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I
often shock my dear darling undergraduate students by
reading a passage from a text aloud, pausing dramatically, and pronouncing
it pornographic. It is my goal to divorce them of their idea that porn
consists of the following elements:
1) Full-frontal nudity
2) Genital penetration
3) Shame when you get caught with it
Rather, I’d like for them to see pornography as a rhetorical mode.
Porn, according to the definition I use in class, is a text whose protagonist
is relatively empty of defining personality traits, and whose sensory
experiences are described or represented in great detail. The point of
this definition of porn is that it has nothing to do with the relative
effects on various vasodilating organs, but instead has qualities intrinsic
to the text itself. One need not measure erection levels to identify porn;
after all, we know it when we see it. (Ba-dum-ching!)
One of the reasons I like to define it as a rhetorical mode is that it
takes the moralistic power out of discussions of textual pornography.
I have many students who are extremely orthodox, and also students who
are hardcore godless liberals. The last thing I want is to fight about
something dumb like whether Gulliver’s
mention of being forced to ride astride
the nipple of a sixteen-year-old Brobdingnagian girl in order
to give her sexual pleasure is “over the top” or not. Of course
it’s over the top. Everyone knows it is.
Whether you get off thinking about it or not is not my business. Here
we must get away from the question “Is it hot or not?” lest
we go down roads I don’t want to travel with a bunch of twenty-year-olds
who live with their parents. But is it pornographic?
The answer, of course, is no, it is not pornographic. Gulliver has far
too much idiosyncratic consciousness for the reader to project the self
inside his mind, and Gulliver is at this moment glossing over what was,
for him, an embarrassing episode, and provides no sensory detail about
the experience. Though the anecdote itself is sexual, and the thought
may be, to an individual, erotic, given some imagination, the text itself
at this moment is not pornographic. It does not allow for the reader to
experience Gulliver’s sensations, mediated only by the descriptive
limits of language. It does not linger on or overload the senses. It may
be erotic, but rhetorically, it does not function as porn.
Compare that with this famous (and, sorry–long) passage from Bram
Stoker’s Dracula, which I highly recommend reading aloud
in a slow voice:
I was not alone. The room was the same, unchanged in any way since I came
into it. I could see along the floor, in the brilliant moonlight, my own
footsteps marked where I had disturbed the long accumulation of dust.
In the moonlight opposite me were three young women, ladies by their dress
and manner. I thought at the time that I must be dreaming when I saw them,
they threw no shadow on the floor. They came close to me, and looked at
me for some time, and then whispered together. Two were dark, and had
high aquiline noses, like the Count, and great dark, piercing eyes, that
seemed to be almost red when contrasted with the pale yellow moon. The
other was fair,as fair as can be, with great masses of golden hair and
eyes like pale sapphires. I seemed somehow to know her face, and to know
it in connection with some dreamy fear, but I could not recollect at the
moment how or where. All three had brilliant white teeth that shone like
pearls against the ruby of their voluptuous lips. There was something
about them that made me uneasy, some longing and at the same time some
deadly fear. I felt in my heart a wicked, burning desire that they would
kiss me with those red lips. It is not good to note this down, lest some
day it should meet Mina’s eyes and cause her pain, but it is the
truth. They whispered together, and then they all three laughed, such
a silvery, musical laugh, but as hard as though the sound never could
have come through the softness of human lips. It was like the intolerable,
tingling sweetness of waterglasses when played on by a cunning hand. The
fair girl shook her head coquettishly, and the other two urged her on.
One said, “Go on! You are first, and we shall follow. Yours’
is the right to begin.”
The other added, “He is young and strong. There are kisses for us
all.”
I lay quiet, looking out from under my eyelashes in an agony of delightful
anticipation. The fair girl advanced and bent over me till I could feel
the movement of her breath upon me. Sweet it was in one sense, honey-sweet,
and sent the same tingling through the nerves as her voice, but with a
bitter underlying the sweet, a bitter offensiveness, as one smells in
blood.
I was afraid to raise my eyelids, but looked out and saw perfectly under
the lashes. The girl went on her knees, and bent over me, simply gloating.
