The concretion of the subjects in Deleuze's conception of Venus in Furs is further elucidated by an exploration of literature's actual function as a dialogue of writings. Such a dialogue is developed by M. M. Bakhtin who in The Dialogic Imagination opens up a subject to develop the interrelation of words' contexts in literature. These contexts are specifically complex and multi-connected, as "no living word relates to its object in a singular way: between the word and its object, and between the word and the speaking subject, there exists an elastic environment of other, alien words about the same object, the same theme, and this is an environment that it is often difficult to penetrate." (Schiller, p. 276) The problem of the word therefore goes beyond its specific isolated meaning and rests within its relationship with other words. The difficulty of penetrating into this environment rests in the immense number of the other words which hover about each part of a sentence. As words burst with multiple associations, so does the texture of their meanings link with those surrounding fabrics of signification.

The dance and play of these associations then not only comes into relations within itself, but also is linked to the larger discourses of meanings in the context of culture and history. In "Word, Dialogue and Novel," Julia Kristeva elucidates how the combination of the voices in these discourses works in Bakhtin's dynamic conception. She describes how his "conception of the 'literary word'" is "an intersection of textual surfaces rather than a point (a fixed meaning), as a dialogue among several writings: that of the writer, the addressee (or the character) and the contemporary or earlier cultural context." (Kristeva, p. 36) In this way, not only the word and meanings have varied discourses, but the significance of the world that the text creates also has a dialogue with other "writings." Kristeva notes how, for Bakhtin, these continually discursive texts do not rest silent: "...any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another." (Kristeva, p. 37) Thus they are constantly interacting and bouncing off each other with their allusions, reverberations and characters formed from their specific cultural histories.

The dialogical relationships thus take part of their strength from the foundations of historical narratives that hang in the air, effusing each new thought with its relation to past meanings. Even when the subject is not noted directly, there is what Bakhtin calls an "alien utterance" which is speaking about it. In the case of Venus in Furs, this "utterance" continually refers back to an erotic history and the formation of sexual relations. Kristeva's conception that "History and morality are written and read within the infrastructure of texts" (Kristeva, p. 36) validates the basis of "alien utterances" within textual structures which both refer back to a historical discourse and found a present one.

The multiplicity of contexts and dialogues from these various "writings" thus evokes a dynamic world from the text. An author's specific involvement within the text's context is of singular importance, as it makes their contribution change both society and history. This relation is especially well-constructed and described by Kristeva:

...Bakhtin situates the text within history and society, which are seen as texts read by the writer, and into which he inserts himself by rewriting them. Diachrony is transformed into synchrony, and in light of this transformation, linear history appears as abstraction. The only way a writer can participate in history is by transgressing this abstraction through a process of reading-writing; that is, through the practice of a signifying structure in relation or opposition to another structure. (Kristeva, p. 36)

In this way, the "writing" of the textual context is of primary influence on a writer's work. Discourses that have shaped the world they live in are both present and malleable; they are able to be transformed and recreated. The focus on separate, diachronous time periods from which literatures are birthed is lessened as their relations, read by an author into a synchronous dialogue, become more evident. In this way, a history of thought is as influential on a writer as is the writer's change or reinforcement of it. History is not written in stone and linearly constructed, but becomes a medium through which the writer can sing as the confrontation of the signifying structures unfolds.

The investigation of the literary world and its relation to history in Masochism by Gilles Deleuze is therefore staggeringly important in understanding the resonance of Masoch's art. To unveil the substance and motivation behind Masoch's dialectic, the essay moves towards a "reading-writing" understanding to open the discourse between the dialogic apertures of a literary erotic world and its predecessor of the actual world. As mentioned in my previous essay, for example, the historical relation of the severe chill of Christianity upon the world of Greek sensual pleasure becomes thematic in Venus in Furs. Thus, it dialogically evokes the conflict between these two times and its far-reaching implications in the world it creates. Although Deleuze doesn't detail further the condensation of the glacial epoch than its effects on sexuality reflected in Venus, this concept must be investigated further to bring to light sentimental cruelty's dialogical and cultural resonances.

