PDF for American laserprinters (8.5 x 11 inches)

The NSFW Files
An Appreciation of the Erotic
in Literature and Comics
Karl Wolff
Chicago Center for Literature and Photography
©
Copyright 2015, Karl Wolff. Released under a Creative Commons
license; some rights reserved.
Printed and distributed by the Chicago Center for Literature and
Photography. First electronic edition: January 2015.
This book is available in a variety of electronic formats, including
EPUB for mobile devices, MOBI for Kindles, and PDFs for both
American and European laserprinters, as well as a special deluxe
paper edition. Find them all, plus a plethora of supplemental
information such as interviews, videos and reviews, at:
cclapcenter.com/nsfwfiles
Contents
Introduction to the Web Series
Introduction to the Book
A Lecherous Lexicon
A Note About Dates
WORDS
The Song of Songs: a New Translation, by Ariel Bloch and Chana Bloch
The Satyricon, by Petroniusm
The 120 Days of Sodom, by Marquis de Sade
Gynecocracy: A Narrative of the Adventures and Psychological Experiences of Julian Robinson by Viscount Ladywood
Story of the Eye, by George Bataille
Our Lady of the Flowers, by Jean Genet
Story of O, by Pauline Reage
The Image, by Jean De Berg
Naked Lunch, by William S. Burroughs
City of Night, by John Rechy
Ada, or Ardor, by Vladimir Nabokov
The Piano Teacher, by Elfriede Jelinek
The Ages of Lulu, by Almudena Grandes
Matriarchy: Freedom in Bondage, by Malcolm McKesson
girls: A Paean, by Nic Kelman
5
9
11
19
21
24
27
36
38
40
48
49
52
56
60
64
67
69
72
WORDS + IMAGES
The Piano Tuner and Aldana, by Ignacio Noe
The works of Michael Manning
Room Mates, by Ivan Guevara and Atilio Gambedotti
Lost Girls, by Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie
77
79
84
86
On the Erotic: Concluding Remarks
89
To Jen, my wife,
and the defenders of the First Amendment
“I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds
of material I understand to be embraced within that
shorthand description [“hard-core pornography”]; and
perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But
I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved
in this case is not that.” [Emphasis added.]
—Justice Potter Stewart, concurring opinion in Jacobellis v.
Ohio 378 U.S. 184 (1964), regarding possible obscenity in The
Lovers
“I don’t know anything about art but I know what I like.”
—Orson Welles
Introduction to the
Web Series
Deckard: “How can it not know what it is?”
—Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982)
In popular criticism, timing is everything. In light of the wild
success and popularity of Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James,
the time is ripe to examine the genre known as erotica. The
near-omnipresence of Fifty Shades in the hands and Kindles
of the American reading populace has made sexuality a topic
of conversation. Not since 1972, when Deep Throat nearly made
porn cinema a mainstream success, has anything comparable
happened in American culture. The early Nineties, when
Quentin Tarantino’s films were new and dangerous, ushered
in a decade of Tarantino knock-offs, imitators, and derivative
films. The same is true for Fifty Shades, with bookshelves filled
with imitators riding the coattails of James’s success. But unlike
Tarantino’s ultraviolent cinematic pastiches, James’s novel is a
thinly veiled piece of Twilight fan fiction. I haven’t read her work
and don’t plan to.
But just because I refuse to read poorly written trash doesn’t
mean the genre of erotica has nothing to offer discerning readers
and fans of quality literature. This essay series is reminiscent
of the works of French philosopher and semiotician Roland
Barthes. Barthes wrote works of literary criticism, but he also
wrote pieces of professional wrestling, soap ads, and car design.
Nothing under the sun, including erotica and pornography,
should be immune from critical examination. In 1967 Susan
Sontag wrote a pioneering essay on pornographic literature
entitled “The Pornographic Imagination.” She asserts, “Not
only do Pierre Louys’ Trois Filles de Leur Mere*, George Bataille’s
Histoire de L’Oeil** and Madame Edwarda, the pseudonymous
Story of O and The Image belong to literature, but it can be made
clear why these books, all five of them, occupy a much higher
rank as literature than Candy or Oscar Wilde’s Teleny or the Earl
of Rochester’s Sodom...” In this new CCLaP series I call “The
NSFW Files,” I will examine three of the five mentioned, as well
as a host of others. As in my previous essay series, “On Being
5 | The NSFW Files
Human,” I will seek to answer a series of questions. What is
erotica? What is pornography? What makes a work obscene or
indecent? How are these related to its possible literary value? To
add order to an already explosive, divisive, and sensational topic,
I will cover the twelve books in historical order of publication.
Besides making an assessment to the book’s literary value, this
will give each book the required historical context.
History plays an important role, a factor that bleeds into things
like availability and expressions used. Unlike other genres, erotica
and pornography have been targets for repressive legislation. One
way to control a populace is to control the flow of information.
To paraphrase what I said in my review of Mania!, a history of
the Beat Generation in relation to free speech, “Shouldn’t you be
the one who determines what you read?” Not some politician,
cleric, or other moral guardian. But that is politics and we’ll get
elbow-deep into that filth soon enough.
All literature is, at root, about language. Most of these works
are studded with four-letter words and coarse expressions of
humans fornicating with each other. To quote another critic,
Walter Benjamin wrote about pornography in an early essay,
saying, “Just as Niagara Falls feeds power stations, in the same
way the downward torrent of language into smut and vulgarity
should be used as a mighty source of energy to drive the dynamo
of the creative act.” With these short little words and with this
sometimes coarse language, society has become hysterical in their
reactions. This attests to the power of the language involved. The
writings of the Marquis de Sade still shock and horrify, despite
being written in the 18th century.
For the selections of works I will investigate, I’ve run the
gamut from allusive highbrow literature to notorious smut.
Some can be classified as erotica or pornography, while others
are novels with erotic elements in them. I have also added novels
with gay and bisexual characters, so this won’t be a straights-only
venture.
We begin with The Satyricon, a novel fragment written by
Petronius in the late first century CE. It is also the only novel
written without the lens of Western Christianity impinging on its
depiction of human sexuality. The next novel is Gynecocracy, by
Viscount Ladywood, written in 1893. It is a Victorian curiosity
about a wayward British aristocrat under the harsh tutelage of
a governess involving physical and emotional submission and
forced feminization. We jump ahead to 1928 with The Story of
the Eye, by George Bataille. The outrageous story is appended
with a philosophical essay by Bataille. Besides being a novelist,
Bataille was a learned philosopher, essayist, anthropologist, and
poet. He had a greater point when writing the short novel. We
shall find out what point he wanted to make.
Our first gay novelist is Jean Genet. He wrote Our Lady of the
Flowers in 1943 and remains one of the most beautiful novels
ever written. It details the life and times of a transvestite named
6 | The NSFW Files
Divine (an inspiration for John Waters’ star of the same name).
The novel overflows with medieval beauty, violence, and
depravity. Unlike other works here, Genet wrote the novel in
prison to titillate himself, not necessarily the reader.
After Genet we have The Story of O, by Pauline Reage, written
in 1954, and The Image, written by Jean De Berg in 1956. Both
focus on themes of sadomasochism and both are considered by
Susan Sontag to be products of the pornographic imagination
with literary value.
Written in 1959, Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
is a Beat Generation classic, along with being the last nonillustrated, non-pictorial piece of literature tried in the United
States on charges of obscenity. The book is filled with sexually
explicit passages, hallucinatory nightmares, and diatribes against
government repression. Burroughs writes about the effects of
heroin addiction and withdrawal in what can be described as
unintentional anti-drug propaganda, as opposed to the hamhanded earnestness of D.A.R.E. advertising campaigns.
Like Burroughs, John Rechy is a gay author. He wrote City
of Night in 1963, chronicling gay hustlers in a pre-Stonewall
America. He was instrumental in making the gay hustler a
literary icon within the cosmology of LGBT fiction.
Unlike previous works mentioned here, Ada, or Ardor by
Vladimir Nabokov is a highbrow literary masterpiece. Written
in 1969, it chronicles an incestuous relationship between two
siblings. Nabokov concocted an alternate history to ground the
narrative, couching it in allusive language. While other works
mentioned here contain explicit language, meaning language
unambiguously clear about what it is depicting, Nabokov writes
with language by turns opaque, nuanced, and subtle. This does
nothing to negate the eroticism within the narrative.
In 1983, Austrian novelist Elfriede Jelinek wrote The Piano
Teacher. It tells the story of the titular teacher who also visits
porn shows at night in Vienna, along with having a tortured
relationship with her mother. She won the Nobel Prize in 2004
for her novels “that with extraordinary linguistic zeal reveal the
absurdity of society’s cliches and their subjugating power.”
The Ages of Lulu, written in 1989 by Almudena Grandes, is
a Spanish novel about the sexual awakening of Lulu. Spain has
had a rich tradition of eroticism in cinema, with works by Pedro
Almodovar and Julio Medem’s erotic labyrinth Sex and Lucia.
We shall see how this Spanish author handles eroticism.
The final novel is Matriarchy, by Malcolm McKesson,
published in 1997. Most of the novels already mentioned have
been works meant for both underground and mainstream
audiences. McKesson’s work can be considered a piece of
outsider art, since he wasn’t a professional writer and his novel
about forced feminization includes several feverishly obsessive
drawings he made.
The last work is Alan Moore’s Lost Girls, from 2006. While
7 | The NSFW Files
it is the only graphic novel covered here, it is a graphic novel
heavily informed by literary history. Moore’s work becomes
controversial because he depicts the sexual lives of Dorothy,
Alice, and Wendy, the female protagonists from The Wizard of
Oz, Alice in Wonderland, and Peter Pan. Now they are all grown
up and brought together in Austria on the eve of the First World
War.
To come back full circle, Susan Sontag mentions two other
genres in contrast to erotica and pornography: science fiction and
comedy. For quite some time, science fiction has been seen as a
disreputable genre, aimed mainly at juveniles, yet one can see
from a cursory glance that science fiction does have numerous
examples of works with literary merit. Sontag’s point about
comedy can be summed up in terms of audience expectations.
One doesn’t watch The Three Stooges and complain about its
violence, since Larry, Moe, and Curly are simply obeying the
rules of slapstick. One shouldn’t mistake the sexual equipment
and endurance of characters in erotica for lacking realism either.
It is a stock feature of the genre and should be understood as
such. If anything is to be gained from this series, it is recognition
that erotica and pornography are genres worthy of examination.
Not only are they legitimate genres, but there exists some works
that exhibit literary quality by writers of talent.
*Translated as Mother’s Three Daughters.
**Translated at Story of the Eye.
8 | The NSFW Files
Introduction to
the Book
9 | The NSFW Files
When I first began this essay series on the CCLaP website, Fifty
Shades of Grey was the pop-culture talking point. With the release
of my book, there are new pop-culture talking points, including
Lars von Trier’s controversial film, Nymphomaniac, Parts 1 and
2, and Showtime’s Masters of Sex is now in its third season.
Nymphomaniac has received notoriety because of its sexual
explicitness and scenes of non-simulated sex. Masters of Sex
sculpts a Mad Men-esque serial drama that explores how little we
knew about sex during the Fifties. The crux of the drama unfolds
in a St. Louis university teaching hospital and Dr. William
Masters’ desire to create a body of knowledge based on a scientific
understanding of human sexuality. As Dr. Masters (played by
Michael Sheen) laments, “The study of sex is the beginning of
all life. Yet we sit like prudish cavemen in the dark riddled with
shame and guilt.” Masters chose the medico-scientific route, I
choose to explore human sexuality through the lens of literature.
Included in this book are several bonus essays and a
concluding essay on the nature of erotic literature. In addition to
the books mentioned in the first introduction, I will examine The
Song of Songs, as translated by Ariel and Chana Bloch; The 120
Days of Sodom, by the Marquis de Sade; and girls: A Paean, by Nic
Kelman.
In my online essay series, I only covered one graphic novel,
Lost Girls, by Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie. For this book, I
have expanded it to include author profiles on Ignacio Noe and
the team of Ivan Guevara and Atilio Gambedotti.
My concluding essay will attempt to unravel the knot of
interlocking issues surrounding erotic literature. These include
language, crime, translation, love and lust, the body, and
Christianity.
I have also included a “Lecherous Lexicon” to help the reader
understand the terminology surrounding erotic literature and
those forces hellbent on its suppression and criminalization. One
of the greatest strategies used by persecuted groups is to weaponize
language. “Taking it back” is the name of the game; that’s how
“queer” went from an insult lobbed by homophobes to a term
of political empowerment used by gay rights advocates. We see
this play out with the turf battles between pro-sex feminists like
Annie Sprinkle and anti-porn feminists like Andrea Dworkin. But
again, I must reiterate, this isn’t a political and medical pamphlet.
My approach is ecumenical and promiscuous—hence including
The Song of Songs and 120 Days of Sodom—and my perspective is
aesthetic, intellectual, and hedonistic. Too often I’ve heard how
people don’t read anymore or they don’t get any pleasure from it.
I hope these selections prove a lascivious counterexample.
Erotica is a gigantic genre, oceanic in scope. These several
selections represent a combination of personal preference,
historical significance, and literary novelty. While the aim
inspired towards comprehensiveness, it is simply impossible to
include everything. The NSFW Files now exists as a standalone
book, but it will also live on as a continuing series on my own
blog, The Driftless Area Review (driftlessareareview.com). Every so
often, I will post a new essay on erotic literature for you to enjoy.
The essay series will be called Even More NSFW Files and will
employ the same format I used for my CCLaP online essays.
(My previous book, On Being Human, lives on with the occasional
essay for my other series, On Being Human Redux.)
10 | The NSFW Files
A smattering of dictionary definitions with my personal commentary.
Before we can explore the world of erotica and pornography, we have to
know how these words are defined. A definition is about finding limits,
the opposite of the infinite. This section will act as a counter-weight to
Justice Potter Stewart’s ham-fisted attempt at aesthetic judgment, “I
know it when I see it.” Only through the proper grasp of language can we
know anything and make reasoned judgments on the works examined.
All definitions taken from Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary (http://
www.merriam-webster.com/), accessed September 17, 2014.
A Lecherous Lexicon
amoral adjective: having or showing no concern about whether
behavior is morally right or wrong.
Commentary: One should think about this distinction between
amoral and ignorant behavior. Not knowing the difference
between right and wrong presumes ignorance. (There are other
factors on why someone wouldn’t know the difference between
right and wrong, but for the sake of this example, I’m keeping the
variables to a minimum.) Assuming one is cognizant, at the age
of reason, and fully aware of the circumstances, if that person
still shows no concern for right or wrong, then that person can
be considered amoral. Amorality is simply not giving a damn. In
certain cases, this comes across as the height of douchebaggery.
In other cases, not giving a damn for right or wrong can be seen
as an act of personal liberation.
debauchery noun 1a: extreme indulgence in sensuality.
b plural: orgies.
2 archaic: seduction from virtue or duty.
Commentary: With this word, one should examine the definition
and who is defining it (the editors at Merriam-Webster). Sensuality
isn’t bad per se, but an “extreme indulgence” in it is. Here can we
bring up the terms connotation and denotation. In this Semiotics
101 example of the red STOP sign, the word STOP is associated
with the color red. Red denotes “to stop.” But red has numerous
negative connotations like: bloody, Communist, passionate,
radical, and fire. With this lexicon we shall see the negative
connotations associated with certain words.
For debauchery, the negative definitions bring up positive
associations to such things as moderation, monogamous sex,
and following one’s duty. While not necessarily sexual in nature,
debauchery implies too much sensuality is a bad thing. Or simply
too much of anything handled in a sensual nature.
depraved adjective: marked by corruption or evil; especially:
perverted.
Commentary: Being depraved is, by association, to be perverted.
11 | The NSFW Files
While not necessarily sexual, it has been used countless times
to condemn non-normal sex acts. As with debauchery and its
implication that moderation is preferred, depravity implies that
one should pursue normal behavior. The Culture Wars have been
fought over the constantly changing idea of what is considered
normal.
erotic adjective 1: of, devoted to, or tending to arouse sexual love
or desire <erotic art>
2: strongly marked or affected by sexual desire.
Commentary: These definitions appear pretty straightforward. It
becomes messier the erotic is differentiated from the pornographic.
Is it erotica or is it porn? This debate has been going on for
centuries. But does it matter? Is it erotica or porn? Yes.
As a book reviewer my job is to maintain a certain critical
distance from the works I’m reviewing. As a human being, I have
sexual desires and I’m aroused by specific stimuli. This hardly
makes me unique. But when it comes to critiquing erotica, how
am I to square this circle? If it’s erotica and it doesn’t become
masturbation fodder, has the author failed? Does critical distance
preclude the critic from achieving sexual arousal?
The definition for “the erotic” is clear. The critical juncture
between personal arousal and critical objectivity threatens to
turn a simple description into a Pandora’s Box of uncomfortable
questions.
explicit adjective 1a: fully revealed or expressed without vagueness,
implication, or ambiguity: leaving no question as to meaning or
intent <explicit instructions>
b: open in the depiction of nudity or sexuality <explicit books and
films>
2: fully developed or formulated <an explicit plan> <an explicit
notion of our objective>
3: unambiguous in expression <was very explicit on how we are
to behave>
Commentary: In short to be explicit is to be clear. Clarity is
usually to be desired, unless it is about “the depiction of nudity
and sexuality.” Why both nudity and sexuality? These represent
two different aspects of humanity. Nudity has been a staple of
Western art since the Egyptians, but sexuality requires veils and
metaphors. The problem that arises is in the implication that
nudity and sexuality are somehow dangerous. Appreciating nudity
in art requires education and a certain degree of personal taste.
Understanding sexuality, like firearms, requires education at an
early age. The big secret is that sex education is rather dry, boring,
and technical. The fascination with human sexuality is akin to
the human fascination with firearms. In my personal opinion,
a blanket ban of possession of firearms or sexually explicit
12 | The NSFW Files
material doesn’t solve the problem. But only in our modern times
have human sexuality and firearm use become problems. In both
cases, acting responsibly would go a long way.
Explicit descriptions of human sexuality is not a problem,
human ignorance, bigotry, and idiocy are the problems.
graphic adjective: shown or described in a very clear way: relating
to the artistic use of pictures, shapes, and words especially in
books and magazines.
Commentary: See above. Complications arise when appending
words to graphic. Graphic novel. No problem. Graphic sex. Cue
warning labels and general hysteria.
illegal adjective not according to or authorized by law:
also: not sanctioned by official rules (as of a game).
Commentary: Is law eternal, reflective of religious mores, or is
law living, changing with the times? When it comes to erotica
and porn, the law plays a big part. Many of the works cited
here could be considered samizdat and illegal to own. Many
of the acts depicted in these works have been considered illegal
by lawmakers, legislators, and tyrants. Sex has been regulated,
criminalized, and standardized by the hypocrites and blowhards
occupying the seats of power. Regardless of government type
(democracy, tyranny, theocracy, etc.), it seems the lawmakers
go out of their way to criminalize homosexuality. But these
same lawmakers will figure out ways to turn stark examples of
criminality and moral evil (like, say, child rape) into areas of
gray. Then they have the audacity to consensual sex between
adults should be illegal.
While some of the books listed below are simply masturbation
fodder, other examples of erotica have potential to be read as
revolutionary texts. Laws that repress and oppress should not be
obeyed. But these same laws should be changed.
immoral adjective: not moral; broadly: conflicting with generally
or traditionally held moral principles.
Commentary: It is easy to get illegal and immoral confused,
especially if one is running for office. One should have the option
to act immorally without the threat of legal consequence. The
distance between immorality and illegality is what differentiates
a pluralistic democracy from a theocracy and/or tyranny. This
is especially true with different religions, regions, and cultures.
Is erotica and porn about immorality or is this too narrow
a reading? Is the erotic charge increased when one realizes that
one is being immoral by reading erotica and porn?
And what are “generally or traditionally held principles”?
In legal terms it involves “local control.” This applies to zoning
13 | The NSFW Files
regulations for porn stores and the like. Why prostitution is legal
in Nevada and not Utah. The more fundamentalist branches
of religions believe their morality should universal application.
Hence missionaries, religious wars, suicide bombings, and Chick
Tracts. On the opposite end of the spectrum is moral relativism,
articulately argued by D.A.F. Sade. He asserts that morality is
simply a product of geography. What one culture finds moral
another will find immoral.
indecency noun: a morally or sexually offensive quality: an
indecent quality: behavior that is morally or sexually offensive:
indecent behavior.
Commentary: What is morally and sexually offensive? To use the
old grad school answer, “It depends ...” Many, many factors
come into play in determining whether something is or is not
offensive. The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA)
has a wonderfully vague description for certain movie previews,
“This film is intended for appropriate audiences.” And another
descriptor is, “thematic subject matter.” Well, thanks, that
narrows it down. This makes indecency, like art and porn, fall
under the tyrannical and capricious rubric of “whatever we
say it is.” Unfortunately, the MPAA has proved anything but
consistent.
Indecency, like immorality, is another descriptor that is
historically and culturally contingent.
lecherous adjective: having or showing an excessive or disgusting
interest in sex.
Commentary: Again we meet the negative appraisal of excess,
this time in relation to interest in sex. Interest in sex is OK, just
don’t be excessive or disgusting about it. So you should probably
stop reading this book right now, since you, the reader, might
be showing an excessive interest in sex by reading a book about
erotica. Hey, there’s always Guns & Ammo in the magazine rack.
That will provide some non-lecherous reading material.
lust noun: a strong feeling of sexual desire: a strong desire for
something.
Commentary: This can also be seen as negative. Although if a
“strong feeling of sexual desire” is a bad thing, how in the hell
were we conceived? We exist because someone somewhere had
sex with somebody else. That’s usually how these things work.
But lust also has a non-sexual definition. One can have gunlust (like our patriotic non-lecherous Guns & Ammo reader), lust
for power (hopefully not the same reader), and so forth. As with
the other terms mentioned, there is an implicit endorsement of
personal moderation. It’s counted as a sin in Christianity and not
14 | The NSFW Files
something one aspires to. Better to describe oneself as ambitious
than as lusting for more.
obscene adjective 1: disgusting to the senses.
2a: abhorrent to morality or virtue; specifically: designed to incite
to lust or depravity.
b: containing or being language regarded as taboo in polite usage
<obscene lyrics>
c: repulsive by reason of crass disregard of moral or ethical
principles <an obscene misuse of power>
d: so excessive as to be offensive <obscene wealth> <obscene
waste>
Commentary: This definition has multiple facets. Excess, disgust,
taboo, repulsive, and abhorrent come into play. Erotica could be
seen as obscene to some, while others would find those beheading
journalists as obscene. The obscene is that which is out of order
and a disruptive force.
pervert transitive verb 1a: to cause to turn aside or away from what
is good or true or morally right: corrupt.
b: to cause to turn aside or away from what is generally done or
accepted: misdirect.
2a: to divert to a wrong end or purpose: misuse.
b: to twist the meaning or sense of: misinterpret.
Commentary: Like obscene, this term denotes disorder. Jim Crow
was a perversion of the law. At the same time, people subscribing
to non-normal sexual behavior are called perverts. They
participate in the misuse of sexuality. Missionary position within
the confines of marriage for the sole purpose of procreation, all
else is sexual perversion. Some seem to think that.
pornography noun 1: the depiction of erotic behavior (as in
pictures or writing) intended to cause sexual excitement.
2: material (as books or a photograph) that depicts erotic behavior
and is intended to cause sexual excitement.
3: the depiction of acts in a sensational manner so as to arouse a
quick intense emotional reaction <the pornography of violence>
Greek pornographos, adjective, writing about prostitutes, from
porne prostitute + graphein to write; akin to Greek pernanai to
sell, poros journey
First Known Use: 1858
Commentary: The definition, as with explicit and graphic, is basic
and straightforward. Writing that turns the reader on. The
problem is with its negative connotations. Because of these, even
erotica writers don’t want their works classified as porn. Writers
15 | The NSFW Files
working in the erotica genre see their writing as different and
better than porn. Besides an implied explicitness, pornography
can also be seen as low-class and unsophisticated. Is there a real
difference between what is one considers erotica and what one
considers pornography? Or is this another false dichotomy, like
the one seen in the alleged difference between “genre fiction”
and “literary fiction.”