There was a deliberate voluptuousness which was both thrilling and repulsive,
and as she arched her neck she actually licked her lips like an animal,
till I could see in the moonlight the moisture shining on the scarlet
lips and on the red tongue as it lapped the white sharp teeth. Lower and
lower went her head as the lips went below the range of my mouth and chin
and seemed to fasten on my throat. Then she paused, and I could hear the
churning sound of her tongue as it licked her teeth and lips, and I could
feel the hot breath on my neck. Then the skin of my throat began to tingle
as one’s flesh does when the hand that is to tickle it approaches
nearer, nearer. I could feel the soft, shivering touch of the lips on
the super sensitive skin of my throat, and the hard dents of two sharp
teeth, just touching and pausing there. I closed my eyes in languorous
ecstasy and waited, waited with beating heart.
The slower you read it, the more likely it is to create the desired effect,
somewhere between goosebumps and an erection. It’s not great literature
– there is no sentiment here that is particularly interesting, no
phrasing that is just so. It is just really fucking sensory, and increasingly
so as the passage moves on, to such a density in the last paragraph that
this one moment of the teeth touching Jonathan’s throat threatens
to stretch out, deliciously, for hours.
I have argued with my class that it is not what is depicted that makes
a textual situation pornographic; it’s the density with which the
attendant sensations are described. Suddenly, we are not thinking of Jonathan
Harker, the young lawyer’s clerk, having far-off curious adventures.
We are Jonathan, climbing up inside his empty shell to feel those two
hard dents tease at the super sensitive skin of our throats. The test
for pornography is not, “Is it representing nudity or penetration?”
nor is it, “Does it give me an erection?” but, “Is it
possible for me to have a vicarious, rather than merely imaginative, physical
experience?” It does so by first emptying the protagonist of consciousness,
and then offering dense sensory details in simple, even repetitive language.
I think this is a definition that translates fairly well to film, other
visual arts, and song. Justin Timberlake may say he’s bringing sexy
back, but at no point am I convinced he knows specifically what this would
entail aside from the deployment of cliché. (Snap!) Prince, on
the other hand, often provides an overwhelming density of detail that
provides not just the promise of sexual fulfillment, but a vicariously
experienced sexual fulfillment that very nearly transcends the barrier
of the medium. Pornography can be thrilling because it insists there is
no wall between the represented experience and the experience of the reader/viewer/listener,
only a thin membrane.
But this is also why pornography presents a moral problem. By luring the
reader into an illusion of an unmediated experience possible through the
text, it creates a situation in which the artificiality of the pornographic
experience (whether sexual or not) becomes a part of the viewer/reader/listener’s
memories of experiences, not with texts, but with the world.
Modernist art, which is by aesthetic purpose absolutely in opposition
to the pretense of offering unmediated experience, can never be confused
for actual experience, and so is never really pornographic. We are so
engaged in the very stuff of mediation in modernist art that it never
would occur to us to confuse, for example, watching Un chien andalou and
having had the experiences therein. Or if we did, it would be a sign of
something very creepy about us indeed.
I don’t want to moralize here about these aesthetic aspects of pornography,
although a great deal of my dissertation is about the social and political
issues that arise when readers begin to confuse texts for experience,
and to privilege fictional characters’ experiences over their own,
which partly happens because of the near-pornographic rhetorical nature
of scenes, for example, in Pamela.
But what is obvious, over the past three hundred years of mass print culture,
and then mass art, music, and film cultures, is that the public always
craves the rhetorically pornographic, especially when it does not explicitly
offend a prudish sexual sensibility.
There is a fine line, in fact, that “pop” tends to walk now,
between providing the pretense of an unmediated experience of something
sensory and representing actual sex. My very prim, religious students
are reduced to puddles by passages like the one from Dracula
above, which gives them something almost like an experience without any
of the messy complications of consequences or interpersonal relations,
which is why, I think, they place such an outlandish value on their ability
to experience along with every text, as I complained about here. What
bothers me most is that they seem not to know the difference between reading
and doing anymore.
Rather, my students tend to use all texts like Dorian
Gray uses his picture. Dorian’s portrait pays the (represented)
price for sins and other risky experiences, while the reader gets to experience
(vicariously) the pleasure of experience without any chaser of consequence.
The effect of this isolation of pleasure from the texture of real, lived
circumstance is readily apparent in Dorian, who must seek out increasingly
depraved stimuli in order to get off. I leave to you, my reader, to speculate
about the effects of this on the average purveyor of pop. (I am not willing
to draw a slippery slope of depravity in Dorianish terms, because many
of my students, as cited before, tend to get as much of a vicarious joyride
now out of Ben Jonson as they do out of Stoker. Wild, man.)
Go have an intense sensory experience in the world, people! Pay the price!
It’s different and worth it and really really good for you!
[B]
AWB
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