The character of Venus, functioning as the necessity of sentimental longing, reverberates back to the desire for a lost past of innocence and Nature in Schiller's essay, "On Naive and Sentimental Poetry." In Venus in Furs, the frozen separation of humanity from nature through reflection and the development of consciousness is the key factor in the dialectical division Schiller elaborates. Following Schiller's contrast of the cold Christian realm to Nature's reflection in sensuous passions, Venus shows a nostalgic longing for the past and a disappointment in the conscious, reflective world. She says to the narrator, "You modern men, you children of reason, cannot begin to appreciate love as pure bliss and divine serenity......as soon as you try to be natural you become vulgar. To you Nature is an enemy."(Masoch, p. 145). It is clear that this ideal goddess of Love and Beauty falls onto a side that Schiller would call Nature, which is opposed to reason and conscious art as artifice.

Even in the very beginning of Venus in Furs, the distinctions of culture and nature are set apart in Venus's character. She is characterized through the narration by her infidelity and her passion which is frozen and stifled in the icy realm. Similarly, Wanda, the goddess's personified counterpart, shows a disdain for the cultural principle of propriety by her infidelity to Severin with the Greek. These specific attributes make these two characters perfect images of Schiller's conception of Nature and natural genius which he describes as "faithful to its character and inclinations, but not so much because it has principles as because nature, for all its wavering, again and again returns to its original state, always reviving the old need." (Schiller, p. 189) There is therefore a natural law and basis that tunes back in to desire ("the old need"), but which is not dictated by the generalized precepts of civil rules. In the world of nature, pleasure and desire are religiously fulfilled as principles, but a reflective morality which is aware of consequences and lack is but a hindrance to the satisfaction of Nature's primary desires.

Schiller's Nature-culture conflict is outlined similarly in Deleuze's explanation of Masoch, yet within a differing framework of two natures. The first, which Deleuze describes as both secondary and coarse nature, and which appears to parallel Schiller's "Nature," is characterized by disorder, violence and sensuality. Masoch's second, primary nature, becomes a combination of the reflective infiltration of culture's division with a pastoral longing. Deleuze describes this nature as "impersonal and self-conscious, sentimental and supersensual." (Deleuze, p. 54) Within Masoch's conception of the latter as "primary nature," it is necessary to unwind his unique formation of sentimentality apart from that of Schiller.

Deleuze summarizes the essence of the matter by noting that "The function of the masochistic ideal is to ensure the triumph of ice-cold sentimentality...to suppress pagan sensuality" (Deleuze, p. 52)

This repression and relegation of sensuality to the cold realms is very different from the idealization of sensuous Nature that Schiller espouses, yet it functions with a similar agenda of sentimentality, which is reached through very different means.

Although masochistic coldness is the freezing of passionate sensuality, Deleuze reemphasizes that "...under the cold there remains a supersensual sentimentality." This remnant, a sentimental vestige from a warmer time, demonstrates the fact of the dialectical opposition between culture and Nature. Deleuze elucidates its necessity in Masoch as the sentimentality "radiates in turn through the ice as the generative principle of new order, a specific wrath and a specific cruelty. The coldness is both protective milieu and medium, cocoon and vehicle: it protects supersensual sentimentality as inner life, and expresses it as external order, as wrath and severity." (Deleuze, p. 52) Within the development of this formation, the masochistic agenda of coldness is both a response to the reflective age of reason and a guard for its result of sentimentality.