Finally, can one write critically about pornography and still
be considered a serious scholar? (Especially when directed at
a general audience, outside the rarefied confines of academia,
where pornography is just another subject of study.) In my humble
opinion, pornography is yet another genre, like science fiction,
the western, and noir. Inherently no better and no worse. But
porn has become shorthand for other subgenres not associated
with sex: food porn, torture porn, emotional pornography, etc.
In some cases, the non-sexual subgenre is sexualized. In other
cases, it heightens the emotions or the senses. A few examples:
Dateline NBC’s emotional pornography and PBS’s Mind of a Chef
food porn. But in naming these things whatever-porn, are we
falling into our culture’s trap of an anti-sensualist bias? Or are we
“taking the word back” like minority and oppressed groups use
with epithets and racial slurs?
prurient adjective: marked by or arousing an immoderate or
unwholesome interest or desire; especially: marked by, arousing,
or appealing to sexual desire.
Commentary: Again with the negativity. The prurient doesn’t
arouse an interest in sexual desire, but an immoderate and
unwholesome amount of interest. The difference between a
gourmand and a glutton is knowing when to stop. Beyond the
definition, this also implies there are authorities and institutions
that know when one has had the proper amount of interest in
sex. What qualifies these people? And is excess sexual interest
really the path towards moral ruin or a path to enlightenment?
sensual adjective 1: relating to or consisting in the gratification of
the senses or the indulgence of appetite : fleshly.
2: sensory.
3a: devoted to or preoccupied with the senses or appetites.
b: voluptuous.
c: deficient in moral, spiritual, or intellectual interests: worldly;
especially: irreligious.
Commentary: Even the definition of sensual is anti-sensual
(definition c). In fact all these definitions sound bad. Like one
should be doing something else with one’s time. “Don’t waste
your life on sensual experiences, but be austere, ascetic, and
dutiful.” Ugh, how boring. The thing that makes life so precious is
what we consume with our senses. A particular sunset, a dinner
16 | The NSFW Files
made by hand, a specific song, and/or a love-making session
with someone special. But being a voluptuary, savoring these
moments in all their sensual magnificence, is seen as a negative
behavior. Is it the voluptuary the one with the problem or the
anhedonic maniacs who are defining these words?
sexual adjective: of, relating to, or involving sex: of or relating to
males and females.
Commentary: Not too much going on with this word. My
only critique is the assumption sexuality is rooted in a binary
opposition. The work done by Judith Butler and the burgeoning
field of transgender individuals herald a future where sexuality
isn’t simply male or female but a spectrum. This spectrum will be
a combination of biology, culture, performance, and individual
decision.
vice noun 1a: moral depravity or corruption: wickedness.
b: a moral fault or failing.
c: a habitual and usually trivial defect or shortcoming: foible
<suffered from the vice of curiosity>
2: blemish, defect.
3: a physical imperfection, deformity, or taint.
4a often capitalized: a character representing one of the vices in an
English morality play
b: buffoon, jester.
5: an abnormal behavior pattern in a domestic animal detrimental
to its health or usefulness.
6: sexual immorality; especially: prostitution.
Commentary: Vice is bad.
virtue noun 1a: conformity to a standard of right: morality.
b: a particular moral excellence.
2 plural: an order of angels — see celestial hierarchy.
3: a beneficial quality or power of a thing.
4: manly strength or courage: valor.
5: a commendable quality or trait: merit.
6: a capacity to act: potency.
7: chastity especially in a woman.
Commentary: Virtue is good.
vulgar adjective 1a: generally used, applied, or accepted.
b: understood in or having the ordinary sense <they reject the
vulgar conception of miracle — W. R. Inge>
2: vernacular <the vulgar name of a plant>
3a: of or relating to the common people: plebeian.
b: generally current: public <the vulgar opinion of that time>
c: of the usual, typical, or ordinary kind.
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4a: lacking in cultivation, perception, or taste: coarse.
b: morally crude, undeveloped, or unregenerate: gross.
c: ostentatious or excessive in expenditure or display: pretentious.
5a: offensive in language: earthy.
b: lewdly or profanely indecent.
Commentary: The most fascinating thing about the word “vulgar”
is its obvious class bias. One can just imagine this exiting the
lips of an upper-class person to comment upon the clothing/
manners/accent of a lower-class person. “Oh my, Muffie, that
couple over there is so vulgar.” The issue with vulgarity isn’t
specifically related to sexuality, but to a more nebulous concept
of offensiveness. It offends because it is coarse, unsophisticated,
gross, and so forth. And the vulgar is all these things, but that is
what makes them more “real.” That is why writers who depict
the lower depths with a heady dose of realism get accused of
vulgarity. Not simply pornographers, but writers of esteem like
Theodore Dreiser, Emile Zola, Honore de Balzac, and many
others. The vulgar also stands in opposition to the artificial. But
this opposition between the real and the artificial is not linear, it
is circular. The vulgar can be more real, more authentic, at least
until it laps itself and becomes fake authenticity, an attempted
shallow realness that is itself vulgar.
Makes your head spin.
Understanding the definition of a word can be the key that
unlocks the mysteries of life, the universe, and everything. And
sometimes the definition will unlock a door and plunge you down
a rabbit hole, a forest of mirrors, a labyrinth with no center.
Words can clarify and words can cloud.
Keep these thoughts in mind when perusing the erotic and
pornographic works selected herein.
A Note About Dates
For many works I will include two dates. The first date denotes
when the work was written. The second is when the work was
translated or publicly published or published in the United
States. Dates for ancient works like The Song of Songs and The
Satyricon are conjectures, while French works like 120 Days of
Sodom, Our Lady of the Flowers, Story of O, and others didn’t
reach American shores (legally) until The Naked Lunch trial in
the 1960s. 120 Days of Sodom, while written in 1785, wasn’t
published until 1935 and didn’t reach English-language readers
until Grove Press released it in the mid-sixties. Erotic and
pornographic works represent a special challenge to researchers
due to legal hurdles, purposely botched mistranslations and
bowdlerized editions that remove all the offending (code for
“interesting”) passages.
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A Note about Dates
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For many works I will include two dates. The first date denotes
when the work was written. The second is when the work was
translated or publicly published or published in the United States.
Dates for ancient works like The Song of Songs and The Satyricon
are conjectures, while French works like 120 Days of Sodom, Our
Lady of the Flowers, Story of O, and others didn’t reach American
shores (legally) until The Naked Lunch trial in the 1960s. 120 Days
of Sodom, while written in 1785, wasn’t published until 1935 and
didn’t reach English-language readers until Grove Press released
it in the mid-sixties. Erotic and pornographic works represent a
special challenge to researchers due to legal hurdles, purposely
botched mistranslations and bowdlerized editions that remove
all the offending (code for “interesting”) passages.
WORDS
Personal History: Raised in a religious household, I’m
not unfamiliar with The Bible. During my last year as an
undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I took
a course in Classical History. It focused on the history of Egypt,
the Middle East, and Greece and Rome. Among the many
books I had to buy for the course was The Song of Songs: a New
Translation, by Ariel Bloch and Chana Bloch. The beauty of the
translation combined with the sensuality of the subject matter
and the rigorously comprehensive commentary struck me in
a profound way. In the end, the Blochs translation made me
appreciate The Song of Songs as literature.
History: The Song of Songs is one of the shortest books in the
Bible. In the Hebrew Tanakh (The Old Testament) it is relegated
to the Kevutim (“Writings”). This disparate group includes The
Three Poetic Books (Psalms, Proverbs, the Book of Job), The
Five Megillot (Song of Songs, Book of Ruth, Lamentations,
Ecclesiastes, and Book of Esther) and Other Books (The Book of
Daniel, Book of Ezra - Book of Nehemiah, Chronicles). This is
also a book that has given translators, apologists, and anthologists
a serious headache. It has been subject to mistranslation, either
from cautious theologians and apologists or from malicious
intent caused by prudishness. Because the Bible is so central to
the Western Canon and how Westerners construct ideas about
human sexuality, it is apropos to examine a book within the Bible.
The Song of Songs:
a New Translation
10th to 2nd century BCE, 1995
Translated by Ariel Bloch and Chana
Bloch, with an Afterword by Robert Alter
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The Book: To avoid confusion from the outset, this section will
focus on the Bloch translation as a whole, not just Song of Songs
as a book within the Bible.
Ariel and Chana Bloch are a husband and wife team of
translators. Ariel Bloch is professor of Near Eastern studies at the
University of California at Berkeley. Chana Bloch has published
two books of poems and is a professor of English, directing the
creative writing program at Mills College. The linguistic and
poetic combination is an important one. A similar combination
occurred with the latest round of Tolstoy translations. Richard
Pevear is a Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at
the American University of Paris and Larissa Volokhonsky has
translated poetry. They are also a married couple.
The proximity, collaboration, and intimacy provided in the
confines of marriage is especially relevant with Song of Songs.
The short poem—only eight chapters—involves two main
characters, the Shulamite girl (or woman) and her male lover
and two gendered choruses. Beyond stripping the poem down
to its poetic basics, the Blochs separate themselves in the field of
biblical translation with two stunning assertions. The first is that
the couple in the Song have consummated their love. Most other
translators, ancient and modern, consider the Shulamite and her
lover in a chaste relationship. The controversy arises from the
context that the pair are not married. As Chana Bloch mentions
in her introduction, the Old Testament isn’t necessarily anti-sex,
but sex beyond the confines of marriage is strictly prohibited,
usually with lethal consequences.
The second assertion that the Blochs theorize involves the
poem’s dating. The Blochs assert that the Song was written in
the second century BCE, not the 10th century. They support this
hypothesis based on the words used in the poem, a melange of
Hebrew, Aramaic, and Persian. The Song’s language also stands
out for two more reasons. The first is its lack of the word God
and the second is the large amount of hapax legomen (words
occurring only once). Since translation is teasing out meaning
from context, the Song presents a special set of challenges:
not only finding the correct meaning of the term, but also the
correct cultural context. Some translators have gone too far and
made the poem sexually explicit. The Blochs think that the Song
existed as lyric poetry sung by the ancient Israelites during festive
occasions. Robert Alter writes that “the poetry of the Song of
Songs is an exquisite balance of ripe sensuality and delicacy of
expression and feeling.”
“My love has gone down to
his garden, to the beds of spices,
to graze and to gather lilies.
“My beloved is mine and I am his.
He feasts
in a field of lilies.” (6:1-3)
The sensuality is lush and suggestive with nature images
repeated. Chana Bloch likens it to the Garden of Eden and
to the romance of Romeo and Juliet. The Shulamite is strong
and intelligent as Juliet, but does not have to suffer the tragic
denouement of Shakespeare’s play.
Throughout the centuries, translators and theologians have
worked diligently to make the couple chaste, adding a veil to the
Shulamite, and freighting the text with allegorical interpretation.
The discomfort caused by the sexually active and intellectually
independent Shulamite created translations riddled with verbal
acrobatics. The poem was robbed of its original power. The
allegorical interpretations varied, as Chana Bloch illustrates,
from the conventional to the ridiculous. In one interpretation,
the Shulamite’s breasts are compared to Moses and Aaron and
the poem is read as code for the rejuvenation of the state of
Israel. From my own experience, I remember the poem taught
during my formative years in Sunday School. In it the man was
Christ and the Shulamite was the Church. With Christ as the
Bridegroom and the Church as the Bride, it all sounded like a
strange piece of slash fiction with Jesus making love to a cathedral.
(As comedian and “deranged billionaire” John Hodgman stated,
we Americans are a literalist and sentimental people.) Reading
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the new translation scrubbed that frankly ridiculous image from
my mind. In its place was a simple story about love and desire,
honest about the physical aspects of lust without being tastelessly
explicit or clinical.
The Verdict: The Song of Songs remains a classic of Western
literature. The Blochs’ translation strips away the mistranslations
and their puritanical agendas. This is a translation well worth
seeking out.
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The Satyricon
late 1st century CE, 1983
by Gaius Petronius
Translated by William Arrowsmith
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The History: Because The Satyricon is so ancient, the actual
publication date had remained ambiguous until recent
scholarship pointed towards the 1st century CE. Petronius lived
during the reign of Nero, no stranger to sexual kinks. Historically
speaking, this novel fragment can be considered pre-Christian.
While Christianity was growing during Nero’s reign, at that time
it was still a new Jewish sect in a provincial imperial backwater.
Nero ruled the Roman Empire from 54 to 68. The Edict of
Milan, which stipulated that Christians could worship without
oppression, was signed by the Roman Emperor Constantine in
313. Emperor Theodosius I made Christianity the official state
religion of the Roman Empire in 380, although persecution of
non-Christians and Christian heretics (specifically the Donatists)
occurred during Constantine’s reign. In terms of names and
dates, the Synod of Nicaea, which established the Nicene Creed,
would be in 325. St. Augustine’s monumental City of God, which
laid the groundwork for Catholic dogma, would come out in 5th
century CE. To reiterate, The Satyricon is a pre-Christian work.
I make note of the names and dates to underline that much
of our modern perceptions have been shaped by Western
Christianity. The Satyricon, in its realistic, sometimes bawdy
depictions of everyday Roman life is a means to escape this
mentality. (Literature is escapism, right?) This is literary escapism
for a positive educational purpose. Even that previous sentence,
lending educational credence to a novel full of fornication, satire,
and violence, bubbles up from my own subconscious. (I need to
make sure this is valuable to readers.) Reading something full of
sex, comedy, and killing, just because it has these things, would
be immoral. Or not. Just read it for fun. I did. Along the way,
you will see Rome at the height of its powers and in the throes of
moral decadence (see “Trimalchio’s Banquet” below).
The Book: Petronius Arbiter’s novel fragment chronicles the
misadventures of the narrator Encolpius, a former gladiator,
and Giton, his sixteen-year-old slave and lover. Along the way,
they meet Ascyltus, a friend of Encolpius, and rival for Giton’s
affections. The trio meet Quartilla, a priestess to the Priapus
cult, in the market and get accused of infiltrating the cult. They
are sexually tortured. Encolpius and Giton get split up, with
Encolpius sleeping with Quartilla and Giton sleeping with a
virgin girl.
A couple days later, Encolpius and his friend Agamemnon
get invited to the freedman Trimalchio’s house. What occurs
is classic satire. Trimalchio, who possesses extreme wealth,
exhibits the gaudy tastelessness of the Roman nouveau riche.
Elaborate meals, a fake funeral for himself, and supernatural
stories about werewolves and witches are told. Trimalchio’s
antics prove that the crassness and excess of the wealthy are still
a rich seam for humorists. (If you’re a fan of Suborgatory, you’ll
love “Trimalchio’s Banquet.”) When one discusses The Satyricon,
“Trimalchio’s Banquet” is most often mentioned, a hilarious setpiece that is still funny to this day.
The next day, Encolpius discovers Giton with Ascyltus.
There are quarrels and sulking, until they decide to part, Giton
leaving with Ascyltus. In the marketplace, Encolpius meets the
old poet Eumolpus. Both discuss their woes. Eumolpus tells the
story of how he seduced a boy while employed as his tutor. That
is the second set-piece of The Satyricon, where the Eumolpus
promises the boy he will give him a horse if he’ll let him touch
him. The seduction occurs over several days and in incremental
stages. Later on, Giton returns and Eumolpus and Encolpius
vie for Giton’s affections. In later sections, Encolpius and Giton
encounter pirates and Encolpius suffers from impotence. Because
of this affliction, Encolpius seeks out a magical cure. In the end,
after other misadventures, Eumolpus is discovered dead and is
consumed in an act of ritual cannibalism.
The Verdict: Because of my attitude toward literature, censorship,
and education, I will more than likely take the stance that every
piece of literature has some value. The issue arises whether X,Y,
or Z piece of fiction has “literary value.” But, answer me this,
what is literary value? Does literary value extend beyond betterthan-average craftsmanship? Does literary value accrue once a
work has a sustained positive critical reputation? Is literary value
gained from attention garnered because said work is a historical
artifact? And it is dangerous to ascribe modern literary standards
to work that is over two thousand years old? Finally, is the notion
of separating literary and historical value a correct path to take?
After all, literary critics and historians have two separate sets of
standards in what should and shouldn’t be preserved.
Those are a lot of questions. But they are questions that need
asking. Keep them in mind when we investigate the rest of these
novels. Back to the matter at hand, Petronius Arbiter’s novel
fragment does have both literary and historical value. It is one
of the few existing historical artifacts to illustrate everyday life
in the Roman Empire. (One sees The Satyricon’s influence in the
HBO series Rome. Noted conservative screenwriter John Milius
is the showrunner and he guides the show’s realism, not shying
away from the ordinary violence and sexuality* that permeated
Roman culture.) Despite its fragmentary form, The Satyricon
foreshadows the ribald masterpieces Gargantua and Pantagruel,
Don Quixote, The Ubu Plays, and Ulysses. Everything from satire
to farce, picaresque, and absurdism owe Petronius a debt. On a
more mundane note, the novel fragment also inspired countless
students to learn Latin (all the better to read it in the original
and hunt down willful mistranslations by prudish translators—
see the Loeb Edition for examples). With our culture desperately
working to make the planet more family-friendly, The Satyricon
exposes us to a history that is violent, sexually depraved,
economically unjust, and delightfully decadent, much like our
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own.
*This sexuality included relations between an adult male
(Encolpius) and Giton, a sixteen-year-old slave. Slavery aside, the
underage status of Giton makes this work controversial. While
a normal practice in Rome and throughout Europe well into the
Victorian age, the issue of underage sex should not be evaded.
Again, when this was written, this wasn’t an issue. Today, in light
of the Catholic Church’s numerous pedophilia scandals, it is an
important topic to confront. What’s the difference here? Immoral
acts versus immoral words. Furthermore, The Satyricon is a work
of fiction and a historical artifact from an ancient culture. Calls
from worried parents, clerics, and politicians to ban this work
doesn’t solve the immediate problem at hand. The sexual abuse of
children is a very real problem for any society. Perhaps giving
pedophiles stricter sentences than non-violent pot smokers may
be a step in the right direction.
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“Madness therefore entered a new cycle. It was now
uncoupled from unreason, which would long remain the
strictly philosophical or poetic province of writers like
Sade and Hölderin, Nerval and Nietzsche, a pure plunge
into language that abolished history and caused to glitter,
on the most fragile surface of the sensible, the imminence
of an immemorial truth.” —History of Madness, by Michel
Foucault
The 120 Days of
Sodom
1785, 1935, 1966
by the Marquis de Sade
Compiled and translated by Austryn
Wainhouse and Richard Seaver
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Personal History: This isn’t the first time I’ve read the work of
Donatien Alphonse François de Sade (2 June 1740 – 2 December
1814) , a.k.a. the Marquis de Sade. As with many other personal
histories in this book, it began with a used bookstore in Madison,
Wisconsin. Let’s just say I broadened my horizons beyond the
usual undergraduate avenues of cool classes and university clubs.
When I picked up an anthology of Sade, it was like Eve taking
a bite of the apple. Forbidden fruit is the most inviting and Sade
represented a branch on a very different tree of knowledge.
Then I read Justine, or the Misfortune of Virtue; Philosophy in
the Bedroom; and Juliette, or Vice Amply Rewarded, along with his
short stories. Justine was appropriately horrifying, yet darkly
comical. The eponymous heroine was beset by a vast catalog of
atrocities, yet she retains a naïve optimism that borders on idiocy.
It reads like a vicious parody of Voltaire’s Candide. Juliette had an
epic majesty, a mirror image of Justine. Its only faults were bloat
and the long-winded speeches by its characters. Unlike Justine,
Juliette embraces vice, much to her advantage.
Philosophy in the Bedroom provided a more streamlined
version of Sade’s personal philosophy. But the first piece I
read was “A Dialogue Between a Priest and a Dying Man,”
of note because it is short, intellectually sharp, and devoid of
explicit sex. During my high school and college years, I grew
increasingly disgusted with the actions, attitudes, and dogma of
conservative Christianity. Sade’s little story not only exploded
these dogmas but demolished their arguments with a humor and
clarity I hadn’t read elsewhere. While many young people today
have become ensorceled with The New Atheists (Christopher
Hitchens, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, etc.), my first encounter
with atheism was with Sade. And while Hitchens and Dawkins
skewer with rapier wit, Sade possesses the ferocity, viciousness,
and thoroughness of a Soviet tank division tear-assing around
Berlin in 1945. The late Hitchens’ tongue was sharp and his wit
bracing, but Sade’s aim was total annihilation.
Finally, I have sought out literary criticism of Sade, reading
Sade: a Sudden Abyss, by Annie Lebrun, An Erotic Beyond: Sade, by
Octavio Paz, and Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti
to Emily Dickinson, by Camille Paglia. (Paglia devotes an entire
chapter to Sade, contrasting him with Jean-Jacques Rousseau.)
But despite all this, I have shied away from reading The 120
Days of Sodom. Even among the works of Sade, it stood out,
black and radioactive. I was afraid to touch it. But after having
read it, it provides insights into the early writings of Sade.
History: The history of The 120 Days of Sodom is just as
fascinating as the book itself, written lightning fast in the Bastille
prison from “the 22nd of October, 1785, and finished in thirtyseven days.” It makes Samuel Beckett’s “siege in the room”
stately by comparison. (Beckett remarked how he admired Sade’s
discipline as a writer.) While the book remained incomplete,
history intervened. Liberated from the Bastille by the Paris
revolutionaries, he lost the manuscript. For the rest of his literary
career (mostly in various prisons and asylums), he would attempt
to reconstruct The 120 Days of Sodom in different forms.
As luck would have it, Sade’s manuscript was discovered “in
the same cell where Sade was kept prisoner, by one Arnoux de
Saint-Maximin, and then came into possession of the VilleneuveTrans family, in whose care it remained for three generations. At
the turn of the present century, it was sold to a German collector,
and in 1904 it was published by a German psychiatrist, Dr. Iwan
Bloch, under the pseudonym Eugene Dühren. […] After Bloch’s
death. The manuscript remained in Germany until 1929, when
Maurice Heine, at the behest of Viscount Charles de***, went to
Berlin to acquire it. From 1931 to 1935, Heine’s masterful and
authoritative text of the work appeared in three quarto volumes,
in what must be considered the original edition of the work.”
In 1966 Grove Press released an English language translation.
(A more detailed history of the manuscript and Sade’s life
and philosophy appear in “Must We Burn Sade,” written by
pioneering feminist Simone de Beauvoir in Grove Press edition
of The 120 Days of Sodom & Other Writings.)
The Book:
Wrestling with Sade
Sade is the K-T Event in Western literature. (The K-T Event
is shorthand for the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event. It is
the scientific theory that the mass extinction of the dinosaurs
occurred after a comet hit the Earth and triggered the resulting
“impact winter.”) Reading Sade is unlike any other reading
experience. The style, vision, assertiveness, and argumentative
nature make it unique. Writing of this kind still shocks, even
though the book was written in the eighteenth century. It would
be hundreds of years before writers and sexologists would
confront and catalog similar subject matter.
For modern readers, there has been a fallacious line of
reasoning that posits a talented author must be a good person.
One imagines Jonathan Franzen, Zadie Smith, and the like
possessing a stock photo-worthy nuclear family, eating organic
food, and having rolls of Seventh Generation recycled paper
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towels. They make appearances on NPR, listen to “indie bands,”
and write compelling think-pieces about global issues like sex
trafficking, conflict diamonds, and so forth. They bear all the
correct profile points of a college-educated liberal and we feel
better for reading them. (This implies that liberal readers read
liberal writers and conservatives read stuff by conservatives. Two
things: One, that’s reductionist as hell, reducing everyone into a
politically ideological Skinner Box. Two, Christ that’s boring!)
Then we get to the Marquis de Sade, a pansexual atheist French
philosopher. (That alone would give one of those “U.S.A!
U.S.A.!” chanters a heart attack from their eyrie somewhere in
‘Real ‘Merica.’)
Sade is a problematic writer, to say the least. He occupies the
same literary-political niche as, say, Louis-Ferdinand Céline and
Ezra Pound. Céline wrote darkly comic novels, but he sided with
Vichy France and wrote notoriously Anti-Semitic pamphlets.
Ezra Pound knew and helped nearly everyone in the Modernist
movement, editing “The Waste Land” for T.S. Eliot and penning
The Cantos, an epic Modernist poem. Later in life, he discovered
the Social Credit movement and larded The Cantos with this
crackpot economic theory. He also sided with Mussolini during
the Second World War and wrote pro-fascist radio broadcasts.
