A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art, Sex, and the Mind

by Siri Hustvedt

  Sontag then links characteristics of pornography to the New Novel, Robbe-Grillet in particular. The writer’s descriptions of spaces and rooms and things and people have no emotional hierarchy and no psychology. The reader enters a world of the disaffected gaze, a world of equal-opportunity voyeurism. She then discusses how pornography can become comical. If one is not in the mood, the slurping, banging, and jiggling can easily feel ridiculous. (This is my language, not Sontag’s. She is far more decorous.) I will elaborate on this. From a first-person point of view, sexual desire is always in earnest. If that earnestness is lost, desire either no longer exists or is in the process of slackening. Sex is never funny if you are the one “having” it. In fact, if it is funny, then it isn’t fun because you have removed yourself from the region of potential pleasure. Sontag does not mention either that the ribald, bawdy, and risqué might be said to occupy a zone between the required sincerity of a first-person passion and a third-person detachment that turns the corporeal antics of sex into pure absurdity. The bawdy text or bawdy bits of texts allow the reader to have a bit of both—the distance of humor accompanied by some enlivening titillation. I recall how much I loved Chaucer’s Wife of Bath when I first met her in The Canterbury Tales. I loved her fight, her wisdom, and her undisguised lust, which did not leave me sexually cold. When her fourth husband takes a mistress, she indulges in some wandering high jinks of her own. As she puts it, “In his owene grece I made hym frye.”

  Sontag discusses the Story of O, the beautifully written, deeply disturbing, utterly humorless pornographic fantasy by Pauline Réage, a pseudonym for an author whose identity would be revealed only many years later as the French intellectual Dominique Aury. The main character, O, “progresses toward the extinction” of her autonomy. Her ecstatic longing is to become no one, a branded, dependent abject thing. Sontag’s subject may be one that includes pricks, pussies, chains, masks, sadistic outrage, and orgasmic extremity, but she is not in the business of shocking her audience with vulgarisms. In fact, her tone throughout is one of third-person academic detachment, a tone that weirdly matches her claims about the quality pornography, Surrealism, and the New Novel share. Indeed, she makes it clear from the beginning that exciting her audience would defeat her purpose. She is right; a sexually aroused audience might find it hard to listen to her.

  The link Sontag makes between the unreality and psychological emptiness necessary for the pornographic and for particular kinds of French modernist literature is then followed by a sharp turn, one she clearly recognizes is abrupt because she admits that she hopes her next point connects to what she has said earlier. As a student of philosophy, she is well aware that a piece of her argument is missing. She clearly wants to say it anyway, and I am glad she did because this is where her talk gets most interesting, at least to me. Important human experiences in life and in literature, she tells us, involve shock. She has leapt through the frozen wall of pornography, Surrealism, and the Nouveau Roman into shock a little too quickly. The strict logic of her talk may suffer as a result, but shock in literature is a theme she wants to address.

  A link between the estranged qualities of pornography, Surrealism, the New Novel, and shock cannot be made. Sontag’s connection is subliminal. Even if its characters are not psychologically “real,” even if pornography depends on an objectification of human beings as things, it has shock value; it is the private made public, the hidden revealed. That shock does not directly follow from her discussion of emptied-out sexual automatons, but it is there nevertheless. She mentions Henry James and his long winding sentences that withhold knowing. She maintains that knowing in James arrives only at risk. I would add that “to know” in Henry James’s novels is actually explosive, and that knowing inevitably turns on the sexual, the secret, “the beneath,” what is finally unspeakable. It is a knowledge that burns with a combination of terror and desire, which is why James’s circuitous style is essential to his material; it is a method of both necessary suppression and gradual, hard-won revelation. Sontag urgently wants her audience to understand why books that appropriate reality too quickly are deficient. They create a “spiritual triviality” that does an injustice to the rich complexities of life itself. She then launches her full-on critique of realism, a form that can create a “too easy sympathy,” a “false intimacy” with the reader, an immediate, reassuring access to a text that leaves out mystery, transcendence, otherness, and what D. H. Lawrence called the “it”—that which escapes words.

  Sontag argues for an aesthetic that goes beyond humanism. She likes to stratify, and she stratifies. Sade is not a great writer, she tells us, but Genet and Rimbaud are. Near the end of the talk she makes it clear that her comments are meant as correctives to the views of, among a couple of others, the “Orville Prescotts of this world.” Prescott was the main book reviewer for the New York Times for twenty-four years and had real power to sway readers. He famously despised Nabokov’s Lolita: “dull, dull, dull in a pretentious, florid and archly fatuous fashion.” He admired Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952). The first line of his review, however, is stunning by contemporary standards: “Ralph Ellison’s first novel, ‘The Invisible Man,’ is the most impressive work of fiction by an American Negro which I have ever read.” (As the review continues, the book’s title appears in its correct form. Who is to blame for the error is anyone’s guess.) The Times’s own obituary of Prescott acknowledged that he often clashed with “experimentalists.” Reading book reviews from the past inevitably proves to be a beneficial exercise for writers of future generations.

