Rapture, by Christine Jordis, trans Sonia Soto

Aches and pains of the literary masochist

This philosophical novel combines musings on romantic obsession and sexual abandon, and quotations from Barthes and Bataille, inside a traditional frame. A detached narrator introduces a manuscript handed over after the writer's death to a sympathetic reader. Camille, the heroine, has retired from her literary life in Paris, working for the ministry of culture, to a villa in Italy. Now conveniently dead, she has left her posthumous portrait in the shape of an account of her torrid affair in middle-age with Julien: a Don Juan of an art historian who cannot resist seducing women and then mistreating them.

Women who let their lovers use, hurt and abuse them continue to be a staple of both pornographic and romantic literature. A novelist such as Catherine Millet, in La Vie Sexuelle de Catherine M, composes a jeu d'esprit, a fantasy, told in the first person, that we are invited naively to enjoy as a true-life confession. Millet performs an apparent striptease, tearing off her narrator's ladylike, intellectual façade to reveal her secret, promiscuous life.

The twist seems particularly French. First drop your knickers for any chap who heaves into view and then philosophise lengthily about it.

To me, the embracing of masochism by contemporary French female novelists seems simply an unresolved legacy of Catholicism: love means suffering; the lover who inflicts delicious pain is by definition godly. It seems that all the linguistic and formal experiments of previous, radical generations are being completely ignored. Back we slip into tremendous anxiety about female sexual power and creativity, our culture saturated with images of bodies as objects we control by buying them.

Here, Camille does not quote from Stendhal's entrancing, encyclopaedic book on love, but seems to agree with it, describing how mental associations to and of the lover flood every aspect of one's world. Now, meeting Julien infrequently, utterly dominated by him, she decides that for the first time her life has meaning. Like all heroines of porn and romance, she has no family and no friends: she exists only for and with her man, available only to him.

Julien, for his part, is married and conducts numerous affairs. Camille does not read self-help books about women who love too much. Nor does she consider herself a victim of masculine misbehaviour. She just carries on being terribly grateful to her saviour.

What has trapped her is her Cartesian view of intellect as superior to and separate from body. If only she had read Colette and learned sooner that sensuality is a way into knowledge and tolerance. As it is, allowing Julien to be the high priest who whips her into awareness of the ineffable, she is condemned to tears before, during and after bedtime.

Our urge to abandon ourselves, to yield utterly, to give up all responsibility in favour of obedient trust, can underlie both mystical and sexual rapture. Psychoanalytical writer Marion Milner argued in the 1930s that this search for ecstasy has its roots in memories or fantasies of infant experience: the blissful baby wants nothing more than to be held and dandled and given to. Rapturous unity with the universe or the lover recalls the bliss of feeding at the breast.

Masochism can perhaps be understood as the quest for a lover as authoritative and omnipotent as that archaic mother. Poor Camille, reading Lacan, learns that she is a void, a hole. She is asking for trouble.

Michèle Roberts's novel 'Reader, I Married Him' is published in Virago paperback in January