A long time ago, I read a book by Umberto Eco called The Limits of Interpretation. But there is a shorter essay on his site that deals with some of the same issues called “The Author and his Interpreters” online. Eco, like many of his generation and those immediately preceding it, had given a lot of thought to the relationship between the writer, the text and the reader. In the latter part of the 20th Century, much more authority was rightly accorded to the reader in the power dynamic of this complex relationship.
And yet still, today, a deep snobbery about what constitutes ‘literature’ remains. If writers can set out to write ‘literary fiction’ and critics can laud it as more ‘important’ than all those novels we consume on airplanes, then has the reader actually gained any authority worth having?
Recently, Ursula K. Le Guin, wrote an outstanding post proposing that any ‘readable’ novel should be considered literature. I would agree with this, but with a bit of a modification. All readable novels aren’t ‘literature’ to every reader. And here, Eco’s excellent concept of shared ‘cultural encyclopedias‘ comes into play. Ian M. Banks’ “The Use of Weapons” is probably not going to be ‘literature’ to someone who has never read any sci-fi before. There needs to be a willingness (a sort of genre-specific suspension of disbelief) to accept a wholly unfamiliar paradigm in order to really have a ‘literary’ experience when reading the book. But if you consider that an examination of violence and its limits a ‘deep’ discussion, then this book is most decidedly deep.
So how could erotic fiction ever be ‘literature’? At the moment, according to most academics, critics and contemporary writers of literary fiction, it can’t. Of course, there are exceptions. It can be considered literature if the author has been dead for a good many years. Apparently only then one can ignore the fact that the text might have any sexually arousing value and concentrate, with adequate seriousness, on the historical context of the work. “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” can be literature because it caused such a social uproar. Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin can be considered literature, because despite the fact that reading it might give you a stiffie, you can contemplate their sexual radicalism within the context of the prevailing social norms of the time. Basically, those books were serious, because they were seriously socially disruptive.
Many people consider Michel Houllebeq to be ‘literary’ because, although he includes repetitive and explicit sex in his novels, it’s all the sort of sex you would rather die celibate than have. I would go so far as to say that, if you found the sex in Houllebeq novels to be arousing, you are probably deeply in need of therapy.
The only type of fiction that can be considered “literary” while courting your libido is gay and lesbian fiction. Admittedly, you’re still not supposed to dwell at any length on how hot the sex scene was, but you can get away with calling it literary because it represents ‘non-heteronormative’ sexuality. And so, very much like D.H. Lawrence in his time, you can proclaim its status as literary by virtue of the fact that, supposedly, its offending someone.
Contemporary heterosexual erotic fiction cannot be considered literature, no matter how loudly you proclaim it to be ‘literary erotica’. You’re simply dressing up smut in lamb’s clothing and putting on airs. It doesn’t matter that your work deals with universally relevant human experiences, or seeks to explore the thornier questions of why people sacrifice amazingly important parts of themselves just to get a leg over. It doesn’t seem to matter that there is an abiding mystery as to why pain and pleasure are so closely related, or how sexual surrender can so closely approximate the erasure of the self.
Critics and academics will all agree that those are worthy subjects worth exploring in literature, as long as you don’t actually describe the act that’s getting us into all this trouble.
If you happen to read or write erotic fiction, and find all this blythe rejection of the ‘seriousness’ of your genre annoying, you have Aristotle to blame for it.
Yes. Aristotle. The basis upon which it is believed that no text which arouses can be considered serious comes from his Nicomachean Ethics (especially book 7). It was he who proclaimed that sexual arousal / desire / pleasure makes reasoned thinking impossible.
The pleasures are a hindrance to thought, and the more so the more one delights in them, e.g. in sexual pleasure; for no one could think of anything while absorbed in this.
For all we know, he might have meant that a person in the middle of an orgasm can’t think clearly, but this is not how his ideas have been interpreted. Through the centuries and still to this very day, there is a deep rooted belief that sexual desire and rational thought are mutually exclusive. As if sexual desire is a switch – either on or off – and there is no difference between a mild tingling in the groin and full-throttle, blank-brained sexual ecstasy.
Those of us who write and read erotic fiction share a common ‘cultural encyclopedia’. We are well aware that it is possible to be sexually aroused and still capable of critical thought. We are not hormone-addled adolescents. We are perfectly capable and, in certain cases, even find it enjoyable to postpone pleasure. Or be intellectually and sexually stimulated at the same time. Moreover, some of us believe that sexual desire is an integral part of the human experience, and that there is a well of mystery and truth that lies in that experience. Admittedly, it is a landscape of errant and abstract thought, but not a thoughtless place until almost the moment of orgasm.
