What Do Women Want? (13 page)

We stand at a crossroads now when many former libertarians and liberals suddenly want to ban sexual materials. The old dream of the avant-garde that freeing sexual oppression would free human beings from their inhibitions and limitations has withered. We think we are sadder and wiser about what sexual freedom leads to, but in truth we never really
tried
sexual freedom. We only ballyhooed its simulacrum.

I want to bypass a reappraisal of the so-called sexual revolution for the moment and look instead at the impulse to create pornography and the role it plays in works of art. We owe it to ourselves to
understand
the impulses toward pornography, eroticism, scatology, before resuming our contentious public debate about their uses and whether or not they should be restricted.

I use the terms “eroticism” and “pornography” interchangeably, because I have come to the conclusion that only snobbery divides them. At one time I thought of pornography as purely an aid to masturbation, eroticism as something more high-toned and spiritual, like Molly Bloom’s soliloquy in
Ulysses.
Now I doubt that distinction. Every visual artist—from the anonymous sculptor of the bare-breasted Minoan snake goddess to Pompeii’s brothel muralists to William Turner and Pablo Picasso—has been drawn to the erotic and the pornographic. So have literary artists throughout history. Sometimes the urge has been to stimulate the genitals; sometimes the urge has been to stimulate the mind. Since the mind and the genitals are part of one organism, why distinguish between masturbatory dreams and aesthetic ones? Surely there is also an aesthetics of masturbation, which our society is too sex-negative to explore. At any rate, it is time to go back to the origin of the pornographic impulse and explore the reasons why it is so tenacious.

Mark Twain’s
1601
is a perfect place to start. Although Mark Twain lived in the Victorian age and knew he could never publish his pornographic fancies officially, they nevertheless preoccupied his energies, and he was so proud of them that he sought to disseminate them among his friends.

In Mark Twain’s case, pornography was an
essential
part of his oeuvre because it primed the pump for other sorts of freedom of expression. It allowed him the freedom to create a new sort of American vernacular, first-person narratives that drew on American speech patterns and revealed the soul of America as never before. Experiments with pornography, scatology, eroticism, allowed him to delve into the communal unconscious and create some of the most profound myths on which American culture is based.

Mark Twain’s notorious
1601 . . . Conversation as It Was by the Social Fireside, in the Time of the Tudors,
fascinates me because it demonstrates Mark Twain’s passion for linguistic experiment and how allied it is with his compulsion toward “deliberate lewdness.”

The phrase “deliberate lewdness” is, of course, Vladimir Nabokov’s. He always linked the urge to create pornography with “the verve of a fine poet in a wanton mood” and regretted the dullness of contemporary porn, where “action has to be limited to the copulation of clichés.” Motivated by such lackluster lust, the connoisseur of pornography is impatient with all attempts at verbal dexterity and linguistic wit. One is reminded that Henry Miller failed miserably as a paid pornographer because he could not leave the poetry out, as his anonymous patron wished. Anaïs Nin fared better with
Delta of Venus
and
Little Birds.
For Henry Miller pornography mattered precisely
because
it aroused him to poetry!

Henry Miller’s attitude toward the pornographic is an ancient one. Poetry and pornography went hand in hand in Roman, Renaissance, and eighteenth-century literature. The pornographic flights of Catullus, Ovid, Petronius, and Juvenal never sacrificed style. Boccaccio, Villon, Rabelais, Cervantes, Shakespeare, John Donne, and Andrew Marvell all delighted in making porn poetic. Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, and Laurence Sterne were equally drunk with lewdness and with language.

No creator should have to bother about “the exact demarcation between the sensuous and the sensual,” says Nabokov. Let the censors worry about such hypocritical distinctions. The literary artist has another agenda: to unfetter the imagination and let the wildness of the mind go free. The pornographic verve of ancient literature was his inspiration: In this he would have recognized Mark Twain as a brother.

