Volume 26, Number 9 · May 31, 1979
Forbidden Fruit
By Michael Wood
Story of the Eye
by Georges Bataille, translated by Joachim Neugroschel
Urizen Books, 120 pp., $5.95
Blue of Noon
by Georges Bataille, translated by Harry Mathews
Urizen Books, 155 pp., $6.95
What we call pornography has many guises, and it may seem a long way from the dark, patrician pleasures of the Marquis de Sade to the topless, bottomless, endless promises of Forty-Second Street. Roughly the same distance, perhaps, as there is between literary pornography like Story of the Eye and The Story of O and the flood of current films with titles like Steam Heat, Hot Honey, Love in Strange Places, and Pussycat Ranch. And yet all pornography, high and low, hard and soft, innocent and morbid, inhabits a world of fantasy. It makes dreams visible or legible. 'Experiences aren't pornographic,' Susan Sontag wrote in a remarkable essay in 1967, 'only images and representations are.'
Review, 3146 words
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