ON PORNOGRAPHY
191
does their status as art become dubious because there is reason to
think that
his
manner of painting had less to do with a conscious
choice of representational means, according to esthetic or art-history
standards, than with the fact that he was deranged and actually saw
reality the way he painted. Similarly,
Histoire de l'Oeil
does not
become case history rather than art because the extraordinary auto–
biographical essay appended to the narrative reveals that these ob–
scene obsessions are indeed Bataille's own.
What makes a work of pornography part of the history of art
rather than of trash is not distance, the superimposition of a con–
sciousness more conformable to that of ordinary reality upon the
"deranged consciousness" of the erotically obsessed. It is rather the
originality, thoroughness, authenticity and power of that "deranged
consciousness" itself, as it is incarnated in a work. From the point
of view of art, the exclusivity of the consciousness embodied in
pornographic books is, in itself, neither anomalous nor antiliterary.
Nor is its purported aim or effect (whether it is intentional or
not )-to excite the reader sexually-a defect. Only by following
a degraded and mechanistic idea of sex could one be mislead into
thinking that to be sexually stirred by a book like
Madame Edwarda
is a simple matter. That singleness of intention often condemned by
critics is, when the work of pornography merits treatment as art,
compounded of many resonances. The physical sensations involuntari–
ly
produced in the reader carry with them something that touches
upon the reader's whole experience of his humanity-and his limits as
a personality and as a body. Actually, the singleness of pornography's
intention is spurious. But the aggressiveness of the intention is not.
What seems in pornography like an end is as much a means, startl–
ingly and oppressively concrete. The end, though, is less concrete.
Pornography is one of the branches of literature-science fiction is
another-aiming at disorientation, at psychic dislocation.
In some respects, the use of sexual obsessions as a subject for
literature resembles that of a subject whose validity far fewer people
would contest: religious obsessions. So compared, the familiar fact of
pornography's definite, aggressive impact upon its readers looks some–
what different. Its celebrated intention of sexually stimulating readers
is really a species of proselytizing. Pornography that is serious litera–
ture aims to "excite" in the same way that books which render an
extreme form of religious experience aim to "convert."
