On the Margins - The Pornographic and Erotic Imagination

Gamiani, or Two Nights of Excess (1833)

Alfred de Musset

Seduction (1908 but re-published in 2003)

Anonymous

 

Tropic of Cancer (1934)

Henry Miller

Erotic Comics: A Graphic History (2008)

Alice Kominsky-Crumb

 

Shameful Duties (Probably 1970s but re-published in 2017) 

Susan Saraband

 

Gamiani is a somewhat Sadean quasi-Gothic erotic novel of the 1830s which has been attributed, although not certainly, to Alfred De Musset and which even reached the hands of Edith Wharton no less. However, you would not know any of this from my Edition, a second-hand copy of its inclusion in the Erotic Prints Society's 'Scarlet Library' which has no introduction, notes or bibiliography. What that Edition does have is excellent erotic illustrations by Vania Zouravliov. That is why I am happy to refer to it here while suggesting you find an edition with more background information.

As for the story, it is a tale of extreme and destructive erotic passion with the standard issue references to the depravities to be found in convents and amongst the clergy but it is rather well written. Assuming you do not have serious problems with 'disgust' (this is, after all, only an exercise in the imagination), the bulk of the book is a very erotic read indeed but it is definitely not for faint hearts. Away from its stimulating content (which is likely to interest only a few), it does have some additional interest as a serious literary attempt at following De Sade but in the context of Romanticism. Though not perfect by any means, it succeeds in its aims and provides an insight into a mind-set whose next full literary flowering, after a gap, would be in the Decadent Movement. Consider it an experiment.

 

Seduction is a 1908 French erotic ‘novel’ set in a leisured milieu at the turn of the last century and chronicling the sexual discoveries of young aristocrats by themselves and through the agency of a lascivious maid. Well written to begin with and a suitable fantasy for older men who would have liked such leisure and pleasure themselves, it runs out of steam towards the end. There are only so many permutations of ‘innocent’ sex and we have, as always, the repetitions, like incantations, of names of intimate body parts that show a lack of imagination. There is no plot of consequence but a genuine languid eroticism gives pleasure even if a constant theme is that the pleasures seem to require some forceful agency. Blackmail is no bar in this respect.  The illustrations of Sylvie Jones are to the point and match the text.

 

Tropic of Cancer is very Henry Miller, one part silly rant, one part acute psychology and one part documentary of expatriate life in Paris between the wars. Let us take each in turn before judging it to be great literature or not. We are supposed to admire the silly rants as ‘literary’. No doubt college professors will get off on some of it but it is mostly self-indulgent, sub-standard and incoherent surrealism. You really have to get past Miller's determination to be 'literary' to enjoy this book. But it is worth it. The psychology is what matters here. Even the rants show a mind screaming to be free in a world of apes and of material limitations but it is no accident that this is an American mind seeking freedom in Europe. Only Americans at that time (we see the same phenomenon a decade or so later in Jack Parsons and then later still in Kerouac) could even contemplate the possibility of freedom in the sense of following one's own instincts and desires and taking personal responsibility for them.

America is the supreme paradox. A sense of liberty is its glory but it is a culture that may laud freedom and encourage the libertarian in its rhetoric but it is also one which is riddled with conventionalism, ‘normality’ and traditional beliefs.  For a man like Miller, the promise of freedom is to be expressed not as a rhetoric based on the nonsense of eighteenth century theoreticians but as a lived reality. The imperative is to get out of America and lose oneself in a big foreign city – Paris was the most obvious choice. The book is an extended exploration of how to be free in an alien environment, one where no one is watching (though he clearly wants us to look). He thought the sexual aspect of his writing was exaggerated and he is right – sex is not the issue in this book. It is a book about freedom. The most fundamental freedom is to have sex. All societies tend to try to contain sexual energy, the United States more than most. It tells you more about the culture of the critics that they seize on the sexual explicitness with shock or awe. To Miller, sex is simply like eating.

