558
WILLIAM PHILLIPS
sex and experience not unlike other extreme kinds of writing, and
that it is not just a recital of sexual acts for purposes of excitation.
Still, I think this view might not be incompatible with the idea that
there can be good and bad pornography; for I am not sure it com·
pletely breaks down the distinction between the genre of pornography
and literature.
One aspect of pornography, however, does seem pertinent to the
question of sexuality in contemporary fiction, and suggests a link
between pornography and literature. The standard form of
porno–
graphy is usually perverse
1
and violent in a way that suggests some
need to overthrow or transform accepted ideas of the sexual relation.
Usually the hero is a victimized woman - or, more frequently, a
girl--'- who is used and abused - rarely used up - and the plot
is
the story of all the things a man could imagine perpetrating on her.
Yet the narrative, which is a male fantasy, is usually told ostensibly
from the innocent point of view of the woman who has been violated,
as though the author is acting out his fantasies both as a man and as
a woman. The obvious example is
Fanny Hill.
And though
Story
of
0 has been rumored to have been written by a woman, it seems
to be the same kind of male fantasy - which might suggest the begin.
ning of a pornographic convention.
One can only guess at the meaning of this kind of sexual con·
version. But what is particularly interesting is that a similar kind of
converted, mechanized and dispersed sexuality is found in modem
writing that cannot be dismissed as pornography. We see it
in
Bur–
roughs, in Genet; and there is a good deal of perversity and ambiguity
in Mailer's willful sexuality (as there was in D. H. Lawrence); in
Selby's sadism; in Henry Miller's acting-out of boyish dreams; in
Pynchon's bizarre connections; in John Barth's pan-sexuality, which
by making everything possible normal, creates a system of comic
perversity.
There is clearly a new kind of sexuality in modern fiction: not
just more sex, but a different kind of sex, one that is undoubtedly
related to the new moods and the new styles of living today. In the
past, even in unconventional writers like Joyce or Lawrence or Kafka,
the treatment of sex usually was quite straightforward and not very
1. I am using the term perverse in its conventional sense, though, obviously,
the concept of perversity needs reexamination.