At war’s end, he was imprisoned for treason. Then, in 1949, he
won the prestigious Bollingen Prize for The Pisan Cantos.
Sade’s ideas, personality, political views, and writing make
him a particularly challenging literary figure, both to summarize
and to appreciate. First imprisoned for sexual excesses with a
prostitute, he not only enjoyed whipping but being whipped. He
would go so far as to tabulate his reactions to getting whipped,
savoring each blow yet contextualizing each in a clinical and
methodical way. Hence Krafft-Ebing’s psychopathological
designation “sadism” seems too specific and too reductive for
Sade’s individual array of erotic kinks.
When released from prison, Sade served as a justice for the
Revolutionary government. Unfortunately, he was adamantly
opposed to capital punishment, especially to the moderates the
Revolutionaries wanted executed. This should give liberal readers
who refuse to read Sade some pause. Yet, at the same time, in his
philosophical writings he believed in the right to murder. This
came not only from a personal satisfaction trumping the petty
ideologies of politics, but from imitating the brutal destructiveness
of Nature. Nature kills its own, ergo, we should kill our own.
And while Sade has been accused of misogyny, that is both
too specific and too broad an accusation. Sade is misanthropic,
but also anti-wife, specifically concerning his own wife, RenéePélagie de Montreuil, “a young girl of petty aristocracy.” She
and her mother worked hard to keep Sade imprisoned for his
sexual excesses. Sade’s work isn’t anti-women, so much as antithese women.
De Beauvoir states in “Must We Burn Sade,”
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And there was one dream common to most young aristocrats of
the time. Scions of the declining class which had once possessed
concrete power, but which no longer retained any real hold on
the world, they tried to revive symbolically, in the privacy of the
bedchamber, the status for which they were nostalgic: that of
the lone and sovereign feudal despot. The orgies of the Duke of
Charolais, among others, were bloody and famous. Sade, too,
thirsted for this illusion of power.
This would explain Sade’s energy and prolific output during his
multiple incarcerations. When Sade was in captivity, he lashed
out in his prose. His tirades—against God, against morality,
against everything—are vulgar, ferocious, and articulate. They
can stand with the profanity-laced rhetoric of comic luminaries
like George Carlin and Bill Hicks. Fans of Hicks’ “Dark Poetry”
will take particular joy in The 120 Days. Sade’s notorious book
reads like an outline for the world’s greatest “Aristocrats Joke.”
Sade is an author one has to wrestle with. But the problematic
authors can reveal themselves as being the most rewarding.
Sade in the Raw
The 120 Days of Sodom is one of the great unfinished works
of literature. It joins the likes of The Canterbury Tales, The
Faerie Queene, and 2666. In its present version, only the first
section (“The Simple Passions”) exists in full-fledged prose.
The remaining three sections (“The Complex Passions,” “The
Criminal Passions,” and “The Murderous Passions”) exist only
as bare outlines with rudimentary prose bridging the inventory
of perversions.
But even in its raw form, the book preserves the power to
shock, horrify, and disgust. Annie Lebrun, in Sade: A Sudden
Abyss, summarizes the book. In some ways, the skeletal outline
anticipates literary Modernism and Postmodernism. But that
could be a case of critical retconning. I leave that judgment up to
the reader. Here is Lebrun’s summary:
Here we have a text which begins like a historical novel, moves
into a theatrical structure, is transformed into a philosophical
dialogue, thins out into a catalog, and finishes as a balance sheet
of those who are massacred and those who survive. Here we have
a book which begins with all the pomp of a historical novel, and
which ends with the laconic formulas of simple subtraction.
One parallel with this structure are manuals for role-playing
games. In Sade’s novel there are detailed character profiles
(along with abbreviated versions later on) and the multipage
“STATUTES.” Not only that, but the libertines desire to re-enact
the passions of the storyteller. For an unfinished novel written
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in 1785, its structure remains a radical format of frames-withinframes.
Sade wrote The 120 Days in 1785. To put that in perspective,
it is the same year John Adams becomes ambassador to Great
Britain, the United States were still governed by the Articles
of Confederation, George III was King of Great Britain with
William Pitt, the Younger as Tory Prime Minister, and France
was ruled by King Louis XVI. Sade might have been an awful
person to his wife and the prostitutes he hired, but he didn’t
own slaves, although the psychopathology of power and his
contradictory philosophical underpinnings for his literature
are no less contradictory than Thomas Jefferson inscribing
“All men are created equal” in The Declaration of Independence
while simultaneously owning slaves, sleeping with them, and
employing his progeny. France was not the only nation to
cultivate intellectually nuanced atheist perverts.
Towards a Mathematical Pornography
The 120 Days of Sodom creates an almost unbearable
tension between a primordial sexual frenzy and a meticulous
mathematical framework. Divided into four sections, each
section is an inventory of 150 passions. Beyond the inventory
is Sade’s hierarchical framework of players, symbols, statutes,
and procedures. Every day, for one hundred and twenty days,
the players follow a rigorous schedule similar to the hours kept
by monks in a monastery or King Louis XIV’s schedules.
The players exist in a hierarchy, each subset representing a
specific tier of power or powerlessness. At the top are the main
power-brokers: The Duc de Blangis, The Bishop of X***, The
Président de Curval, and Durcet, the banker. Then there are
the wives of the power-brokers: Constance, Adelaide, Julie, and
Aline. Prior to the proceedings, the quartet of power-brokers
arranged for each to marry the daughter of the other. For
example, Constance is the Duc’s wife but Durcet’s daughter.
Below them are the four storytellers, each becoming more and
more ugly and evil with the nature of the passions. Thus, Duclos,
who narrates the 150 simple passions is fifty and beautiful.
Madame Desgranges narrates the 150 murderous passions and
is the epitome of ugliness. “She is one-dugged, is missing three
fingers and six teeth, fructus belli. There exists not a single crime
she has not perpetrated.”
Beneath the storytellers are the three duennas, a harem of
little girls, a harem of little boys, and eight fuckers. The harems
have boys and girls between the ages of twelve to fifteen, while
the eight fuckers each have a penis that is massive.
The mathematical arrangements become enmeshed within
Sade’s eccentric personal philosophy. Even though the wives of
the power-brokers should be seen as members of high society,
according to the statutes the wives are treated with contempt and
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intimidation. Prior to deflowering the little boys and little girls,
the four power-brokers decided to amend the statutes to provide
a symbolic representation of that defloweration. Some wore a
bow to signal that they could be taken vaginally or a bow of
another color to be taken anally.
The mathematical possibilities are taken a step further with
the third section, “the criminal passions.” “The simple passions”
were an inventory of fetishes and kinks, but focused on a single
obsession: whipping, pissing, fucking, sodomy, and so forth.
“The complex passions” creates a kind of erotic multiplier effect,
mostly involving multiple participants. The third section, “the
criminal passions,” exacerbates this multiplier effect:
20. In order to combine incest, adultery, sodomy and sacrilege,
he embuggers his married daughter with a Host.
The mathematical ingenuity of the proceedings have
consequences for all involved. Due to the stipulations of the
statutes, the libertines confront the tension between design and
impulse. The narrators heat their passions, but the statutes declare
that the libertines must preserve the virginity of their spouses
until matrimony. Because of this, the libertines routinely thighfuck their submissive underlings. It creates a depraved asceticism.
Many times in the first section, the novel’s narrator pulls back
from the action, since the libertines engage in acts that have not
yet been dramatized by one of the four designated narrators.
“As amongst these twelve individuals, there was not one worthy
of the noose, the rack, and probably the wheel, I leave it to the
reader to picture what was said and done.”
An Encyclopedia of Perversions
Sade was a contemporary with the encyclopédists, a group of
individuals who compiled entries for Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire
raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (English: Encyclopaedia, or
a Systematic Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts, and Crafts). Compiled
between 1751 and 1772 and edited by Denis Diderot (1713 –
1784), it represented a new way of organizing knowledge. The
120 Days of Sodom attempts a similar feat.
Prior to Sade’s work, sexual knowledge was sparse,
relegated to anatomical and medical texts, usually hidden
away in monasteries. The Enlightenment saw the rediscovery
of countless classical texts and the creation of new knowledge
through scientific inquiry and natural philosophy.
Sade is the primitive first step in the field of sexology. Many
of the 600 passions enumerated within The 120 Days of Sodom
could be classified under terms like “fetish,” “perversion,” or
“kink.” The term “fetish” originated as a religious term, denoting
an object that receives concentrated attention and obsession.
The term has since been adopted by Karl Marx (1818 – 1883)
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to highlight modern industrial capitalism’s devotion to the
commodity.
Sade attempts a categorized inventory of human sexuality
and other base impulses, including the desire to hurt and kill
others. The prison’s confinement liberated him from society’s
judgment. What were they going to do, arrest him? While the
sexological investigation is highly autobiographical, it is still an
important first step in the field of sexology and psychology. This
relates back to the original premise of the work. The libertines,
extremely wealthy and extremely jaded, have secluded themselves
in the Château de Silling to hear four narrators tell stories of
simple, complex, criminal, and murderous passions.
Duclos’s narration in the first section is the only fully-written
section of the work. She begins her list of 150 passions by
weaving them together in a basic autobiographical arc. But as the
passions increase in severity and specificity, her autobiography
becomes atomized. The narrative propels forward with tales of
clients and their specific kink and perversion. On occasion we
witness a kind of double-framing. For many passions, Duclos
is a participant, actively engaging in sex with her clients. For
other passions, she secludes herself in a separate room and spies
through a hole in the wall. Thus we have the libertines listening
to the narrator as she tells a story of something she witnesses.
Since she is a prostitute and a procuress, we read pornography in
its purest form, since these tales are about prostitutes and their
sexual activities.
Sade’s own kinks and perversions became reduced to a
singular term, “sadism,” in Psychopathia Sexualis (1886), by
Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing (1840 – 1902). Like The
120 Days of Sodom, Krafft-Ebing’s work is a compilation of
case studies. The field of sexology would later encompass the
scholarship of Magnus Hirschfield (1868 – 1935), who founded
the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexual Research)
in Berlin in 1919. Krafft-Ebing approached sexology from a
psychological perspective, predating Sigmund Freud’s research.
Hirschfield took a more medical and educational approach to
human sexuality. Unfortunately, his efforts met a swift end when
the Nazis took power.
On the American side, the pair Dr. William Masters (1915
- 2001) and Virginia Johnson (1925 – 2013) achieved a medical
breakthrough with the publication of Human Sexual Response
(1966) and Human Sexual Inadequacy (1970). Their four-level
organization of human sexual behavior (excitement, plateau,
orgasm, resolution) is surprisingly similar to the libertine’s
reactions in The 120 Days of Sodom.
For all of the notoriety and shock value in Sade’s book, it still
remains an important historical and educational text. It shines a
light on sex in the eighteenth century, albeit from the perspective
of a jaded libertine.
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Canons of Darkness
Annie Lebrun writes that Sade “spent twenty-seven years of
his life in eleven different prisons, under three different régimes.”
During those years Sade produced a voluminous amount of
work. His writing is an epicenter of multiple canons (literary
and medical). Writers like Georges Bataille, Pauline Réage,
Elizabeth Berg, Jean Genet, Alan Moore, and Michael Manning
have been influenced by his writing. He exists in a Canon of
Darkness. One can see Sade as the negative reflection of William
Shakespeare. The Bard created a panoply of characters whose
hesitancy, introspection, and depth make them representatives
of a secular humanist tradition. Scholar Harold Bloom goes so
far as to assert that Shakespeare “invented the human.” Sade, on
the other hand, exposes the inhuman, brutal, and cruel nature
of humanity, although he sees it as a reflection of Nature’s
own inhumanity and brutality. Sade and Shakespeare are two
sides of the Western literary canon, although not necessarily as
opposite as one would imagine. Like Hamlet, The 120 Days of
Sodom ends with a pile of corpses. The rot in Denmark spins
out of control as ambition, betrayal, and love turn court intrigue
into a final bloodbath. But Shakespeare saw Hamlet as a tragedy,
while The 120 Days of Sodom could be seen as a parody. It
parodies picaresque novels and satirizes the moralistic attitude of
Rousseauist humanitarians talking about sense and sensibility. It
is also a prescient foreshadowing into how the well-intentioned
French Revolution, founded on “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité”
(“Freedom, equality, brotherhood”) would devolve into statesanctioned executions, regicide, empire, and the atrocities of
war. Napoleon Bonaparte kept Sade in prison, scandalized by his
prurient tales, yet he also created a dictatorship, a secret police
force, and his Iberian Campaign will be remembered not for
spreading the ideals of the French Revolution, but for enacting
upon the Spanish populace war atrocities captured by Francisco
Goya. The Disasters of War by Goya, while as shocking and horrific
as anything Sade could write, are not fiction, but document reallife events. Unlike numerous authors profiled within these pages,
it is by and large the puritanical and sanctimonious that have
made the Sadean imagination into stark reality.
Sade represents the beginning of a Dark Canon in Western
Literature. This darkness is something within us all, even if we
pretend it doesn’t exist.
The Verdict: Wainhouse and Seaver assert that “There are
other works more finished, of greater literary merit and with a
more philosophic content more developed … It is perhaps his
masterpiece; at the very least, it is the cornerstone on which
the massive edifice he constructed was founded.” Sade’s work
remains unfinished, existing in an unpolished state. Even with
the majority of the work amounting to nothing more than a
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glorified outline, its power and influence remain undeniable. His
influence runs like a main circuit cable throughout the many
works profiled within these pages. Georges Bataille, Pauline
Reage, Elizabeth Berg, and the comics of Alan Moore and
Michael Manning bear his footprint. The 120 Days of Sodom also
reads like an archaeological document, anticipating the tropes of
bondage erotica and bizarro fiction. And Sade’s work as a whole
combines a comprehensive understanding of anthropology,
history, and sexology, giving his work an intellectual heft buried
amidst the orgies, tortures, and bad behavior. While his work
founders on female internal anatomy and comparative biology,
for a libertine stuck in a series of prison cells it is a phenomenal
achievement.
In the end, Sade prepared the groundwork for a new sexually
explicit, uninhibited, and violent erotic literature. Sade shined
new light on what had been hidden by superstition and fear, but
when you look up to see this light breaking upon the dawn the
dread realization occurs that the light isn’t the benevolent sun but
indeed a comet hurdling towards the earth.
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Gynecocracy
1893
by Viscount Ladywood
The History: Along with the Fifties in US history, the Victorian
era is a time period at best misunderstood and at worst stereotyped.
Covering piano legs, rigid class and gender roles, and the rise of
industrial capitalism and European imperialism paint very broad
strokes of what was a dynamic, complex, and revolutionary time
period. In order to understand Gynecocracy better, we should take
a look at its immediate cultural and literary context. The novel
was written in 1893, while its thematic predecessor Venus in Furs
was written in 1870.
By the 1890s, numerous artistic and literary movements
flourished in Victorian England and the European Continent.
Many overlapped with similar aesthetic agendas. Romanticism
was on its way out and new scientific discoveries threatened the
established order. Movements at the time included Aestheticism,
Art Nouveau, Arts and Crafts, Symbolism, and Decadence.
Each commingled with the others, members joining one and
then another group. Gynecocracy exists on the tail end of what
historians call the Long Nineteenth Century (1789-1914).
Bookended between the French Revolution and the First World
War, the Victorian era seemed an oasis of political, social, and
economic conservatism. But beneath this facade of upright
behavior lay a swirling vortex of sexual eccentricity and gender
confusion.
From 1879 to 1880, The Pearl, a pornographic magazine,
was published in the United Kingdom. Psychologist Sigmund
Freud would devote his life to investigating the human mind,
itself a battleground between the Death Instinct and the sexand-violence crazed Id. A few years before Gynecocracy went to
press, Richard von Krafft-Ebing wrote Psychopathia Sexualis, a
comprehensive inventory of sexual deviance and dysfunction.
Written in 1886, it gave us the words “sadism” and “masochism.”
Besides these developments, advancements in electrification and
the combustion engine would revolutionize transportation and
domestic life.
The Book: Written in 1893, the full title of the work is Gynecocracy:
A Narrative of the Adventures and Psychological Experiences of Julian
Robinson (afterwards Viscount Ladywood) Under Petticoat-Rule,
Written by Himself. Dr. CJ Scheiner, in the introduction in the
Masquerade Books edition, informs us that Julian Robinson
is none other than London attorney Stanislas de Rhodes. The
sensation and prurient content of the novel necessitates the
use of a pen name. Scheiner goes on to inventory the various
humiliations and degradations suffered by Julian—”He is
kicked, beaten, whipped, pierced, circumcised, locked in a cage,
urinated on, covered in filth, and made to wear a penis sheath,
women’s clothes and tight corsets.” While all this sounds pretty
horrendous, the novel operates on another level, offering a satire
and pointed critique of gender roles in Victorian society.
After harassing a maid, Julian is sent to be tutored under a stern
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French governess named Madamoiselle de Chambonnard. She
also teaches Julian’s cousins, Maud, Beatrice, and Agnes. After
an initial bout of disobedience, Julian is put under “petticoatgovernment,” meaning he is dressed like a girl and treated
like one. At first Julian endures this treatment as humiliation,
especially to someone from the aristocracy. He eventually sees
this subjugation as exhilarating, acting like a girl and getting in
the good graces of Mademoiselle. He gets “birched”—beaten
by a thin birch branch—on numerous occasions throughout the
novel. One notable occurrence is when he gets birched by the
scullery maid. Julian (later Julia) takes offence at such treatment,
not necessarily because of the physical beating, but because he is
beaten by someone from the lower classes.
The novel is a panorama of gender fluidity. In academicspeak, one can say gender is “performative.” This is a fancier
way of saying gender is a performance of specific roles,
gestures, costumes, etc. One can act like a girl despite having
the sexual apparatus of a male. Gynecocracy, beneath its prurient
combinations and outrages, is a delightfully anti-deterministic
novel. Julian, now in a dress as Julia, is seduced by Lord Alfred
Ridlington. Lord Alfred, it is later revealed, is none other than
Lady Ridlington, dressed as a male. Our benighted narrator also
comes across Gertrude Stormont, a fellow train passenger who
also torments Julian, much to the chagrin of Mademoiselle.
During their affair, Gertrude insists he call her Mamma, adding
the frisson of faux incest to the mix.
In the end, Julian marries Beatrice, but finds himself still
under petticoat-government. Beneath his proper English suit, he
wears a corset and a chemise, even as he declaims mightily in the
House of Commons. (Julian informs us he is not the only MP
subject to this specific regime.) Make no mistake, Gynecocracy
is a prurient book. The many sexual situations are described,
albeit without the explicitness one would expect from a modern
novel of the genre. One has to read carefully, since descriptions
vary from the florid and oblique to the clinical and mechanical.
Because of the time period, readers at the time would find this
work transgressive. Today it is merely eccentric. But it is worth
reading, if one’s temperament is sympathetic to material of this
nature. Those seeking an early example of “trans literature”
should give this novel a look, at least from a historical and
cultural perspective. This is a wonderful examination of fluid
gender roles.
The Verdict: An underground classic.
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Story of the Eye
1928, 1967
By Georges Bataille
Translated by Joachim Neugroschel
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The History: In Susan Sontag’s essay, “The Pornographic
Imagination,” she discusses five novels, including Georges
Bataille’s The Story of the Eye. My essay series covers three of
these, the first being Bataille’s 1928 shocker. Easily dismissed
as juvenile and vulgar, a reader new to the capacious works of
Bataille should first have some historical, literary, and aesthetic
background surrounding the novella. Written in 1928 by Bataille
under the pseudonym Lord Auch, the novel went through four
versions (1928, 1940, 1941, and 1967). The City Lights edition
I’m using for this review is based on the 1928 version.*
When it was written, France had endured the hardships and
atrocities inflicted by the First World War. To put a perspective
on how this affected the nature of French culture I will throw out
some not-so-random numbers. 1.4 million. That is the number
of French military casualties. During the Second World War, the
United Stated had 418,000 total deaths, including military and
civilian casualties. I mention this because during the Twenties,
France becomes the hot-bed for the artistic avant-garde. Creating
this infusion of literary and artistic radicalism involved a rejection
of the old values that killed millions in the trenches, left survivors
scarred and insane, toppled most European monarchies, and
obliterated the techno-capitalist-progressivist optimism that
fueled the Nineteenth Century.
Amidst this cultural change and aesthetic avant-garde is Georges
Bataille. Novelist, poet, anthropologist, surrealist, pornographer,
philosopher, and literary critic, Bataille is comparable to William
T. Vollmann in terms of scope of knowledge and dwelling on the
more salacious aspects of human existence. Story of the Eye is the
tip of a massive, fascinating iceberg. (I will explain more of his
philosophy and how it dovetails with Story of the Eye below.)
In addition to the creative maelstrom of the Twenties,
Bataille’s pornographic fiction is part of a larger French
literary heritage. The United States has the historical baggage
of being founded by the Puritans with their funny shaped hats,
harsh Calvinism, and penchant for hanging Quakers. France
is an entirely different animal. Apart from France’s ferocious
secularism following the 1789 Revolution, France also has two
literary figures instrumental to understanding this novella: the
Marquis de Sade and Alfred Jarry. Jarry wrote Ubu Roi in 1896 to
the shock of polite French society. Sade, as Sontag wrote, “had
never been forgotten. He was read enthusiastically by Flaubert,
Baudelaire and most of the other geniuses of French literature of
the late nineteenth century ... The quality and theoretical density
of the French interest in Sade remains virtually incomprehensible
to English and American literary intellectuals, for whom Sade is
perhaps an exemplary figure in the history of psychopathology,
both individual and social, but inconceivable as someone to be
taken seriously as a ‘thinker.’” Sade’s literary footprint looms
large in Story of the Eye.
(I will be approaching this analysis from a literary perspective,
avoiding the condescension implied by both the moralizing and
pathologizing perspectives.)
The Book: Story of the Eye is broken into four parts. The first is
“The Tale,” concerning the carnal misadventures of an unnamed
Narrator, his friend Simone, and a girl named Marcelle. The
Narrator and Simone participate in a series of sexual situations.
Marcelle also participates, is scandalized, institutionalized, and,
shortly after the Narrator and Simone free her, she hangs herself.
As fugitives, the Narrator and Simone flee to Spain. They meet
a debauched English aristocrat named Sir Edmond and their
carnal misadventures escalate in ferocity and intensity. In one
scene, Simone reaches orgasm upon witnessing a bullfighter
getting gored, the bull’s horn going through the bullfighter’s eye.
The final scene in this novella involves the Narrator, Simone,
and Sir Edmond sexually abusing a priest, eventually killing him.
The reader understands the title of the novella because of things
done with a plucked out eye. With Bataille, as with Sade, sex is
inextricably linked with death. In French, the orgasm is called
“la petite mort,” translated as “the little death.”
The second part, called “Coincidences,” is Bataille’s
biographical and psychological explanation for “The Tale.” In
this essay, he gives a kind of psychological exorcism, explaining
his eccentric and torturous childhood. His father, a syphlitic,
slowly disintegrated, mentally and physically, during Bataille’s
childhood. His mother also attempted suicide. During the First
World War, his family had to abandon his father in their home
during the German advance. Like a bonus featurette on a DVD,
Bataille pulls back the curtain and explains the transpositions
and substitutions he made to his personal history. Taken alone,
“The Tale” would be an amusing shocker and probably fade
into literary obscurity. “Coincidences” transforms this shocker
into literary art. The artistic merit is gained from how Bataille
uses pornography. (By comparison, look at how the steampunk
genre uses history.) The last two parts include “W.C.”, a short
essay about an abandoned work similar to Story of the Eye, and
“Outline of a sequel,” which follows Simone and the Narrator
fifteen years after the novella, with Simone dying in a scene of
sublime torture. (Again the sex and death motif.)
The Verdict: Yes, Story of the Eye is pornographic and yes, it is an
example of literary genius. “The Tale” has cardboard characters,
inexhaustible sexual acrobatics, and is festooned with four-letter
words. But ... it is a monument of psychological confession and
the power of transgressive literature. Besides influencing the
Surrealists, Bataille’s work can be seen as an early version of
bizarro fiction.
