Why isn't erotica considered literature?

[Arafura]

I had an interesting class today. We had some reading to do, some particularly juicy letters from a baron to his friend, describing all the sensual delights one could get up to in Venice in the 1890s.

A student raised her hand and said that these letters should never have been published. When questioned, her reason: "They're not literature...they're just, erotica." The sneer as she said the word conveyed her sentiment perfectly: that erotica is less than literature, that graphic sex has no place in Literature, capital "L".

My question - why not? Why the devaluation? Here's a guy who writes about sex in a beautifully poetic way. I don't have the text in front of me, but I will post quotes later.

In the meantime, I'd love to hear anyone's thoughts/ruminations on the relationship of erotica to literature.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

Do you know of any erotica that tells a story?

 

[Jenny_Jackson]

This is a typical reaction. Erotica is oten confused with Pornography. Some of the finest Erotica can be found in mainstream literature. John Updyke comes immediately to mind.

I'm saddened that since this came up in a classroom, the instructor/professor didn't ask for a discussion of definitions.

 

[rgraham666]

Because sex is bad, and not something serious people do either in literature or life.

Or so say the 'intellectuals'. Personally I think they're full of shit.

Also it's a power thing. Their expertise is their power. The power to decide what is 'proper' and 'good'. Something like sex is too inconsequential in their minds to be 'proper' and 'good'.

 

[BlackShanglan]

(With some apologies to Raymond Williams, because I really do resist that whole "high literature" / "low literature" divide thingy ...)

I'd say it depends on the erotica, of course, but if it's just a lush and stimulating description of sex, I think I'd rate it as less impressive than the great works of the western canon for the same reason that I'd feel that way about a piece that was just a lush and stimulating description of dinner or a bath or a sumptuous bit of velvet. Good description is good for what it is, but if it doesn't try to communicate anything other than "Here's a stimulating little sensual thrill," then it hasn't set very complex goals for itself. It hasn't asked to be taken seriously.

I have no objection whatsoever to simple, light, pleasurable stuff with no complex goals in mind; I write a fair bit of it myself. I simply cede a higher place to that which is both well-written and pleasurable and also attempts to achieve greater complexity of characterization, plot, theme, and style.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

Would a cookbook or auto repair manual be literature? No. Getting it on is not a story. No one reads John Updike.

 

[English Lady]

It's scary. Sex is primal and intimate alot of people just don't want to handle the emotions brought about by erotica -they're pure and powerful and so people mock it instead.

Ithink this is part of the attitude, anyway.

 

[Arafura]

Jenny,

Don't want to sadden your day! The discussion continued from there, and many people chimed in to question her strict definition of literature - including the professor.

It is curious to me that after so many famous authors (James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence and many more) have incorporated sex and tropes from pornographic texts that erotica still retains many of the taboo elements of the 19th century. Authors using pen names, for example.

If I write a story, and it has graphic sex in it, yet is still a story, why is that worse? I've even seen this happen in the Story Review section of this site, with authors told to tone down the sex parts.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

Erotica DOES NOT address any profound truth about humanity. There are no revelations of any consequence in erotica. Its just grooving.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

ARAFURA?

What profound wisdom is there in LADY CHATTERLY'S LOVER?

 

[rbijon]

I had an interesting class today. We had some reading to do, some particularly juicy letters from a baron to his friend, describing all the sensual delights one could get up to in Venice in the 1890s.

A student raised her hand and said that these letters should never have been published. When questioned, her reason: "They're not literature...they're just, erotica." The sneer as she said the word conveyed her sentiment perfectly: that erotica is less than literature, that graphic sex has no place in Literature, capital "L".

My question - why not? Why the devaluation? Here's a guy who writes about sex in a beautifully poetic way. I don't have the text in front of me, but I will post quotes later.

In the meantime, I'd love to hear anyone's thoughts/ruminations on the relationship of erotica to literature.

You should check out some Italian Literature written in the 1800's. I am sorry I can not remember right now the authors name, but this particular author wrote some very erotic, but humorous short stories. & of course we all remember reading the Canterbury Tales.
The truth is some erotic is finely written; example, Ann Rice, but most is trash. Fun but not well written.

 

[BlackShanglan]

Because sex is bad, and not something serious people do either in literature or life.

Or so say the 'intellectuals'. Personally I think they're full of shit.

Also it's a power thing. Their expertise is their power. The power to decide what is 'proper' and 'good'. Something like sex is too inconsequential in their minds to be 'proper' and 'good'.

