Comment on "The Story of O as Told by E"
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"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 . . . The artistic 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 part of and means to a total, authentic literary experience"
— Eliot Fremont-Smith, The New York Times
"It is only when you make me suffer that I feel safe and secure."
— O.
O is nothing. O is not even a blow-up doll or a bundt cake. She very much wants you to put one of your possessions into one of her emptinesses. But her emptiness-ness is hemmed in by lines of type, lines of time. By lies. She's an opening caught up in flesh, or text. A conniving nothing inside a torture chamber. An invisible wrist held to the wall by a chain. She's queen of a perverse universe of, among other things, anal-sadism. She is ruled by pain. She would rather die than not have it. Maybe she is dead. Pain, which she mistakes for her lover's insatiableness, or for her own signature, is written with a riding crop across her back.
Sir Stephen. Oh, Sir Stephen. Spectral silhouette. Strange rapist. Bird man in a cape of masculine prerogative, of safety. His hands are colossal. His domination suffering from elephantiasis. He imposes on, he possesses, a no-thing that is not his.
E, she's an amazon with one tit missing and a dagger in her waistband. (She's not in this book.) Her feet are flat on the floor. She wants to slice a line down the side of the circle around O's mind. She says constraint can be the place where good sex and good writing meet to faire l'amour, but she wants O to know that she can choose her own aphrodisiac, her own posture, her costume, her custom, her sine qua non. She wants O to be Q, really. To have an out. To have a tailbone. To have a qunt. To have a clue.
Gail Wronsky is the author of Poems for Infidels (Red Hen Press), Dying for Beauty (Copper Canyon Press), The Love-talkers (a novel, Hollyridge Press) and other books. She is the translator of Volando Bajito, a book of poems by Argentinean poet Alicia Partnoy. Her poems have appeared in journals and anthologies including Poets Against the War, A Chorus for Peace, The Poet's Child, Pool, Volt, and Runes. The recipient of a California Artists Fellowship, she is Director of Creative Writing and Syntext at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.