Choosing to write from the point of view of “the Pepys of that day, the same being cup-bearer to Queen Elizabeth,” in
1601
Mark Twain was transporting himself to a world that existed before the invention of sexual hypocrisy. The Elizabethans were openly bawdy. They found bodily functions funny and sex arousing to the muse. Restoration wits and Augustan satirists had the same openness to bodily functions and the same respect for eros. Only in the nineteenth century did prudery (and the threat of legal censure) begin to paralyze the author’s hand. Shakespeare, Rochester, and Pope were far more fettered
politically
than we are, but the fact was that they were not required to put condoms on their pens when the matter of sex arose. They were happy to remind their readers of the messiness of the body. They followed a classical tradition that often expressed moral indignation through scatology. “Oh Celia, Celia, Celia shits,” writes Swift (in one of his so-called unprintable poems), and he writes it as if she were the first woman in history to do so. Swift is debunking the conventions of courtly love (as well as expressing his own deep misogyny), but he is doing so in a spirit that Catullus and Juvenal would have recognized. Satire lashes the world to bring the world to its senses. It does the dance of the satyrs around our follies.

Twain’s scatology serves this purpose as well, but it is also a warm-up for his creative process, a sort of pump-priming. Stuck in the prudish nineteenth century, Mark Twain craved the freedom of the ancients. In championing “deliberate lewdness” in
1601,
he bestowed the gift of freedom on himself.

Even more interesting is the fact that Mark Twain was writing
1601
during the very same summer (1876) that he was “tearing along on a new book”—the first sixteen chapters of a novel he then referred to as “Huck Finn’s autobiography.” This conjunction is hardly coincidental.
Huckleberry Finn
and
1601
have a great deal in common besides linguistic experimentation. According to Justin Kaplan in
Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain,
“both were implicit rejections of the taboos and codes of polite society and both were experiments in using the vernacular as a literary medium.”

What is the connection between
Huck Finn
and
1601
? As a professional writer whose process of composition often resembles Twain’s (intermittent work on ambitious novels, writing blocks during which I put one work aside and devote myself to other projects, and periods of lecturing and travel), I think I understand Twain’s creative strategy. He was sneaking up on the muse so that she would not be forewarned and escape.

Every author knows that a book begins to live only when the voice of its narrator comes alive. You may have plot ideas, characters may haunt you in the night, but the book does not fly until the sound of its voice is heard in the author’s ear. And the sound of one book’s voice is as individual as the sound of a child’s voice. It may be related to that of other offspring, but it always has its own particular timbre, its own particular quirks.

In order to find the true voice of the book, the author must be free to play without fear of reprisals. All writing blocks come from excessive self-judgment, the internalized voice of the critical parent telling the author’s imagination that it is a dirty little boy or girl. “Hah!” says the author. “I will flout the voice of parental propriety and break free!” This is why pornographic spirit is
always
related to unhampered creativity. Artists are fascinated with filth because we know that in filth, everything human is born. Human beings emerge between piss and shit, and so do novels and poems. Only by letting go of the inhibition that makes us bow to social propriety can we delve into the depths of the unconscious. We assert our freedom with pornographic play. If we are lucky, we
keep
that freedom long enough to create a masterpiece like
Huckleberry Finn.

But the two compulsions are more than just related: They are
causally
intertwined.

When
Huckleberry Finn
was published in 1885, Louisa May Alcott put her finger on exactly what mattered about the novel even as she condemned it: “If Mr. Clemens cannot think of something better to tell our pure-minded lads and lasses, he had best stop writing for them.” What Alcott didn’t know was that “our pure-minded lads and lasses” aren’t. But Mark Twain knew. It is not at all surprising that during that summer of high scatological spirits Twain should also give birth to the irreverent voice of Huck. If
Little Women
fails to go as deep as Twain’s masterpiece, it is precisely because of Alcott’s concern with pure-mindedness. Niceness is always the enemy of art. If you worry about what the neighbors, critics, parents, and supposedly pure-minded censors think, you will never create a work that defies the restrictions of the conscious mind and delves into the world of dreams.

