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SUSAN SONTAG
the guide-lines of realism- like "fantasy" or "surrealism"-don't clar–
ify much. Fantasy all too easily declines into "mere" fantasy; the
clincher is the adjective "infantile." Where does fantasy, condemned
by psychiatric rather than artistic standards, end and imagination
begin?
Since it's hardly likely that most contemporary critics seriously
mean to bar prose narratives that are unrealistic from the domain of
literature, one suspects that a special standard is being applied to
sexual themes. Transfer to another kind of book, another kind of
"fantasy," and the matter becomes clear. The ahistorical dreamlike
landscape in which action is situated, the peculiarly congealed time
in which acts are performed- these occur almost as often in science
fiction as they do in pornography. There is nothing very remarkable
in the fact that most men and women fall short of the sexual prowess
people in pornography are represented as enjoying ; that size of
organs, number and duration of orgasms, variety and feasibility of
sexual postures and amount of sexual energy available
all
seem grossly
exaggerated. Yes, and the spaceships and the teeming planets depicted
in science-fiction novels don't exist either. That the site of narrative
is an ideal
topos
doesn't disqualify either pornography or science
fiction from being literature. Such negations of real, concrete, three–
dimensional social time, space and personality-and such "fantastic"
enlargements of human energy- are rather the ingredients of another
kind of. literature, founded on another mode of consciousness.
The materials that go into the pornographic books which count as
a branch of literature are, precisely, one of the extreme forms of
human consciousness. Of course, many people would agree that the
sexually-obsessed consciousness can, in principle, enter into literature
considered as an art form. Literature about lust? Why not? But
then they usually add a rider to the agreement which effectually
nullifies
it.
What's asked is that the author of such a work have the
proper "distance" from his obsessions for their rendering to count as
literature. This is a hypocritical standard, revealing once again that
the values most people employ to deal with pornography 'are, in the
end, those belonging to psychiatry and social affairs rather than to
art.
(Since Christianity upped the ante and concentrated on sexual
behavior as the core of virtue, everything pertaining to sex has been
a "special case" in our culture, evoking peculiarly inconsistent at–
titudes.) Van Gogh's paintings are not considered less admirable nor
