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rushthatspeaksSomewhere in the quite large pile of Samuel R. Delany's criticism-- I'm not going to look up where because all of my copies are in a storage unit (and anyway it is probably in more than one place)-- he talks about pornography as a discourse.
If you're into postmodernist theory this says a great deal, but to unroll that a little for everyone else, what he means is that pornography, like, say, horror, or slapstick comedy, can be a genre but is more and other than a genre: it is a set of tools an author (and by extension reader) can use within a piece of fiction to examine certain questions or cause certain effects.
I find this to be a much handier way of looking at the eternal arguments of genre in general than the ways I usually see genre discussed. I wish that instead of the infinitely iterated panel at many SF cons about the difference between science fiction and fantasy as genres we instead had a few on what a work being science fiction or fantasy means that it is able to do, and how the effects a work produces with the reader (this is postmodernism; I am not going to say on the reader) differ based on the readers', editors', marketers', and critics' views on whether a book is science fiction or fantasy. But that's a whole other can of live bait.
Anyway, Delany points out that for much of the history of Western art and literature (the branch he knows well enough to discuss), there's been a structure of categorization similar to this:
Art <----- || -----> Porn
wherein you might as well call that middle separation the Line of Respectability, and never the sides shall meet. If you view pornography as a discourse, i.e. as a set of tools for working within texts, those tools comprised of the various devices people use and have used to talk about sex and eroticism with at least some purpose of evoking or inciting same, this structure immediately becomes completely ridiculous. Shutting out an entire set of tools and saying that it is impossible to make art with them is ridiculous in any context. The Line of Respectability-- that if you use these particular tools, beyond a certain point people start looking at you funny, ostracizing you, and eventually not publishing your work and perhaps outlawing it, and perhaps outlawing you-- becomes the major relevant point. Delany, a person who, by reason of having various marginalized identities, was never going to default to being on the 'respectable' side of that line as said line is applied various places in what we can amorphously call the world of arts and letters, considers that line a social artifact to duck under and over, avoid, ignore, flout, ironically make much of, and in other ways play with. To him, one of the interesting things about pornography as a discourse is how much, in using it, you have to take that line into account, and how many of your tools work directly with or directly on that line and its presence in peoples' heads.
Delany is, of course, a pornographer of great intellectual capacity and wit, who has spent the last several decades writing books which combine porn with fantasy, with historical fiction, with roman Γ clef, with picaresque, with science fiction. All of his porn uses the tropes of porn in ways which mean that his books would not work without being porn, but in which porn is not, in itself, a genre, but the thing which enables the book to more fully explore the questions of its overall genre. Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders is an SF novel in which the SF conceit would not work without the book being porn; Phallos is a historical-philosophical fantasy in which the main philosophical concept could not be expressed without the book being porn. It is still worthwhile reading these books even if one is not aroused or is outright repulsed by the sexual content involved, because that sexual content is, as well as being sufficient to itself, working towards larger goals in the context of the overall work. Delany talks about how much he'd like to see people doing similar things with pornography and other genres and discourses-- mystery! thriller! epic!-- now that we are starting to get to a point, especially with the internet, where this kind of work can overcome the distribution and censorship issues which previously made it extremely rare.
Anyway, I read a lot of porn (I only read it for the articles /s) (you are now reading one of the articles) and, as with most genres and/or discourses, Sturgeon's Law applies and ninety percent of it is terrible. This implies, of course, that every so often one stumbles across something that isn't.
In this case, and the reason I'm writing this, because I have legitimately never seen this before, I stumbled over a pornographic high fantasy. And by high fantasy I mean the kind with numinous, evocative magic and worldbuilding that suggests everything Tolkien talked about as Faerie, and by pornography I mean explicit, extremely, um, squelchy sex approximately every three pages, and this in a visual medium. And it could not be the first without also being the second.
Legit didn't think that was possible. Have been frantically analyzing it ever since.