  Sontag’s lecture became an essay, “The Pornographic Imagination,” published in Styles of Radical Will (1969), in which her analysis of the Story of O, as well as works by Georges Bataille, are developed more fully, although the thrust of the argument is the same. Again she articulates a “posthumanist” position: “For the matter at stake is not ‘human’ versus ‘inhuman’ (in which choosing the ‘human’ guarantees instant moral self-congratulation for both author and reader) but an infinitely varied register of forms and tonalities for transposing the human voice into prose narrative.” Sontag is surely right that literature must be open to all aspects of experience. Because human beings are the only animals that consume literature, there can technically be no inhuman literature, but she is arguing for an expansion of both form and content, for writing beyond stifled realist and humanist conventions.

  One can feel the presence in her text of French intellectual debates of the late forties and fifties, Sartre’s worries about literary forms, Roland Barthes’s critique of realism in Writing Degree Zero (1953) and his examination of cultural fictions in Mythologies (1957). Posthumanism became and still is a rallying cry in parts of academia, especially in the humanities, where structuralism was followed by poststructuralism and a fierce anti-Enlightenment sentiment ruled. At the very least, poststructuralism has served as a harsh corrective to the earlier, barely qualified myth of the Enlightenment and its mythical citizen, that autonomous man ruled by a glowing lamp of reason in his head, a lamp that subdued the bodily monstrosities or machine-like mechanisms below. “The emotional flatness of pornography,” Sontag argues, “is thus neither a failure of artistry nor an index of principled inhumanity. The arousal of a sexual response in the reader requires it. Only in the absence of directly stated emotions can the reader of pornography find room for his own responses.” In the essay, the link between the emotional flatness of the pornographic and the actual sexual response is made far more explicit. “Man, the sick animal, bears within him an appetite which can drive him mad.”

  She also reiterates what she argued in her lecture, that there is a divide between the fulfillment of the sexual self and the fulfillment of the ordinary everyday self because high erotic pleasure depends on a loss of self. At the end of the essay, she admits to her own queasiness about pornography because it can be “a crutch for the psychologically deformed and a brutalization of the morally innocent.” It is, she tells us, a kind o
f knowledge that must be placed beside other kinds of knowledge, many of which are more “dangerous commodities” than pornography. The deep questions involved are ones of knowledge and the particular consciousness that receives that knowledge.

  In 1964, pornography occupied a different place in the culture than it does today. I was nine when Susan Sontag was giving her lecture at the Y. My sexual knowledge involved seeds and eggs and, perhaps because I had a Norwegian mother, I knew that in order to make a baby the man’s penis somehow got into a woman, but exactly where and how remained rather murky except that the spot involved was somewhere “down there.” The only “porn” I had access to before I lost my virginity were copies of Playboy I eagerly scanned at certain choice babysitting locations after the children had gone to sleep. Had I wanted fare less sanitized than Playboy, I would have had to search out particular theaters far from my hometown, purchase a ticket, stand in line with numbers of furtive, horny men, and sit alone in a rickety seat with dried semen stains or wait for a package in the mail wrapped in plain brown paper my parents would surely have noticed. In other words, I would have had to have been crazy. What was then called “smut,” a word that seems to have vanished with seedy theaters and unmarked brown packages, is now widely available to anyone who can type out a few words on a computer keyboard.

  Most young people today have seen images of people having sex before they themselves ever have it. Pornography has changed the meaning of “sex education,” and this fact induces fear in many. Estimates of how much traffic on the web is devoted to porn are so varied (they range from well under 10 percent to more than 50 percent) that research into statistical methods would be required to know where these numbers are coming from and whether it is even possible to arrive at them. We can be confident, however, that pornography is big business, an industry that generates billions of dollars a year and that, with the Internet, it has moved from underground to aboveground.

  Gone are the films offered to girls-only classes with flitting pink and yellow butterflies that showed us abstract anatomical drawings of ovaries and uteruses with a voice-over I recall as soothing but male, a man who spoke with authority about “menstruation and the wonders of becoming a woman,” of “marriage” and “motherhood.” None of this propaganda did a thing to squelch genital fires. And no one controlled our girlish imaginations, at least not entirely. The pornographic in its various forms also belongs to the mental image, formed by the conventions of the culture, but also from the erotic tastes of the one who fantasizes, images that inevitably accompany the startling realities of an adolescent’s changing body and the complex past that body has had with others.

  When Sontag gave her talk at the Y, the pornography trials of literary works—Howl (1957), Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1960), and Tropic of Cancer (1961)—were not at all remote. A defense of literature from censorship, which she does not dwell on, may nevertheless be read as a subtext of both her lecture and essay. Sontag is right that most pornography partakes of stock types, repetition, and a deliberate externality. Surrealism was a buoyant movement between the wars, and it had a strong erotic component, although frequently a misogynist one, that would leave its traces in art and commerce, showing up in everything from Busby Berkeley musicals to Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound to a 1998 television ad for Chanel No. 5. Such is the capacious maw of capitalism. The radical roots of Surrealism and the Marxism of its founder, André Breton, whose sympathy for Trotsky produced a manifesto for revolutionary art in 1938 on the eve of the Second World War, survive in images selling an expensive perfume.