What Miller is trying to get across is the sheer energy and normality (to him) of sexuality and of the struggle for survival under conditions of extreme poverty. He struggles for food more than he worries about sex. He cannot see why either consensual sex or food should be scarce. He is right. There are occasions (in this fictionalized account of reality) of him being very underhand and self-centred. This honesty is to be applauded. Being energetic in life is likely to drive one to the socio-pathic boundary of humanity, even if one is not a psychopath, under conditions of scarcity. It is the clash of his normality with social normality that is at the core of this book. It might as easily have been Kerouac in Mexico. The conditions of his liberation are confined by his poverty and it is this third aspect of his book that has been most neglected. It seems that you must either have freedom in abject poverty or slavery in wealth as part of a murderous normality that builds war machines and conscripts its suckers for the killing fields. The mark of 1914-1918 is on this book. There are shades of Chaplin’s critique in ‘M. Verdoux’.
 

Miller's silly rants seems affectedly surrealist but they also remind one of the hysteria of Artaud whose Heliogabulus speaks of blood and violence as catharsis. (we have covered Artaud and, indeed Bataille at https://timpendryfictionreviews.blogspot.com/2022/10/transgressive-french-flummery-artaud.html ) This is the raging rhetoric of frustrated masculinity and it fuelled the fascist male rage of the period.

But Miller is no fascist – he is a frustrated liberal and anarchist. He is struggling to tell us about a world that Orwell wrote about with more discipline in his ‘Down and Out in Paris and London’. Orwell made the leap to socialism but Miller cannot – perhaps with wisdom in retrospect.

The book is about what it is to be without money in a cold-hearted and small-minded world. This is where his literary genius shines through. His account of his time as unpaid school master in Dijon captures the deprivation of the time so that you can feel the cold, the hunger and the humiliation.

His infamous but misunderstood treatment of women has to be seen in this documentary context rather than that of his sexual drives. Far from being misogynistic, he treats women as sexual equals at all times. They are not ‘owned’ by convention but equal players in a trading game.

Men and women are both objects of the system and subjects to themselves. Both men and women struggle to survive, seeking life. Both want love but both, in order to survive, are capable of extreme sociopathic behavior.

He may call them ‘cunts’ and treat them as sexual objects but the women, bluntly, behave like ‘cunts', treating the males as objects of survival, sources of scarce cash and scarce food. There is competition and camaraderie in such a relationship between persons. It has its integrity.

Miller could have taken a socialist line as Orwell was to do, but his instinct was probably correct that the sacrifice of individual free choices in how to engage in the struggle for existence would be at too great a price in the long run.

Perhaps behavior would change if scarcity was replaced by abundance but he is puzzled, as many of us are puzzled in theory though less in practice, by the fact that abundant societies seem to permit less freedom in areas that matter most to people like Miller – good solid sexual pleasure.

Contemporary liberal culture is more sexually free now on the basis of abundance but there is a constant rearguard action against authoritarian traditionalists and the State, while the majority of the population still self censors its own behavior and language out of fear and anxiety.

The difference between a socialist like Orwell and a libertarian like Miller is probably this – the socialist wants to change the world in order to change the species whereas the anarchist wants to change the species in order to change the world.

Neither is going to get very far so, perhaps, you have to choose the balance of your misery according to your aesthetic. The socialist effort to improve the lot of man through controlling the world merely results in the control of persons who cannot change their core nature.

Conforming to external demands was the basis of the very sort of society that Miller was seeking escape from. But our species is always likely to remain a herd one, a conformist one. Failure to conform is always likely to end in some form of want. Miller simply prefers poverty to slavery.

Men and women who choose freedom are either going to have to be so talented that they can acquire the means to live freely above the herd or they are going to be living on the margins of the herd. If they are on the margins of the herd, they will be competing for scraps.

The rants and the documentary account of deprivation still came down to this – Miller had chosen the risks of freedom. Few of those around him made the same choice so consciously. The mutual exploitation and struggle for existence was not of one sex over another but of all against all.

