ON PORNOGRAPHY
185
credibility and reports only the motiveless tireless transactions of
depersonalized organs. Simply extrapolating from the conception of
what a work of literature is maintained by most English and Amer–
ican critics writing today, it would follow that the literary value of
pornography has to be nil.
But this argument by paradigm simply won't do. Even taking the
prevailing concept of literature and applying it to, say,
Story of 0,
there's scarcely a single respect in which it fits. Though the novel
is
thoroughly obScene by the usual standards, and more effective than
many in arousing a reader sexually, it can't be said that sexual arousal
is the sole function of the situations portrayed. The narrative does
have a definite beginning, middle and end. Far from giving the im–
pression that its author considered language a bothersome necessity,
the book is written in an elegant, accomplished French (whose
quality the translation doesn't put over too well into English).
Further, the characters do possess emotions of a very intenSe kind,
although obsessional and indeed wholly asocial ones; characters do
have motives, though they are not psychiatrically or socially "normal" ·
motives. The characters in
Story of
0 are endowed with a "psy–
chology" of a sort, one derived from the psychology of lust. And ·
while what is learned of the characters within the situations in which
they are placed is severely restricted- to modes of sexual concentra–
tion and explicitly rendered sexual behavior-O and her partners
are, in form, no more reduced or foreshortened than the characters
in
many nonpornographic works of contemporary fiction.
The fact is, if English and American critics had a more sophisti–
cated view of literature, an interesting debate could get underway.
(In the end, this debate would be not only about pornography, but
about the whole body of contemporary literature insistently focused
on extreme situations and behavior.) The difficulty
is
that so many
critics continue to identify with prose literature itself the particular
literary conventions of "realism" (what might be crudely associated ·
with the major tradition of the nineteenth-century novel). For ex–
amples of alternative literary modes, one is not confined to appealing
only to much of the greatest twentieth-century writing-to
Ulysses,
which is a book not about characters but about media of trans–
personal exchange, about all that's outside individual psychology and
personal need, to French Surrealism and its most recent offspring, the
New Novel, to German "expressionist" fiction, to the Russian post-
