Eye, Haunted

Third person intense viewpoint

Oh, O!

Pauline Réage was the pen name of a Frenchwoman, an intellectual who was mistress to a famous French intellectual man in the 1940s and 1950s. Alas, the man was married, and would not leave his wife, who was quite ill. Thus the lovers could only meet at the odd moments, and rare was the night ‘Pauline’ could share with her love.

Feverish with longing, and fearful lest she lose his affections to a younger woman, Réage wrote her lover love-letters of a most unusual kind. She wrote him a pornographic tale, which he had published, and which became world-celebrated: L’Histoire d’O or The Story of O.

This tale is justly famous. Throughout most of its telling, up to the throw-away ending (which Réage later admitted was more a stop than a conclusion), the tale holds a luminous, hypnotic quality. It haunts one.

It also haunted its authoress. Its quality stems from these factors:

• The state of mind of its authoress
• The subject matter of the tale
• The circumstances under which it was written

Réage wrote O in a sort of delirium. She longed to be with her lover and could not; when writers and talesmen find themselves in these straits, they usually turn to love-letters or love-poetry, addressed to the object of desire. In the course of writing these notes and verses, the lover feels she is with her love, that he is present with her, looking over her shoulder, hearing her voice, nodding and smiling and encouraging. Addressing such lines to the lover, she brings his presence into sharper focus. This is one of the flowers of the madness of love. But O was no love-letter, but a tale, and the fever of Réage burns through the prose and comes, in a way, to infect the reader.

The tale was, of course, pornographic, and engaged in sadomasochistic fantasies. The best pornography is Romance, or Fantasy that takes place in a lustful quarter of Eartherea. Since these fantasies (not those of Réage, she tells us, but of her lover) are un peu bizarre, they involve the creation of a demimonde, an underground association of men and women involved with these unusual tastes and activities. Every demimonde has its flavour of Eartherea and ‘unreality,’ which strengthens the natural bent of the pornographer towards the realization of the unreal. So these streets of Paris, the château at Roissy, and the fêtes in the midi, only look like France of the 1950s. In truth they belong to Eartherea.

Réage could see her lover in the day, at work, at lunch, after work. It was only in the night, in the late night, alone in her room, that she could not have him, and longed for him the most. She wrote O late in the night, until the dawn, when she would wash and dress and go to work, just like a million other Parisiennes. What is written in the small hours, when the streets outside are quiet and dark, when the rest of the world lapses into dream, into unreality, comes to glow with that unearthly fervor, it acquires a particular earnestness and focus. Also what is written in a rush, easily, in utter self-absorption, as though the writing were the automatic product of dreams and sleep, has both that focus and that unearthly, dreamlike, haunting quality.

The work was penned without plan or structure; an opening that has no preparation, no setup, no introduction of its world or characters, launches O herself along with us into a strange phantastical adventure. She finds herself in her car with her lover, even as one would come to remember the onset of a dream; the lover has his driver take her to the château where she commences her training as a slave. She accepts this without a murmur, as I recall; her motives are obscure as are his; this too partakes of the quality of a dream or even a game they both enter into, and they follow its strictures because those are the rules of this particular game. With a game, you may stop playing, but so long as you play, you must obey its rules (or at least you must appear to obey the rules, if your aim is to cheat).

Eye Shadow

There is one other aspect to L’Histoire d’O that contributes to its haunting quality, and that is the point of view Réage chose. It would be called ‘third person subjective’ by most, but I call it ‘third person intense.’

It is a most extreme form of third person viewpoint. The narrator or talesman is completely suppressed; we the audience must swim inside O’s mind, her thoughts, and her feelings. We never see a scene where O is not present, nor do we see a scene except through O’s eyes. More, O is herself a character well-suited for third person intense: she is interior, thoughtful, introverted and introspective. She dwells mostly within herself, and the outer world exists for her only insofar as it holds meaning for her and her story and her relations with her lovers.

The third person intense is third person written as if it were first person. It would be simple to take O and rewrite it in the first person; all we would need do is replace ‘elle’ with ‘moi’ and ‘je.’ I think nothing else would be required.

If we were to take Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca or The Scapegoat and replace ‘I’ with ‘she’ or ‘he’ it would give us the third person intense point of view. The same cannot be said of all first person tales.

There are two points that make a tale third person intense:

1. The narrator hangs with the hero like his shadow, never leaving, never seeing more than he sees.
2. The hero has a rich interior life that dominates the tale, every bit as important as external events.

We the audience seem to haunt the hero, and in turn, tales told in the third person intense seem to haunt us long after we finish with them. They linger, and we can, if we hark back upon such a tale, see our own world through the eyes of the intensive hero. So we can enter his world, and find his world become our own.

Trends Today

The third person intense form has come to dominate many tales today. This I think comes from two factors: first the tendency to suppress the actual narrator of tales, and second the inclination among writers and readers alike toward introversion and introspection. This sort of subjective experience of reality is how the world seems to many writers, and to those people who still read today. And since the form is so strong, those readers who go on to become writers themselves learn from the third person intense tales they grew up on, that this is the ‘natural’ way to tell a tale — it is what a tale is.

(Composed on keyboard Saturday, May 24, 2008)