If we still find ourselves rooting for Miller, despite his bad writing, his self-destructiveness and his skewed analysis of his situation, it is because, despite all these flaws, he is authentically greater than most of the rest of our species. He is satanic perhaps. Promethean.

He does not want freedom just for himself. He wants us all to be free. He is the best of men in that sense. He is a hero if only for not going mad at the sight of a beaten horse like Nietzsche or being beaten into submission by a manipulative ‘cunt’ as his friend Fillmore was.

We look at our short time on this planet and at the even shorter period during which we are capable of an independent physical existence and of intense pleasure and we ask how we ever allowed ourselves to become drudges to the conventional in the first place. But we do nevertheless.

Miller is naïve but there is something great in the man despite that naivete. Unfortunately, the book is not as great as the man. We have confused our fascination with his blind surge towards the light with literary prowess. The book, though culturally important, is not great.

 

Erotic Comics: A Graphic History is an excellent, if very NSFW and often nerdish, account of the graphic illustration of sex up until the late 1970s. Much of the background to this era has already been covered in a series of book reviews on our sister blog at https://timpendrybookreviews.blogspot.com/2022/12/the-pornographic-and-erotic-imagination.html and at https://timpendrybookreviews.blogspot.com/2022/07/readings-on-sexuality.html  Lavishly illustrated, this is not a book to leave lying around the house if the vicar or a sheltered maiden aunt is coming to tea but the sexual representation is only half the story. The other half is what this material says about repressed male desire during a sexual dark age. We have elsewhere noted the role of war and the failure of mainstream entertainment to offer a realistic model for sexual relations. Hollywood, literature and advertising offered only a sensualised romanticism (at most), one that seemed constantly geared to female aspiration and a presumed male gentility. The First World War and its aftermath appear to have allowed some form of male sexual expression that was not entirely vicious (though the Tijuana Bibles were scarcely kind, women appeared to be allowed a sexuality of their own) but this was crushed with the new puritanism of the 1930s.

What we think of as sexism probably reached its highest point from the 1930s to the 1970s when a repressive public morality shifted its gaze from alcohol suppression to sexual conduct, not for the first time in American history. American puritanism is and always has been a deep neurosis in the American soul. Neither the British nor the Europeans were ever quite so obsessed with sexual rectitude, a position that still affects the rhetoric of politics in the three worlds today. There is no doubt that this deliberate repression of both male and female desire resulted in an inability for honest dialogue between the sexes to take place, whose worst manifestations were female lack of fulfilment and a male rage that erotic comics fully expressed. The objectifying pin-ups of the period were often delightful (there is reference to them here) but this book is about comics. Comics in America could be deeply unpleasant in their misogyny and in their attitude towards women as not objects of desire but objects of use, almost alien artefacts.

It might be said that, by denying the instinctive need of both sexes to be objects of desire (as the French do so well), Anglo-Saxon culture turned men and women into opposing forces who were obliged to see each other in terms solely of their use-value. The result was a suppressed rage and hatred in some quarters - an entrapment of women that led to a vicious feminist reaction that would crush male desire further and a misogyny that became the blokish way of surviving sadness and a sense of loss of manhood under a feminising culture. This degenerate farce of Judaeo-Christian misery was compounded by war. War (as we have noted in the case of Russ Meyer) liberated men to think new thoughts about comradeship and sex but the women of a defeated or dislocated Europe presented a contradiction to the expectations of the home front. Women went from relatively free spirits in the 1920s through the experience of war work to enforced domestic slavery just as men were returning to a mythic homeland of Norman Rockwell domesticity that was endorsed by magazines, churches, anti-communist politicians and advertisers.