Or it could possibly have nothing to do with sex and everything to do with the goals and nature of the piece itself.

If sex is bad and something that serious people don't do either in literature or life, what are the Canterbury tales doing on pretty much anyone's list of canonical western works? What about 1984? Orlando? Gulliver's Travels, in which we're treated to a description of Gulliver sitting naked astride the nipple of a giantess? What about "The Wasteland" and its searing insight into the barren, listless sex of the typist and her clerk, or Elizabeth and her paramour knees-up in a canoe? Or D. H. Lwarence's "Tortoise Shout" and its speculation upon a tortoise in the act of orgasm? Let's not even get into Yeats's "The Herne's Egg."

There's sex all through the material constantly recommended by experts. There's nothing less stuffy than Ginsberg's "Howl" or the "squeezing sperm" scene in Moby Dick, and no expert worth his or her salt denies it. Honestly, I think that's what half of them are in it for.

 

[BlackShanglan]

If I write a story, and it has graphic sex in it, yet is still a story, why is that worse? I've even seen this happen in the Story Review section of this site, with authors told to tone down the sex parts.

Just personally, I try to keep in mind John Steinbeck's thrice-blasted turtle.

When I was a wee foal, I was tortured with The Grapes of Wrath, of which some people would gush with great enthusiasm, "He can spend three pages describing a turtle crossing a road!" That was intended to be a compliment to his great gift of description.

To me, that's not a great gift of description. It's an annoying distraction. Part of the flow of any good work of literature is its ability to use rhythm and proportion to speak to us. When a writer spends a long time lingering over an image, s/he is communicating its importance to the reader. Long, lingering descriptions are common to erotica, but less common to character interaction, plot movement, etc. - so when an author slams on the breaks to linger over lengthy and explicit sex scenes, it can effect the rhythm of the piece as a whole and communicate to the reader that the sex is the most important thing in the book.

Sometimes it is. That God-awful revelation in A Severed Head needs time and focus to suck the reader in, and we really need to know that actual passionate sexual activity is occurring because the next piece of information we're going to get is that the two people involved are brother and sister. But when sex is had as part of everyday life, not the central lynchpin of the story and all experience, then it needs to accept the same sort of proportional treatment that other activities get. Otherwise, it ends up feeling as oddly sudden-focused as if the author decided for no reason other than a love of good food to describe every meal in explicit, luscious, lingering detail simply because it's yummy.

 

[CeriseNoire]

I find sex to be a useful characterization tool. I just see it as one of those things that say a lot about a person; from the way a person gets into a sexual situation, to their thoughts about it, to even the way they come--it's all very telling. It can be used for internal and external conflict, climax, turning point, etc. within the framework of a larger story.

Power, betrayal, trust, need, want, and various dichotomies of basic human elements can also be expressed through sex.

Just my 2 cents.

 

[gauchecritic]

Erotica can be literature, it just most often isn't. In much the same way that sci-fi, who-dunnits and westerns are more often not, they are rather just simply stories.

Quite a few AHers strive towards literature, preferring to write plot and characterisation and themes and &c (quite a few non-AHers too) mainly because the consensus seems to be that sex without a story just doesn't cut it in readability.

Whether it's literature or not is down to posterity.

 

[Liar]

Because most of it is pretty lousy.

 

[jomar]

Just personally, I try to keep in mind John Steinbeck's thrice-blasted turtle.

When I was a wee foal, I was tortured with The Grapes of Wrath, of which some people would gush with great enthusiasm, "He can spend three pages describing a turtle crossing a road!" That was intended to be a compliment to his great gift of description.

To me, that's not a great gift of description. It's an annoying distraction. Part of the flow of any good work of literature is its ability to use rhythm and proportion to speak to us...

Thank you. It's why I finally screamed and gave up on James Mitchner when he couldn't get off a cup of coffee after five frickin' pages.

ETA: I like gauche's take. But add that when people talk about LITERATURE they often mean BIG ISSUES addressed in the writing.

 

[Belegon]

There are five questions that always must be answered for a complete story.

Who
What
Where
How
Why


Of these, the most interesting is "Why"

and the answer, very often, in literature and in life... is sex.

Deny who we are if you want. Sex is a part of life, is a part of us. Sex sells for a reason. Sex scares for a reason. Sex motivates for a reason.

Erotica DOES NOT address any profound truth about humanity. There are no revelations of any consequence in erotica. Its just grooving.

BULLSHIT!