  The New Novel, interesting as it was in some ways, did not have an enlivening effect on French literature or any other literature. It did not become a fertile avenue for new works for the very reason Sontag describes: it is a literature of the dead egalitarian gaze. What she does not say is that the New Novel can be described as a form of trauma literature, a benumbed, depersonalized narration that resembles those of the witnesses of horror. These are texts that refuse vitality itself because to live “normally” in the wake of the monstrous seemed in itself monstrous. In 1964, no one could know that this foray into the antinarrative and antihuman would not bloom but wither. And while the people and things described in that French literary movement may share a passing resemblance to the figures in deadpan silent comedy, it was born of a historical sensibility so radically different that the similarities are outweighed by differences. Despite the fact that the silent movie hero’s face registers none of the extremity visited upon him, the audience roots for Buster Keaton and identifies with him. Although we have never had houses fall on us, were never chased by a hundred eager brides (if we were in those same situations, we would be howling in terror), he is nevertheless our all-too-human focus. Keaton’s persona is an indomitable survivor of life’s vicissitudes, not a dissociated, damaged survivor of the death camps.

  We now have professors who devote their lives to “porn studies.” Thirty years ago, this would have been greeted as satirical fiction. Porn studies is not all that dissimilar to the department Don DeLillo gave us in White Noise: Hitler Studies. Published in 1985, the novel caught what was already in the air: nothing is considered too outrageous for scholarly examination. It is testament to DeLillo’s prescience about American culture that Hitler Studies doesn’t sound all that funny anymore either. I am all for porn studies, by the way. I am just noting the distinct change in climate. The pornography wars are still with us. Feminists remain divided. There are, however, as far as I can tell, more feminists speaking out for pornography than there were in the seventies and eighties.

  In Defending Pornography, Nadine Strossen forcefully argues, “The false equation of sexuality and sexism, which lies at the core of procensorship feminist philosophy, is as dangerous to women’s rights as it is to free speech.” I agree. The assumption that pornography is evil by definition and always harmful to and exploitative of women is, I think, a spurious one that robs women of their own desires. If Fifty Shades of Grey is testament to anything, it is that millions of middle-class, heterosexual women enjoy pornography with an S&M bent, even if it arrives with sentences such as, “My inner goddess is jumping up and down, clapping her hands like a five-year-old” and “Holy Shit” as frequent textual punctuation. We now have “feminist porn.” Apparently, this kind of porn is more woman friendly and the contracts issued by its producers are more protective of workers’ rights. In a lively text called “Porn Wars,” included in The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure, Betty Dodson writes, “I want feminism to signify a woman who knows what she wants in bed and gets it.” The Wife of Bath all over again. In the same essay, she admits that “while it’s true that a lot of pornography out there is shitty for the most part, it still works: it gets people hot.” Indeed it does. Dodson defends free speech and erotic diversity in refreshingly plain speech.

  Sontag narrows her definition of pornography to a virtue/vice opposition for her own purposes. However, the idea that pornography, whether it celebrates lust or plays with the naughty and forbidden, is by definition a low, beastly form, so thin and mechanical that it can never have aesthetic value, is a view predicated on a long history in aesthetics: the idea that bodily feeling muddies the contemplative, cognitive art experience, and sexual feeling is pollutant number one. This has been especially prevalent in visual art. While it is undoubtedly true that during orgasm no one can reflect on a Brunelleschi drawing and think through Erwin Panofsky’s view that vanishing-point perspective is a historical construct, it is untrue that sexual desire plays no role in our understanding of art, whether literary or visual. Although Immanuel Kant’s idea of aesthetic pleasure is complex and involves feeling and the imagination, he firmly maintains that aesthetic pleasure is disinterested; it is not about desiring the object in question, rather it is founded on a necessary absence of desire. This idea, which has many echoes in the long history of Western philosophy, is one in which the passions are suspect. It became the rock of modern visu
al aesthetics.

  In his introduction to a volume called Pornographic Art and the Aesthetics of Pornography (2013), Hans Maes notes that Clive Bell, a preeminent proponent of formalism, made a sharp distinction between aesthetic emotion and the sensual desires evoked by appealing bodies. Maes asks, “What about those works of art that appeal to our sensual feelings and desires and that are so popular with the man in the street?” He quotes Bell’s answer:

  The art that they call “beautiful” is generally closely related to the women. A beautiful picture is a photograph of a pretty girl; beautiful music, the music that provokes emotions similar to those provoked by young ladies in musical farces; and beautiful poetry, the poetry that recalls the same emotions felt, twenty years earlier, for the rector’s daughter (my italics).