I Roved Out In Search Of Truth & Love, a webcomic by Alexis Flower (whose pronouns, by the way, I do not know and cannot deduce), describes itself as "a warmly pornographic fantasy saga", which is absolutely accurate. There is no sexual coercion, sexual violence, or the threat or thought of same anywhere in it. I think this is one reason why it works, and is certainly the reason I am willing to keep reading it if/when the sex it showcases is not to my interest, because at least the people involved are being nice to each other. It is visually very technically competent and can be stunningly beautiful, and the sex passes the basic tests of revealing character details about everyone and of being relevant to the overarching plot.
One of the worldbuilding things it does, one of the ways in which it has to be porn in order to be high fantasy, I find myself thinking of tentatively as 'the Elden Ring strategy'. Fromsoft, the makers of the Dark Souls series of video games and most recently of Elden Ring, realized that in high fantasy, just as in horror, showing your hand can decrease the effect. There are no worldbuilding infodumps in these games, no helpful prophecies; you piece together everything you know about magic and metaphysics and history from correlating things people say to you and the descriptions on your items. The plot is revealed by your own guesswork as you scramble to make sense of things which were going on before you, are going on around you, and can proceed without your input or knowledge... though how well things will turn out for you and the world if you do not inject yourself into events is debatable. (As is how well they will if you do.) There is a lot of time and a lot of work between the pieces of solid information you encounter, and each new thing feels hard-won. It especially feels hard-won because some of the most brutally difficult fights in all of video games are standing between you and the knowledge, increasing the time between revelations, your investment in the world and in the revelations, and the beauty of acquiring even one more piece of answer. If one were flat-out told some of the interesting things in Elden Ring, I don't think they'd have half the emotional impact, but when they emerge from a sea of other theories and confusion, when you've finally correlated something with something else with a set of other things that seemed totally unrelated and then that set of things grows big pointy teeth and turns into your next boss fight, the game can start evoking legitimate awe and terror.
In I Roved Out, instead of difficult fights and a lot of wandering around locating stuff and piecing it together, there is sex.
Seriously. All of the characters know all of the worldbuilding stuff perfectly well, after all; they live there. So you get told what is going on in little pieces after the sex, or between sexual encounters, or sometimes during the sex, but, and this is perfectly reasonable, none of the characters is going to be thinking primarily about the plot while they are having sex. This can get a little frustrating-- there's at least a couple of sequences where I swear the plot is taking place, like, just over to the left a smidge, if only literally anyone would consent to pay attention to it-- but a) overall it really does have the same effect as the Elden Ring infosearch thing, and b) the narrative does lampshade the protagonist's ditzy inability to think with her brain on most occasions (she is at more than one point literally hauled places because other people are aggrieved that she has not yet caught up with the plot). (Okay, it can be very funny.)
And I Roved Out also follows Elden Ring's example in another direction, one which is difficult to do in both epic fantasy and horror, but which pays off immensely when well-executed: when information gets pieced together correctly, when the reader finally has that shock of understanding, the narrative has to deliver. In both works, what you find is better-- more beautiful, more numinous, more frightening, funnier, stranger-- than you were expecting, or could expect from only the pieces you have.
So that's one way I've never seen the discourse of pornography used before. But if that were the only way, while it would still be neat, it wouldn't be as neat as this comic is, because you will note that this particular device only uses the sex as an obstruction. Like, a fun obstruction! A witty and cute and warm obstruction! (If a bit sloshy for me personally.) But an obstruction nevertheless, an obstacle in the way of more interesting things.
The other thing I see this comic doing with the discourse makes the sex interesting in and of itself, and is also something I haven't seen high fantasy do so easily or beautifully before.
This is not a perfect metaphor or categorizing system (and that's an understatement), but it will give you an idea of what I'm talking about. Let's divide narrative/character expression in fantasy into three modes: the vulgar, the everyday, and the high/allegorical.
Here is an exemplary incident in each mode: a character stubs their toe. It hurts.
In the vulgar: Character says something along the lines of "Motherfucker, I've just hurt my fucking toe!" They move on about their business, continuing to swear under their breath. This kind of thing happens all the fucking time.