*For more on City Lights and their legal battles, check out my
review of Mania! by Ronald K.L. Collins and David M. Skover.
39 | The NSFW Files
Our Lady of the
Flowers
1943
by Jean Genet
Translated by Bernard Frechtman
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Personal History: It is rare for me to have a book that impacts my
life on such a monumental level. Our Lady of the Flowers, by Jean
Genet, is an unlikely candidate to have this honor. Genet’s novel
affected me in such a way that I remember where I bought the
book and it forever altered my reading habits. Rewind back to the
mid- to late-1990s, Madison, Wisconsin, where I am completing
my undergraduate degrees in History and Communication Arts
(Radio-TV-Film). On some days I’d have several hours between
classes. During these idle hours I’d haunt the various used
bookstores along Madison’s State Street, the Wisconsin capital’s
famed car-free street. One day I walked into Paul’s Bookstore
and browsed the fiction section, randomly picking out volumes
and flipping through the pages, seeing what caught my interest.
One book that caught my eye was Genet’s novel, especially its
weirdly beguiling cover, Self Portrait by John Kirby. It depicted
a bald men in a dress, his hand in a parody of a gesture seen
in paintings of Catholic saints. As a fan of Beat writers, I had
seen Jean Genet’s name thrown around. (I had read Naked
Lunch by William S. Burroughs in high school, loving it far more
passionately than Jack Kerouac’s On the Road.) Here Genet is
hanging out with William S. Burroughs in the Bunker, and there
he is with the Black Panthers. Needless to say, I was intrigued.
I later read most of Genet’s fiction, devouring volumes along
with other outliers of the Beat Generation like John Clellon
Holmes and Herbert Huncke. In the end, Our Lady of the Flowers
remains one of top three favorite novels I’ve ever read, the other
two being Against Nature by Joris-Karl Huysmans and Chants de
Maldoror and Poems, by Comte de Lautreamont. My tastes, shall
we say, ran to the dark, violent, and idiosyncratic.
The History: As of this writing (May 2013), gay marriage has
been recently legalized in France and Minnesota became the
twelfth state to legalize gay marriage. I mention this as a prelude
to France’s tumultuous gay rights history and how that ties into
issues like censorship, erotica, international trade, and the US
Post Office. As late as 1750 in France, sodomy was a criminal
offense punishable with burning at the stake. The French
Revolution paved the way for abolishing press censorship and
relaxed legislation on sexual behavior. The politics is much
more complicated. The see-sawing between revolutionary and
restorationist governments from the 1790s to the Fall of France
in 1940 involved the French public getting whipsawed between
liberalized regimes and more repressive, authoritarian regimes.
Although as Proust chronicled in his novel, In Search of Lost
Time, sexual license co-existed in the repressive monarchist
dictatorship of Emperor Napoleon III’s Second Empire.
The situation of sexuality in France is tangled up in the issue
of class. The upper classes have more leeway with their sexual
behavior while the lower classes tend to be more conservative.
During the 1920s, censorship and sexual mores became
more free, as opposed to the reigning puritanism of the United
States. Like the earliest days of the French Revolution, quality
literature thrived simultaneously with the volcanic outpouring
of pornographic material (the dynamo that pushes the language
forward, to paraphrase Walter Benjamin). The 1930s became
more repressive, starting with the passage of the Code de le
Famille, a dark prelude to the Vichy regime’s criminalization
of homosexual behavior. (The complicated interrelationships
between homosexuality, criminality, the law, and treason will be
unraveled when I discuss the specifics of Genet’s book.)
The Book: Our Lady of the Flowers was written in Fresnes Prison
in 1942. Located in the southern suburbs of Paris, Jean Genet
wrote his book in relative safety while France was ruled by the
Vichy government. Following World War II, Genet had difficulty
finding a publisher and in 1956 was convicted of pornography.
Genet revised the novel in 1951 when it was published by
Gallimard, which omitted some of the more pornographic
passages. After World War II Genet also received a pardon from
the French government, aided by luminaries in the French literary
establishment like Jean-Paul Sartre. Genet had been imprisoned,
facing a life sentence, for thievery.
The book begins with an incantation to murderers by the
prisoner Jean. (While Jean shares many autobiographical
similarities to the author, the character Jean is not the same.
A similar confusion occurs for In Search of Lost Time between
the narrator Marcel and the author Marcel Proust.) Writing in
his prison cell, Genet creates the novel from his masturbatory
reveries. When the guards confiscated his writings, he began
again. Out of his masturbation, he imagines Divine (nee Louis
Culafroy), a drag queen in pre-war Paris and her exploits with
Darling Daintyfoot, a pimp and stool pigeon. After Darling
leaves, Divine lives with the soldier Gabriel, Gorgui the killer,
and the murderer Our Lady of the Flowers. What Genet excels
at is world-building, usually something associated with science
fiction and fantasy. From the lower depths of the gay and
criminal underworlds, he builds a beautiful, violent, hermetic,
and decadent world.
Adding to this world-building, Genet’s novel is polyvocal.
It contains many voices, best exemplified in this description by
The New York Times Book Review: “Elegiac elegance, alternately
muted, languorous, vituperative, tender, glamourous, bitchy,
lush, mockingly feminine, ‘high camp’, overripe, vigorous,
rigorous, exalted.” This is a novel where voices clash, collide,
and merge together into a seamless whole. One passage has
all the hot-house luxuriousness of the Decadence movement,
another passage has criminal toughs speaking in language not
too different from a Raymond Chandler novel, while another
has bitchy queens gossiping in an elevated, ironic, and gorgeous
slanguage. Genet writes of his wartime incarceration, “The
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whole world is dying of panicky fright. Five million young men
of all tongues will die by the cannon that erects and discharges
... But where I am I can muse in comfort on the lovely dead
of yesterday, today, and tomorrow.” While the world destroyed
itself and France was ruled by traitors, Genet sat serenely in his
cell and wrote his stories.
The novel undergoes a double transformation with Jean,
the prisoner, putting up twenty pictures of murderers and
masturbating to their images. He describes how he venerates
these images like the images of Catholic saints. Divine becomes
a self-anointed saint, suffering the slings and arrows of love and
betrayal, until she dies of consumption in a garret. The narrator
refers to Divine as “he” or “she” with casual familiarity as
well as freely switching from past to present tense. We read of
Divine’s childhood as a boy named Louis Culafroy, the son of
Ernestine, in a lovely bucolic setting. These passages can rival the
best examples of literary realism in rural settings.
When Darling and Divine go to mass, “They sometimes take
communion from a mean-looking priest who maliciously crams
the host into their mouths. Darling still goes to mass because of
its luxuriousness.”
One reads how the narrator transforms the poverty, suffering,
and violence of the criminal underworld into lush prose. Divine’s
fellow queens—Mimosa I, Mimosa II, First Communion,
Milord, and others—become saints in this inverted Catholic
cosmology. Murderers become holy, not because they can be
redeemed (they won’t be), but because they are murderers. A
pimp can embody the Eternal as he thumbs his nose at the prison
guard. This novel transforms the gutter into the holy and the holy
into the high camp, Divine’s decorating her garret a cheap parody
of a Catholic cathedral, but done with the same reverence and
visual splendor. Jean-Paul Sartre asserts in his introduction to
the novel that “Our industrial twentieth century has witnessed
the birth of three medieval edifices, of unequal value: the work
of Giraudoux, Ulysses, and Our Lady of the Flowers.” One can
understand why.
Into the general narrative of the novel are separate sections
entitled DIVINARIANA. Kaleidoscopic snippets including bon
mots, vignettes, or disconnected extended passages. The novel,
reflecting its Catholic origin, has three of these sections, mirroring
the concept of the trinity. Jean’s stream-of-consciousness fuels his
masturbatory fantasies and like most fantasists, he grows tired of
his creations. By the end he says, “So here are the last Divinariana.
I’m in a hurry to get rid of Divine. I toss off helter-skelter, at
random, the following notes, in which you, by unscrambling
them, will try to find the essential form of the Saint.” Genet
breaks the fourth wall and directly comments on his creations.
This predates literary postmodernism and Divine an exemplar
of what queer theorist Judith Butler calls the “performativity of
gender.”
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This performativity is exposed in the harsh light of the law
during a climactic court scene. Like a bizarro world version of
a legal drama, Jean recounts the trial of Our Lady of the Flowers.
The queens are trotted out before the court and forced to utter
their birth names, a procedure at once humiliating and banal.
They are stripped of their magic and exalted status. Our Lady is
sentenced to death for the senseless murder he committed and,
unlike Dostoyevsky’s tortured Raskolnikov, is unrepentant, his
final words disabusing his elderly victim’s lack of sexual vigor.
(My euphemizing Our Lady’s last words steals the passage’s
original power and humor.)
As stated before, Genet was a career criminal. Born an
illegitimate child, he continually found himself on the wrong side
of the law. He spent many years in prison and his view of the law
and the bourgeoisie culture that supported it was antagonistic.
Later in life, as a literary elder statesman, he used his prestige
to bolster support for the Black Panthers and the Palestinian
Liberation Organization. With years spent in prison, considered
a sexual deviant and moral danger to “proper society,” it is only
fitting he become an ally with fellow underdogs like AfricanAmericans, gays, and Arabs. Prisoner of Love, a later work from
the 1980s, recounts the time he spent with the PLO. Today
Genet is a tricky literary figure. Unlike recent years, the gay
rights movement had been fragmented and is antagonistic to
different elements within the movement. This is the case with
drag queens. While one can get into another digression about
comedic and dramatic drag, mainstream gay rights advocates
felt that drag queens did a disservice to the movement. They
found them effeminate and weak, a parody of femininity, as
well as being fake and superficial. Genet’s Divine is a wonderful
counterexample. It would be the drag queens who fought back
against the police in 1969 at the Stonewall Inn.
Things get further complicated when Genet likens
homosexuality to criminality and insanity. While this isn’t
advantageous to gay rights advocacy, it is Genet’s means of
fighting a bigoted and evil status quo. Remember, Genet wrote
Our Lady of the Flowers in 1942, when Stalin, an ex-criminal,
ruled the Soviet Union and Nazis ran Germany. The Nuremberg
Trials would accuse the Nazis as a criminal political organization.
When the rulers of Europe were murderous criminal thugs,
Genet’s adoration of moral deviance sounds more like liberation
and his queens in an impoverished underworld comes closer to a
personal utopian vision.
The Verdict: Our Lady of the Flowers is a great novel, if not
one of the greatest novels written in the 20th century. I would
put it alongside Ulysses, by James Joyce (another novel that
offended proper society, accusing Joyce of being obscene and
pornographic). Genet’s novel would inspire the Beat Generation
and the Mid-century Modernists’ fascination with criminality (see
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Norman Mailer’s “The White Negro”). The cavalcade of queens
and criminals would find its analogue in Andy Warhol’s Factory
scene with its Superstars (celebrity icons yet also parodies/
homages to the Catholic saints of Warhol’s Slovak heritage). The
lowbrow counterpart to the Factory were the films of Baltimore
native John Waters. Waters would, like Genet, anoint another
pop culture saint with the name Divine, shot through with
lumpen glory, criminal violence, and sexual perversity.
I won’t mince words: Genet’s novel is a tour de force. To call
it something like a Great Gay Novel or a Great French Novel
belittles its status and its power. Our Lady of the Flowers is not only
of literary merit, despite its prurient creation and sensational
subject matter, but it deserves a place within the Western Canon.
Genet wrote stories of his masturbatory fantasies, yet he created
art that will last the ages.
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Personal History: During my high school years, I spent most
of my time at the bookstore at the mall. Back in those days it
would have been Scribner’s at Mayfair Mall in Wauwatosa,
Wisconsin. Before the emergence of omnipresent Barnes &
Noble, I hung around the various different sections of the rather
smallish bookstore. On one of those occasions I wandered into
the comics and graphic novel section. While there I happened
upon The Story of O by the comics artist Guido Crepax. Needless
to say, since I was in high school, I didn’t really dwell on the text
of said comic. Then I imagine I exited the store, simultaneously
curious and horrified at humanity’s darker nature.
Some time later I became a fan of cultural critic and essayist
Susan Sontag. In her groundbreaking essay, “The Pornographic
Imagination,” she wrote about The Story of O. Up to this point, I
had never read the actual novel. This essay series gave me reason
to read and analyze it, determining if Sontag was correct about
assessing it with literary value.
Story of O
1954
By Pauline Réage
Translated by Sabine D’Estree (Richard
Seaver)
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The History: Written in 1954 by Pauline Réage, the pen
name for novelist Anne Desclos, it became a literary sensation
in Europe and the United States. Once again, Grove Press
became the delivery vehicle for sophisticated titillation. As John
Updike sardonically quipped, “Its courage has preceded its
commercialism; it pioneered in the territory it now so cheerfully
exploits with its black-mass version of Book-of-the-Month Club,
its roguish get-with-the-sexual-revolution ads, its stable of Ph.D.s
willing to preface the latest ‘curious’ memoir or ‘underground’
classic with admonitory sermons on the righteousness of
fornication.” Story of O is one of those books.
Réage (I’ll use Desclos’s pen name hereafter) was the lover
of her employer, the publisher Jean Paulhan. When the Second
World War ended, Paulhan decided to publish the complete
works of the Marquis de Sade. Paulhan considered Sade to be
the greatest of French writers. This was also a kind of literary
rehabilitation since Sade was now blamed for every kind of fascist
atrocity and genocidal excess. (An ironic charge, since Sade was
an adamant opponent of the death penalty and enough of a
societal nuisance to be imprisoned by Bourbon King Louis XVI,
the French Revolutionaries, and Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte.
This doesn’t mean he was a good person, but even John Cheever
or Evelyn Waugh would be an awful person to get stuck with
on an elevator.) Despite these accusations, Sade still holds a
valued place within French literary tradition. His virulent atheist
philosophy made him a counterpart to fellow Enlightenment
philosophers Voltaire and Denis Diderot.
Réage was challenged by Paulhan to write a Sadean novel.
She complied, writing a Sadean novel from a female perspective.
(Sade’s greatest novels also had female perspectives, most notably
Justine and Juliette.)
While written during the apogee of postwar French global
power, the novel possesses a fairytale quality. It is a strange
reflection of the Victorian classic Gynecocracy by Viscount
Ladywood. In 1954 France had the Fourth Republic (1947 - 1954)
and Algeria and Indochina were firmly under French control.
France in the Fifties was a picture of Modernist confidence.
Meanwhile in the United States, undercover cops were spending
their time arresting people for selling Betty Page photographs
and Grove Press operated as a kind of erotica samizdat.
The Book: A story of two beginnings and two endings. In the
first beginning, we see O and her lover Rene get into a taxi. On
Rene’s command, she takes off her panties. Rene then orders her
to get out and enter an apartment to await further instructions.
End of scene. Beginning Number 2: Dressed in the same way,
her lover is driving now, and she is driven to a chateau to await
further instructions.
Once inside the chateau, she is subject to various humiliations
and several scenes of sexual dominance. Rene whips her as well
as his friend Sir Stephen, an older English aristocrat. Included in
her laundry list of tortures include getting whipped by various
characters, male and female, including a negro maid. She is also
restrained, forced into servitude, pierced, and finally branded.
She endures all these things joyfully, on both an emotional
and erotic level. Rene “prostitutes” her to other men and then
hands her off to Sir Stephen. (It is later revealed that Sir Stephen
and Rene are related; both have the same mother but different
fathers.)
But not is all humiliation and torture in the hermetically
sealed chateau. After her first session, O returns to her normal
job as a fashion photographer. As is typical of these kinds of
stories, O becomes jealous of Jacqueline, a beautiful fashion
model. In the final set piece, O wears an owl mask and becomes
the plaything of a rotund man known only as the Commander.
In a second ending, written in italics, Réage relates how the final
chapter had been suppressed, since the subject matter related how
Sir Stephen granted O’s wish to be killed by him. (Controversial,
yes, but also a bit of metafictional trickery.)
The Verdict: While this may sound like the epitome of
understatement, Story of O is a problematic book. While I
agree with Sontag’s assessment that it is a literary classic, as a
heterosexual male, it left me feeling titillated and uncomfortable.
Like hearing a bigoted joke, but also understanding all too well
why the joke is funny, this novel is a potential hand grenade.
One has to be especially delicate and nuanced in its appreciation.
While some scenes were arousing to me as a reader, others left
me frankly horrified and nauseated. BDSM and kink practices
are pretty run-of-the-mill. There are obvious consent issues, but
enlightened partners should be given the benefit of the doubt.
But literary critics shouldn’t be distracted by either medicalizing
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or moralizing the novel, as Sontag warns in “The Pornographic
Imagination.” Still, when it is described that O is “getting beaten,”
it leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Despite the imprimatur of
O’s consent to all this, it still radiates the foul vibe of domestic
violence and violence against women. But that is my imprinting
my prejudices on the novel.
Even with its sensational subject matter, Réage writes in a
detached, almost clinical style. This isn’t the obscenity-studded
novel of Sade with its endless orgiastic acrobatics and lengthy
atheist treatises. It more closely resembles Gynecocracy with a
limited set of characters acting within a closed space. Annie
Le Brun, the French literary critic, likened Sade’s novels with
fairy tales, since they made the reader afraid. It is a fear borne
of childhood and childlike innocence. Réage performs a similar
operation. Le Brun also restores Sade’s heroine Justine as a
heroic figure, her naivete coupled with her saintlike endurance
of tortures. O is a similar figure, ending all manner of personal,
physical, and emotional tortures, each session increasing her
love for Rene. It doesn’t seem logical, but when has love ever
been logical?
Finally, there is the matter of erotica itself. The popular
argument by anti-pornography feminists is that pornography
perpetuates degradation and objectification of women, along
with empowering the Male Gaze. So what do we do with this
novel? It is written by a woman and told from O’s perspective.
O herself is simultaneously a figure of objectification and
endurance. Strengthened by her love for Rene, no matter what
humiliation he puts her through, she remains loyal, a pillar of
fidelity. The biggest challenge to politically correct thinking is
O’s willingness to be dominated. She becomes a slave in these
situations, but it is of her own free will. This confounds issues like
sex and power. The interplay between dominant and submissive
participants is predicated on consent and a mutual understanding
of the situation. The freedom to be dominated is not a popular
notion and doesn’t sit well in our post-colonial society that aspires
towards greater egalitarianism. But an evolving societal maturity
involves understanding and appreciating seemingly distasteful
personal predilections. Like criticism itself, it all boils down to
taste. Story of O definitely is not for everybody ...
Then again, if all those suburban housewives who devoured
the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy want to read something really
good, then they should read Story of O. Réage can at least write
well and her chaste prose doesn’t come across like it was written
by a prudish serial killer.
Additional: Pauline Réage wrote a sequel to Story of O in 1969,
called Return to the Chateau: Story of O, Part II. In the further
adventures of O, Rene, and Sir Stephen, O returns to Roissy
where she undergoes further tortures and humiliations. There is
an espionage subplot involving a “client” and some untoward
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business practices. Like similar authors, Réage attempts to revisit
an original premise and can’t recapture the lightning. Part of that
is historical context, along with an “Is this really necessary?”
vibe. Not a shameless cash-in, but it lacks the ascetic nightmarish
fairytale quality of the original. What was once groundbreaking
has now become stale and quaint. The increasing permissiveness
of literature and the visual arts (along with the mainstreaming
of hardcore pornography) made Réage’s chaste descriptions and
aristocratic swingers seem obsolete. I would recommend Return
to the Chateau for completists and those curious about Sixties-era
French erotica.
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Personal History: Virtually none. While the previous entry,
Story of O, is a minor classic and a well-known novel within the
BDSM community, I had known little to nothing about Jean de
Berg’s novel, The Image. Susan Sontag’s mention of the novel
in her essay, “The Pornographic Imagination,” was the extent
of my previous knowledge. For all intents and purposes, I read
this novel cold. In some ways, this is beneficial for criticism. It’s
nice not being weighed down with a novel’s fame or notoriety,
let alone one’s preconceived opinions. My only preconception
about The Image was that Susan Sontag considered it to be a
pornographic text with literary merit.
The Image
1956
By Jean de Berg
Uncredited English translation
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The History: This is the last novel Susan Sontag discussed in
her essay, “The Pornographic Imagination.” Along with Story
of the Eye and Story of O, Sontag considers The Image to be a
pornographic novel that has literary merit.
Written in 1956 by Jean de Berg, the pen name for Catherine
Robbe-Grillet, the wife of nouveau roman pioneer Allain RobbeGrillet. Like Story of O, the novel became emblematic of MidCentury Modernist erotica. In the process of postwar recovery
and still possessing much of its colonial empire, France was a
hub of high culture, fashion, and commercial success. Along
with heightened national pride and disposable income, France
returned to its tradition of creating challenging experimental
work and nurturing its aesthetic avante-garde. Allain RobbeGrillet’s work creating the nouveau roman (“the new novel”) went
along with the early pioneers in Cahiers du Cinema (François
Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard). The years Pauline Réage and
Jean de Berg published their books, Samuel Beckett disassembled
the novel with his landmark Trilogy. The Fifties re-ignited artistic
experimentalism in everything from books to plays to art. A
Streetcar Named Desire laid bare an inarticulate, yet charismatic,
American masculinity. Jackson Pollock’s canvasses confounded
gallery patrons. Bebop ripped apart the pre-war jazz elegance
with technical virtuosity and boundless energy.
In the United States, one could still get arrested for reading
“Howl” or drooling over Bettie Page photographs. It wouldn’t be
until the Sixties when censorship would be relaxed enough for
people to appreciate erotica on an aesthetic and philosophical
level. Susan Sontag’s essay would make inroads towards
legitimizing this otherwise notorious and prurient genre.
On a much larger historical level, The Image, like Story of
O before it, would continue the French literary legacy begun
by the Marquis de Sade: the bondage novel. It’s difficult for
American readers to understand that there’s a literary tradition
for these books. It’s too easy to either consider erotica akin to
thermonuclear waste and not touch it, unless one has a moral
hazmat suit, or medicalize the genre and see the kinky world
of bondage as a realm best left to the psychologically damaged.
Both these lines of argument won’t be dealt with, because, in the
end, they are irrelevant to appreciating this piece of literature.
The Book: The Image is peculiar, even by the standards of MidCentury Literary erotica. With a preface by Pauline Reage, the
book doubles down on the pen names. A literary sensation writes
effusively about a book written under another pen name. Nothing
like starting a book about bondage and domination with some
mind-games for the reader.
The story itself is pure simplicity. Like Waiting for Godot with
its minimal stage direction, The Image has a limited number of
locations and only three major characters. Unlike Story of O, this
story is barely over one hundred pages. The narrative involves
Jean, the male narrator, witnessing and occasionally participating
in various humiliations of Anne. Anne is privately and publicly
humiliated by her mistress Claire. In the end, Claire submits to
the will of Jean and lets Jean dominate her sexually.
This is bare-bones erotica. Written in a style that’s
simultaneously explicit yet detached and clinical, the reader
identifies with Jean and his mounting shock and arousal at
the humiliations he witnesses. Like O, Claire is a fashion
photographer. The novella’s climax is when Claire shows Jean a
series of pictures. The pictures involve ascending levels of sexual
humiliation visited upon Anne. Jean thinks they are staged
until he sees Claire do the same things to Anne. This shocks
and arouses him. He eventually becomes a participant in these
humiliations. While Anne is Claire’s subject, she gets verbally
harassed by Claire, who treats her like a child, using language
that infantilizes her.
Story of O had an intricately built erotic underworld created
around O and her torturers. The Image is like a stage-play. Actors,
setting, situation. The barest necessities to create a plausible
narrative.
The Verdict: The Image is a classic bondage novel and it does
have literary merit. But this brings up some relevant points.
Would I have considered it “literary” if Susan Sontag hadn’t
given it her critical imprimatur? Possibly. Perhaps it would have
shown up in the bin of forgotten classics like Gynecocracy? It’s the
same conundrum with other aesthetic judgments. Just because
it’s in a museum and has a nice frame around it, does that make
it “art?” Does the incomprehensible gibberish on the museum
label also make it “art?” (Although the incomprehensibility of
museum labels is most rampant in contemporary art galleries,
where artists writing grants and galleries catering to the academic
crowd create a feedback loop of obscurantist jargon.)
