Technical Difficulties

He seems (fairly passionately) to want to argue for pornography as the novel's Evil Twin, although he never comes out and SAYS that's what he's doing.

And if that's the case, then of course pornography can't exist prior to the seventeenth century. Because you can't be the Evil Twin of something that hasn't been born yet.

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Hah: you could probably make a case for pornography being the Evil Twin of various art forms, given that it's one of the first things that people will use new technology for - printing, photography, film, the computer. But if you're an Eng Lit person and a committed Freudian, I guess you're going to want to see pornography as the Return of all that's been Repressed in the mainstream novel.

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franzeska

Maybe it has something to do with the rise of subjectivity? Am I right in pegging the 17thC as the time when we start seeing the illusion of self awareness in fictional characters? Maybe he's thinking of pornography as a depiction of real people having real sex rather than just material that makes the audience horny.

...

No, I don't actually think it makes sense either.

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As an explanation for what Marcus's critical/epistemological structure might have been, that's a good one. Thanks!

[soap-box]
That whole "subjectivity begins in the Renaissance" thing is (pace Joel Fineman) a chauvinistic over-simplification in its own right. The novel is definitely the genre of interiority, and certainly earlier eras understood and interacted with what we call subjectivity in different ways, but Shakespeare didn't invent it (which is Fineman's argument). Ovid's exile poetry is the clearest counter-example I know.
[/soap-box]

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franzeska

Heh heh. Ok. But I was sort of assuming you were looking for chauvinistic over-simplifications upon which someone might have based a faulty theory. He's got to be thinking of some major change that happened around then. I guess the thing about the rise of the novel is more likely though, isn't it.

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Argh, no, sorry! The soap-boxing wasn't aimed at you. It was aimed at the whatchamacallit, the paradigm of the Renaissance invention of subjectivity.

V. sorry.

Bad Truepenny, no cookie.

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I'm confused as to what subjectivity really is when people talk about "the rise of subjectivity in literature/whathaveyou." I mean, I understand what they're talking about, but not why it was new. I always sort of assumed that older characters (Beowulf, Zeus, whatever) would be self-aware except that they were always described in fairly minimalist terms - that it was a stylistic thing rather than a Big Change in the Way People Thought.

I'm being stupid, aren't I?

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franzeska

Go stand in Nora Johnson's office doorway and say that. I dare you.

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I took her Ren. Sexualities class once, actually, but that was the semester I had to withdraw from due to illness, etc, so I don't remember much.

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franzeska

What? The best class offered by Swarthmore? Say it aint so!

Err... but more to the point, she likes to rant about subjectivity and Shakespeare's female characters, so you'd probably have heard a bit about that if you'd been less ill.

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If credits permit, etc. etc., I'm going to try and take it again, because I would have loved it if I hadn't been off on another planet.

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No, not stupid.

The problem is, of course, that we don't have anybody to ask. So scholars make guesses, based on literary texts, and the rightness or wrongness of those guesses are, well, you pays your money and you takes your choice.

It is, however, possible to make a very plausible argument that people of earlier eras understood selfhood differently than we do now. I made that argument myself, in an undergraduate paper about the Aeneid. Anthropologists talk about the difference between a shame culture and a guilt culture: shame is about how the individual is perceived by other members of the society; guilt is about how the individual perceives her- or himself. (My favorite modern example of shame culture is the world of pro-wrestling.) The Iliad, the Odyssey, Beowulf all take place very definitely in shame cultures, as--I suppose one could argue--do the Arthurian romances. Certainly Orlando Furioso, iirc.

We don't know much about how people experienced their selfhood; all we can talk about is how they represented their experience of selfhood. And because that's a tricky, annoying, and subtle distinction, it often gets simplified into assertions that literature can be taken as direct evidence. (The same thing Marcus does when he treats Dickens as a historically accurate record of Victorian life, and one of my pet peeves.)

You can certainly read, as a random example, Beowulf under the assumption that what we would recognize as interiority and subjectivity is there, simply not expressed, but that's a different way of relating to the text than the way that modern literary criticism has chosen.

Um, does that answer your question at all?

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larryhammer

I've always read chivalric romances as being set in a guilt culture — Parcifal's story certainly is — one created as part of the mileux of courtly love. And that part of the something different Ariosto (and Bioardo, though not Pulci) did was to blend elements from guilt-culture and shame-culture stories, producing something interesting and new. But it may be the guilt-culture aspects of Authoriana was blended in when the stories were more overtly Christianized. I know less about this than perhaps I ought.

---L.