My modest and less important hypothesis is that erotic fiction can be literature. When well written, it can possess enormous meaning and depth for the adults who read it. It is not produced solely, or even chiefly, for the purpose of aiding masturbation, although it can sometimes have that effect.
We are, contrary to what many critics, academics and readers of ‘literature’ believe, able to find depth in it, enjoy it, and gain insight from it specifically because we are particularly continent readers. We don’t feel the need to pretend that sex or sexual desire doesn’t exist in order to think straight. We’re past the novelty of sex, and on the journey of seeing it within the context of a broader reality.
P.S. There have recently been a lot of good articles revisiting the literary/genre divide – they’re worth reading:
Arthur Krystal: Guilty Pleasures without Guilt
Lev Grossman: Literary Revolution in the Supermarket Aisle: Genre Fiction is Disruptive Technology
Ursula K. Le Guin: Le Guin’s Hypothesis
Brilliant, thought provoking and informative.
Have read it twice to soak it up.
Decadent David
XX
To the BLitt unencumbered like me, literature is a story or plot which conceals a moral or parable, much like a cryptic crossword clue. The trick is to see what the author is really saying, disguised behind the story. I’m much helped these days by the GCSE/Alevel primers which tell me what the novel is really all about.
So I can usually recognise literature which has dirty bits in it (for the sake of the plot and parable, natch) and novels which are simply an excuse for writing a collection of dirty stories.
Take Lady C (though at the outset I’ll make it clear that I think that DHL is a totally turgid writer): even I can see that it’s a fable about the effete, impotent upper class in England, and the “real values” of manliness, strength, fertility and future which are in the working class. (And ignore the fact that Sir Clifford’s paraplegia isn’t directly mentioned, and ignore also that paraplegia doesn’t inevitably lead to impotence.) It’s “literature” because there is a parable to be explored, and the “dirty bits” are there to strengthen the divide between the two classes. And to signal that Constance actually likes fucking, at a time when “proper” English ladies were supposed not to; so she’s a “forward-looking” woman.
I’ve always found it odd, that authors have to write novels in this circumlocutory way; why can’t they just spell things out? Why go through all this impotence stand in, why can’t they say what they mean? Or is it just me, literal and empirical?
The average “bonkbuster/airport novel” is nothing more than a series of shags; there’s no “back story” to workout, no parable, no “message”, no exercise for the cerebrum, it’s just “brain candy”. And sometimes, all we need is candy.
So it’s possible to have literature with erotic (dirty bits) in it, representing I guess manliness, strength, femininity, etc, and erotic literature where the eroticism (dirty bits) is the parable for the exploration of the “human condition”; and “bonkbusters” or “mommy porn” which are really no more than visual pornography in written form, simple, straight to the point, there’s no ultimate message.
“Gaijin”, for example, is therefore (erotic) literature: it’s (primarily) about a “cultural clash” between a western girl and a Japanese man, expressed (secondarily) through non-consensual sex; and how this came about.
Or am I being too simplistic?
I don’t think all stories are fables or puzzles set by an author waiting for you to figure them out. But I think you might be a reader who approaches a story that way. Mysteries and thrillers are definitely an attempt to pose the reader a puzzle, although often, as in P.D. James, they contain many other aspects. But a lot of novels are not, particularly, puzzles or mysteries. I remember that, when I was doing my A’Levels, poems were often taught that way, too, as if there was a hidden message that only the adept could glean. I remember a lit teacher who forced me through all the foreign language bits that T.S.Eliot had to offer, and plied us with all the classical allusions he was making, and then told us what it meant. It spoiled it for me. “What the Thunder Said” was converted from a poem I felt spoke to me very clearly and powerfully, into a junk-pile of irrelevant cultural clutter.
You ask the question of novelists: “why can’t they say what they mean”? My answer to you is why is what THEY mean so important? The text is now yours, and you as the reader have the ability to read it as meaning whatever it means to you. You are ascribing to the writer more power, I think, than they deserve. Obviously, if you think Lady Chatterley’s Lover is about a flock of ducks, then you haven’t read it very thoroughly, but also, if it is only about the masculinity of the working class and the effeteness of the aristocracy, then what is the point in reading it today – since those issues are, for the most part, far in the past? It would only still have relevance to us now, if we could find something else in it.
You talk about ‘bonkfest’ novels being a series of shags. And, if they are really poorly written, it might be that this is all they are. But I think, if they are well written, the series of shags themselves become an interesting question of ‘why’ to me. Why all these shags, what’s the shagger getting out of it beyond a series of orgasms, since we all know what shagging is like, and don’t really need enlightenment on it. Usually, though not always, I find that the serial shags begin to paint a portrait of the character and where all these shags are getting them. And perhaps not where they want to go really, or perhaps they’re unhappily shagging their way through life in avoidance of something, or shagging their way towards someone they haven’t found yet.
