ON PORNOGRAPHY
be rewarded for it by a renewed loss of liberty, the same indignities
and the same blasphemous sermons in praise of vice.
For the most part, the figures who play the role of sexual objects
in pornography are made of the same stuff as a principal "humour"
of comedy. Justine is like Candide, who is also a cipher, a blank, an
eternal naif who can learn nothing from his atrocious ordeals. The
familiar structure of comedy which features a character who is a
kind of still center in the midst of outrage (Buster Keaton is a classic
image) crops up repeatedly in pornography. The personages in por–
nography, like those of comedy, are seen only from the outside, be–
havioristically. By definition, they can't be seen in depth, so as truly
to engage the audience's feelings. In much of comedy, the joke
resides precisely in the
disparity
between the understated or anes–
thetized feeling and a large outrageous event. Pornography works in
a similar fashion. What's gained by a deadpan tone, by what seems
to the reader in an ordinary state of consciousness to be the incredible
underreacting
of most of the characters to the situations in which
they're placed, isn't the release of laughter. It's the release of a
sexual reaction, originally voyeuristic but probably needing to be
secured by an underlying direct identification with one of the par–
ticipants in the sexual act. The emotional flatness of pornography
is
thus neither a failure of artistry nor an index of principled in–
humanity. The arousal of a sexual response in the reader
requires
it.
Only in the absence of directly stated emotions is the reader of por–
nography likely to have room for his own responses. When the event
narrated comes already festooned with the author's explicitly avowed
sentiments, the reader may be stirred by those sentiments. But it's
harder to be stirred by the event itself.'1
Silent film comedy offers many illustrations of how the fonnal
principle of continual agitation or perpetual motion (slapstick) ' and
that of the deadpan really amount to the same thing-a deadening or
neutralization or distancing of the audience's emotions, its ability to
identify in a "humane" way and to bring moral judgments (etc.)
1.
This is very clear in the case of Genet's books which, despite the explicit–
ness of the sexual experiences related, are not sexually arousing for most
readers. What the reader knows (and Genet has stated
it
many times) .is that
Genet himself was sexually excited while writing
The Miracle of the Rose, Our
Lady
of the Flowers,
etc. The reader makes an intense and unsettling contact
with
Genet's erotic excitement, which is the energy that propels these metaphor-
It1Idded
narratives; but, at the same time, the author's excitement precludes the
leider's own. Genet was perfoctly correct when he said that his books were not
pornographic.