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ex-greythist387.livejournal.com

As I understand it, the Arthurian stories as we have them are always already "overtly Christianized." Geoffrey of Monmouth, writing in the 1130s, is responsible directly or indirectly for 95% of what we consider Arthurian narrative, and he casts the Britons as righteously Christian before Hengist shows up, hence before Arthur's born as the acme of the noble British line. The "courtly love" iterations of Geoffrey's base begin appearing only a couple decades later--Chrétien de Troyes, Robert de Boron, and others.

There are a few earlier texts that mention Arthur by name, and Geoffrey read and used them, but they had substantially less of an impact on the chivalric romances. I'd be very interested in evidence showing that, say, Ariosto had read Nennius; even Gildas and Nennius apply guilt-culture aspects to their narratives.

I'm going on at too much length, for which I apologize. I do appreciate your point about Ariosto's reconfiguration, which seems to me separable from the issue of how earlier Arthurian texts address guilt and shame--or, for that matter, subjectivity.

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Please, don't apologize for being interesting.

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larryhammer

Indeed, please don't.

Though now I trying to work through my pointy little head what, exactly, Ariosto (and Bioardo) was doing. The way I usually think of it is blending the Matter of France with the Manner of Britain. Which is shorthand for taking the plot and martial concerns of the Roland/Charlemain cycle and telling it in the manner of Arthurian Romance, complete with the courtly love appendages and knight-errantry and the emphasis on purity and all the rest. And to my mind, the self-consciousness of the latter equates to guilt culture. Which means the shame culture Ariosto/Bioardo blended in came from the original Roland stories. Thus some confusion on my part.

Part of it is that while I've gone through much Arthuriana (though all of it post-Geoffrey), for Roland I've only read the original Chanson and Pulci's satirical Morgante, so I'm guessing at what they took from that spring. Assumptions are bad, or at least dangerous. And, of course, I'm not a scholar in this field in any way shape and/or form.

---L.

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Yes, actually, and much more clearly than my professors ever managed. Thanks!

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dmsherwood53.livejournal.com

I'm being stupid, aren't I?
Not realy stupid but a bit simpleminded. In cases involving states of mind the way you describe yourself and the way the Youness of yyou is like flow into themselves. Pretty much YOU are a story you tell youself.
Is that pretentious enuf.

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dmsherwood53.livejournal.com

This sounds interest5ing can you reccomend a book on the subject for someone intelegant but lacking a BA

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ex-greythist387.livejournal.com

Joel Fineman or Joel Altman?

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Who is Joel Altman? (I know I should know, but then there's the whole part where apparently I don't.)

I'm thinking Joel Fineman and Shakespeare's Perjured Eye.

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ex-greythist387.livejournal.com

I know next to nothing about Shakespearean scholarship and wondered in my own ignorance whether it'd been a slip of the fingers. Joel Altman is a professor at Berkeley who sometimes seems very intent on subjects as actors and subject-creation in early modern drama. This may be one of those times when a taught approach turns out to belong to someone else. :)

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Well, Joel Fineman is dead, so it can't be him.

That probably is why the name Joel Altman rang a bell, though.

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But as I recall (years that it's been since I read the book) Marcus makes a big point out of how flat and stereotyped and lacking in reality the stock characters in pornography are: he cites some description from a Victorian porno about a daisy chain and comments that everyone is reduced to sexual organs. Also he claims that any background detail is similarly flat (i.e. that you would not read The Lustful Turk as representing even what the average C19th person knew about Turkish manners and customs). That it's about figments. Though less so in the case of My Secret Life.

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jonquil.livejournal.com

I think The Secret Museum argued that the concept of "pornography" as a separate thing was a late invention -- Catullus used obscene language and images as a weapon of satire, but it wasn't pornography. Similarly, the sex scenes in Satyricon (or for that matter the descriptions in the Secret History) are one part of a larger work; the work as a whole is not intended to arouse. (Oh, bugger, am I confusing the Satyricon with The Golden Ass? I think I am.) If I'm right, Marcus's argument is that a standalone work whose sole purpose is to arouse is a later invention.

But I haven't reread TSM or The Other Victorians in years, so I'm probably misrepresenting the argument.

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peake.livejournal.com

Even if Satyricon wasn't written with the sole and express intention of arousal, there was plenty of stuff produced at the same time that clearly was. Just look at some of the surviving greek and Roman vases, wall paintings, mosaics, etc. If there is pornography in art I'll lay odds there is pornography in literature. Pornography, I'll lay odds is as old as sex.

So if Marcus wants pornography to begin in the 17th century (unless he is also trying to claim that sex began then also) then he is limiting his argument to a very specific form of pornography. Perhaps the pornographic novel, which as you say could not predate the 17th century if the novel itself was only born then. (Actually I have doubts about that as well, but that is a much bigger and wider argument.)