With the barest elements present, what makes this novel an
example of erotica and not pornography? Sontag thought it was
pornography. My issue is that there are two words to begin with.
“Erotica” and “pornography” implies we are talking about two
different things. (In the visual arts and cinema, there’s probably
50 | The NSFW Files
merit to that argument.) Either the distinction is inherently
classist (hence the old joke: “The difference between erotica
and porn is the lighting”) or narrative based (plot equals erotica;
plotless equals porn). Is that always true? Beckett’s Trilogy has
explicit language, a couple horrific sex scenes, and then becomes
a jumble of hallucinations and plotlessness. Hardly porn,
especially to those who awarded him the Nobel Prize. There’s
also prurience. Molloy’s actions with the old lady do not inspire
arousal.
In the end the distinctions between erotica and porn seem
like historically contingent definitions. Sontag was writing in
the Sixties about books written in the Twenties and the Fifties.
Today, The Image appears like a quaint relic from the past. The
challenge with assessing literature is figuring out the lens to
interpret the narrative. As a historian, I like historicizing the
novel, contextualizing it with the events, politics, and trends of
the time period. But I also like reading books for the sheer joy of
reading something new and unknown. I also had to juggle critical
assessments. Art for the ages versus historical relic, although I
find either/or judgments constricting and self-defeating. I neither
want to diminish a novel by historicizing too much and I don’t
think “art” is something special and beyond-the-ordinary. This
ends up being a roundabout way to say that The Image is both
historically important to the literary history of erotica and an
entertaining read. It is minimalist erotica: a novel about sexuality
and domination sanded down to its barest components necessary
for a narrative.
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Naked Lunch: The
Restored Text
1959, 2002
by William S. Burroughs
Edited by James Grauerholz and Barry
Miles
Personal History: It’s a common truism that the books read in
high school leave a lasting impression in those formative years.
As the screenwriter John Rogers put it, “There are two novels
that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of
the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often
engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes,
leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood,
unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves
orcs.” I read The Fountainhead when I was a senior and didn’t pick
up Ayn Rand’s “writing” again until the economy collapsed in
2009. And I never read The Lord of the Rings until the movie came
out. Prior to this, I read Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
and, to use the cliché, it blew my mind.
How did I get to William S. Burroughs? I read him before
I read Ms. Rand’s attempts at prose. I went to high school in
the early 1990s. I can’t remember what steps led to my reading
Naked Lunch, but I’ll set before you a hastily assembled montage
of events and images during that same time period. I’m not
sure whether I saw the David Cronenberg 1991 film before or
after reading the book. (It’s hard to establish a firm date since
the book and film are radically different creatures.) I remember
renting it and watching it on the VCR, Peter Weller and Roy
Scheider acting in a very bizarre version of the Fifties. There was
Burroughs’s appearance on Saturday Night Live where he read
“A Thanksgiving Prayer.” Late one night I saw a strange stop
animation short on PBS called “Ah Pook is Here,” written and
performed by Burroughs. I also saw him in his cameo in Gus
Van Sant’s Drugstore Cowboy. Unlike other high school students
with Tolkien or Rand, I had my Beatnik phase. I read Kerouac,
Ginsberg, Burroughs, John Clellon Holmes, and Herbert Huncke.
I listened to jazz a little bit, but I was more entranced by the
literature.
Part of loving Burroughs is coming to terms with the
Burroughs Mystique. Like Captain Willard listening to Colonel
Kurtz on the reel-to-reel, I was hooked by Burroughs’s voice.
When one listens to him read from his books or philosophize on
drug culture, one hears an otherworldly voice. Burroughs doesn’t
sound elderly, he sounds ancient, insectoid, inhuman. His voice
also has a slight Western accent, probably owing to his living
in Lawrence, Kansas. Unlike other writers associated with the
Beat movement, he doesn’t look the part. In the same way that
Robert Crumb looks like an Iowa grocer from 1910, William S.
Burroughs looks and sounds like a Kansas insurance agent.
Back to Naked Lunch. I read it, it blew my mind. It altered
all my pre-conceptions about writing and American culture. A
book blew my mind only two other times, when I read Ulysses by
James Joyce and Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon.
The History: Written in 1959, Naked Lunch is a scabrous and
lacerating satire of American life and mores. (I’ll get into the
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specifics of the publishing history below.) The Fifties were a
contradictory, hysterical, and revolutionary time in American
history. Advances in technology and design co-existed with
institutional segregation in the South, the Red Scare, and the Cold
War. In the Fifties, homosexuality was still considered a mental
illness, at least according to the 1952 edition of the Diagnostic
and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. (The classification
wouldn’t be reversed until 1974.) Since it was a mental disorder,
society had the daft notion that it could be cured. In addition to its
psychological classification, homosexuality was a criminal act.
Not until Bowers v. Hardwick in 1986 would homosexuality be
de-criminalized.
The Fifties experienced numerous hysterias. Communist
plots, juvenile delinquents, drug abuse, comics, and rock and
roll. Everything could be tailor-made into a Communist plot.
Those tarred as Communist agents included Civil Rights icons
like Martin Luther King, Jr., and gays. The unanimous Supreme
Court decision of Brown v. Board of Education caused the South
to erupt in violence and resistance. Amidst the disturbances at
home, there was the Korean War at the beginning of the decade,
and the French battling anti-colonial insurgencies in Algeria and
Indochina.
On the pop culture front, comics became neutered under
the Comics Code. Movies became more and more permissive,
until the draconian and repressive Hays Code imploded in the
late Sixties. Meanwhile, the Beat Generation sought to loosen
the shackles of a post-Victorian Puritanism. Kerouac, Ginsberg,
and Burroughs (among other personalities) created their own
brand of individual morality. This included writing books about
shocking topics like drugs and sex and using four-letter words
to describe these experiences. Remember, this was a time when
purchasing Betty Page photos or the poem “Howl” could mean
jail time.
The Book: Dr. Benway, Slashtubitch, the “talking asshole
routine,” Hassan’s Rumpus Room, Interzone, Hauser and
O’Brien ... Naked Lunch is filled with iconic characters and setpieces. It is the story of an addict fleeing the Police and entering
Interzone, a decadent dystopia like Tangier, Morocco. As he
flees, he has this to say: “America is not a young land: it is old
and dirty and evil before the settlers, before the Indians. The evil
is there waiting.” He describes American cities like “Chicago:
hierarchy of decorticated wops, smell of atrophied gangsters,
earthbound ghosts hit you at North and Halsted, Cicero,
Lincoln Park, panhandler of dreams, past invading the present,
rancid magic of slot machines and roadhouses. [...] Illinois and
Missouri, miasma of mound-building peoples, groveling worship
of the Food Source, cruel and ugly festivals, dead-end horror of
the Centipede God reaches from Moundville to the lunar deserts
of coastal Peru.” He says New Orleans “is a dead museum.” One
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thing that strikes the reader right away is how dark Burroughs
is compared to the rest of the Beats. Kerouac and Ginsberg
are upbeat, Whitmanesque, exploring the possibilities of the
continent. Burroughs offers scabrous satire and nightmarish
hallucinations.
Besides the dark tone (akin to Louis-Ferdinand Celine and
Jonathan Swift), Burroughs drenches the book in abundant drug
use, vulgar language, and sexually explicit acts (predominantly
of the homosexual variety). He satirizes cops, psychiatrists, and
small-town Southern sheriffs. Not only is it dark and satirical, but
the book itself subverts numerous genres in the process, including
science fiction. One of the iconic characters of Naked Lunch is the
Mugwump. People become addicted to what Mugwumps secrete
from their male reproductive organs. Genres like the hard-boiled
detective novel, the Western, and Middle Eastern novel also get
subverted.
I don’t really classify Naked Lunch as a novel, even though
it has chapters and recurring characters. In the same way that
Samuel Beckett stripped the novel bare with his Trilogy, peeling
off character, plot, setting, etc., and leaving only the insistent
voice, Burroughs took the novel and exploded it. Naked Lunch
is fragmentary, hallucinatory, dark, nightmarish, decadent,
and sex-drenched. It is reminiscent of Maldoror by Comte de
Lautreamont, a violent phantasmagorical novel. Many of the
chapters came about via “routines,” a kind of spoken word
performance art popularized by Burroughs.
Needless to say, the combination of sexual explicitness, drug
use, lacerating social satire, and non-linear plotting caused Naked
Lunch to erupt on the literary scene like a Molotov cocktail. “The
Restored Text” version of the book includes an Editors’ Note
from Barry Miles and James Grauerholz. They chronicle the
book’s genesis, construction, and editorial challenges. Initially
slated to be part of a trilogy including Junkie, Queer, and material
for The Yage Letters, Ginsberg persuaded Burroughs to focus
attention on what later became Naked Lunch. There are two first
editions, the 1959 Olympia Press version and the 1962 Grove
Press version. The inevitable obscenity trial didn’t resolve until
1966, when one could purchase the book legally.
The Verdict: In terms of aesthetics, Naked Lunch is sexually
explicit, but not erotic. It is loaded with sexual situations, but
the point isn’t to be prurient. Sexual explicitness does not make
the book pornographic. It is about one man’s experience with
heroin addiction and society in the Fifties. It is frank, brutal, and
cruel. It is offensive because Burroughs found the death penalty
offensive.
Once one gets past the shock factor, Naked Lunch stands
out as a monument of American literary postmodernism. It
influenced countless writers and artists, everyone from Lou Reed
to Thomas Pynchon to William Gibson. It is also a watershed
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book. It helped knock down the last barriers of written expression.
Burroughs, like Supreme Court Justices William O. Douglas and
Hugo Black, was a free expression absolutist. Alternately, Naked
Lunch is still a troubling and challenging book. The Fifties drug
and crime slang make it tough for modern readers. It is a worthy
member of the literary avant-garde, along with other respected
works like Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and Alfred Jarry’s Pere Ubu.
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City of Night
1963
by John Rechy
Personal History: City of Night by John Rechy was another
discovery I found in Paul’s Bookstore in Madison, Wisconsin
during my undergraduate years. Sequestered in a crate of random
paperbacks was a 1964 edition (a second paperback edition in
this particular instance). The initial attraction to the book was
its vintage status, already more than twenty years old when I
purchased it (‘97? ‘98?). I was also drawn to the noir-ish cover
photograph by Grove publisher and translator Richard Seaver.
(Seaver would go on to publish everyone from Beckett to Ionesco
to Henry Miller to the Marquis de Sade.) Since Rechy’s book
could be considered gay erotica, I will admit that I came to this
book with some nostalgie de la boue (ungrammatical French for
“yearning for the mud”). It’s why I took Latin to read Catullus
and Propertius and why I read William S. Burroughs in high
school. I also wanted to know the history of all things forbidden.
High school and undergraduate history courses don’t
normally cover the history of gay prostitution. This made reading
City of Night for the first time an eye-opening experience. This
second time around, I read it as more of a historical relic (and
treated with the awe and reverence relics deserve). One of the
consequences of reading is discovering entirely new territories.
While minorities and women got their cursory token placement
in my history classes, nothing was mentioned or acknowledged
about gay history, American, global, or otherwise. For me,
reading across orientations wasn’t an exercise in increasing my
awareness and lessening my liberal white guilt, it was feeding a
lustful greed to know more. Between Naked Lunch and City of
Night, gay life sure seemed interesting, exciting, and forbidden.
Luckily the University of Wisconsin-Madison had a vibrant and
supportive LBGT student life. I had gay classmates and even
went to a LGBT film festival. (“So that’s what drag kings are.
Huh. America is awesome!”) While I was initially drawn to the
book’s tabloid nature and winking hints at gay sex between the
covers, I realized after I read it that there was more to modern
American society than that disclosed in my suburban middleclass upbringing.
The greatest thing City of Night did for me was open up a
galaxy of new fiction choices: Gay fiction, BDSM fiction, New
Orleans fiction, and so on. From Rechy I moved on to Ethan
Mordden, Alan Hollinghurst, Ronald Firbank, John Waters, and
Todd Haynes. There are more, but you get the general idea.
The History: City of Night was written by John Rechy in 1963.
In other words, it is a work about being gay in Fifties America.
The year 1963 was the cusp year at the end of the Long Fifties,
an attempt by historians to square the circle of periodicity. From
Ike’s inauguration in 1951 to Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, the
United States experienced a long period of economic growth and
prosperity (albeit for white people) and a cultural attitude focused
on creating stability. Two perspectives collide in this decade and
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how you assess this decade will be based on your own personal
interpretation. One perspective is that the Fifties saw the creation
of a stable society after two decades (roughly 1929 to 1945) of
economic depression, war, suffering, psychological despair,
and shared sacrifice. This feeds into the popular mythology of
manicured lawns, nuclear families, smiling housewives, and
an idyllic Republican suburbia. Another perspective sees the
Fifties as a decade of blacklists, redbaiting, redlining, bigotry,
segregation, the lynching of Emmit Till, and hysteria about juvie
gangs, junkies, Commie infiltration, and a castrating conformity.
Both have a kernel of truth to them, but as a historian, I tend
to avoid either/or propositions. Mythology isn’t just limited to
Greek and Roman myths taught in literature classes. Mythology
is also taught in history classes. The Fifties and the Sixties have
their own mythologies and one should be discerning enough to
recognize them for what they are.
This is a roundabout way of arriving at John Rechy, a
Mexican-American writer, raised in Texas, who wrote City of
Night. Life for gays in the Fifties and Sixties was not easy. Existing
in a world largely hidden, these places included gay bars and
areas where men exchanged money for sex. Unless one was in a
large metropolis, the notion of homosexuality didn’t exist in the
minds of many. Publicly shunned, ghettoized, and persecuted,
the threat of discovery included severe consequences. One
could lose his or her job. To straight America, gays existed as
caricatures, comic relief, and freaks of nature. In the back of my
paperback edition, there is a list of books published by Grove.
One of these is Three Men by Jean Evans. Here’s the synopsis:
“The shocking life stories of three warped and tortured men—a
criminal, a necrophile, and a homosexual—brilliantly told in this
widely hailed masterpiece of psychological reporting.” Equating
these three men is pretty horrifying stuff. It’s hard to lobby for
equal rights when one is likened to a criminal and a necrophile.
Compounding this dilemma was the Mid-Century Modernist
habit of glorifying the declasse. Case in point, “The White
Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster,” by Norman
Mailer, where he equates the jazz-loving white hipster to the
psychopath. Part of the popularity of such writers like William
S. Burroughs and Jean Genet was their criminality and violent
prose. While both writers transcended the caricatures provided
by their literary champions, the overall effect on gay liberation
was far from positive.
Gay Americans weren’t entirely invisible in Mid-Century
America. Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, and William Inge
took Broadway by storm with groundbreaking dramas. Senator
Joseph McCarthy’s familiar Roy Cohn would later be revealed to
be a practicing homosexual, along with Communist spy Whittaker
Chambers. And one can’t avoid mentioning J. Edgar Hoover’s
perplexing relationship by Clyde Tolson. (Perplexing because
being married was de rigueur for special agents working for the
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FBI and Hoover was an adamant believer that homosexuality
was another means of Communist infiltration.)
The Book: City of Night follows an unnamed narrator across
the United States in a nomadic version of the bildungsroman.
His coming of age is coupled with his coming to terms with his
own homosexuality and dealing with the threat of aging. After
a torturous childhood in El Paso, Texas, a dusty border town, he
witnesses his dog die during a wind storm and has issues with his
father, a failed musician now working as a janitor in a hospital.
Following a brief stint in the army, he makes his way to New
York City, having his “first contact with the alluring anarchic
world which promised such turbulence.” Throughout the novel,
he meets various memorable characters and in the end attempts
to come to terms with being gay.
Unlike Our Lady of the Flowers or Naked Lunch, Rechy’s novel
can be likened to a gay Grapes of Wrath. There is abundant
personal suffering and the occasional heavy-handed metaphor.
(The narrator’s attachment to his dog and wondering why it can’t
go to Heaven is the most egregious example.) But not everything
about the novel is quite so blunt and obvious.
Unlike Steinbeck’s characters in search of a Promised Land,
the narrator’s pilgrimage is simultaneously internal and external.
He visits Times Square, Hollywood Boulevard, Pershing Square
in San Francisco, and the French Quarter, New Orleans. Each of
these locations has become a pilgrimage site for gay Americans.
Besides his geographic pilgrimages, the narrator also travels
on a psychological pilgrimage, in this case being comfortable
as a gay man. But like Moses, he never reaches the Promised
Land. The novel is light on plot, but makes up for it with indepth character studies. These range from a closeted individual
calling himself “The Professor,” who collects beautiful gay men
for his amusement. There is Pete, a closeted hustler who calls
queens “queers.” There is Neil, the bondage aficionado and
wannabe fascist. The novel has others as well, each offering up
a personal testimony, a literary monument to their individuality
and meaningfulness as human beings. Not all of these portraits
are that idealized, since Rechy’s portraits of drag queens and
leathermen tend to be quite crude. We see how Gay America
isn’t a secret conspiratorial monolith, but a subculture riven with
factions, rivalries, and resentment. Pete tells the narrator that since
men have sex with him for money, he isn’t “queer.” He resents
the female parody represented by the drag queens. Yet the queens
are out and despite their make-up and campy mannerisms, they
are authentically who they are, not compromising to society’s
wishes for them to conform to pre-determined gender norms.
While the novel’s narrative is very loose and shambling, Rechy
gives each character the time and space for a personal testimony.
This is where the novel succeeds. This was pretty subversive,
since it dares to put a human face on the various figures that
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make up the cosmology of American gay culture. The narrator
gets out of the way and lets them speak.
The Verdict: The novel is a classic of gay American literature.
It is also a relic of a gay America before Stonewall and before
the AIDS epidemic. Both of these events galvanized, unified,
and even normalized the gay community. Not to sound glib,
but City of Night shows straight America the Closet and it’s like
the TARDIS: it’s bigger on the inside. Rechy shows us entire
universes inside lives tightly secured and secreted away from
persecution and ridicule.
The novel also established the Gay Hustler as an American
literary icon. (Other literary icons include the cowboy, the hardboiled private eye, the Italian gangster, etc.) It is an enduring
figure, even if it is from a socioeconomic stratum many would
prefer not to recognize.
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Personal History: Ada, or Ardor: a Family Chronicle by Vladimir
Nabokov, had been on my To Be Read list for quite some time.
My knowledge of Nabokov is woefully thin. I have read Lolita
multiple times, the first time in high school for purely prurient
reasons. To my dismay I discovered a lot of untranslated French
passages and utterly lacking in material that would satiate high
school lusts. (High school lusts were sated, shocked, and numbed
instead by Naked Lunch.)
The second time I read it I had less prurience in mind, but
also a nice set of footnotes to navigate Nabokov’s oft-difficult
prose. But Nabokov wrote much more than Lolita. He wrote
Pale Fire, an epic poem with footnotes written by a delusional
madman. He wrote Invitation to a Beheading, a political fable
about totalitarianism. And many more novels, besides plays,
poems, translations, and lectures.
Ada represents an oddball combination of attributes: an epic
novel about incest set in an alternate history. As a fan of the
alternate history genre (and erotica), I knew I had to read the
book.
Ada, or Ardor: a
Family Chronicle
1969
by Vladimir Nabokov
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The History: Written in 1969, Ada, or Ardor: a Family Chronicle is
one of Vladimir Nabokov’s lesser known novels. Airing from 2003
to 2006 (and briefly resurrected on Netflix), Arrested Development
is a cult hit and known by many. What do these two things have
in common? Incest and comedy. Arrested Development is a hyperdense sitcom, replete with in-jokes, pop cultural references,
satire of political and corporate malfeasance, and GeorgeMichael Bluth’s incurable lust for his cousin Maeby Funke. Ada
is a verbally dense, allusive, word-drunk feast of a doorstopper.
Over 580 pages of multilingual puns, alternate history, and incest
between cousins Ada Durmanov, amateur lepidopterist, and Van
Veen, psychologist and time-theorist. Les Cousins Dangereux is, as
the poster boasts, “a ‘relative’ masterpiece of complex eroticism.”
As one of Nabokov’s last three novels, it symbolizes this
twentieth century literary stylist at his creative peak. His last two
novels would become even more postmodern, metafictional,
and solipsistic. Nabokov would refer to Ada in his next novel,
Transparent Things. The fictional bibliography includes the novel
Ardis.
It represents his nomadic life, his obsessions, and his
monumental talent. Written in Montreux, Switzerland, and
published at the end of the Sixties, we see Nabokov as both a
relic of a bygone age and a pioneer of a nascent postmodernism.
Nabokov came from a family of St. Petersburg aristocrats who fled
Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution. He settled in France and
Germany, and studied literature at Trinity College, Cambridge,
where he graduated in 1923. (Samuel Beckett studied literature
at Trinity College, Dublin, from 1923 to 1927.) He fled again,
this time to the United States, to escape the Nazi onslaught.
Later, after teaching at such places like Stanford, Wellesley,
Cornell, and Harvard, he returned to Europe in 1961, dying in
Switzerland in 1977. Like fellow writers Ivan Klima and Vasily
Grossman, Nabokov has witnessed both forms of twentieth
century totalitarianism.
Ada came out in 1969. In the United States, the Sixties went
down in flames. My Lai, Altamont, and Manson treated Flower
Power with carnage, atrocities, and blood. Monty Python’s Flying
Circus began its first season on BBC. Richard Nixon was in his
first term and the decade’s idealism would curdle into cynicism
and withdrawal. The Sixties and Seventies were the high days
of Postmodernism, a literary style endemic of an age where
all institutions have proven corrupt, inept, and untrustworthy.
There would be Linguistic Turns and New Rights. There would
also be erotica and porn. By 1969, one could read Naked Lunch
and “Howl” without legal prosecution. The visual arts weren’t
quite out of the woods, since the Supreme Court still had their
“Stag Nights.” This involved the Nine Brethren watching porn
loops and deeming whether they were obscene or not.
Unlike the new pornographers and the vulgarity-laced youth,
Nabokov came from an earlier time. An aristocrat to the end,
he held strong opinions, wrote with a ferocious erudition, and
commanded respect as a literary stylist. (To be fair, fellow prolific
writer Anthony Burgess hated rock and roll music.) Like Burgess
and Joyce and Pynchon, Nabokov never won the Nobel Prize for
Literature, although he certainly deserved it.
Ada got lost in the sea of time. Only a few years later, Pynchon
would release his postmodernist masterpiece Gravity’s Rainbow,
altering the literary landscape like Rocket 00000.
The Book: Ada begins with a parody of the opening line from
Anna Karenina. In many ways, this muligenerational “family
chronicle” resembles those old nineteenth century doorstoppers.
Although the world is very different than Victorian times, we see
characters dominated by class, society, reputation, and manners.
All very aristocratic, hyperintelligent, and multilingual. Like their
historical Russian counterparts, the family speaks fluent French.
The novel even includes a useful family tree. This becomes handy,
since Nabokov, ever-playful, has characters with similar names
marrying characters also with similar names. To summarize:
Ivan Durmanov married Daria. They had three children: Ivan,
Marina, and Aqua. The other branch of the family had Daedalus
Veen marry Countess Irina Garin. Their child is Demetriy
(Demon). Daedalus’s brother Ardelion married Mary Trumbell.
Their son is Daniel. Daniel married Marina Durmanov. They had
two daughters, Adelaida (Ada) and Lucinda (Lucette). Demon
Veen marries Aqua Durmanov and they have a son, Van Veen.
Following a history of the earlier generations, the storyline
follows the lives of Aqua and Marina. Demon, married to Aqua,
has an affair with her sister, Marina. Nabokov explains it like
this:
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Was there some additional spice? Marina, with perverse
vainglory, used to affirm in bed that Demon’s senses must
have been influenced by a queer sort of “incestuous” (whatever
that term means) pleasure (in the sense of the French plaisir,
which works up a lot of supplementary spinal vibrato), when
he fondled, and savored, and delicately parted and defiled, in
unmentionable but fascinating ways, flesh (une chair) that was
both that of his wife and that of his mistress, the blended and
brightened charms of twin peris, an Aquamarina both single
and double, a mirage in an emirate, a germinate gem, an orgy
of epithelial alliterations.
Demon’s philandering ways become reflected, refined, and
intensified with Van Veen’s love for Ada. At first the relations
between the cousins is purely platonic, one familiar to anyone
at family gatherings. But the agape soon turns into eros and their
lusts are consummated the night of a spectacular barn fire on the
Durmanov property.