In the everyday: Character closes their eyes for a moment, and says "Ouch," softly, but with feeling. They are briefly distracted from whatever else was going on.
In the high/allegorical: Character realizes that they have stubbed their toe by the grace of the gods, because they were about to be struck by a snake which has been lurking nearby if they had moved even one more step. Character enters honorable battle with the snake.
This is of course totally overexaggerated and overdetermined, but the distinction I'm trying to make here is between the nitty-gritty, the everyday, and the numinous chivalric. (I say nitty-gritty and vulgar instead of, say, bawdy, because there is not necessarily a distinction between bawdiness and filth and the numinous chivalric. There is a distinction between everyday blech and the numinous chivalric.)
It's difficult to yank your narrative from one of these modes to another quickly, and it's easier to get to either vulgar or chivalric from the everyday than from each other. In fact, many narratives stay primarily in the everyday, jumping to higher or lower registers for dramatic effect when necessary. But every really three-dimensional character is capable of existing in all three modes, as is every actual human.
These three modes can feel irreconcilable, or as though one cannot be reached from the others no matter what-- and certainly there are stories that leave one or more of them out. But I've heard people complain both about high fantasy in which everything is so numinous that the logistics vanish into smoke and air, and about the kind of novel which insists that everything interesting in the world is a mistake or an illusion.
The thing that I Roved Out does which is so brilliant is that every character exists in all three modes, and sex is the thing which allows them to move between them instantly. Because, in real life, sex can do that-- move from ridiculous to sublime and back within literal seconds.
This is a work in which both the protagonists are high Elven champions, one literally a princess, both knights of great valor and cunning and wisdom, and also completely sex-mad lust-driven bimbo sluts who are going to prioritize fucking everyone they meet over the literal necessities of survival, and it is never out of character for them to behave either way at any given time. In fact, the sheer amount of sex they have, and again the narrative lampshades this, emphasizes how out of human reach they are as Elven champions: mortals cannot keep up. The sex itself moves through all three modes, sometimes work-a-day kind-of-dull we-were-in-the-same-place, sometimes friendly exercise or comradely comfort, sometimes religious-numinous as a way of interacting with the literal gods, and the characters move within all three modes within that, and so the writer has many more character directions available most of the time than many other writers would in the same circumstances. And takes full advantage of them.
And that's the part I found so impressive that I had to write this entire essay, that this comic has high fantasy characters who cannot be as epic as they are, as unhuman and not-of-this-world and magical and downright wise, without also being airheaded fuckbunnies. The porn and the high fantasy have crashed together to make something beautiful and strange.
I hope Mr. Delany knows that people can write this sort of thing, now; that people do write this sort of thing, now. He probably does, he's far more widely read than I am. I appreciate having the critical tools to pin down why I'm happy with the reading experience, and I hope I keep stumbling across this sort of thing in the future. Still rare, I suspect. I doubt this comic would have been published by a brick-and-mortar publishing house, even though it's certainly well beyond technically accomplished enough.
But this comic, and other things like it, are a real sign of hope for those of us who want art to use all its possible tools, without worrying about that Line of Respectability.
If you're into postmodernist theory this says a great deal, but to unroll that a little for everyone else, what he means is that pornography, like, say, horror, or slapstick comedy, can be a genre but is more and other than a genre: it is a set of tools an author (and by extension reader) can use within a piece of fiction to examine certain questions or cause certain effects.
I find this to be a much handier way of looking at the eternal arguments of genre in general than the ways I usually see genre discussed. I wish that instead of the infinitely iterated panel at many SF cons about the difference between science fiction and fantasy as genres we instead had a few on what a work being science fiction or fantasy means that it is able to do, and how the effects a work produces with the reader (this is postmodernism; I am not going to say on the reader) differ based on the readers', editors', marketers', and critics' views on whether a book is science fiction or fantasy. But that's a whole other can of live bait.