1601
is deliberately lewd. It delights in stinking up the air of propriety. It delights in describing great thundergusts of farts, which make great stenches, and pricks that are stiff until cunts “take ye stiffness out of them.” In the midst of all this ribaldry, the assembled company speaks of many things—poetry, theater, art, politics. Twain knew that the muse flies on the wings of flatus, and he was having such a good time writing this Elizabethan pastiche that the humor shines through a hundred years and twenty later. I dare you to read
1601
without giggling and guffawing.

In the last few years a great deal of pious, politically correct garbage has been written about pornography. Pornography, the high-minded self-anointed feminist Catharine MacKinnon tells us, is tantamount to an assault on women and actually causes rape.
¹²
Pornography, MacKinnon’s comrade in arms Andrea Dworkin asserts, is a
form
of rape.
¹³

A chorus of younger feminists has at last come along to counter these unexamined contentions. Pornography, says Susie Bright, is necessary to liberation. Pornography, says Sallie Tisdale, is desired by women as well as men. Pornography, says Nadine Strossen, is guaranteed by the Bill of Rights.

But what about the Bill of Rights for artists? Could Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs of lilies have existed without his photographs of pricks? Could Henry Miller have grasped human transcendence in
The Colossus of Maroussi
without having wallowed in the sewers of Paris in
Tropic of Cancer?

I say no. Without farts, there are no flowers. Without pricks, there are no poems.

This is not the first time in history we have seen an essentially libertarian movement like feminism devolve into a debate about purity. The suffragists of the last century also turned into prudish prohibitionists who spent their force proscribing drink and policing pure-mindedness. One might argue that a concern with pure-mindedness is fatal not only to art but also to political movements.

Why does this urge toward repression crop up in supposedly libertarian movements? And why does this puritanical urge to censor the artist keep recurring? The artist needs to be free to play in the id in order to bring back insights for the ego. But the id is scary. It yawns like a bottomless
vagina dentata.
It threatens to bite off heads, hands, cocks, and to swallow us up in our darkest impulses. Society fears the id even as it yearns for the release to be found there. We retreat from dream and fantasy even as we long to submerge in them. Make no mistake about it: The primal ooze of creation
is
terrifying. It reminds us of how little control we have over our lives, over our deaths. It reminds us of our origins and inspires us to contemplate our inevitable annihilation.

Pornographic art is perceived as dangerous to political movements because, like the unconscious, it is not programmable. It is dangerous play whose outcome never can be predicted. Since dream is the speech of the unconscious, the artist who would create works of value must be fluent in speaking the language of dream. The pornographic has a direct connection to the unconscious.

I suspect this was why Twain was having such fun with
1601
the very summer
Huck Finn
’s adventures were burgeoning in his brain. The filth of
1601
fertilized the garden of Huck’s adventures. Like any literary artist who is in touch with his id, Twain instinctively knew that sex and creativity were interrelated. He could not fill
Huckleberry Finn
with farts, pricks, and cunts, but he could play in
1601
and prepare his imagination for the antisocial adventures he would give his antihero in the other book.

In his classic essay “Obscenity and the Law of Reflection,”
¹⁴
Henry Miller suggests that “when obscenity crops out in art, in literature more particularly, it usually functions as a technical device. . . . Its purpose is to awaken, to usher in a sense of reality. In a sense, its use by the artist may be compared to the use of the miraculous by the Masters.” Here Miller means the
spiritual
masters. He believed that Christ and the Zen masters resorted to miracles only when such were absolutely necessary to awaken their disciples. The artist uses obscenity the same way. “The real nature of the obscene lies in its lust to convert,” Miller says. Obscenity is used in literature as a sort of wake-up call to the unconscious. Obscenity transports us to “another dimension of reality.”

So
1601
served an important creative function for its author. It awakened his freedom to experiment, play, and dream outrageous dreams.