“Story of O” by Anne Desclos, living as Dominique Aury, writing as Pauline Réage: Nameless, uncreated character; author’s pseudonyms and contradictions.

If you have never read this famous work of literary pornography (1) and are unfamiliar with the controversy surrounding it, I recommend the “The Story of the Story of O,” an article by Carmela Ciuraru (2).

The author, herself, says the novel “was a way of expressing a certain number of childhood and adolescent fantasies that persisted into my later life, that not only refused to go away but came back time and again” (3, p. 73). “In fact, the first sixty pages of O are literally copies of these fantasies. I won’t say dictated by them…but transcribed from them” (3, pp. 88-89).

“I didn’t even have the feeling I was creating a character. What O admits to in this book, what she ‘confesses,’ is the confession of a ghost…without the normal marks of identity, little more than a low voice, like a shadow that murmurs in the night” (3, p. 146).

“For a long time I’ve lived two parallel lives: work and family on the one hand, and love or loves on the other, and I have meticulously kept those two lives quite separate, so separate in fact that the invisible wall between them seems to me normal and natural” (3, p. 147).

“I’m the first to admit that I’m a walking contradiction. It took me a long time to realize that, and even longer to come to terms with it. My use of a pseudonym in my writing is much more than a mere artifice; it reveals and denounces that basic contradiction…” (3, p. 148).

“…this part of me known as Pauline Réage…is not me entirely and in some obscure way is…I move from one me to the other…Story of O is a fairy tale for another world, a world where some part of me lived for a long time…The book of an unknown woman, and that that woman is I continues to amaze me…and all my contradictions are, as you see, still with me” (3, pp. 149-150).

Search “nameless,” “pseudonyms,” and “contradictions” for previous posts on these recurring topics.

1. Pauline Réage. Story of O [1954/1965]. New York, Ballantine Books, 1973.

2. Carmela Ciuraru. “The Story of the Story of O.” Guernica, June 15, 2011.  https://www.guernicamag.com/ciuraru_6_15_11/
3. Régine Deforges. Confessions of O: Conversations with Pauline Réage [1975]. New York, Viking Press, 1979.