Anyway, Delany points out that for much of the history of Western art and literature (the branch he knows well enough to discuss), there's been a structure of categorization similar to this:
Art <----- || -----> Porn
wherein you might as well call that middle separation the Line of Respectability, and never the sides shall meet. If you view pornography as a discourse, i.e. as a set of tools for working within texts, those tools comprised of the various devices people use and have used to talk about sex and eroticism with at least some purpose of evoking or inciting same, this structure immediately becomes completely ridiculous. Shutting out an entire set of tools and saying that it is impossible to make art with them is ridiculous in any context. The Line of Respectability-- that if you use these particular tools, beyond a certain point people start looking at you funny, ostracizing you, and eventually not publishing your work and perhaps outlawing it, and perhaps outlawing you-- becomes the major relevant point. Delany, a person who, by reason of having various marginalized identities, was never going to default to being on the 'respectable' side of that line as said line is applied various places in what we can amorphously call the world of arts and letters, considers that line a social artifact to duck under and over, avoid, ignore, flout, ironically make much of, and in other ways play with. To him, one of the interesting things about pornography as a discourse is how much, in using it, you have to take that line into account, and how many of your tools work directly with or directly on that line and its presence in peoples' heads.
Delany is, of course, a pornographer of great intellectual capacity and wit, who has spent the last several decades writing books which combine porn with fantasy, with historical fiction, with roman Γ clef, with picaresque, with science fiction. All of his porn uses the tropes of porn in ways which mean that his books would not work without being porn, but in which porn is not, in itself, a genre, but the thing which enables the book to more fully explore the questions of its overall genre. Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders is an SF novel in which the SF conceit would not work without the book being porn; Phallos is a historical-philosophical fantasy in which the main philosophical concept could not be expressed without the book being porn. It is still worthwhile reading these books even if one is not aroused or is outright repulsed by the sexual content involved, because that sexual content is, as well as being sufficient to itself, working towards larger goals in the context of the overall work. Delany talks about how much he'd like to see people doing similar things with pornography and other genres and discourses-- mystery! thriller! epic!-- now that we are starting to get to a point, especially with the internet, where this kind of work can overcome the distribution and censorship issues which previously made it extremely rare.
Anyway, I read a lot of porn (I only read it for the articles /s) (you are now reading one of the articles) and, as with most genres and/or discourses, Sturgeon's Law applies and ninety percent of it is terrible. This implies, of course, that every so often one stumbles across something that isn't.
In this case, and the reason I'm writing this, because I have legitimately never seen this before, I stumbled over a pornographic high fantasy. And by high fantasy I mean the kind with numinous, evocative magic and worldbuilding that suggests everything Tolkien talked about as Faerie, and by pornography I mean explicit, extremely, um, squelchy sex approximately every three pages, and this in a visual medium. And it could not be the first without also being the second.
Legit didn't think that was possible. Have been frantically analyzing it ever since.
I Roved Out In Search Of Truth & Love, a webcomic by Alexis Flower (whose pronouns, by the way, I do not know and cannot deduce), describes itself as "a warmly pornographic fantasy saga", which is absolutely accurate. There is no sexual coercion, sexual violence, or the threat or thought of same anywhere in it. I think this is one reason why it works, and is certainly the reason I am willing to keep reading it if/when the sex it showcases is not to my interest, because at least the people involved are being nice to each other. It is visually very technically competent and can be stunningly beautiful, and the sex passes the basic tests of revealing character details about everyone and of being relevant to the overarching plot.
