A Reader on Reading

In the Judeo-Christian world, the banning of Eros finds its canonical voice in Saint Augustine, a voice that echoes through the entire Middle Ages and still rings, distorted, in the censor boardrooms of our day. After a youth of womanizing and carousing (to make use of these fine preacherly words), looking back on his quest for a happy life, Augustine concludes that ultimate happiness, eudaemonia, cannot be achieved unless we subordinate the body to the spirit, and the spirit to God. Bodily love, eros, is infamous, and only amor, spiritual love, can lead to the enjoyment of God, to agape, the feast of love itself that transcends both human body and spirit. Two centuries after Augustine, Saint Maximus of Constantinople put it in these words: “Love is that good disposition of the soul in which it prefers nothing that exists to knowledge of God. But no man can come to such a state of love if he be attached to anything earthly. Love,” concludes Saint Maximus, “is born from lack of erotic passion.” This is a far cry from Plato’s contemporaries, who saw Eros as the binding force (in a real, physical sense) that keeps the universe together.

Condemnation of erotic passion, of the flesh itself, allows most patriarchal societies to brand woman as the temptress, as Mother Eve, guilty of Adam’s daily fall. Because she is to blame, man has a natural right to rule over her, and any deviance from this law—by woman or by man — is punishable as treacherous and sinful. An entire apparatus of censorship is constructed to protect male-defined heterosexual stereotypes and as a result, misogyny and homophobia are both justified and encouraged, assigning women and homosexuals restricted and depreciated roles. (And children: we excise the sexuality of children from social life, while allowing it to appear in seemingly innocuous guises on the screen and in the fashion pages — as Graham Greene noted when he reviewed the films of Shirley Temple.)

Pornography requires this double standard. In pornography, the erotic must not be an integral part of a world in which both men and women, homosexual and heterosexual, seek a deeper comprehension of themselves and of the other. To be pornographic, the erotic must be amputated from its context and adhere to strict clinical definitions of that which is condemned. Pornography must faithfully embrace official normality in order to contravene it for no other purpose than immediate arousal. Pornography—or “licentiousness,” as it used to be called — cannot exist without these official standards. Licentious, meaning “sexually immoral,” comes from license, permission granted (to depart from the rules). That is why our societies allow pornography, which embraces official notions of “normal” or “decent” behavior, to exist in specific contexts but zealously persecute artistic erotic expressions in which the authority of those in power is brought implicitly into question. “Girlie” magazines could be bought in neat brown paper bags while Ulysses was being tried on charges of obscenity; hard-core porno films were shown in theaters a few steps away from others at which The Last Temptation of Christ or How to Make Love to a Negro were being picketed.

Erotic literature is subversive; pornography is not. Pornography, in fact, is reactionary, opposed to change. “In pornographic novels,” says Vladimir Nabokov in his post-scriptum to Lolita, “action has to be limited to the copulation of clichés. Style, structure, imagery should never distract the reader from his tepid lust.” Pornography follows the conventions of all dogmatic literature—religious tracts, political bombast, commercial advertising. Erotic literature, if it is to be successful, must establish new conventions, lend the words of the society that condemns it new meaning, and inform its readers of a knowledge that in its very nature must remain intimate. This exploration of the world from a central and utterly private place gives erotic literature its formidable power.

For the mystic, the whole universe is one erotic object, and the whole body (mind and soul included) the subject of erotic pleasure. The same can be said of every human being who discovers that not only penis and clitoris are places of pleasure but also the hands, the anus, the mouth, the hair, the soles of the feet, every inch of our astounding bodies. That which physically and mentally excites the senses and opens for us what William Blake called “the Gates of Paradise” is always something mysterious, and, as we all eventually find out, its shape is dictated by laws of which we know nothing. We admit to loving a woman, a man, a child. Why not a gazelle, a stone, a shoe, the sky at night?