From The Shores Of Pornotopia: David Wallace-Wells Traces The Sex Novel
1. "The sex novel did not come to America until the sexual revolution had made it safe. The United States never had a Sade; no Georges Bataille and no Pierre Louys; no Story of O and not even a demure chronicle of Lady Chatterley. We produced Henry Miller but did not publish him, exporting him instead, like a chemical agent. Terry Southern's Candy was published first in Paris and came to America only after a six-year tape delay. By the time the sex novels of John Updike and Gore Vidal and Erica Jong arrived in American bookshops, the sexual revolution had already been won, if only by mutual capitulation -- a revolt by sexual desire against bourgeois values, ending with desire installed as the ultimate bourgeois value.
And since sex fiction had lost its contrived moral imperative -- to shatter stuffy society with the karate chop of libertinism -- it became largely a matter of middle-class ethics. Updike at his dirtiest was still surveying an inherited behavioral landscape, mapping the erosions and surface ripples caused by the demands of democratic pleasure and boomer entitlement. And it was never all that dirty -- it's John Updike, for fuck's sake."
2. [Nicholson Baker's] House of Holes is a different kind of beast. It is perverse not just because it deals frankly or outrageously with desire but because it does so for an audience that has long since abandoned that rubbed-out Romantic faith in sex as a vessel of meaning. We've stopped reading about sex because we stopped believing in it, at least in the way Norman Mailer or Philip Roth or John Updike did, as sacrament or incantation. We believe in it now as just, well, sex. And we tend to discount the idea that it could be anything but personal or amount to anything more than the business of pleasure.
But that materialist landscape is not the landscape of House of Holes, an out-of-time adult fairy tale that resemble,s perhaps to the point of mimicry, the brand of Victorian utopian fantasy that the critic and literary historian Steven Marcus memorably labeled "pornotopia."
3. "In The Other Victorians, a study of the pornography boom in imperial England, Marcus described pornotopia as
literally a world of grace abounding to the chief of sinners. All men in it are always and infinitely potent; all women fecundate with lust and flow inexhaustibly with sap or juice or both. Everyone is always ready for anything.
In pornotopia, time and character are both suspended. Time is internal time, sexual time: against the new onslaught of Victorian industrial rhythms, pornotopia pushes back with sexual rhythms. Characters there are single social types, activated by desire rather than individuation. "Emotions are an embarrassment to [such a novel] and motives are distractions," Marcus observes, and the "diagrammatic" nature of the staging "suggests that a pornographic novel might be written by a computer."
4. "Nor is there much point in lingering on the particularities of place. (Alongside other provocations, nineteenth-century pornography flipped the bird at the encyclopedic aspirations of literary naturalism.) The sexual encounters in pornotopia are set precisely nowhere, Marcus tells us, in locations notable only for their interchangeability.
"The ideal pornographic novel," Marcus notes, "would go on forever."
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