Again, since this is an epic tale, I’m going to summarize:
They become infatuated with each other, enduring separations
of various lengths. Lucette falls for Van, turning things into a
complicated love triangle. Van goes to college and later becomes
an eminent psychologist, while Ada gets married. Time passes.
After the initial chapters do we realize that Van is the author of
this family chronicle. Nabokov, again the playful postmodernist,
makes the authorship one of rivalry and counter-claims. After
certain passages, Ada butts in and gives her opinion. There’s also
insertions by an Editor.
Amidst the dueling narrators, editor interruptions, and
alternate history, the novel comes to a complete halt near the
end. At that time, Van Veen writes a long theoretic treatise of the
nature of time, smugly confident in the wrongness of Einstein’s
Theory of Relativity. (One sees this in The Royal Family by
William T. Vollmann, where the narrative halts and Vollmann
treats the reader to a digression on the nature of bail.)
This all happens in a world called Anti-Terra. Some believe
that Terra exists, although those people many consider insane
or obsessed. The cult of Terra develops to an extent that people
believe one goes to Terra after death. Anti-Terra isn’t simply
steampunk, although there was a global catastrophe that resulted
in the banning of all electrical power. This complicates matters
and people end up using the toilet to communicate. (No, that
isn’t a typo. Anti-Terrans communicate via dorophone, a kind
of sewer-based telephonic system.) Politically, things are opposite
of Earth. What would be the United States in North America
has been colonized by the Russians, although it was discovered
by Africa. England conquered France in 1815 (a nice counterNapoleonic twist). And chronologically, everything appears as
it would fifty years hence. So life on Anti-Terra in 1900 would
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seem like life in our reality in 1950.
Is anyone else confused?
The brilliance of Ada is that Nabokov actually pulls it off
successfully. The novel finally ends with a brief summation of
the novel itself, the once epic bildungsroman folding back on itself
in an act of literary contortion.
The Verdict: In the ladies bathroom Mia Wallace (Uma
Thurman) takes a giant snort of cocaine. “I said God damn! God
damn!” That would be my response to reading Ada. It’s a big
challenging book that will knock your socks off. Literary genius
meeting moral depravity the likes of which I can only compare
to the works of the Marquis de Sade and William S. Burroughs.
Ada is one of the Great Books of Literature. It’s usually not
found on Top 100 lists, but it should be. It is also a word-drunk
celebration of language, a monument to excess and playfulness,
along the lines of Darconville’s Cat by Alexander Theroux,
Gravity’s Rainbow, Ulysses, and Hadrian the Seventh by Frederick
Rolfe. It is a literary classic and a must-read for those who enjoy
erotica, alternate history, and trilingual puns.
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Personal History: Every once in a while, the Swedish Academy
awards the Nobel Prize in Literature to someone you’ve never
heard of. In my case, it was Elfriede Jelinek. When she was
awarded the Nobel in 2004, a storm of controversy erupted.
Knut Ahnlund resigned in protest, saying her work was
“whining, unenjoyable public pornography” and “a mass of text
shovelled together without artistic structure.” A Nobel laureate’s
work likened to pornography? I became immediately interested
in finding Jelinek’s work. As with several other authors in this
series, this is the first time I’ve read anything by Elfriede Jelinek
and I read it “cold.” (For those who haven’t read The Piano
Teacher and want to read it, stop reading this essay right now.
Everything below will inevitably involve spoilers, historical and
cultural context, and my opinion on the book. Reading those
things would ruin your initial reading experience. Caveat lector.)
The Piano Teacher
1983
by Elfriede Jelinek
Translated by Joachim Neugroschel
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The History: Elfriede Jelinek is Austrian. This is an important
distinction in German-language literature. While Germany and
Austria share the same language, they are radically different
cultures. Germany became unified in a series of nationalistic
wars in the 1860s and reigned triumphant with their victory in the
Franco-Prussian War of 1871. Then the World Wars happened,
followed by the economic miracle, and eventual unification
between East and West Germany. Following the First World
War, Austria was lopped off from the Austro-Hungarian Empire,
a multinational, multiethnic imperial entity that had been ruled
by the Hapsburg dynasty for centuries. (The Austro-Hungarian
Empire also included the nations that made up Yugoslavia, as
well as Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Romania.) A Germanspeaking aristocracy ran the government and supplied candidates
to the officer corps. Non-German speakers were one rung lower
on the social hierarchy.
Unlike Germany, with its mix of Lutherans and Catholics,
Austria is almost entirely Catholic. For centuries, the Austrian
monarchy provided Catholic brides to European kings. Marie
Antoinette came from Austria. During the early modern period,
Austria saw itself as the bulwark against the Muslim hordes of
Asia and the Ottoman Empire. Hitler was also born in Austria.
In addition to this cultural background, Austria has a rich
literary tradition. Writers, philosophers, and intellectuals include
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Thomas Bernhard, Sigmund
Freud, Karl Kraus, Arthur Schnitzler, Joseph Roth, and Robert
Musil. There are many, many more. Elfriede Jelinek is part of
this tradition. Her relentless, bleak, yet darkly comic style is
reminiscent of Bernhard and her acidic bon mots burn like those
from Kraus. Kraus summed up the Austrian national character,
saying, “Prussia: Freedom of movement, with a muzzle. Austria:
Solitary confinement, with permission to scream.” (This reads
like a two-sentence summary of The Piano Teacher.) “In Berlin
you walk on papier mache, in Vienna you bite granite.”
Elfriede Jelinek distills the suffocating, bureaucratic, culturesoaked decadence, Catholic sexual repression, and her nation’s
culpability in Nazi criminality and turns it into a lacerating novel
about love, sex, and desperation. Written in 1983, The Piano
Teacher can be considered “contemporary fiction.”
The Book: The Piano Teacher is a story about relationships. Erika
Kohut teaches piano at the Vienna Conservatory and lives with
her mother. After having failed a major recital, Erika’s destiny
to become a famous concert pianist is destroyed. Her mother,
a monstrous showbiz mom right out of Toddlers & Tiaras,
shepherds her daughter into becoming a piano teacher. When
she can, Erika escapes the suffocating micromanagement of
her mother to watch sex shows and visit porn stores in Vienna’s
darker corners.
Then she meets Walter Klemmer, an engineering student
studying piano. He is a young student and Erika is approaching
forty. Walter thinks he can get sexual experience from Erika.
Erika desperately desires Walter to be her lover. Erika punishes
herself for such naughty thoughts by cutting herself. Unlike
other professionals, Erika shares an apartment with her mother,
gives her mother her paychecks, and sleeps with her mother in
the same bed. (As far as well-adjusted parent-child relationships,
Erika and her mother make Norman Bates and his mother seem
normal.)
Erika is hen-pecked by her mother, reprimanded and guilttripped for buying a dress. She would like nothing more than to
escape her clutches, but she can’t seem to muster the willpower.
Each are dangerously co-dependent on each other. The novel
also tells us how her father was driven insane by her mother.
In order to jumpstart the affair, Erika flirts with Walter. They
eventually kiss in the Conservatory’s bathroom. Walter hopes he
can get Erika to consummate the relationship. Unfortunately,
Erika pleasures him, but refuses to bring the act to completion.
The stillborn affair enters a black tailspin when she gives Walter
a letter. The letter pleads with Walter. It says he can do whatever
he wants with her, including tying her up and beating her. Walter
is disgusted. The novel ends with Erika locking her mother in
her bedroom and begging Walter to have sex with her. Walter
ends up raping her and beating her. After her recovery, she gets a
knife and prepares to find Walter to stab him. She chickens out,
instead using the knife to cut herself and then walking back to
the apartment and back to Mother.
The Verdict: This was one of the few books that affected me
physically. The only other books that have done that have been
those written by the Marquis de Sade. I had to put it down after
reading one or two chapters. Jelinek’s style alienates, intimidates,
and mocks. The Swedish Academy said she has a “musical
flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that with
65 | The NSFW Files
extraordinary linguistic zeal reveal the absurdity of society’s
cliches and their subjugating power.” These voices and countervoices resound throughout the novel. Mother tells Erika she
must teach in order to school people in the value of the arts.
Then Mother tells Erika that the people coming to her recitals
are nothing but philistine poseurs who know nothing about art.
Walter, sexually immature, will stop at nothing to possess Erika.
Yet he finds her desperation disgusting and he calls her ugly.
Again and again, pretensions are raised high and then dashed
against the rocks with merciless efficiency. It reminds me of Miss
Lonelyhearts by Nathanael West.
While Jelinek has roots in Communist and feminist ideologies,
The Piano Teacher transcends being mere agitprop for some
specific agenda. The book’s ferocity is relentless and omnicidal.
It attacks everyone and everything. Jelinek is like an Austrian
version of Kathy Acker. The book takes everyday cliches and
spits them back at the reader’s face.
Granted, this book isn’t for everybody. It lacks a redemptive
arc and every character is morally contemptible. Lacking
conventional dialogue and filled with dream sequences and
hallucinations, it is a challenge to read.
Is it erotica? Or pornography? Hardly. While the book pulsates
with sexual derangement and obsession, it is the least erotic
thing I’ve read. Sexuality is treated as yet another power game
with Erika, Klemmer, and Mother as a trio of self-destructive
con artists. While this is challenging literature written with
savage beauty, the eroticism is curdled and rancid, since every
relationship remains infused with a numbed toxic hatred.
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Personal History: It would be untrue to say I don’t choose books
by their covers. Case in point, The Ages of Lulu, by Almudena
Grandes. With its luscious black and white photograph by Craig
Morey and a Booklist blurb saying, “Intensely erotic,” it ended
up getting purchased. I bought it at my local Half Price Books in
Brookfield, Wisconsin. Despite buying it years ago, this has been
the first time I read it. I was glad I did.
While I’m familiar with Spanish-language literature, I’m
not too familiar with literature from Spain. I’ve read my share
of Mexican and South American literature, notably Roberto
Bolano and Octavio Paz. My unfamiliarity with Spanish
literature doesn’t mean I’m unfamiliar with Spanish erotica. I’ve
encountered it in different forms: comics and film. I’ve read the
erotic comics of Ignacio Noe and seen numerous Spanish erotic
films. These include: Jamon Jamon (Bigas Luna, 1992), starring
Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem, both in the bloom of their
youth; Sex and Lucia (Julio Medem, 2001); and several films
from the master, Pedro Almodovar. Jamon Jamon is a modern
sex farce involving underwear and pigs, while Sex and Lucia is
the hallucinatory journey of Lucia that becomes darker and
more labyrinthine as it progresses. Almodovar is a category unto
himself, creating films that are simultaneously comedic, tragic,
and ornate. His well-rounded characters and baroque plotting
put him in the company of Shakespeare in terms of storytelling
mastery.
It turns out that Bigas Luna also directed a film version of
The Ages of Lulu in 1990. I have not seen this film, but if it is
available on Netflix, then I will have to watch it.
The Ages of Lulu
1993
by Almudena Grandes
Translated by Sonia Soto
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The History: Since The Ages of Lulu was written in 1989, I’ll fold
the historical material into my book summary. Like The Piano
Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek, this could be classified as a “modern
classic.”
The Book: Told in the first person, The Ages of Lulu is about
the life of Maria Luisa Ruiz-Poveda y Garcia de la Casa. The
novel charts her life, beginning as an impulsive fifteen-yearold up to the brink of middle age. Like The Piano Teacher, it
alternates between chapters set in “real life” and chapters that
are Lulu’s sexual fantasies. As the novel progresses, reality and
fantasy bleed into each other. We learn that Lulu was eleven in
1969, meaning she was born in 1958, during the heyday of the
dictatorship of Francisco Franco. She comes from a large family
and is a rebellious teen. When she gets seduced by Pablo, her
brother’s friend, she is fifteen years old.
The seduction occurs after an illegal Socialist rally. When
Pablo introduces her to the concept of fellatio, Lulu’s remarks
are telling. “Somewhere far inside my head, far back enough so
it didn’t bother me, but near enough to be noticeable, throbbed
the fact I was under-age, six years to go before I was twenty-one
(at that time, coming of age was twenty-one—I couldn’t give a
shit, nobody could vote anyway).” The repression of Franco’s
Spain gives Lulu incentive to become reckless and rebellious.
(Francisco Franco ruled Spain from 1939 to 1975.) While in
others it becomes manifest as political opposition, for Lulu it
becomes a means to explore the darker fantasies she harbors.
But the book doesn’t begin with this seduction. It begins with
Lulu and Pablo happily married. They have a daughter named
Ines that they pick up from school. As the story progresses, we
learn about Pablo’s brief imprisonment on political grounds,
Lulu’s large family, and her work as editor of Martial’s epigrams.
She becomes friends with Ely, a tranvestite prostitute she meets
while on a “transvestite hunting” trip with Pablo. Lulu, Pablo, and
Ely have a menage a trois. The bisexuality of Lulu’s encounters
lead her to more dangerous things. She fantasizes a scenario with
Pablo as her father, the role playing prefiguring the quasi-incest
erotica subgenre.
Other acts include one between Pablo, herself, and her brother.
She also participates in group sex with a group of gay men. In
the end, she goes to a bondage scene run by a madam. The scene
is notable for its frank brutality. She eventually escapes, thanks
to a conveniently timed police raid. The novel closes with Lulu
contemplating the consequences of her actions and facing the
prospect of aging.
The Verdict: I would classify The Ages of Lulu as a modern
classic. Through the genre of erotica, it weaves together the
personal history of Lulu, her sexual compulsions, and her
intimate fantasies. These inner and outer experiences confront the
repression and monotony of the Franco dictatorship. It does this
with language that captures the quotidian, but also illuminates
Lulu’s compulsions and fantasies in visionary scenarios. My
only quibble is minor. My translation, by Sonia Soto, reads as
British English and it doesn’t fully capture the verbal flavor of the
original Spanish. It reads like British actors in a Spanish novel,
with Lulu talking about blokes and mates. The true power of
Grandes’s novel stands out despite its British-y translation. It is a
backhanded rebuke of Franco’s Spain and an exploration of the
volcanic fury of female sexuality.
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Personal History: I have a distinct memory of me purchasing
Matriarchy: Freedom in Bondage, by Malcolm McKesson at about
the same time as Gynecocracy, by Viscount Ladywood. It has long
been on my To Be Read pile. As an enthusiast of outsider art, I
found this a fascinating addition to my analysis of the erotica
genre.
Matriarchy:
Freedom in
Bondage
1999
by Malcolm McKesson
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The History: Malcolm McKesson’s autobiography provides
thin gruel in terms of mining information. Tony Thorne, in
the introduction, lays out a rough outline: “[A] fairly privileged
background, hints of parental disapproval, a period as a
businessman in the Twenties and Thirties, religious disillusion,
service in the US army overseas.” Early in his life, he had a sister
die. In the Postlude, McKesson also tells about a death of a
brother in a motorcycle accident. During his sophomore year in
college, he began to experiment with transvestism. His marriage
with poet Madeline Mason involved him becoming a submissive
in a sadomasochistic relationship.
This is the first book in The NSFW Files classified as Outsider
Art. Here is Tony Thorne quoting Michel Thevoz on the definition
of an Outsider Artist: “To reroute, develop, and elaborate—albeit
with an adult’s capacity for concentration and perseverance
impulses ... springing directly from early childhood.” Much of
Matriarchy’s atmospherics hearken to children’s fairy tales.
At heart, Matriarchy is an autobiographical work, an attempt
by McKesson to create a “fictionalized idealized and realized
version of his lifetime struggle to define himself.” It is the
product of long fermentation and distillation. Unlike Gynecocracy
by Viscount Ladywood, it is not a prurient Victorian curio, but
possesses a mythological aspect closer to Our Lady of the Flowers.
The Book: Matriarchy is the story of Gerald Graham in the year
1929. About to enter Harvard, he meets Gladys von Gunthardt
on a ski trip. He is invited to her mansion on the West Side of
Manhattan. He becomes her prisoner. During his confinement,
he becomes Rose, a serving maid, dressing as such and getting
training from Gladys’s maid, Sally.
As the novel progresses, Gerald’s relationship to Gladys
intensifies. He begins as child to her mother, but Gladys becomes
his Mistress, his Goddess, and then, finally, his wife. Gerald
attains freedom when he is dressed as a serving maid and serving
his Mistress with complete submission. Gerald doesn’t see this
submission as a form of oppression, but as an exaltation of his
true nature.
During his instruction and servitude, he gets captured by one
of Gladys’s friends, but eventually returns. He passes the test for
loyalty. He also has a run-in with the law for his curious attire
and odd behavior. Later, he confronts his parents, and rescues his
artistic-minded sister, Mary, bringing her to Gladys. One of the
most powerful sequences is Gerald’s dream of The School for
Pages. It is a lush yet disciplined and hierarchical world recalling
Story of O’s world.
While the writing is amateurish, its combination with
the illustrations create something altogether different and
marvelous. Thorne explains how the illustrations are populated
with “voluptuous, anonymous, androgynous figures [that] seem
to emerge from a soft muffling darkness.” McKesson freely
switches from third to first person and from addressing Gerald/
Rose with male and female pronouns. For those interested in the
“performativity of gender” and the more fluid aspects of human
sexuality, they should read three books: Our Lady of the Flowers
by Jean Genet; Wraeththu by Storm Constantine; and Matriarchy
by Malcolm McKesson.
For a novel included in a series about erotica and
pornography, Matriarchy has almost no sex; for it wasn’t
about sex with McKesson, it was about secret rites and a very
peculiar, very individualized kind of personal spirituality. This
is a bondage novel, but I’d characterize it as a “dainty” bondage
novel. No leather, just lace and ribbons and petits fours at high
tea. (McKesson had a distaste for the masculine fashions of the
times.) And make no mistake, I’m linking the term “dainty”
with a personal feminine exaltation, akin to Jean Genet’s use of
Catholicism and gutter pimp criminality to create an ornate and
decadent world and making Divine a kind of holy figure. To use
“dainty” is without its normal pejorative connotations.
McKesson creates a world combining narrative and
illustration that has the visual softness of a Jean-Honore
Fragonard painting with an atmosphere, simultaneously magical
and menacing, of Grimms’ Fairy Tales. Gerald/Rose continually
receives treatment that infantilizes him, yet he is subject to many
of the adult world’s pleasures and cruelties. The narrative and
illustration work together in the same manner as William Blake’s
poetry and drawings. Like a Blakean figure, Gerald has his
masculine and feminine emanations.
The Verdict: Matriarchy was a marvelous reading experience. Its
themes and subject matter bring to mind many of the previous
entries in this series. It is autobiographical exorcism like Bataille’s
Story of the Eye, but it is autobiography transfigured into personal
mythology like Our Lady of the Flowers by Jean Genet. It shares
the themes of transvestism and bondage with Our Lady of the
Flowers (again) and Gynecocracy by Viscount Ladywood. The
bondage themes are similar to Story of O and The Image, although
with very little actual sex. Unlike Nobel Laureate Elfriede
Jelinek or Roman-era gossip Petronius, Malcolm McKesson’s
literary heritage as an outsider artist brings him closer to artistic
eccentrics like William Blake and Matthew Barney.
My copy of Matriarchy was published by HECK Editions and
woefully out of print. Luckily one can find reasonably priced
softcovers online. HECK Editions was a publisher focusing on
70 | The NSFW Files
lowbrow artists like Joe Coleman and performance artists like
Annie Sprinkle. It may be time to revive Matriarchy, since it can
stand besides other erotica classics.
Matriarchy is weird, but in the best way possible.
71 | The NSFW Files
Personal History: I found this book at my local library bookstore.
The breathless back cover blurb had me hooked. “girls is an erotic
spree, a journey into the most forbidden corners of male desire,
a story about men who have been rendered numb by their power,
who have sacrificed everything for success, who have lost their
souls and can find meaning only by living vicariously, obsessively
through young women.”
But beyond its alleged prurience, I discovered a book with
far more emotional and moral depth. In addition girls has a
challenging and provoking form that sets it apart from novels
usually marketed to the trenchcoat-wearing set that frequents
adult bookstores.
Apart from that, I knew nothing about Nic Kelman or girls
(not to be confused with Lena Dunham’s TV show and the
Beastie Boys song that share the same name).
girls: A Paean
2003
by Nic Kelman
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History: girls was written in 2003 by Nic Kelman who “holds
a BS from MIT in brain and cognitive science and an MFA
from Brown University in creative writing.” Kelman’s work has
appeared in various anthologies and a few highbrow magazines
(the Kenyon Review, the Village Voice, Glamour).
“The Origins (and Compulsions) of girls” is a personal
essay by Kelman at the end of the book. He writes about why
a person like him (an MIT grad) would write a book like girls (a
sexually explicit romp featuring older, wealthier men hooking up
with partners far below their age bracket). He traces the origins
to a party by a longtime family friend. The party was for the
company’s latest success. This family friend was wealthy, while
Kelman was the nobly impoverished university graduate. His
friend ends up showing Kelman a ring inscribed with the words
“Dream More.” Later it was revealed that this wealthy corporate
type got the ring from “his new girlfriend, a first-year university
student.” But Kelman goes on to explain, despite the vast wealth
and power, these men weren’t crass philistines. “Still worse,
perhaps, was the fact that these men were smart, well educated,
and discerning. They were as comfortable discussing the finer
points of the Ring Cycle as they were telling you Bleak House was
written before Vanity Fair.”
Now more than ten years on, we can look at this book with
a new perspective, a perspective made cynical by the Great
Recession and the foreign policy disasters of the Dubya years.
These very same men, these ephebophiles, helped engineer one
of the greatest global economic catastrophes since the Great
Depression. If anything, girls shines a light on their inner psyches,
this stubborn belief that oceans of capital and the right political
connections make them immune from criminal prosecution
and common ordinary morality. While not as self-consciously
villainous as the libertines of Sade’s universe, they exist in that
same elevated plane. Fear makes people stupid, but money
makes the less-moneyed grovel like obedient livestock. But in
2003 the sub-prime mortgage scheme had yet to explode like an
IED in investors’ faces. 2003 was also the year of Operation Iraqi
Freedom and everything in that region turned out fine …
The Book: girls begins with an unnamed narrator traveling
to Pusan, South Korea. He is there to fire someone, to send a
message, because a container ship isn’t getting finished in time.
After he terminates the employee, he finds himself stuck in his
hotel room, jet lagged, bored, and horny. He ends up deciding
to get a call girl, looking at a card his co-worker gave him. His
co-worker tells him how the girls in Pusan are the best. (It should
be noted that the narrator has a girlfriend in the United States.)
After some hemming and hawing, he admits the call girl into
his hotel room. With a combination of clinical description and
tortured introspection, the narrator succumbs to his desires and
has sex with her. In the opening pages, Kelman asks, “When did
we become the men that made us so jealous?”
But girls isn’t a novel per se, it is “A Paean.” The original term
means a poem of triumph or thanksgiving. (See Operation Iraqi
Freedom, subprime mortgages, credit default swaps, and the Tour
de France medals of Lance Armstrong. The appropriately named
“naughts” decade were years of triumph: hollow, superficial,
deceitful triumph. Like the Gilded Age minus Mark Twain.)
The paean is written in second person, making the book
simultaneously accusatory and vicarious. The perspective
collapses the gap between reader and narrator. It is the perspective
most often used in role-playing games. Instead of a critique of
the Male Gaze, you are the Male Gaze. (That makes reading
the blurbs from both men and women reviewers all the more
fascinating.)
In addition to the unique perspective, Kelman interlaces the
book with quotes from The Iliad and The Odyssey and sections
devoted to the etymologies of vulgar words. At first blush, these
seem like either: 1) the height of pretentiousness, or 2) an attempt
to validate the explicit sex scenes peppered throughout the book,
like one of those academic introductions to an exploitation film.
Both could be true if Kelman failed in his erotic investigation.
Yet the quotes from The Iliad reference Briseis, a mythical queen
from the Trojan War, over which Achilles and Agamemnon fight.
One could extend the theory that the Trojan War and indeed all
of Western literature stemming from Homer’s two epics began
with two men fighting over a young woman.
