Tasks

By Paul Gray

VIRGINIE: HER TWO LIVES

by John Hawkes

Harper & Row; 215 pages; $13.95

In a brief preface to his ninth novel, John Hawkes writes: "My subject was, from the start, that wisp of shell-pink space shared equally, I am convinced, by the pornographic narrative (in color photographs) and the love lyric, from the troubadours, say, to the present." He adds that the story first came to him "in a reverie about de Sade." But the reader who thinks "Boyohboy!" and curls up with Virginie expecting a spanking good time will be disappointed. Like all of Hawkes' fiction, including The Blood Oranges and Travesty, this book is thoroughly cerebral; it uses eroticism to arouse thought.

The heroine is an eleven-year-old girl who lives twice and keeps two journals, which set forth, in alternating sections, both of her stories. Virginie's first narrative takes place in 1740, the year of the Marquis de Sade's birth. She lives in a chateau somewhere in the French countryside and serves as a "child accomplice" to Seigneur, whose mission in life is to render women perfect for love and then give them away to other men. He claims the artist's calling, and then some: "Is it actually not more difficult to work with a woman's living flesh than to squeeze paint from tubes or chop away at blocks of stone or chunks of wood?"

Seigneur trains five women at a time, subjecting each to a rigorous, never changing schedule of tasks and ordeals. They must make love to a pig and debauch a priest in his confessional. To attain pride, they must calmly watch a tooth being wrenched from the mouth of a horse and accept it, with aplomb, as an unwanted gift. They must undress and embrace a beehive; they must suffer a butterfly to be slowly tattooed on their backsides. "The regimen of true eroticism is strenuous," Seigneur reminds one of them. Virginie, the child who sees and records all these rituals, retains her innocence.

She appears again, somehow reincarnated, in the Paris of 1945. Her surroundings this time are considerably shabbier than they were back at the chateau, but the activity looks familiar. Her older brother Bocage, a taxi driver, has opened their ailing mother's house to five prostitutes. Each evening, with Virginie as silent witness, they stage different "charades of love," sometimes with clients, sometimes with a crippled ex-boxer who hangs around the premises. Like Seigneur two centuries earlier, Bocage arranges entertainments or watches them but never participates.

Despite their many erotic moments, both of these stories are curiously lifeless. The effect may be intentional. Hawkes displays the paraphernalia of pornography in a cautionary manner. Both tales end in a kind of hellfire. Seigneur is burned at the stake by some vengeful ex-pupils, and Virginie voluntarily joins him; Bocage's mother puts an end to the latter-day revels by torching her house. These fates are not surprising. Virginie foreshadows her fiery destructions throughout her journals. Other forms of suspense are similarly lacking; the second story recapitulates the first with increasing listlessness. If Hawkes set out to show that erotic literature can be (and often has been) repetitious and passionless, then Virginie succeeds. But reading through this lesson seems uncomfortably like an act of masochism. --By Paul Gray

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