One of the worldbuilding things it does, one of the ways in which it has to be porn in order to be high fantasy, I find myself thinking of tentatively as 'the Elden Ring strategy'. Fromsoft, the makers of the Dark Souls series of video games and most recently of Elden Ring, realized that in high fantasy, just as in horror, showing your hand can decrease the effect. There are no worldbuilding infodumps in these games, no helpful prophecies; you piece together everything you know about magic and metaphysics and history from correlating things people say to you and the descriptions on your items. The plot is revealed by your own guesswork as you scramble to make sense of things which were going on before you, are going on around you, and can proceed without your input or knowledge... though how well things will turn out for you and the world if you do not inject yourself into events is debatable. (As is how well they will if you do.) There is a lot of time and a lot of work between the pieces of solid information you encounter, and each new thing feels hard-won. It especially feels hard-won because some of the most brutally difficult fights in all of video games are standing between you and the knowledge, increasing the time between revelations, your investment in the world and in the revelations, and the beauty of acquiring even one more piece of answer. If one were flat-out told some of the interesting things in Elden Ring, I don't think they'd have half the emotional impact, but when they emerge from a sea of other theories and confusion, when you've finally correlated something with something else with a set of other things that seemed totally unrelated and then that set of things grows big pointy teeth and turns into your next boss fight, the game can start evoking legitimate awe and terror.
In I Roved Out, instead of difficult fights and a lot of wandering around locating stuff and piecing it together, there is sex.
Seriously. All of the characters know all of the worldbuilding stuff perfectly well, after all; they live there. So you get told what is going on in little pieces after the sex, or between sexual encounters, or sometimes during the sex, but, and this is perfectly reasonable, none of the characters is going to be thinking primarily about the plot while they are having sex. This can get a little frustrating-- there's at least a couple of sequences where I swear the plot is taking place, like, just over to the left a smidge, if only literally anyone would consent to pay attention to it-- but a) overall it really does have the same effect as the Elden Ring infosearch thing, and b) the narrative does lampshade the protagonist's ditzy inability to think with her brain on most occasions (she is at more than one point literally hauled places because other people are aggrieved that she has not yet caught up with the plot). (Okay, it can be very funny.)
And I Roved Out also follows Elden Ring's example in another direction, one which is difficult to do in both epic fantasy and horror, but which pays off immensely when well-executed: when information gets pieced together correctly, when the reader finally has that shock of understanding, the narrative has to deliver. In both works, what you find is better-- more beautiful, more numinous, more frightening, funnier, stranger-- than you were expecting, or could expect from only the pieces you have.
So that's one way I've never seen the discourse of pornography used before. But if that were the only way, while it would still be neat, it wouldn't be as neat as this comic is, because you will note that this particular device only uses the sex as an obstruction. Like, a fun obstruction! A witty and cute and warm obstruction! (If a bit sloshy for me personally.) But an obstruction nevertheless, an obstacle in the way of more interesting things.
The other thing I see this comic doing with the discourse makes the sex interesting in and of itself, and is also something I haven't seen high fantasy do so easily or beautifully before.
This is not a perfect metaphor or categorizing system (and that's an understatement), but it will give you an idea of what I'm talking about. Let's divide narrative/character expression in fantasy into three modes: the vulgar, the everyday, and the high/allegorical.
Here is an exemplary incident in each mode: a character stubs their toe. It hurts.
In the vulgar: Character says something along the lines of "Motherfucker, I've just hurt my fucking toe!" They move on about their business, continuing to swear under their breath. This kind of thing happens all the fucking time.
In the everyday: Character closes their eyes for a moment, and says "Ouch," softly, but with feeling. They are briefly distracted from whatever else was going on.
In the high/allegorical: Character realizes that they have stubbed their toe by the grace of the gods, because they were about to be struck by a snake which has been lurking nearby if they had moved even one more step. Character enters honorable battle with the snake.
This is of course totally overexaggerated and overdetermined, but the distinction I'm trying to make here is between the nitty-gritty, the everyday, and the numinous chivalric. (I say nitty-gritty and vulgar instead of, say, bawdy, because there is not necessarily a distinction between bawdiness and filth and the numinous chivalric. There is a distinction between everyday blech and the numinous chivalric.)
It's difficult to yank your narrative from one of these modes to another quickly, and it's easier to get to either vulgar or chivalric from the everyday than from each other. In fact, many narratives stay primarily in the everyday, jumping to higher or lower registers for dramatic effect when necessary. But every really three-dimensional character is capable of existing in all three modes, as is every actual human.