As the book progresses the reader will discern the appearance
of three narrators. These narrators possess vast wealth and
undergo all the tropes of a middle-age crisis. One purchases a
British sports car that impresses a group of college kids. Like the
schlock bondage fanfiction novel Fifty Shades of Grey, girls could
be considered lifestyle porn. Whereas Fifty Shades is a slavering
adoration of wealth, power, and abusive relationships, girls uses
the premise to vivisect the underlying power dynamics beneath
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the shiny baubles and bloated bank accounts. Hence the second
person perspective.
The three narrators offer fragmentary and impressionistic
storylines. The book is more poetic than novelistic. Vignettes
of varying length focus on a specific narrator. Each vignette
reads like a sexually graphic O. Henry story. The twist ending
usually coincides with something heart-wrenching. While there
are physical climaxes a-plenty, the vignette’s climax reveals an
emotional hollowness or the devastating consequences of the
sexual activity. Kelman lays bare the emotional core and one
sees the fragile connections shattered by these impulsive acts. It
is also deeper than any pro-sex or anti-sex reading would merit.
As an example, there is the affair between Geoff Martinson
and his friend’s daughter Cassandra. (Spoiler: It doesn’t end well.)
“You have no idea how it happened. You know you were staying
with Jonathan, at his villa on the cliff in St. Barths.” While “he
[Jonathan] and Marjorie and Tamsin went out to shop,” Geoff
was by the pool reading “your book, a masturbatory, soapbox
piece by a CEO you knew very well.” When Cassandra exits the
pool without drying off, “You think that was what did it, that
was what broke your will to resist.”
When Geoff gets stung by a bee, that becomes the catalyst for
this ill-fated tryst. Things get very passionate very fast. They meet
in clandestine locations for sex and even have sex during a party
thrown by Jonathan and Marjorie. The heartbreak comes when
Geoff and Tamsin leave. Cassandra is devastated. While Geoff
saw Cassandra is a delightful little fucktoy, she sees it differently.
But when you did leave at last, she confused you. When you did
leave at last, to your amazement, she had been crying. When
you did leave at last, she stopped you alone in the hallway and
said, “But I love you.”
In another vignette, a businessman meets a woman on the
plane who talks to him about birds. Both are on their way to
the same city in China. They meet and she shows him the bird
sanctuary. She is passionate about saving the birds, but he is from
the business that will destroy their habitat.
But when she calls two weeks later, and again two weeks later
after that, you don’t return her calls. You lost interest after
fucking her once. That undamaged part of her was so small, it
was only good for one night. Nothing more.
Geoff Martinson, while confused about Cassandra’s reaction,
comes across as lustful and a bit obtuse. This unnamed narrator
seems almost Sadean in his cold detachment and abandonment
of this woman. He dispatches her with the clinical efficiency that
mirrors his ambitious project that will wipe out the bird’s habitat.
This is the male sex drive as a pure destructive force.
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The book ends with a narrator pondering the future of his
teenage daughter and trying to come to terms with his personal
lusts for women of a similar age group. The final paragraphs of
the book sums up the situation:
And when did that which was offered us disfigure us? How does
glory make us rot? How does something we cannot touch, or see,
or even define, do so much damage, make us so miserable?
How did we get so ugly?
The Verdict: As with my review for Alan Moore’s Lost Girls,
Nic Kelman’s work is too recent for me to append the word
“classic” to it. The word carries too much baggage. But I will go
so far as to assert that girls is notable and highly recommended
reading. Despite the prurient subject matter, the book is formally
daring and seeks to explore the darkest crevices of male desire.
It is sexually explicit without being gratuitous or a work of
cynical exploitation, but it is also moralistic without being
solemn and dour. It is realistic about the consequences of sex
and passionate impulses without coming across like a screed
written by a puritanical hack fraud. That is what the book isn’t.
What the book is is a precisely written meditation on the actions
and consequences of the ruling class, Lolita by way of American
Psycho.
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WORDS + IMAGES
Ignacio Noe
The Piano Tuner
2000—2002
Translated by Robert Legault
The Piano Tuner, Vol. 2
2002—2004
Translated by Oscar Rodriguez
Aldana
2008—9
Translated by Oscar Rodriguez
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Mariano D’Elia is a piano tuner that inherited the business from
his father. Throughout the comic, Mariano has sex with numerous
clients but, in a kind of punchline, no pianos get tuned. Aldana
is a maid who works for Arthur, a rake who was disinherited
from his family’s fortune. Aldana is “the luscious curvy maid
… incessantly horny for him.” Now Arthur works hard to get
financing for one of wild Barbara’s super-productions. The comic
Aldana follows two storylines: Arthur’s attempts to get financing
and claim his inheritance; and Aldana’s attempts to help Arthur.
These two works by Spanish comic artist Ignacio Noe trade
in equal parts comedy and prurience. The full-color illustrations
burst forth with busty women and well-hung men. On the front
cover of The Piano Tuner, Mariano is ravishing a D-cup maid and
on the second volume he busies himself in a threeway. The piano
tuner’s misadventures consist of random isolated episodes. He
goes from one client to the next. As with a genre like this, upon
his arrival the situation irrevocably leads to hot sex. To quote
The Dude, “He doesn’t fix the cable?”
Yet each episode contains humor, mostly farcical. In the final
episode of the first volume, Mariano gets an urgent call from
Carajo 54. He enters the VIP Room and finds an exclusive brothel.
After some dalliances in the VIP Room, he meets B.B., a local
gangster. He tells Mariano that he owns a Guarneri piano, an
valuable find since Giuseppi Guarneri del Gesú’s claim to fame
was making violins. B.B. plans to sell the piano, but he needs it
tuned first. Hilarity ensues. Since the piano was barely out of tune,
he goes to back “finishing” with “Gold Barbie,” the prostitute he
fooled around with in the VIP Room. She has him tape the sex
they have. Then, to the camera, she says, “Before you go, just so
you’ll have something to remember me by, I thought you’d like
to see how a real man can fuck me. But I know you, and that
will hardly matter to you. So I’ve decided to do something that
will really break your heart. Something unforgettable!” (As she
lights a Molotov cocktail.) “Look what I’m doing to your stupid
little piano that your whore of a secretary is getting!!! YOU FAT
BASTARD!!!” (As she hurls the Molotov cocktail into the piano.)
Mariano protests to no effect and then skedaddles as Carajo 54
goes up in flames.
Aldana’s situation has her pining for Arthur but to no avail.
She throws herself at him, ripping off her clothes, and trying all
kinds of things to get him to pay attention to her. Once she thinks
she has him, only to discover he’s asleep following a raucous bit
of sex. Like two ships passing in the night, Aldana and Arthur
never seem to be able to consummate the affair. She wants to cook
Arthur a wonderful meal only to discover the butcher doesn’t sell
on credit. He does make an exception after Aldana offers to have
sex with him.
Like Atilio Gambedotti, Ignacio Noe was born in Argentina.
Unlike Gambedotti, Noe’s artistic output encompasses much
more than erotica. He has done landscapes and portraits along
with work for adult and children’s magazines. His credits range
from City Mouse & Country Mouse, Little Red Riding Hood, and The
Emperor’s New Clothes to The Convent of Hell and The Piano Tuner
series. With a varied oeuvre like that it renders the question “Is
it porn or is it art?” obsolete. Whether working on fairy tales or
a hardcore bedroom farce, Noe’s images are fleshly, vibrant, and
expressive. Even if the hardcore sex isn’t one’s cup of tea, the
artwork can be appreciated on its own.
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Early Works
Michael Manning
The Spider Garden (Spider Garden), 1995
Hydrophidian (Spider Garden), 1997
Cathexis, 1997
Lumenagerie, 1997
Tranceptor, Book One: The Way Station
(with Patrick Conlon), 1998
In a Metal Web (Spider Garden), 2003
In a Metal Web II (Spider Garden), 2003
Inamorata: the Erotic Art of Michael
Manning, 2005
Tranceptor, Book Two: Iron Gauge: part
one (with Patrick Conlon), 2007
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San Francisco-based Michael Manning is a revolutionary
visionary in the erotic graphic novel genre. His work melds
BDSM, hentai, gederfuck, and science fiction into a seamless
whole. (In my previous book, On Being Human, I referenced
Manning’s work in my essay on Storm Constantine’s Wraeththu
series.) Given his idiosyncratic vision, I would put his work
alongside other visionaries like William Blake, Henry Darger,
and the Marquis de Sade. Those snobbish reverse philistines
who dismiss comics as a literary form remain blind to the larger
heritage of illustrated books, including the works of Sade,
Dickens, Thackeray, and many others. Dismissing entire media
forms based on a haughty view that Art is Eternal and Literature
is Special (while comics are the realm of children and manchild
fanboys) comes across as an aesthetic practice best suited for the
pretentious out-of-touch bourgeois hack.
Michael Manning is a visionary comics artist and writer,
but his style did not appear sui generis; it took time to develop
and become refined. His earliest works include the anthology
Cathexis and The Spider Garden, both from 1997, the first volume
of his landmark Spider Garden Series.
Cathexis is an anthology of works from 1987 to 1996. Most
represent stories reprinted from Manning’s self-published ‘zines
and hand-made books (UKIYO X 1-3, FROZEN MOTION, Z/
XERO 1-6, and SPIRAL). For those interested in Manning’s
development as an artist, it shows his mastery of different styles
and formats. Manning states in his interview in Lumenagerie
tha “Sheets and Coils” from 1987 provided a partial basis for
THE SPIDER GARDEN. It includes characters that will reappear in Manning’s famous series, including an androgyne and
Casanova, a perpetually erect dog-man creature. In only three
pages, Manning has created an iconic world, a hermetic dreamworld of robotics, genetics, and erotics.
“Cyndil Timbraals” is Manning’s re-creation of foreign erotic
comics. The characters, snarled in various sexual positions, speak
in a fictional language. The language approaches the almostfamiliar. “... vues amor a pet obediante e turnon. Hmmmm?”
“Red Time Overload” is sketchy and hallucinatory while
“Audio Frequency Book of the Dead” (from 1989) offers up
clean and complex draughtsmanship.
Born in Queens and raised in Boston’s North Side, Manning
attended art school and worked as an animator. His earliest
influences included Japanese wood block prints, Alphonse
Mucha, and Greek mythology. In an interview in Lumenagerie,
he said he aims for simplicity and gesture. Even in his earliest
works, he captures moments of erotic crisis, moments of pain
and/or moments before orgasm. But beneath his fantastical
creations, one observes an anatomical realism. Beneath the
leather and latex lie taut skin shaped by bone and muscle.
The Spider Garden Series
The Spider Garden remains the most famous Manning
creation. It is also the name of his website. Genderfuck, court
intrigue, bondage, and transformation collide and commingle in
his four-book (thus far) series.
The series revolves around Shaalis, the Sacred Androgyne,
the Spider Garden that surrounds her mansion, and Hir human
pets, intelligent machines, and leather concubines. In the
abovementioned Lumenagerie interview, Manning explains:
My characters are idealized. In some cases they’re created, some
cases they’re born, but it’s a world where the whole medical side
of it, the hormones and surgery aren’t an issue anymore. It’s
getting beyond the physical part of it. If you could transform
your body with your mind, or just have it be the way you want
it to be, then what would you do with it?
Manning treads the same genderfuck ground as Iain Banks
and Storm Constantine (see On Being Human for a more detailed
discussion). In Banks’s “Culture” series, one can switch gender
over a period of a year. Storm Constantine’s Wraeththu series
traces the ascendance of an androgynous race with magical
powers in a post-apocalyptic setting. But before one redlines on
their outrage over transgender representation, it should be noted
(with profound obviousness) that these are works of fiction. In the
real world, transgender and gender non-conformist individuals
still face harsh judgment, hatred, and confusion. By the same
token, sensitivity to oppressed groups should also not become
so pronounced as to produce a chilling effect on creatives. The
challenge is creating a workable balance between these two. (One
could go on about these interrelated topics; unfortunately they
lie beyond the purview of these essays.)
The Spider Garden, the eponymous first volume, begins with
a debt being repaid. Shaalis receives orgasmic pleasure from
Okami, the former concubine of Lord Verio. (Okami is a busty
Asian woman with long flowing black hair, while Shaalis has long
blonde/white hair, in addition to Hir vagina.) Following Okami’s
pleasuring Shaalis, she is taken by Natsu, the Androgyne’s
castellana, in preparation for her service in the Garden. Natsu
initiates her into the Spider Garden Clan as Sasaya Nijan.
During a session where Okami services the Androgyne and
Lord Gion, a dog-headed tengu, a ninja attacks. (In Japan, a
tengu is considered a Shinto god, although it is based on a doglike demon figure from Chinese mythology.) After his capture,
Shaalis makes the ninja assassin his submissive concubine. After
her initiaton, Okami sends out a missive to Lord Verio, but it is
intercepted and decrypted by the Androgyne before being sent
off. As a character later states, the Androgyne prefers “intrigue
and complexity” to enacting vengeance.
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The final chapter has Squamata Serpentine of the Water
Serpent Clan join another fete with Shaalis and two other
aristocrats. They witness a “scrolling,” a kind of erotic dance.
The scrolling tells the story of how the Empress forbade contact
between humans and tengu. The male tengu are played by
females with dog masks and dildos and the princess is played by
a male dressed in a kimono. While a masked Shaalis narrates,
the three actors of the scrolling struggle until it becomes a menage
a trois.
After the Androgyne is unmasked by Squamata, S/He takes
her back to a chamber where they fuck Okami and the ninja
assassin. The Spider Garden is a graphic novel of eroticized ritual
and gender transformation. Okami has a strap-on while the
assassin partakes in the events as a female concubine.
Hydrophidian continues the series, this time in the palace
of the Water Snake Clan. Lichurna, Squamata Serpentine’s
incestuous twin sister, watches from the surface as Lord Verio
suits up. He descends the waters to play with the water naiads,
women with hands bound but sporting mermaid tails. Lichurna
sits atop Lord Gion, the tengu last seen in The Spider Garden.
Upon the return of Squamata to the Water Snake Clan,
she reveals that Okami has become a leather concubine of the
second rank. In retribution, the Water Snake Clan took Arha,
a gifted concubine belonging to the Androgyne. Squamata goes
on to tell her sister and Lord Verio about how Androgyne tightly
bound and corsetted Okami in the Wasp position (the wasp being
the enemy of the spider). This was punishment for Lord Verio’s
assassination attempt. During her bondage, Okami has a fellatrix
service her. (A fellatrix is a man dressed as a leather geisha.) The
Androgyne eventually joins them.
Squamata then tells a story told by the Androgyne. S/He
tells about receiving Lord Verio in the South Wing of the palace.
In exchange for his life, he has Lord Verio service the tengu
matriarch, the only female of her race. (The tengu matriarch
looks like the other tengu, but has four breasts.) He fucks the
matriarch, watched closely by her lover-sons. Aroused, the sons
join in the orgy.
The volume ends with Lord Verio breaking the disc Squamata
gave him and Lord Gion bringing himself to climax in an act of
autofellatio.
In a Metal Web and In a Metal Web II elaborate upon the
origins of Squamata and Lichurna Serpentine. After eleven days
of boredom, Lord Verio seeks pleasure in the tengu slave Lord
Gion. Threatening to make the tengu orgasm, thus breaking his
pledge to the sisters, he conspires with Verio to once again take
down the Androgyne. Meanwhile the Serpentine sisters secretly
drug Sasaya Nijan (formerly Okami). Sasaya begins hallucinating
when she is with the Androgyne, memories of her time with
Verio flooding her mind. This threatens her mental state as she
prepares the various delegations visiting the Spider Garden. The
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drugs are part of a plan to abduct Sasaya. It is a daring move,
since no one has abducted a castellana before (abductions of
concubines and courtesans being routine). The sisters seek the
aid of Lady Fusilind of the Ghost Fox Clan.
The Androgyne comforts Sasaya by explaining the origins of
the Serpentine sisters. The Spider Garden Clan and the Water
Serpent Clan are the two most ancient clans in the Empire.
(The Androgyne and Squamata represent what are known as
Metahumans.)
Both the Androgyne and Squamata were present when
the clans united under the Scarlet Empress of the Fire Bird
Clan. During a “banquet held to honor the elder clans” the
Androgyne and Squamata became infatuated with each other,
first taking part in exploring each other, and then finally falling
in love. During their courtship, the Androgyne gave Squamata
an enchanted mirror. After devoting much concentration to the
mirror’s power, the mirror would produce a living double of the
person. Thus Lichurna was created. Lichurna and Squamata
become inseperable and become lustful towards each other.
Squamata is so entranced with Lichurna that she forgets about
the Androgyne.
The series ends (thus far) with plots and intrigue in motion, but
no resolution. In the end, she asks Natsu, the former castellana
who is now Sasaya’s concubine, why she gave no quarter in her
training? She then assures Natsu that she will give her no quarter.
The Spider Garden Series remains one of the great unfinished
comics series.
Portfolios and Collaborations
Manning also released two portfolios of his artwork.
Lumenagerie collects together works executed from 1991 to 1995.
As the title suggests, it presents the reader with various tableau
and vignettes. Each vignette has several characters, mostly in
bondage gear with animal themes. With titles like “Aviatrix”
and “Canus,” the reader witnesses ornate arrangements of
domination and submission.
Inamorata: the Erotic Art of Michael Manning, from 2005, is
a second portfolio. With an introduction by Patrick Califia and
Midori, the portfolio also includes commissioned work, several
full-color images, and a couple fold-out spreads. Published by
Last Gasp, they give Inamorata the unbridled depravity and
perversion within its pages the high-art treatment.
The Tranceptor series is a collaboration between Michael
Manning and tattoo artist Patrick Conlon. Book One: The Way
Station and Book Two: Iron Guage: part one take place in an
arid post-apocalyptic wasteland. Water is scarce. The young
Hyu works at Way Station No.56 along with other miners. One
day they are visited by a tranceptor, “an acolyte of the mystic
Sisterhood, skilled in both martial and erotic arts.” She arrives
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in a ponygirl-drawn carriage. A plot involving stolen documents
involves most of the drama. The tranceptor’s sister, Ravanna, is
known for her treachery, along with having a carriage pulled by a
pair of ponyboys. Instead of dog-like tengu, there are lizardmen.
While beautifully drawn and soaked with eroticism, it lacks the
epic vision of The Spider Garden Series.
Beyond individually commissioned works, the Tranceptor
series is the last narrative fiction he’s done. For better or worse,
Manning works slowly, despite the finished product looking like
it was quickly done. To appreciate Manning’s work, one must
have patience. Like new seasons of The Venture Bros., it is slow
and meticulous work.
Michael Manning’s unique voice and vision propel erotica
and the graphic novel into new strange dominions. His animation
background gives each gesture a realistic underpinning. The
visual style threatens to overflow from the page. The panels
themselves seem to disintegrate as the erotic action increases in
intensity. He couples this artistic mastery with a skilled worldbuilding. The Spider Garden series remains a landmark example
of erotic fantasy. His Asian-inspired pansexual bondage-themed
erotica establishes a high benchmark for future comics artists
and writers.
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Room Mates, Vol. 1
& Vol. 2
2004
By Ivan Guevara and Atilio Gambedotti
Translated by Michael Guerra
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“Most Spanish-speakers don’t think of sexual adventures as
immoral or depraved unless they’re jealous old schoolmarms
addicted to telenovelas. … These handy names for all shades
of gray between singledom and married life are less judgmental
than their English equivalents.” D!rty Spanish: Everyday Slang
from “What’s Up?” to “F*%# Off !” by Juan Caballero with Nick
Denton-Brown, besides being a handy compendium of smutty
words you won’t hear in a high school Spanish class, also gives
the reader a straightforward picture of sex in Spain. Room Mates,
Vol. 1 and Vol. 2, by Ivan Guevara and Atilio Gambedotti, offer
a raunchy sex-positive look at a group of men and women living
in close quarters. Argentina-born Atilio Gembedotti does the art
and Ivan Guevara provides the stories.
Playing like a pornographic soap opera, these beautiful
people fuck around with abandon. Sophia loves Steve, but
Steve is fooling around with Teresa. Sophia ends up having an
affair with Luis while Teresa seduces George, a highly religious
student. Each chapter ends up with an aphorism from a famous
author. The chapter where Sophia seduces George ends with
the oft-quoted line from Oscar Wilde, “I can resist everything
but temptation.” In a later chapter, when Sophia finds George
turned into a full-on libertine, there is an Anton Chekhov quote,
“A hungry dog only has faith in the flesh.”
The second volume concludes with Sophia and Steve in bed
together, but the lustful fucking doesn’t end well. Steve wants to
do all manner of things to Sophia, but she resists. He wants to
have anal sex and cum in her face. To Sophia, she finds these
things degrading. She realizes the error of her infatuation and
doesn’t want to have a relationship with Steve. For an erotic
comic book series that revels in sexual variety and the pleasure
of a good fuck, Sophia’s personal preferences aren’t treated with
contempt or misogyny, more a matter of personal taste. And
most importantly, she isn’t judged harshly because she wants to
have sex with Steve. Sex is still seen as a positive activity, even
if there are negative emotional consequences. But that could be
said for any human activity.
The lesbian affairs have a human poignancy. When Teresa
starts an affair with Martha, they are treated as literary subjects,
not erotic objects. (Although that gets complicated since this is
a visual medium and both women are gorgeous. It appears like
a lipstick lesbian trope, but the explicit sex becomes a means
to forward the narrative.) Guevara writes stories that have you
caring for the characters, even after the inevitable money shots.
The stories have a mostly comedic tone, leavening the heavy
drama of the room mates sleeping around.
Gambedotti depicts the characters in a cartoonish style (Cf.
Terry Moore’s women in Strangers in Paradise). When it involves
sex, the women have breasts that reflect the effects of gravity.
While the full-color spreads make the figures flat and poster-like,
Gambedotti makes it plain that beneath the naked skin are bones
and muscles.
Like fellow erotic comic artist Ignacio Noe, Guevara and
Gambedotti show Spain with a raunchy sex-positive honesty.
The celebratory sexuality is kept in check by real consequences
to the characters. This isn’t simply fucking in a moral vacuum.
The heat of lust has real consequences for all involved.
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Personal History: Alan Moore wrote an epic erotic comic. And
Lost Girls also carried with it hints of controversy. As a longtime
fan of Moore, I had to see what he did with this particular genre
of comics.
Lost Girls
2006
by Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie
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The History: Published in 2006, Lost Girls is still too new to have
“a history,” at least in the same way as Story of O or Naked Lunch.
Those two novels were controversial and shocking when they
first hit bookstores, but have since accrued literary respectability
and legitimacy with the addition of so many years. Lost Girls isn’t
even ten years old, therefore I will hold off on any premature
announcements to its status as a classic.
The exact nature of the controversy is in its depiction of child
sexuality. Without the proper contextualization, the words “child
sexuality” comes across as shocking and horrific. This requires
unpacking and seeing it within the narrative framework of Lost
Girls. Moore and Gebbie have created a work that explores an
erotic world based on the fictionalized lives of three protagonists
from children’s literature: Alice from Alice in Wonderland, Dorothy
from The Wizard of Oz, and Wendy from Peter Pan. Here is what
Alan Moore has to say about this: “If we’d have come out and
said, ‘well, this is a work of art,’ they would have probably all
said, ‘no it’s not, it’s pornography.’ So because we’re saying,
‘this is pornography,’ they’re saying, ‘no it’s not, it’s art,’ and
people don’t realize quite what they’ve said.” (Quote from The
Forbidden Planet International Blog Log.) The whole art-versuspornography conundrum, while saving the authors and readers
the headache of legal prosecution, does little to solve the issue.
This is what makes the arts different from the sciences. Because
of the slippery subjectivity of artistic intentions, reader reactions,
and critical interpretation, things can get ugly when butting
against the ferocious consequences of the law and psychology.
Back when I began this essay series, I cited Susan Sontag’s
“The Pornographic Imagination.” In Sontag’s influential essay,
she works diligently to support erotica and pornography as a
legitimate literary genre. She also goes out of her way to avoid
discussing either legal or psychological aspects of the works she
selected. But (and this is key) the works she discussed were prose.
Lost Girls is a comic, a medium built upon an interplay between
words and image. It is these images where things get dicey.