Neither the women nor the men stood a chance against the dead weight of 'normality' where sexuality was presumed to be deviant if not straight, where women were supposed to be passive lest they become rapacious and a real man had to be a chivalrous (in public) or brute (in private). These comics represent a superb guide not to female but to male alienation. It might good for women to see this book not in order to lambast men as misogynistic apes (a first reaction) but to ask what it is that makes men want this cruel humour since most do not want it now. Many of the cartoons (in particular) express a paradox - the women are strong and emasculating. The men may have formal power but they are psychologically weak, putty in the hands of feminine sexual power or what is now called their erotic capital. The misogyny is linked to weakness and fear. The dominance of fetish and bondage imagery (represented in the pin-up sector by the now oddly charming and innocent representations of Betty Page), if for only small minorities of the male public in practice, constantly remind us that many males were fetishised by their condition.

One trope is the strong and frightening female - Wonder Woman was the creation of such an acknowledged fetishist - crushing the will or body of a weaker girlish figure in an avowedly sado-masochistic lesbian relationship. Where is the male her?. He is not just observer but secret participant. He has become the woman in a fantasy of revenge where the powerful are brought into play to bring to heel the 'feminine' that oppresses through subtle means that confuse a male who has no language for what is happening to him. The situation changes again with the 1960s. 'Sexual liberation' took rather a long time to work through the culture, certainly for women. The first fruits were in popular culture where Playboy, then Penthouse, developed a gentler pornography until Hustler returned to old misogynistic ways. To an extent, the last part of the book shows a culture that allowed liberation to mean merely the more effective artistic licensing of cruelty, although, in Europe, the bondage culture shifts gear into a type of sado-masochistic eroticism that is so fantastic as to become appealing to women. It is, in fact, often women who lap up the Sadean 'Histoire d'O' because we see a reversal of the 'Wonder Woman' theme of revolt against submission. In modern female eroticism, women are seeking the fantasy of safe submission because they miss the romantic strength of the male.

It is not that men have become 'wimps' but that they have no longer a sphere (war and industry) where they were strong. They came home to a feminised environment from a presumed masculine culture where their strength could also be presumed (or their failure despised).  The whole elite world has become partially feminised (not entirely since women have learned 'male strength' in the public sphere) but men have given up without much of a fight, perhaps almost with relief at not having to fight any longer. There is a point in the late 1970s where you can see the seeds of what will become sex-positive feminism, something reaching out to the world we have today where it is women as much as men who decide the nature of erotic representation at the smarter end of popular culture. It has to be said that there are some very sick and deviant minds present in this book, much darker than the relatively benign Russ Meyer and Paul Raymond. On the other hand, there is some genuine humour and some genuine eroticism and beauty but it is still a long way from Violet Blue and Coco de Mer.

What this excellently produced and detailed account tells us is that these erotic and pornographic comics were reflections of a very mentally disturbed mid-twentieth century culture that, it must not be forgotten, coped with two world wars and human slaughter on an industrial scale. We Anglo-Saxons may still not have resolved ourselves into a civilised stance on desire and transgression but at least the two sexes are talking to each other and are allowing some pace for phantasy and (despite radical feminist idiocy) mutual objectification. The cruelty is proportionately disappearing. It is to be hoped that our current troubles do not turn us back to those days of repression. Sadly, a malign alliance of faith-based groups and progressive feminism against sex workers and male desire suggests that the seeds of a new hell are in the making. The fact that Google foolishly directed funds towards faith-based groups involved in the sex-trafficking lobby (according to SWAAY) should fill us all with trepidation that the new capitalism will follow the old capitalism into making alliances with the devil.

Now a word for the British who get honourable mentions not only as providing some fine artists but for wartime contributions like 'Jane' and the comic seaside postcards of the persecuted Donald McGill, lauded by no less than George Orwell. The authorities here were more pragmatic about sexuality, seeking to contain it when it was disruptive, mobilise it (as did the American military) when it was useful and ignore it when it was harmless and hidden. Social mores did the rest in that way the British have of ignoring troublesome things. 

