Pornography requires this double standard. In pornography, the erotic must not be an integral part of a world in which both men and women, homosexual and heterosexual, seek a deeper comprehension of themselves and of the other. To be pornographic, the erotic must be amputated from its context and adhere to strict clinical definitions of that which is condemned. Pornography must faithfully embrace official normality in order to contravene it for no other purpose than immediate arousal. Pornography—or “licentiousness,” as it used to be called — cannot exist without these official standards. Licentious, meaning “sexually immoral,” comes from license, permission granted (to depart from the rules). That is why our societies allow pornography, which embraces official notions of “normal” or “decent” behavior, to exist in specific contexts but zealously persecute artistic erotic expressions in which the authority of those in power is brought implicitly into question. “Girlie” magazines could be bought in neat brown paper bags while Ulysses was being tried on charges of obscenity; hard-core porno films were shown in theaters a few steps away from others at which The Last Temptation of Christ or How to Make Love to a Negro were being picketed.
Erotic literature is subversive; pornography is not. Pornography, in fact, is reactionary, opposed to change. “In pornographic novels,” says Vladimir Nabokov in his post-scriptum to Lolita, “action has to be limited to the copulation of clichés. Style, structure, imagery should never distract the reader from his tepid lust.” Pornography follows the conventions of all dogmatic literature—religious tracts, political bombast, commercial advertising. Erotic literature, if it is to be successful, must establish new conventions, lend the words of the society that condemns it new meaning, and inform its readers of a knowledge that in its very nature must remain intimate. This exploration of the world from a central and utterly private place gives erotic literature its formidable power.
For the mystic, the whole universe is one erotic object, and the whole body (mind and soul included) the subject of erotic pleasure. The same can be said of every human being who discovers that not only penis and clitoris are places of pleasure but also the hands, the anus, the mouth, the hair, the soles of the feet, every inch of our astounding bodies. That which physically and mentally excites the senses and opens for us what William Blake called “the Gates of Paradise” is always something mysterious, and, as we all eventually find out, its shape is dictated by laws of which we know nothing. We admit to loving a woman, a man, a child. Why not a gazelle, a stone, a shoe, the sky at night?
In D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love, Rupert Birkin’s object of desire is the vegetation itself: “To lie down and roll in the sticky, cool young hyacinths, to lie on one’s belly and cover one’s back with handfuls of fine wet grass, soft as a breath, soft and more delicate and more beautiful than the touch of any woman; and then to sting one’s thigh against the living dark bristles of the fir-boughs; and then to feel the light whip of the hazel on one’s shoulders, stinging, and then to clasp the silvery birch-trunk against one’s breast, its smoothness, its hardness, its vital knots and ridges—this was good, this was all very good, very satisfying.”
In John Collier’s His Monkey Wife, Eros is a chimp called Emily with whom an English schoolmaster, Mr. Fatigay, falls madly in love: “‘Emily!’ he said. ‘My Angel! My Own! My Love!’ At this last word, Emily raised her eyes, and extended to him her hand. Under her long and scanty hair he caught glimpses of a plum-blue skin. Into the depths of those all-dark lustrous eyes, his spirit slid with no sound of splash. She uttered a few low words, rapidly, in her native tongue. The candle, guttering beside the bed, was strangled in the grasp of prehensile foot, and the darkness received, like a ripple in velvet, the final happy sigh.”
In Cynthia Ozick’s “The Pagan Rabbi,” Eros is a tree: “I busied my fingers in the interstices of the bark’s cuneiform. Then with forehead flat on the tree, I embraced it with both arms to measure it. My hands united on the other side. It was a young narrow weed, I did not know of what family. I reached to the lowest branch and plucked a leaf and made my tongue marvel meditatively along its periphery to assess its shape: oak. The taste was sticky and exaltingly bitter. I then placed one hand (the other I kept around the tree’s waist, as it were) in the bifurcation (disgustingly termed crotch) of that lowest limb and the elegant and devoutly firm torso, and caressed that miraculous juncture with a certain languor, which gradually changed to vigor.”
This is Marian Engel describing an amorous encounter between a woman and a beast in Bear:
He licked. He probed. She might have been a flea he was searching for. He licked her nipples stiff and scoured her navel. With little nickerings she moved him south.
She swung her hips and made it easy for him.
“Bear, bear,” she whispered, playing with his ears. The tongue that was muscular but also capable of lengthening itself like an eel found all her secret places. And like no human being she had ever known it persevered in her pleasure. When she came, she whimpered, and the bear licked away her tears.
And the English writer J. R. Ackerley describes in these words his love for his dog, Tulip: “I go to bed early to end the dismal day, but she is instantly beside me, sitting upright against my pillow, her back turned, shifting, licking, panting, shifting, peering at my face: pulling at my arm. Sweet creature, what am I doing to you? I stretch out my hand in the gloom and stroke the small nipples…. Panting, she slackly sits while my hand caresses her, her ears flattened, her head dropped, gazing with vacant eyes into the night beyond the windows. Gradually, she relaxes, subsides. Gradually, my hand upon her, she sleeps.”
Even the lover’s severed head can become an erotic object, as when Stendhal has Mathilde, in The Red and the Black, seek out Julien’s remains: “He heard Mathilde move hurriedly around the room. She was lighting a number of candles. When Fouque gathered enough strength to look, he saw that she had placed in front of her, on a little marble table, Julien’s head, and was kissing its brow.”
Confronted with the task of making art out of a bewildering variety of objects and subjects, acts and variations, feelings and fears; limited by a vocabulary specifically designed for other purposes; walking the perilous edge between pornography and sentimentality, biology and purple prose, the coy and the overexplicit; threatened by societies intent on preserving the aristocracies of established power through the censoring forces of politics, education, and religion, it is a miracle that erotic literature has not only survived this long but become braver, brighter, more confident, pursuing a multicolored infinity of objects of desire.
A postscript: I believe that, like the erotic act, the act of reading should ultimately be anonymous. We should be able to enter the book or the bed like Alice entering the Looking-Glass Wood, no longer carrying with us the prejudices of our past and relinquishing for that instant of intercourse our social trappings. Reading or making love, we should be able to lose ourselves in the other, into whom—to borrow Saint John’s image—we are transformed: reader into writer into reader, lover into lover into lover. “Jouir de la lecture,” “to enjoy reading,” say the French, for whom reaching orgasm and deriving pleasure are both expressed in a single common word.