At CONvergence this year I attended a panel titled “Fetishes:
Gone Too Far?” During the discussion, one of the key points
was the interrelated issues of controversy versus legality. Like
William S. Burroughs, I hold an ideological position of “First
Amendment absolutist.” What this means is that I believe artists
should have almost no restrictions in terms of subject matter. In a
related legal case, Neil Gaiman went so far as to assert that comic
book characters have no claims to legal personhood. Comic book
characters do not exist in the same way that fictional characters
represented by a film or stage actor exist. And in cases like these,
where someone is prosecuted for possessing a comic where
underage characters have sex, it sets a dangerous precedent. One
shouldn’t confuse moral judgments (what said person does with
said comics) with legal writ. What is moral and what is legal isn’t
always a 1:1 ratio. This holds especially true in a multi-ethnic,
multicultural pluralistic democracy like the United States.
But with any absolutist position, this has a number of caveats.
This circles back to context, genre, and child sex. The First
Amendment protects speech not acts. Lost Girls is work of fiction
and, as such, is legally protected free speech. This isn’t a howto manual on how to solicit children for sexual acts. And even
with the protection of the First Amendment, it is clear that the
depictions are artistic renderings. When it comes to photographs
or filmic representations, the context changes entirely, since that
brings up a host of issues like age of consent, coercion, criminal
enterprise, and more.
I spend a lot of space discussing the context and particulars
because one should be able to read Lost Girls without fear of legal
prosecution. Despite the sensational subject matter, Lost Girls is
a groundbreaking erotic comic that Moore and Gebbie use to
explore issues of genre, history, and narrative.
The Book: Lost Girls centers its narrative around an Austrian
hotel on the eve of The Great War. At the hotel we meet
Wendy Darling, Dorothy Gale, and Alice Fairchild. As the
story progresses, Wendy, Dorothy, and Alice recount erotic tales
from their childhood. We see eroticized origin stories. Dorothy
masturbates during a tornado. Wendy meets a strange boy in the
park who initiates her (and her young brothers) into the world
of adult sexuality. Alice engages in sexual escapades with a
schoolmistress named Mrs. Redman (a sexualized version of
The Red Queen). They continue regaling each other with their
erotic autobiographies amidst sexual shenanigans at the Austrian
hotel.
In a way Lost Girls comes across like slash fiction, the
sexualized version of fan fiction. This is relevant since Moore
and Gebbie are using characters and situations from classic
literature. But Moore and Gebbie further complicate things. The
hotel proprietor named Monsieur Rougeur lends the women
The White Book, an anthology of erotic pastiches allegedly
written and illustrated by such luminaries as Aubrey Beardsley,
Guilliame Apollinaire, Oscar Wilde, and Egon Schiele. Near the
end of Lost Girls, the specter of war hovers ever closer. Archduke
Francis Ferdinand is assassinated and various European powers
prepare for an imminent war. The husbands of the three female
protagonists leave to attend to the immediate crisis. The hotel
is emptied but for Dorothy, Wendy, and Alice, and the lusty
hotel staff. It is during this orgy that Monsieur Rougeur recounts
his own origin story. He tells about his life as a master forger
and pederast. In typical Moore fashion, the comic depicts three
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simultaneous storylines. The first is a story from The White Book;
the second is Rougeur’s life story; and the third is the presentday hotel orgy. But because Rougeur is a master forger, we don’t
know whether he is telling the truth with his story. And this
relates back to the alleged authenticity of the art in The White
Book. Lost Girls exists simultaneously as an epic piece of slash
fiction and as an avant-garde exploration of narrative itself.
The final scenes involve German soldiers breaking a mirror
(a prop present in the prologue) and a slow pull back that reveals
the entire narrative was a dream by a dying soldier in a trench.
One recalls the endings of Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, and The
Wizard of Oz: the common ending trope all these works had was
that it had been a dream.
The Verdict: As I stated previously, I’m avoiding any verdict
saying Lost Girls is a classic; it’s simply too early to tell, although
this will be yet another example within Alan Moore’s oeuvre that
scholars can puzzle over, dissect, and contextualize. Despite its
controversial subject matter, it holds its own both within Moore’s
body of work and against other erotic comics.
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Author’s Note: These concluding remarks attempt to unravel the Gordian
Knot of interrelated topics and ideas that make erotica and pornography
such contentious literature. They will focus primarily on the written
works profiled here. Because the visual nature of graphic novels brings
along with it a separate array of conventions and expectations, they will
be excluded.
The Word
On the Erotic:
Concluding
Remarks
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“Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other.
It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the
tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.” –
Roland Barthes
To borrow a concept from Karl Marx, the word is the
elementary particle of literature. Marx saw the commodity as
the elementary particle of political economy. From words we get
sentences, paragraphs, stories, and novels. With erotica we read
because of the alleged “naughty words.” The “dirty words” that
make us filthy for reading them. But in the end, to point out the
obvious, the words are simply ink on text or atoms on a Kindle
or iPhone.
Words are powerless … until we give them power.
Words are meaningless … until we give them meaning.
What kind of power? What kind of meaning?
Most words pass us by like water to a fish. Omnipresent yet
invisible. Useful to the point we don’t even second-guess their
origin and manipulative power.
Fuck. Shit. Cunt. Cocksucker. Motherfucker.
“Oh, I’m sorry. Did I break your concentration?”
These alleged dirty words have bedeviled writers, translators,
critics, and moralists. Writers employed metaphor and euphemism
to get the point across, but not too directly. Prudish translators
bowdlerized phrases and entire sections of erotic works. One had
to study Latin or Greek to discover the unvarnished vulgarities
and obscene words.
Song of Songs has been subject to mistranslations and
intellectually acrobatic interpretations, chastening the poem’s
erotic intensity. When translations haven’t been intentionally
botched by the self-righteous hands of moralizing prigs, other
methods of repression were used. Books were banned and
burned. Those caught reading The Satyricon faced prosecution or
death. Even as late as the Fifties, those caught in possession of
“Howl” or Naked Lunch faced criminal prosecution and jail time.
Why do we react to the use of these words? What makes us
so afraid?
The Body
“The world is full of vulgar Purists, who bring discredit
on all selection by the silliness of their choice; and this the
more, because the very becoming a Purist is commonly
indicative of some slight degree of weakness, readiness to
be offended, or narrowness of understanding of the ends
of things.” – John Ruskin
The aforementioned litany of dirty words. What do they
describe? Either acts or parts of the body. Is our body a temple or
an amusement park? Everyone reading this text is here because
two people fucked. Now that’s not the most elegant or polite
description of human conception and the miracle of birth, but
it is the truth. Two bodies, ensnarled together, suddenly, for a
brief moment, reached an erotic climax and nine months later
(generally speaking) a new life exited the mother’s body.
The body has been a site of cognitive dissociation for
thousands of years. At once a form celebrated in the arts, we
Americans immediately cringe when faced with the roiling
disgusting sin factories that encase our inner organs. Why is this?
This sounds totally insane. Erotica and pornography expose the
realities of the human body, whether in the clinical atrocities of
the Marquis de Sade or the poetic wonderment of Jean Genet.
While critics and writers heroically toil to differentiate the
definitions of erotica and pornography, they both involve people
fucking, bodies in collision and crisis. Depending on the specific
work, the wet mechanics of skin against skin and spilling fluids
might be masked beneath poetic phrasing and overly literate
expression.
Are we drawn to erotica because we are uncomfortable in
our own bodies? Our sexual desires an engine for shame and
self-loathing? Can we only feel good about these orgasmic urges
within the strict confines of marriage, lights out, in a missionary
position that doesn’t last too long, because that would be gross
and lecherous?
Sade creates entire worlds for his characters to enact atrocities
and pleasures on the bodies of others. His characters have
herculean libidos and over-sized cocks. Malcolm McKesson’s
ornate dreamworld involves rituals enacted over a constrained
body. These rituals appear similar to the gender-switched bondage
of Gynecocracy.
While a certain degree of sexual repression is necessary to
function in modern society, erotica and pornography make us
realize the human body is not a toxic waste dump but something
to be investigated and celebrated.
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Christianity
“That’s what I find ironic, too, is that people who are
against these things that cause sexual thought are generally
fundamentalist Christians, who also believe you should
be fruitful and multiply. Boy, they walk a tight rope every
day, don’t they?” – Bill Hicks
“Every ejaculation doesn’t deserve a name.” – George
Carlin
For most of the works profiled here, Christianity exists over
them like a shadow. The tenets and morality of this religion seem
omnipresent and inescapable. While the United States is not
legally a Christian nation, it is culturally a Christian nation, a fine
distinction not usually grasped by those seeking to demolish the
separation of church and state.
Christianity has been behind the suppression of erotic
works in the United States and Europe. It has included not only
suppression of pornography, but also contraception information
and specific sexual acts forbidden in the Bible. After Eve’s bite
into the apple and the resulting shame, we have been taught to
feel disgust about our bodies.
But how is one to square the circle of The Song of Songs,
an erotically charged love poem within the Bible? Bury it in
euphemism, assert that the two lovers are chaste, overload the
small poem with a clunky interpretation, and threaten with
hellfire and damnation anyone who questions you. No wonder
the Marquis de Sade became so furious.
But this isn’t a simple either/or proposition. Sade remains
famous for his articulate atheist rage, but Genet’s works transcend
the shabby trappings of gay hustlers and impoverished drag
queens to create a kind of Mystical Gay Cosmology. The erotic
and the spiritual have also been melded in Tony Kushner’s Angels
in America.
But erotica, like any other genre, is propelled by conflict.
Beyond the explicit mechanics of sex, sin can be a great
addition to a story. Graham Greene’s fictions radiate with the
inner conflicts of personal lusts against rigid Catholic doctrine.
The men, in their cheating hearts, are not just lustful, but will
inevitably face damnation. Christianity can also be the grit that
makes the pearl. Fiction requires friction.
Within the cultural context of the United States, following
the lead of Europe, Christianity has evolved into something
more insidious, more cunning. The specter I speak of is that of
middle-class propriety. Unlike the precepts of the church, one isn’t
striving to obey a random bit of religious dogma in the hopes
of attaining a better life in the hereafter; middle-class propriety
is all about adhering to the appropriate, but unvoiced, cultural
likes and dislikes in the desperate hope of being accepted by your
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next-door neighbor. This conformity, this stifling lust to be the
liked, creates a hydra-headed monstrosity. Middle-class propriety
breeds things like inoffensiveness, decency, properness, envy,
acquisitiveness, and sentimentality. Yearning for entry into the
New Jerusalem gives way to keeping up with Joneses and being
up to date on the latest water cooler gossip. Scratch a committed
leftist ideologue and you’ll find the same middle-class proprieties
that compel a central Iowa Republican insurance salesman to get
up every day.
William S. Burroughs eviscerated this propriety and its
attendant nationalist mythologies in Naked Lunch, shattering the
novel form in the process. George Bataille exposed the death and
depravity laying beneath his bourgeois upbringing in Story of The
Eye. As the Walter Benjamin quote asserts in the Introduction,
pornography is the dynamo that propels language forward. But
to do so, it will disrupt the placid surface waters of the middle
class and everything they hold dear.
Pleasure
“Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere,
may be happy.” – H. L. Mencken
Pleasure is not a simple thing. It is closely linked with pain
and death. While reading erotica one relishes the pleasurable
feelings associated with the stories and situations, yet it can’t
be reduced to the simple chestnut, “If it feels good, do it.” One
needs to crack open that expression. The expression ties together
a sensation (“feels”) with a moral judgment (“good”). Pleasure is
what feels good, but what if that involves pain? Or inflicting pain
on others? Sade’s fiction explores the darker regions of human
pleasure. Whipping and getting whipped become additions to
the hedonistic spectrum of sensations.
Because of our Neo-Victorian sensibilities and middle-class
proprieties, we see hedonism as a negative philosophy. Erotica
and pornography make us confront the reality of sensation for
sensation’s sake. The 120 Days of Sodom creates a scenario where
hedonism is taken to its limit. The jaded libertines, wallowing in
limitless wealth and the immediate access of beautiful submissive
bodies, have become prematurely satiated. The limber delicious
bodies become that thing most anathema to a committed libertine:
the beautiful has become boring. In order to stave off impending
boredom, they embark on an obsessive gluttonous exploration
for bizarre and idiosyncratic pleasures. The libertines indulge
their perversions by becoming aroused by the old, the ugly, and
the diseased. When the act of fucking, either individually or in
staged orgies, also becomes boring, they spice up their atrocities
with criminal and murderous acts.
That is one route to the palace of wisdom. Another route is
from the pleasure of the text, to steal Roland Barthes’s book title.
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Sade’s text becomes a burden to read, the inventory of vicious
fetishes becoming as monotonous as the rigid laws in Leviticus
and Deuteronomy. But the text can become transfigured into
pure pleasure, as when one reads Our Lady of the Flowers, by Jean
Genet. Despite its sensational subject matter and downtrodden
subjects, the queens and pimps become very much alive through
their use of language. Genet braids together richly poetic passages
with hard-boiled criminal dialogue and the ornate expressions
of the drag queens. One sees this in British English. Polari
melded together Cockney slang, theater terms, and words from
other languages to create a meta-language used by the British
gay community. It is language encoded to protect gay men from
persecution and physical violence, but it also becomes a means
of self-expression.
The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek represents an opposite
approach from Genet’s multivocal ornamented language. Jelinek’s
writing exposes the reader to a suffocating, claustrophobic,
Freudian hellscape. Base primordial urges struggle against
repression, parental expectations, and Austria’s suffocating
version of Roman Catholicism. Fiction requires friction and The
Piano Teacher’s friction creates a heat that becomes painful to the
touch.
History
“Every intellectual product must be judged from the
point of view of the age and the people in which it was
produced.” – Walter Pater
The works profiled within these pages were arranged in
chronological order. Defining what erotica and pornography is
involves the practice of history. What was once considered the
height of perversion and explicitness is now considered quaint.
The pendulum from propriety to permissiveness swings back and
forth. One can also add national history and class distinctions
to the mix as well. The challenge of historical practice is that
one has to decide which variables to include. With history, one
can include nearly everything. But most importantly, one must
include time. After one lives long enough, one can see society
change around them. Then one starts making judgments, rightly
or wrongly. The two most common judgments involve either
nostalgia for the past or utopian dreams for the future. Both
pervert how one sees the present. One becomes crippled by
despair, either for the better times of the past or for better times
in the future.
Erotica and pornography become victims of nostalgic
yearnings and utopian visions. Both conservative and leftist
regimes have worked diligently to stamp out erotica and
pornography. It becomes the literary other, something to be
separate, quarantined, and extinguished. But what erotica and
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pornography is is not a fixed point on a grid. It constantly changes
over time. But time has the last laugh, since the puritanical urges
of the censorious crusaders of moral decency will eventually
become punchlines. Against the moralists, sometimes the most
valiant thing to do is point at them and laugh.
On Translation
“I am inventing a language which must necessarily burst
forth from a very new poetics, that could be defined
in a couple of words: Paint, not the thing, but the effect it
produces.” – Stéphen Mallarmé
Several works I’ve written about were written in languages
other than English. Unlike other genres, erotica and pornography
have been subject to intentional mistranslations, bowdlerizations,
and redaction. Things become tricky with translation, since the
best translations are not simply transcriptions of a text from
Language A to Language B. In fiction the best translations
combine the knowledge of the original passage with an
adaptation of how the original language would be re-interpreted
in the reader’s language. As with history, this is a time-sensitive
process. Every few years, books will require a new translation. If
the language feels outdated, it will further alienate the reader.
With erotica and pornography the urge for new translations
is more pressing than ever. New translations have appeared with
suppressed passages restored. Song of Songs, translated by Ariel
and Chana Bloch, underline this issue. Their translation, in
keeping with the spirit of the text and the text’s historical nature,
is neither too clinically vulgar nor too obfuscatingly chaste.
Crime
“That which is not just, is not Law; and that which is not
Law, ought not to be obeyed.” – Algernon Sydney
From the specific context of the United States, many of these
works have been banned and their possession made a criminal
offense. Crime is a main ingredient to an exploration of erotica
and pornography. Not only has the United States banned the sale
and possession of books containing descriptions of erotic acts,
it has also criminalized specific sex acts. Only recently has the
United States decriminalized sodomy between two consenting
adults.
But criminality and creativity link together in erotic writings.
Unlike graphic novels, which brings along a host of issues due
to their visual nature, the written word has only become free
following the “Howl” and Naked Lunch trials. A writer who lacks
the option to write four-letter words in narrative fiction lives
under tyranny.
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The 120 Days of Sodom again proves a valid test case. Sade
wrote it in the Bastille, yet he produced a novel totally uninhibited
from language controls. Naked Lunch did the same thing when it
was written during the height of the Eisenhower administration.
While the Victorian language controls have vanished and the
one-man dictatorship of the United States Postmaster General
has been severely reduced, the writer of smut must deal with
that ambiguous, borderline nonsensical appellation of “artistic
merit.” Art, like porn, is ridiculously vague and exceptionally
difficult to define.
But does the work really need to have artistic merit for the
author to write it? The threat of criminal prosecution shouldn’t
hang over the writer’s head if someone thinks it lacks artistic
merit. It should be noted that the “artistic merit” canard
becomes especially important for works that involve acts of
criminal sexuality (pedophilia, bestiality, necrophilia, etc.). It
is my opinion that the author should feel free to whatever the
author wants, regardless of morality or legality, so long as the
work is clearly identified as fiction. A morally vile fiction filled
with criminally depraved sex acts can be published, but here’s
the rub: it will require readers. If no readers are found, then the
work is harmless. Amazon.com is chock-full of erotic ebooks, of
varying quality, based on all manner of sexual fetishes. But so
many books means a limited amount of readers. Even the most
shocking, most criminal book thrown up on Amazon.com will
only yield a few readers, unless the author of the self-published
work wants to invest in a serious marketing campaign. With
millions of books online, it is easy to become forgotten.
The Moving Target
“Of what use is freedom of speech to those who fear to
offend?” – Roger Ebert
“Literature isn’t a moral beauty contest.” – Philip Roth
Simply put, what one considers erotica or pornography is a
historically contingent phenomenon. What the Victorians considered
vile and obscene depravity is to modern eyes rather quaint. To
use the tired metaphor, the pendulum swings back and forth.
In modern times, pornography, like flag-burning, abortion,
and gun ownership, is a hot-button issue to culture warriors and
other moralizing chickenhawks of the Left and Right. Going
after smut is so easy and so lazy. The anti-porn crusader is the
Michael Bay of the American political landscape.
It’s not like there aren’t real problems out there. So instead of
trying to stamp out police brutality, easy access to semi-automatic
firearms, the rise of anti-government militias, and the universal
corruption in political, corporate, and religious institutions, we
need to man the barricades to prevent our soft-headed fellow
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citizens from getting media that shows titties? Really? In the
words of cartoon character Eric Cartman, “Screw you guys, I’m
goin’ home.”
Free Will and Artistic Intent
“I like big butts and I can not lie.” – Sir Mix-a-lot
Even if it is masturbation fodder, is it any less artistic? Many
of the previous topics boil down to the artist’s intent and the
reader’s use. With erotica and masturbation, since they were
clearly written to arouse the writer and the reader, this somehow
makes them less worthy of artistic merit. But shouldn’t a reader
be able to use the book as he or she desires? During a panel at
CONvergence, one of the female panelists confessed how she
considers her Kindle to be a sex toy. She reads the smutty ebook
and gets off on it.
Although not all books profiled here fit that criteria. The
books of Sade and Jelinek, while filled with sexuality, aren’t
exactly masturbation fodder. I enjoyed reading Our Lady of
the Flowers, Naked Lunch, and City of Night, despite having no
inclination to enjoy them in terms of my own sexual arousal.
Gay erotica just doesn’t do anything for me. It becomes a matter
of personal taste.
Literary Pretensions versus Literary Merit
“And I started reading it... and I was surprised. It was
good. It was fun. It was not nearly as pretentious as I
remember I wanted it to be when I was writing it. Not
nearly as weighted down with the importance that I
thought I was investing it with.” – Bret Easton Ellis on
American Psycho
The common rubric associated with differentiating erotica
and pornography is that erotica has literary pretensions while
pornography doesn’t. Like most rubrics, it works as a simple
guide for the perplexed. Like most rubrics, it is so simple it
completely misses the point. The differentiation also includes
other generalizations: erotica has plot, porn is plotless; erotica
has realistic characterizations, porn has cardboard characters;
and so forth.
Either/Or Vs. And/Both
Is it pornography or is it art? Is it erotica or is it pornography?
Yes.
Too often we become wrapped up in binary opposites.
Christian or heathen. Coke or Pepsi. Democrat or Republican.
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As if these were the only two choices? As if there were only
two sides to an argument. Binary opposition, like a literalist
interpretation, comes across as simplistic and pedestrian. When
arguing the alleged difference between pornography and art, the
either/or proposition becomes less an aesthetic judgment and
more of a moral one. If aesthetics were this simple, why not flip
a coin and be done with it?
The problem arises in the legal arena, where thinking becomes
about whether one is guilty or not. Whether or not a law was
broken. Although one should read Supreme Court decisions to
see how many ways a hair can be split. Simple judgments about
right and wrong devolve into ideological turf battles and vote
counting, watered down by compromise and collaboration.
When approaching erotica, don’t think like a Supreme Court
Justice, whether or not it is or is not. Think like a sommelier
or a dandy. Savor every taste and sensation, comparing and
contrasting it against the others. Use the pleasure you gain from
the reading experience to inform your aesthetic judgments.
Throw “either/or” in the trash bin and embrace the
promiscuous arms of “and/both.”
In Defense of the Pornographic Arts
“Yet I am not more sure that my soul lives, than I am
that perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the
human heart — one of the indivisible primary faculties,
or sentiments, which give direction to the character of
Man.” – Edgar Allan Poe
Why defend erotica and pornography? You some kind of
pervert or something? (Email me your Google searches, especially
the ones you don’t tell friends and family about, before pointing
your bony finger of moral self-righteousness in my direction.)
Why defend this historically disreputable, allegedly
misogynistic, morally corrosive, and aesthetically mediocre
genre? Because I have to.
Erotica and pornography, as a genre, is the unavoidable canary
in the coal mine. It is the first genre attacked by moral crusaders,
worried parents, prudish tyrants, and blathering hypocrites. Like
science fiction, it is a genre that reflects the mores, fears, and
desires of the present. If you think shapeshifter erotic romance
is a terrible thing, well, write a better version of one or kindly
shut the fuck up. Critiquing the merits of a genre is the work
of an aesthete, but throwing out an entire genre because of a
few (or not so few) terrible examples is the outlook of a boring
middlebrow tyrannical hack.
Erotica is inherently no better or worse than any other genre. I
picked historical classics and well-written exemplars, but criticism
is about selection; discernment coupled with enthusiasm. Despite
this essay series being inspired by the runaway popularity of
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Fifty Shades of Grey, I never bothered to read it. Again, selection
is key. But even middlebrow suburban thinly veiled fanfiction
mom porn needs defending; not for the individual book, but for
the genre. The American Civil Liberties Union has defended a
fair share of nefarious, if not downright evil, organizations and
individuals. Because of that, the First Amendment is stronger,
broader, and better.
Words are weapons and dirty words are some of the most
dangerous. That danger spices up what would be rather boring
and bland stories. Sometimes people read stories about falling in
love. Others read stories about a good hard fuck. Erotica, to tweak
Steve Albini’s notorious album, are “stories about fucking.” How
do you think we got here?
People fuck. Other people write about it.
The stories continue …
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Acknowledgements
Getting a book published is an exciting collaborative process. This
book would not be possible without the editorial supervision of
Jason Pettus. His work in streamlining the prose and book layout
cannot be underestimated. Thanks must also be directed to the
writers who risked imprisonment or worse. Because of their
effort and sacrifice, we can all write books shot through with
four-letter words without the fear of legal prosecution. Jason’s
editorial efforts have made this book what it is, but editing is not
omniscience; all errors, factual or otherwise, are my own.
Karl Wolff is the author of On Being Human (CCLaP, 2013) and the founder of
The Driftless Area Review, a literary blog. He lives in Milwaukee with his wife and
too many books. His book reviews can be read at CCLaP, the New York Journal of
Books, and The The Poetry Blog. When not reviewing books and writing non-fiction
essays, he works valiantly to finish his novel and perfect his chili recipe. (Photo:
Ralph Pearson/@rapglass13)
CCLaP
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