Pauline Réage's notorious Histoire d'O, published by Les Editions Jean-Jacques Pauvert in June 1954, is turning fifty. My paper marks this occasion by considering the reception history of Histoire d'O--from objet de scandale to bestselling livre de poche--and the evolution of its curious literary status over the last half-century. My inquiry is meant as a contribution to the colloquium theme of diversity and difference from the standpoint of canon formation, literary censorship, and genre theory. The case of Histoire d'O underscores the problematic function of genre itself, classically formulated as a distinction between modes of enunciation (e.g., narrative versus mimetic) and eventually codified as doctrine, rule, and prohibition. If 'erotic literature' has come to be considered a genre, it remains a genre strangely defined by 'content' alone, without respect to enunciative, stylistic, or structural criteria--a genre, then, whose normative and exclusive function is exemplary. When Gaston Gallimard refused to publish Histoire d'O in 1951, his decision was made largely on the basis of a reader's report that speaks eloquently to this function of genre: 'Gaston,' wrote N.R.F. reader Jean Dutourd, 'tu ne peux pas publier ce genre de livres!' It was Jean-Jacques Pauvert who, some three years later, eagerly assumed publication of the manuscript, announcing that it would mark an important date in the history of all literatures.

A half-century later, Histoire d'O--perhaps the most widely translated and read work of literature ever published in France--continues to occupy an ambiguous place with respect to the hexagonal canon. Its origins and its paratext inscribe it within the history of one of the most prestigious literary institutions of the twentieth century, the N.R.F.: famously prefaced by Jean Paulhan in 1954, it was originally composed as a letter to Paulhan by the secretary general of the N.R.F., Dominique Aury (alias Pauline Réage). Despite this institutional legitimation, Réage's scandalous château de Roissy, now as familiar the world over as Proust's petite madeleine, stands outside the walls that circumscribe what Pauvert once called the canon of the avouable. Has the opprobrium attached to Histoire d'O in the 1950s (when it narrowly escaped condemnation as an 'outrage aux bonnes mœurs') transmuted with our times into a version of political correctness? Or is Histoire d'O, as François Mauriac asserted long ago, a fundamentally 'intolerable' text? My analysis leads me to pose these questions--and ultimately to wonder whether the Francophone literary canon, often qualified as ever more diverse, remains intolerant to certain kinds of difference.