage, whose ability to construct a story is, as I have said, that of a very great novelist, thus refuses to exercise her imagination when dwelling on details, there is good reason to believe that it is a matter of pride, that she wishes to glory in triumphing through methods which are in the public domain. It has been noted that the owl costume O wears in the last chapter is actually like a mask by Leonor Fini, whose sensual and disturbing qualities I had occasion to comment upon not long ago. Madame Réage has seized upon this cast-off piece of clothing for a masked ball and has infused it with a prodigious and sinister life; through an act of admirable intuition, she has understood the role for which it was suited, and then follows the major scene at the end, when O is exposed to public scorn: the display of a body which is no longer anything but an object, flouted beneath the plumage, offered to the first comer. Then: death. Inevitably; woman, through the decline of her flesh, having become pure spirit.
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