As to the badly written stuff, which you describe, my question becomes: why hasn’t this writer simply made a porn movie. If the novel is nothing more than visual pornography in written form, then why use words where pictures will do far better?
I suppose I’ve read too much non-fiction, where it’s vital to exactly understand what the author says. I have difficulty with the conventions in paintings — specially Old Masters. How am I to know what colour always represents Mary without being told? It’s that sort of thing that I have difficulty with in literature, a feeling that there is a “secret” language that I’m not party to (as with you and TS Eliot). And I don’t have the appropriate background knowledge for much of classical literature. Bonkbusters are much more accessible for me, yet I’d prefer to be comforatble with something with more meaning.
You make meaning. Not the writer.
“We are past the novelty of sex.”
I think culturally, at least here in the US of A, that isn’t exactly true…and I think it’s a huge part of the problem. It’s difficult to get readers interested in the kind of thought-provoking erotic literature you’re talking about here when American culture still has this giggling, adolescent, sort of surface-style reaction to anything sexual.
Don’t get me wrong; I absolutely agree that we should be well past the novelty of sex and be able to approach sexual narratives within the contexts of broader realities. I’m just not sure the culture is ready for it.
This is such an excellent post!
I wondered whether by ‘literature’ you mean ‘literary fiction’? The two are quite distinct in my mind, and would change the ideas you’ve expressed here. Ursula LeGuin talked about putting all fiction under the banner of ‘literature’, but the levelling I prefer is to acknowledge that literary fiction is just as much a genre as romance or crime – with its own markers, traditions, tropes etc. With that distinction made, I think most erotica isn’t literary fiction – which is NOT saying it has any less value, is less intellectually rigorous, etc., only that it belongs to a different literary tradition.
Or did you mean something else by ‘literature’? What do you consider makes a book ‘literature’ as you’ve used the term here, and is it distinct from genre (incl. literary fiction)?
So many questions 🙂 I do find this topic very interesting.
Hehehe. Busted. You see, I avoided defining ‘literature’ and literariness because I really don’t have and have not found a definition I can agree with. So I guess what I mean, in a way, is exactly what Le Guin suggested: any readable fictional text that conveys meaning to the reader should be considered literature.
I thoroughly agree with you that ‘literary fiction’ is a genre like any other genre, with its own conventions and tropes. And, for me, a particularly stagnant and uninteresting one in its present form. Moreover, older texts which are now considered ‘literary fiction’ are classified as such for such inconsistent and ill-conceived reasons that I simply dismiss most of them.
What Le Guin poses, at the end of the post, is the question of how we determine quality. And for me, this is easier to assess. I require any novel to offer me good characterization, a reasonably complex, interesting plot, dialogue that rings true, and enough descriptive passages to allow for reader-immersion and the suspension of my disbelief. On that basis, there is a lot of sub-standard genre fiction of every type out there, but there is equally a towering pile of literary fiction. By the same yardstick, there is a great deal of fiction in almost every genre that can be included, from detective fiction to fantasy and romance.
I will admit to being partial to writing where language is used consciously and with care. So some literary fiction does squeak in there, but not all of it by any means. The poetic use of language in fiction doesn’t, in my mind, let the writer off from producing a good story with complex and tangible characters. And god knows, there’s a lot of literary fiction that doesn’t even get close to bothering with that.
I mostly read romance, so I can’t comment on other genres, but I feel like we’re definitely seeing more and more of that ‘conscious, careful’ language – which is such a joy! Did you see Lev Grossman’s article back in May that responded to Krystal’s “Easy Writer”? He talks about genre fiction as ‘disruptive technology’. I found it so fascinating – plus, he gives Agatha Christie all her dues! http://entertainment.time.com/2012/05/23/genre-fiction-is-disruptive-technology/
Yes! I did. In fact, I’ve linked all three articles now.
And yes, damn it! Agatha Christie does deserve her due in so many ways.
I think writing is a lot like painting in a way. There are a lot of painters who can competently render a representational scene. But the conscious and careful use of language adds a expressionism to the scene that tells the story AND layers a world of nuance on top of it. However, I have read a lot of literary fiction that is nothing but nuanced language with no plot, unbelievable characters and so poorly constructed that ‘escapism’ was never going to be an option unless you close the fucking book. hehe.
omg- yes! Closing the book to escape from it! LOL. My friend went to a signing of The Sea and returned the book to John Banville… Maybe a bit harsh, but I do not blame her.
Had I been able to do that to Julian Barnes, I would have.