These three modes can feel irreconcilable, or as though one cannot be reached from the others no matter what-- and certainly there are stories that leave one or more of them out. But I've heard people complain both about high fantasy in which everything is so numinous that the logistics vanish into smoke and air, and about the kind of novel which insists that everything interesting in the world is a mistake or an illusion.
The thing that I Roved Out does which is so brilliant is that every character exists in all three modes, and sex is the thing which allows them to move between them instantly. Because, in real life, sex can do that-- move from ridiculous to sublime and back within literal seconds.
This is a work in which both the protagonists are high Elven champions, one literally a princess, both knights of great valor and cunning and wisdom, and also completely sex-mad lust-driven bimbo sluts who are going to prioritize fucking everyone they meet over the literal necessities of survival, and it is never out of character for them to behave either way at any given time. In fact, the sheer amount of sex they have, and again the narrative lampshades this, emphasizes how out of human reach they are as Elven champions: mortals cannot keep up. The sex itself moves through all three modes, sometimes work-a-day kind-of-dull we-were-in-the-same-place, sometimes friendly exercise or comradely comfort, sometimes religious-numinous as a way of interacting with the literal gods, and the characters move within all three modes within that, and so the writer has many more character directions available most of the time than many other writers would in the same circumstances. And takes full advantage of them.
And that's the part I found so impressive that I had to write this entire essay, that this comic has high fantasy characters who cannot be as epic as they are, as unhuman and not-of-this-world and magical and downright wise, without also being airheaded fuckbunnies. The porn and the high fantasy have crashed together to make something beautiful and strange.
I hope Mr. Delany knows that people can write this sort of thing, now; that people do write this sort of thing, now. He probably does, he's far more widely read than I am. I appreciate having the critical tools to pin down why I'm happy with the reading experience, and I hope I keep stumbling across this sort of thing in the future. Still rare, I suspect. I doubt this comic would have been published by a brick-and-mortar publishing house, even though it's certainly well beyond technically accomplished enough.
But this comic, and other things like it, are a real sign of hope for those of us who want art to use all its possible tools, without worrying about that Line of Respectability.
no subject
Date: 2022-11-29 08:40 am (UTC)Nine
(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2022-11-29 03:50 pm (UTC)(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2022-11-29 03:56 pm (UTC)(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2022-11-29 06:18 pm (UTC)I have spent a large portion of the past couple years writing and posting pseudonymous erotica, along the way wrestling with the eternal pornographer's problem of how to make Teh Sex relevant to the story and to the plot. One thing I've been groping towards, dimly if not blindly, is the larger question of how to make that there is Teh Sex relevant to the story -- and this essay just crystalized that this is what I've been struggling with. With that clarity, several issues with projects in flight became much easier to frame, and so be addressed.
A big, big Thank You for this. ππΌββοΈ γ©γγγγγγ¨γγγγγΎγ ππΌββοΈ
(Also, I would love to see that panel too.)
(no subject)
From:Outstanding essay
Date: 2022-11-29 07:44 pm (UTC)...among other things lures me into thinking that understanding postmodernism has value!
Re: Outstanding essay
From:no subject
Date: 2022-11-29 09:17 pm (UTC)(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2022-11-30 01:42 am (UTC)(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2022-11-30 07:50 am (UTC)There is a lot of time and a lot of work between the pieces of solid information you encounter, and each new thing feels hard-won.
Fallen London is a game that worked
onwith me a bit like this: it has an overarching numinous story (why was London carried down into a cavern below the earth by bats?) which is only hinted at initially, most of what you're initially doing is hunting rats in swamps, investigating murders, etc - and the main mechanic is waiting, performing the same rote bits of work again and again - with a limited budget of actions per day - to tick a story-progression value upward until it hits target. I found this in itself boring, but that boredom allowed one of those hunting-rats-in-swamps stories to suddenly jump upward into being about the main matter of the game in a way I found incredibly emotional. Same with later games in that universe, where 'sailing a ship between islands containing segments of text' replaces 'waiting for actions to refresh.' It seems more interesting the more the delaying mechanism can be textured in itself - like sex or boss fights.no subject
Date: 2022-12-01 05:17 am (UTC)(Flower's Twitter bio has he/him pronouns.)
