Susan Sontag
THE PORNOGRAPHIC IMAGINATION
No one should undertake a discussion of pornography
before acknowledging the
pornographies,
of which there are at least
three; and before pledging to take them on one at a time. A good
deal is gained by treating pornography as an item in social history
quite separately from pornography as a psychological phenomenon
(according to the usual view, symptomatic of sexual deficiency or
deformity in both the producers and the consumers). And everything
is
to be gained by distinguishing from both of these another por–
nography-a minor but highly interesting modality or convention
within the arts.
It's the last of the three pornographies that I want to focus upon.
More narrowly, upon the literary genre for which, lacking a better
name, I'm willing to accept (in the privacy of serious intellectual
debate, not in the courts) the dubious label of pornography. By liter–
ary genre I mean a body of work belonging to literature considered
as
an art, and to which inherent standards of artistic excellence per–
tain. From the standpoint of social and psychological phenomena, all
pornographic texts have the same status; they are documents. But
from the standpoint of art, some of these texts may well become
something else. I for one am convinced that not only do Pierre
Louys's
Trois Filles et leur Mere,
Georges Bataille's
Histoire de l'Oeil
and
Madame Edwarda,
the pseudonymous
Story of
0 and
The
Image
belong to literature, but that it can be made clear why these
books,
all five of them, occupy a much higher rank as literature than
Oscar Wilde's
Teleny
or the Earl of Rochester's
Sodom
or Apol–
linaire's
The Deba'uched Hospodar
or Cleland's
Fanny Hill,
or
Candy.
The avalanche of pornographic potboilers marketed for two centuries