 

This did not mean that sexual life was any less painful and repressed than in America but at least it was enforced by something closer to a Japanese style of mutual conformity - a shame culture - rather than the unpleasant guilt culture perpetrated on Americans by puritan miserabilism. In America, that beacon of light and idealism, there was always some organising lobby for 'decency' with a hold on the political process who would add ideology to the pot. Sexually, America was a cesspit trying to pretend that it was an ornamental lake. It was not only sex, American attitudes to alcohol, drugs and gambling are and were much the same. Somewhere there is always a schoolmistress or a priest or a politician trying to tell people in the land of the free how to live their lives. The result is a swing to cruel excess in response. For all its faults, I am glad I live on this side of the Atlantic ... and these comics help to tell me why .

Let's start by saying that Shameful Duties is not erotica - it is downright pornography. It is also charmless and I have to say at the beginning that it did not 'turn me on' - sorry, I lie, twice there was a slight reaction, twice around only a few lines in all 216 pages - and I am no prude nor by any means a-sexual. It is an oddity that preserves in aspic a pivotal moment in sexual history, that point when male aggression was being seen through a feminist lens. To go further down that route would result in a spoiler so let's stick to general themes. The book is one of a series published by Past Venus Press, a label of Erotic Review books, which claims to offer 20th century erotic pulp classics. In fact, Erotic Review itself was a surprisingly uninteresting magazine (I think it is still plugging along somewhere), mixing genuinely useful insights into sexual culture in non-fiction articles with erotica of varying quality, some decent imagery and a rather unpleasant line in repressed masculine lechery - often from men who would but can't or would like to but won't. The fact that its contact advertisements in the back are almost exclusively male or 'couples' says it all. Erotic Review, much touted as liberatory in the mainstream media, is, in fact, the last gasp of English repression and 'naughtiness'. It depresses me because English middle class culture is depressing.

This particular book was actually passed to me by a woman, curious to know how I would react to what she called its 'masochism'. Well, masochist from her female perspective but sadist from my male perspective. The book is ostensibly by a woman (one can never tell in this milieu) but I can well believe it on the basis that Pauline Reage was so. Shameful Duties is, of course, not so subtle, not so erotic and not so well written as 'Histoire d'O', a true masterpiece.  On the other hand, although there are a few moments of comical banality, the matter of fact tone works in a literary sense. This is a story of one of the nastiest bits of work (the male) in pulp literature and of a number of women whose cold obeisance rings true as a possible condition of women in relation to a certain type of male. We know of this syndrome from the memoirs of the likes of Catherine Millet. The interest lies in the probable dating of the story - almost certainly based in the 1970s, on internal evidence and on the evidence of the illustrations, although it is hard to be sure.

The women are not, however, mindless puppets but nor are they a-moral participants in a swinger set: they are women who are clearly in a pragmatic but submissive economic relationship with the men. Part of the tension in the book is between their exploitation as objects and their own desire for pleasure and experience as subjects. The women, at the end of the day, are attractive as persons. The men are vicious. And so this oddly feminist book slyly subverts the male reader, even if the typical male pulp reader may not quite realise that he is being taken for a ride. If one of the least erotic books you may read (that is, as a man unless you really are very repressed indeed), it is an intriguing glimpse into that sort of sexual submission that can still contain more integrity and self awareness within itself than ever can the grunting dominance of any self-styled 'master'. The male in this story is a bully, using his superior economic power. He is, in truth, little more than a type of mid-level business owner you might find in any local community out of range of a sophisticated city.

Shameful Duties is on the veryedge of being a novella of sexual revenge on male abuse through the very perversity of the women's absolute submission - cruelty and vice have nowhere else to go but into their own black hole when power is so one-sided that willing submission (these girls all make repeated choices and could do otherwise than they do: none are 'slaves', only anxious about their material condition) turns the libidinal experience into dust for the degenerating male.  Fortunately, this world started to die as a cultural norm in subsequent decades even if it still exists, no doubt, in many nooks and crannies where women are economically vulnerable and men are ignorant. Eventually, some day, it will pass from the face of the earth completely ... this man (and many women) may dream of that day.