''The Image'' (or in French "L'Image") is a classic 1956
sadomasochistic
Sadism () and masochism (), known collectively as sadomasochism ( ) or S&M, is the derivation of pleasure from acts of respectively inflicting or receiving pain or humiliation. The term is named after the Marquis de Sade, a French author known ...
erotic novel
Erotic literature comprises fictional and factual stories and accounts of eros (passionate, romantic or sexual relationships) intended to arouse similar feelings in readers. This contrasts erotica, which focuses more specifically on sexual feeli ...
, written by
Catherine Robbe-Grillet
Catherine Robbe-Grillet (; ; born 24 September 1930) is a French writer, dominatrix, photographer, theatre and film actress who has published sadomasochistic writings under the pseudonyms Jean de Berg and Jeanne de Berg.
Biography
She was bor ...
and published under the pseudonym of Jean de Berg by
Ă©ditions de Minuit in 1956.
It was made into a 1975 film, ''
The Image'', also known as ''The Punishment of Anne''.
Appraisals
Edmund White
Edmund Valentine White III (January 13, 1940 – June 3, 2025) was an American novelist, memoirist, playwright, biographer, and essayist. A pioneering figure in LGBTQ and especially gay literature after the Stonewall riots, he wrote with ra ...
considered the novel "scandalous but eloquent...metaphysical".
Susan Sontag
Susan Lee Sontag (; January 16, 1933 – December 28, 2004) was an American writer, critic, and public intellectual. She mostly wrote essays, but also published novels; she published her first major work, the essay "Notes on "Camp", Notes on 'Ca ...
placed the text among the very few (5) erotic novels she considered to have serious artistic weight.
Theme
''The Image'' is centred on a
triangular relationship between the male narrator and two women, Anne and Claire. The narrator is puzzled by the meaning of their behavior throughout, gradually accumulating clues which only make full sense in the closing chapter, when Anne is revealed as the
mirror image
A mirror image (in a plane mirror) is a reflection (physics), reflected duplication of an object that appears almost identical, but is reversed in the direction perpendicular to the mirror surface. As an optical phenomenon, optical effect, it r ...
of the woman he actually loves, Claire.
[Susan Sontag, 'The Pornographic Imagination', in ]Georges Bataille
Georges Albert Maurice Victor Bataille (; ; 10 September 1897 – 8 July 1962) was a French philosopher and intellectual working in philosophy, literature, sociology, anthropology, and history of art. His writing, which included essays, novels, ...
, ''Story of the Eye'' (2001) p. 109-10
See also
References
1956 French novels
BDSM literature
French erotic novels
French novels adapted into films
Works published under a pseudonym
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