Defining Erotica

This has been a very exciting week on the blogsphere.  Oh Get A Grip has had a week of posts from the members of their group on defining erotica. And Catherine Leary went on to respond to this in her own inimitable way.

One of the proclamations that came up over and over again was that, in order for something to be ‘erotica’, it has to turn you on. Oh, wait – it has to turn YOU on? Or ME? Or Harry over there?

So we’re predicating the identity of a whole genre of literature – my genre – on the the individual sexual response of any given reader? Fuck! No wonder this genre is so maligned and disrespected and derided! We are all suffering from severe identity confusion here. I’m an erotica writer if this particular story turns your crank, but tomorrow I could just be bad pulp because you’re not feeling inclined to be horny.

There is a difference between any given piece that may or may not be ‘erotic’ to a given reader, and whether that piece of fiction contains the conventions associated with erotica as a genre. Just as there might be novels within the ‘Thriller’ genre which a given reader may not find too thrilling. That doesn’t make it NOT a Thriller. That makes it an unsuccessful Thriller to the reader. And, within any given genre, there is simply a lot of bad writing. Bad writing doesn’t make something not of its genre unless it fails to conform to the conventions of the genre.

If one of the conventions of the genre of erotica is that it turns anyone who reads it on, we’re fucked. Well and truly fucked. Because the genre then becomes predicated on what a reader may FEEL – not on what the book contains, nor on a general consensus that it belongs in a certain genre.(i.e. that’s the heading under which it should be listed on Amazon).

Clearly genre is a problematic thing, because genres change and evolve over time. (For a great and in depth understanding of genre and genre theory, Daniel Chandler has a marvelous multipage websitelet about it). It isn’t a fixed taxonomy. It’s a living, growing thing.

In her post, Legitimizing Erotica, Kristina Wright states:

In erotica, women enjoy the sex. In literary fiction, women enjoy the sex– and are punished for it.

Although, in all fairness, she does ask the reader if perhaps she’s being too simplistic, she goes on to say that she finds that there is a lot of explicit sex in some literary fiction, but that it is for the most part misogynistic.

My response is that a) there is some erotica that is most definitely not literary fiction but is definitely misogynistic.
b) I think what she is suggesting is that sex in erotica should never be represented as having any negative consequences. In fact, it shouldn’t have any consequences at all that aren’t the successful arousal of the reader.
c) That’s pretty much my definition of porn.
d) it is possible for a work from any given genre to also be literary fiction if it conforms to the conventions of both. There is nothing to say that any given piece cannot straddle genres.
e) While I agree that it seems presently very fashionable to write literary fiction which contains sex presented in very unarousing ways, and this might be a function of the writer not wishing to present the sex as arousing, or he or she may just be particularly inept in writing sex scenes. However having unarousing sex in the story is NOT a convention of literary fiction.

I don’t believe that, as an erotica writer, I should be required to ignore the fact that sex often has problematic consequences. And, in fact, very few of my stories present sex in a completely unproblematic way.  Nonetheless, I believe that I write erotica and that my fiction belongs on the bookstore shelf in that category. I feel that, with few exceptions, my work sits well within the conventions that are commonly understood to classify it as erotica. Some pieces might also be situated within literary fiction, but not most of them. And here I think it is important to take the entire oeuvre of a writer into account in order to determine what genre they primarily belong in.

This discussion reared its head in a very timely fashion for me. I just finished reading JG Ballard’s novel Crash. And someone asked me if I thought it was erotic fiction. By Kristina’s definition, Crash should be considered erotica. The book is almost entirely filled with either accounts of sex or characters thinking about it. The men and the women in the book enjoy the sex they have and no one is punished more than they want to be. The fact that they are all erotically obsessed with dying in car crashes and conceive of their genitals and bodily fluids being spectacularly sprayed and splayed as they undergo horrendous injuries is neither here nor there. They WANT that.

But the truth is, Ballard did not write Crash with the intention of writing erotica. He wrote it as a damning critique on a culture that has become obsessed with technology, spectacle, consumption and terminally alienated from themselves and their authentic emotions. And Ballard purposefully uses only the most clinical terms for sex – vagina, vulva, penis, prepuce, anus, etc. as a linguistic way to distance the reader from the erotic events in the story. It is undeniably literary fiction.  As to whether it should be, as the cover garishly proclaims, erotica, is up for debate. When asked why he wrote the book, Ballard said: “I wanted to rub the human face in its own vomit, and force it to look in the mirror.”

And on that level, I have read a GREAT deal of erotica that would qualify as literary fiction because it is full of nothing but spectacle, consumption and the characters seem utterly removed from the context of their society, totally devoid of any authentic emotions and the plot presents them with absolutely NO consequences for their actions. They just cup their perfect breasts, wield their perfect cocks and jizz all over the place. They’re either perpetually and brainlessly trapped in the moment of orgasm or they’re contemplating being there soon. The problem is that these writers are writing like Ballard unintentionally – having never read Ballard and probably never wanting to read Crash because it would be too much of a ‘downer’.

Although, on the whole, I do embrace Barthes‘ insistence that once a piece of writing becomes available to the reader, the authority to determine meaning resides with them, things like the cultural environment, language and genre do play a part in informing the reader how far he or she might reasonably reinterpret a given piece. And for this reason I do believe that, as the initial author, I have a right to say… this is erotica. You are welcome to judge my work, but within the confines and the conventions of that genre.

Furthermore, I don’t believe as a writer I am obliged to arouse everyone who reads my work. I fully embrace Umberto Eco’s theory of the model reader.  I write for a very specific type of person. Catherine Leary describes my model reader almost perfectly as someone who finds  “pure escapism to be shallow and uninteresting. Perfect bodies and perfect sexual techniques and perfect emotional configurations feel all slick and smooth and monochromatic to me when I am all about the full spectrum.”

There may be some, perhaps many, readers of my work who skip the complicated shit and jump to the sex bits and wack off to them. I don’t have a problem with this, but they are not my target audience. I don’t write FOR them. I don’t feel obliged to write for them.

This will mean that I am not going to be Dan Brown. I won’t ever have a very wide readership. I just don’t find this a problem at all. And I reject the post-modern notion that your book sales are any kind of accurate measure of how good a writer you are. I simply reject it as a measurement.

Ultimately, I don’t think we are doing the genre or its evolution any favours by confusing the definition of the genre with whether any given text may or may not be erotic to a reader. We would do better to enter into a discourse that solidified the conventions and that attempted to describe a canon which we could reference as at least the origins of the genre and the places from which the conventions arose.

All this said, I am very glad to see these discussions. I think they ask writers, publishers and readers to come together and proclaim their understanding of what erotica means. And that is all to the good.

Oh, yes. And we could just improve our skills as writers. That would be good, too.