no subject
Date: 2022-12-01 07:13 pm (UTC)This is a fascinating essay that very much gets at why I write as much porn as I do. Thank you for it! <3
Also, like![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
jesse_the_k, this is the first time I think I've understood much of anything about post-modernism (I am steeped deeply in fannish critique and meta and would say I have pretty good media analytical skills but I've not done really any formal reading on analytic frameworks beyond the one class I did on Women & Film that understandable focused on feminist film criticism in the readings). Or--it's less that I feel like I understand it as such and more that I feel like I've glimpsed why anyone bothers to understand it, if that makes sense.
no subject
Date: 2022-12-06 11:20 am (UTC)Years ago I read something along the lines of 'everything in a story is about sex except the sex, which is about everything else' and I think about it a lot. Admittedly I don't set out to do anything but write porn (to quote Tom Lehrer: Dirty books are fun, that's all there is to it!), but it kind of does have to feel right for the characters, even if the story kicks off with a sex scene.
Sex is like horror--it reflects the anxieties of the time and culture it comes from. And like Eliot said, all art is in conversation with all art that came before it. But this bit here:
[Erotica] can be a genre but is more and other than a genre: it is a set of tools an author (and by extension reader) can use within a piece of fiction to examine certain questions or cause certain effects.
I find this to be a much handier way of looking at the eternal arguments of genre in general than the ways I usually see genre discussed...
Specifically put me in mind of Rod Serling, and his whole philosophy about 'At the beginning of the story you pose a question, by the end of the story that question should have an answer of some kind--doesn't have to be the right answer, just an answer.' plus, his whole thing about how a writer's whole raison d'Γͺtre is to upend, challenge, and question norms and mores. Your essay really hit home with me in that it really made me revisit that idea, but specifically connect it up with smut.
And like, listen. Listen. My FIRST erotica book was a collection of Victorian erotica. And ever since then, I just... never stopped researching and reading about the old stuff, the first stuff--de Sade, Masoch--and once you start looking for the history of erotica, the whole idea that it is just exactly like horror, it's the other side of the coin from horror, and comments on exactly the same things, becomes SO apparent. It is not meaningless, it's heavy. Death looms so large over all erotica even now, even if you're writing a pornotopia where everyone is having fun and nobody has to deal with reality.
It's like... you know, that saying about how tragedy and comedy are so very close and changing just a few things about a story can switch it from one to the other? Horror and Erotica are the same kind of pairing, I think. And that matters, because horror is one of the most fucking revealing genres there is. You want to know the zeitgeist of a time and place and society? Look at their horror and their erotica, I say, and you will find the truth.
Idk if any of this is making sense, I've been drugged out of my mind on sudafed and benedryl for like three days bc of a cold, so apologies if this is disjointed.
(side note: good christ, are we still hauling out that old saw 'what's the diff between scifi and fantasy'?? Hello??? Can people stop being BORING for ten seconds??? One of my teachers always said: 'Your job is to write the story; let the publisher worry about what genre it is')
no subject
Date: 2022-12-07 10:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-12-08 05:09 am (UTC)Also, "what is the difference between sf/f" panels (etc.) are pretty much one of the reasons I have stopped going to conventions, either as a panelist or an audience member. I'm done.
no subject
Date: 2022-12-16 07:02 am (UTC)I have a feeling you have a lot to say (if have not already said) about the ways that "erotica" and "pornography" get used to impart moral or artistic judgments to stories that use the same toolkit, and the avenues that the toolkit gets to use for things like the "romance" genre, so long as it stays textually explicit sex instead of visually explicit sex. It seems like that's an important, if separate, thread in the ideas you're laying out here.
no subject
Date: 2022-12-18 10:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-07-03 08:35 pm (UTC)