pain, etc.

The evil in each version: the love of the sadist and the writer.

Justifications for perversion from a rhetorical assault: the wounds he opens in one's morality cannot let one rest.

Durrell's Justine creates herself, seeks herself, debases and threatens (telepathically) with--herself. Catharine--who is actually Sade's Justine telling her own story by the name Catharine--does not go in for sin straight from the home as does her sister. She carries virtue until she is finally struck through the breast and into the heart so that the lightning rips through her, a cavity, passageway, orifice through the regions of her very life. Heart, arteries, blood and rhythm: destruction of the sex she's been subjected to--chapters upon chapters, positions upon torturing position, of deliberate, elaborated rape.

But we also get protracted treatises on why this is natural, how crime is the energy that moves us. Progress, growth, etc.

And where it turns from pain to pleasure is only in the 20th century, with Durrell running through the metaphysical ways Justine is caught up in desire: though the pain is still crucial: "We use each other," she says, "like axes to cut down the ones we really love."