The Telling of the Act: Sexuality as Narrative in Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century France (review)

This lively and provocative book has two aims: to make a contribution to the history of sexuality, in the form of an account of French pornographic writing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and to provide a critique of the universalizing and anachronistic assumptions about forms of libidinal reality that other cultural historians and literary critics are said to have brought to the subject. A lavish accumulation of examples, some familiar, others less so, provides the weight of historical evidence through which Cryle hopes to bring objectivity into the vicious circles of interpretation. The main focus of his analysis is on the changing importance attributed to climax in erotic and pornographic narrative. In fictions of the early eighteenth century, he finds that pleasure is represented as a matter of extended play, gradations and infinite deferral. From around 1740, throughout the nineteenth century and up to the fin de siècle, pleasure is represented as a climactic event, the 'concrete eventuality' that ends delay (pp. 364–65). Variations in narrative form associated with this basic difference of perception are tracked and contrasted over ten thematically based chapters. Part i, entitled 'Beginnings', looks at some key images of the décor of seduction. 'Furniture' offers entertaining insights into changing fashions in upholstery, and the varying resistance of the sofa. 'Marble and Fire' explores the erotic ambivalence of the statue, and the pornographic uses of frigidity. 'Cantharides' describes the transformation of the aphrodisiac from a minor role in the eighteenth century, as an artificial aid to pleasure, to a starring part in the nineteenth century as the image of 'the very "essence" of desire' (p. 112). Part ii, 'The Middle', comments on the technical means as well as the vocabulary available for expressing the sounds and spasms of sexual congress. Part iii, 'Finishing', explores the iconic themes of 'Messalina' and 'Lesbos' to evoke the displacement of male power that by the end of the nineteenth century had undone 'the established narrative (and social) order' (p. 362). Some existing critical hierarchies are challenged. There is, for instance, a useful summary of the constructed reputation of Sade. Sacher-Masoch, however, is a curious absence; the history of sexuality still has not quite caught up with this difficult figure. More might also have been said of Remy de Gourmont, the fin-de-siècle stylist of complex sensation, whose novels celebrate the protractions of fantasy and the deferral of pleasure, and whose eroticisation of the declining potency of the Satyr embraces, uniquely, the new icons suggested by the New Woman. Gourmont appears just once, in not entirely typical form, at the end of the chapter 'Orgasm', supplying the quotation from Physique de l'amour with which Cryle buttons up his demonstration of the fin-de-siècle's obsession with 'the' sexual act. A wide-ranging bibliography and helpful index complete a useful work for future reference.