The reflective state of this icy tension is thus well developed in the style of Masoch's literary art which freezes and suspends through its narratives and through the contracts that the characters sign. In its very nature, the contract is a chilling force which binds nature, with its passions and fickle whims, to have a conscious restraint of will and order. Wanda develops into a cruel, cold statue when her natural sensuousness is confined to a formal situation of being the controlling Mistress. The agreements and contracts of Venus thus are key representations of culture divided from nature, as one's actions are dictated through the convention that gives binding value to a sheet of paper. Severin's natural sexual desire for Wanda is thus combined with an absolute restricting control that makes him her captive. She owns him completely, for the propriety is forced through the contract, and thus he cannot run even when he wants to. Giving a contractual concretion that the characters must live and relate within is thus Masoch's foundation for the dialogue with the division in history to which Schiller refers.

In Masoch's work, the division between the inner sentimentalism and the cold external reaction to the main conflict propagates movement towards the Ideal. This masochistic Ideal is very similar to Schiller's form of the projected ideal which is that which reaches unity: "Nature makes a human being one with himself, art separates and divides him; by means of the ideal he returns to the unity."(Schiller, p. 202). The ideal is projected because one can never actually return to the original undivided state of Nature. In this manner, Schiller deals with the situation of nature's permutation to culture, and their combination into the Ideal or divine similarly to Masoch. Yet Deleuze notes that in Masoch's framework, the problem centers around the transformation of the body to art to the Idea.

In Venus in Furs, the removal of the Ideal of Love as reflected in the Grecian Venus is emphasized as she only truly appears within the dream. Wanda, a reflection of Venus as Ideal, points towards the projected Ideal by being both a combination of nature and culture. Her body, the natural part, is contrasted to the art of the cold marble statue of Venus. This combination explains why Venus/Wanda covers her body with furs to protect and separate it from the cold world of culture and reason. While the unity of Schiller's ideal is only projected, Masoch's idealism becomes based in the conflict of the two realms. Deleuze notes that "What characterizes masochism and its theatricality is a peculiar form of cruelty in the woman torturer: the cruelty of the Ideal, the specific freezing point, the point at which idealism is realized." (Deleuze, p. 55) As sentimentality makes one realize the depravity (as Schiller would call it) of the modern world, instead of giving over to the impossible embrace of sensuality, Masoch's art reflects the collision of the two conflicting worlds in the external concretion of cruelty.

Thus it is in this cruelty that masochism's inner sentimentalism finds an appropriate expression. The necessity of such an external result is highlighted in Schiller's conception of the artistic transformation of the Ideal: "The content of the poetic lamentation can thus never be an external object...it can only be an inner, idealistic object. Even if it deplores a loss in the actual world, it must first transform it into a loss in an ideal sense." (Schiller, p. 213). The cold, "actual world" in Venus is the limitation for the supersensual sentimentalist who must then reconcile it with his Ideal under the figure of the whip.

Finding solutions within the conflict of the conscious world, Masoch and Schiller's conceptions of an Ideal create a remarkable dialogue of agreement and opposition. With the limitations of the present state of reflective division in culture, Schiller reiterates the goal of being able to "act...freely amidst that bondage" (Schiller, p. 193), which remarkably plays into Masoch's ideal of cruelty. Deleuze notes that the thought of freedom despite all constraints, bondage and control is described well by Theodore Reik who states that the masochist "shows his submission certainly, but he also shows his invincible rebellion, demonstrating that he gains pleasure despite the discomfort...He cannot be broken from outside. He has an exhaustible capacity for taking a beating and yet knows unconsciously he is not licked. (pp. 163)" (Deleuze, p. 137, note 28) Through various dialogues, these formations of the sentimental ideal unravel how the world Masoch created ideally projects beyond itself to a broader context of the multiple writings of eroticism.

Bibliography

Bakhtin, M. M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996.

Deleuze, Gilles. Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty. Zone Books: New York, 1991.

Kristeva, Julia. The Kristeva Reader. Ed.Toril Moi. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986.

Sacher-Masoch, Leopold von. Masochism: Venus in Furs. Zone Books: New York, 1991.

Schiller, Friedrich. "On Naive and Sentimental Poetry." from Essays. New York: Continuum.