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The question of the development of the novel qua novel is a whole different can of worms (and depends as much on the question of function as the question of form), but I agree with you that fundamentally, it isn't pornography and the novel that are cojoined like Siamese twins, it's pornography and sex. (Mirrorthaw said something very much along the same lines when I brought the question up with him last night, that pornography began with some scratches on a cave wall.) The Hellenistic fad for Sleeping Hermaphrodite statues (pretty young woman with erect penis) is another case in point.

Marcus's argument about Victorian pornography and the Victorian novel might actually be quite compelling, if he'd had the sense to define his terms and limit his parameters.

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[not arguing with you--arguing with the argument that you have very kindly offered. if that makes any sense at all.]

Okay, granted that the version we have of the Satyricon appears to be fragmentary, I have to say that it really doesn't look like it has any purpose beyond that of arousal (with some rather haphazard satire thrown in, but even that comes back around to sex eventually). The Golden Ass DOES have other stuff going on and a professed purpose greater than that of mere titillation.

It occurs to me, suddenly, that Marcus would have been helped immesurably by deploying the term "picaresque."

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dmsherwood53.livejournal.com

Since I've never read any OVID but won't some of his stuff counciously writen to be arousing

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This is a huge, complicated and continuing argument, and I suspect that Marcus's concept of what he means by pornography falls within the Humpty Dumpty paradigm of when he uses a word, it means what he wants it to mean. A lot of the debate on the rise of pornography (and whether this was C17th, C18th or C19th) is about not just the presence in art forms of erotic motifs and arousing material, but the existence of a form of representation which is only about sexual arousal and directed to that end, i.e. 'one-handed literature'. (Oh, wouldn't it be neat if this could be tied in with the rise of masturbation panic?) I think there are issues involved of public and private - between material which would be consumed and enjoyed in a relatively communal setting, and that which was consumed by the individual in solitude. 'Pornography' isn't just about the inclusion of the erotic/bawdy - it's much more about its ghettoisation into one stigmatised genre. See, for example, Julie Peakman's Mighty Lewd Books: the development of pornography in C18th England - although recent work on the C17th does suggest the date of origin could be moved further back. But it's only relatively recently that there has been this kind of debate on what is pornography and how does it differ (or does it differ) from the erotic and how it can be historicised.

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Thank you. That helped a lot.

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I forgot to mention an excellent article by the late Dorelies Kraakman (in the volume Sexual Cultures in Europe: Themes in Sexuality): she makes a good case for pornography developing into a formulaic genre of repetitive standard tropes over the course of the C18th, out of a much richer and complex range of preceding bawdy/erotic literature. (Peakman is working with a similar model.) Possibly the first example of the creation of genre? (if genre is seen as a despised form of sub-literature.)

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par-avion.livejournal.com

Is he using the legal definition of pornography? I'm guessing from the context here he means 17th century England or Europe? I'm not sure when pornography was first defined/criminalized, but the definition in my Black's Law Dictionary states:

Pornographic: That which is of or pertaining to obscene literature; obscene; licentious. Material is pornographic or obscene if the average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find that the words taken as a whole appeals to the prurient interest and if it depicts in a patently offensive way sexual conduct and if the work as a whole lacks serious literaty, artistic, political or scientific value.

This is a modern, American definition. I don't have ready access to a British/European 17 century legal definition, but note the emphasis both on obscenity and literature.

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Pornography has never been defined as such within English law. Morality societies such as the Society for the Suppression of Vice were bringing common-law prosecutions against the producers and purveyors of blasphemous, seditious and obscene works from the C18th. The English law on issues of censorship and obscenity is byzantine and confusing: the 1857 Obscene Publications Act, one of the main pieces of actual legislation, didn't ever define 'obscene', this got decided in case-law.

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par-avion.livejournal.com

Thanks for the info! I do find it passing strange that the OPA chose not to define obscene, seeing as it's in the title. Perhaps another case of "I know it when I see it."

I thought this general definition was interesting, courtesy of Wordsmith:

From Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913):

Pornography \Por*nog"ra*phy\, n. [Gr. ? a harlot + -graphy.]
1. Licentious painting or literature; especially, the
painting anciently employed to decorate the walls of rooms
devoted to bacchanalian orgies.
2. (Med.) A treatise on prostitutes, or prostitution.

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I suspect that the creators of the law didn't want to be too specific, and did think that there was an exemption for serious works of literature and science: a proviso which had a coach and horses driven through it by a famous judgement by Lord Cockburn (which brought in the 'any passage that would bring a blush to the cheek of a modest young girl' standard, without regard to context or overall intent) and had a dire effect.

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fitzcamel.livejournal.com

How would you classify the Decameron in this discussion?

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