Sex is one of the most profound and basic truths about humanity. It is as great and powerful a motivator of historic and pivotal events as greed, power, hunger, love...

And those pivotal events can be of any scale, personal or global.


Sex IS a profound truth about humanity. The use of this basic drive to fuel things other than pure reproduction is one of the most interesting things about our nature. It is impossible to truly know if it is unique to humans without better interspecies communication.

The denial of "base instincts" is not a necessary goal of human self-actualization. That belief is, in my opinion, a fallacy and a road that will lead to a conclusion that has not considered all relevant information.

Sex, as much as altruism, as much as greed, as much as war, as much as the desire for freedom, as much as the will to survive...

These things have led us to the creation of culture, of civilization, of leisure... and will lead us to the stars.

 

[xssve]

Because most of it is pretty lousy.

Pretty much what I was going to say, i/e/, for the same reason pornography isn't considered Cinema - or your basic Arnold Shwartzenegger movie for that matter - it's a movie, not a film.

Anyway, it doesn't matter, erotica can be literature, even great literature - the Magic Mountain is basically a long drawn out story of unrequited love, and highly erotic.

Really, erotic fiction i closer to literature than Romantic fiction, which, for all it's tastefulness, is bubblegum to your average critic.

In "real"literature, there are no happy endings, everybody dies miserably, that's pretty much the difference - The Story of O is considered literature for example, Beach Blanket Butt Bimbos is not.

 

[rgraham666]

As usual, gauche has it right.

I just write the stuff. Others can read it, classify it, love it, hate it, line the bottom of a hamster cage with it. That's their choice. I get paid whatever.

 

[jomar]

Sex is one of the most profound and basic truths about humanity. It is as great and powerful a motivator of historic and pivotal events as greed, power, hunger, love...

And those pivotal events can be of any scale, personal or global.


Sex IS a profound truth about humanity. The use of this basic drive to fuel things other than pure reproduction is one of the most interesting things about our nature. It is impossible to truly know if it is unique to humans without better interspecies communication.

The denial of "base instincts" is not a necessary goal of human self-actualization. That belief is, in my opinion, a fallacy and a road that will lead to a conclusion that has not considered all relevant information.

Sex, as much as altruism, as much as greed, as much as war, as much as the desire for freedom, as much as the will to survive...

These things have led us to the creation of culture, of civilization, of leisure... and will lead us to the stars.

How often do people not think about sex? Not often - sucker bet. I knew a counselor who said he'd seen a high school boy for therapy. The boy said, "I can't wait to graduate high school so I don't think about sex all the time." I asked my friend it he broke it to the student gently.

 

[BlackShanglan]

In "real"literature, there are no happy endings, everybody dies miserably, that's pretty much the difference - The Story of O is considered literature for example, Beach Blanket Butt Bimbos is not.

I don't think that the presence or absence of a happy ending really has much to do with what is considered literature - and what's fascinating about that is that whether you define "literature" as "excellent works of fiction addressing central themes of human existence" or "stuff that academics say is literature," that's still true. It's true that tragedies have often held the focus of drama, but then in the same time periods there have also been comedies, historical plays, and heroic epics. The ending is practically the only sufferable and vaguely happy part of Grapes of Wrath, not to mention Wuthering Heights. It is, after all, difficult to get any more foundationally "literary" than "The Odyssey" - and that's got a happy ending as well.

 

[3113]

Semantics!

My question - why not? Why the devaluation?

Well, the answer, of course, is that it IS literature. Anything IS or can be literature that has the elements required to be defined that way. Like thematic layers, use of symbols, poetic style, etc., etc,. etc.

But those who decide which works of writing are allowed to be given that elite label are often horrible snobs who don't want to be associated with "common" things--including those forms of fiction that common folk read. To be fair, the whole idea of a literary cannon was created so that certain works would be taught to college students and not vanish from the face of the earth because everyone else was reading popular works of fiction and it was feared that literary works (with a capital "L") would become extinct. But once you label something as being important and worthy of great minds, once you create an exclusive club for these exclusive works and make membership cards hard to come by, you end up with this strange, semantic game.

I tell this story often: I went to a lecture about science fiction. The lecturer said that Frankenstein was science fiction, which, by definition, it certainly is. But one of the professors at the lecture went ballistic! Frankenstein, he argued, was "LITERATURE" and therefore could not be Science Fiction...because Science Fiction was not literature!

The argument made no sense then and still doesn't. But you get the gist of it. Something worthy of being given the literature-membership card could NOT be anything so "common" and lowly as "science fiction." Likewise, when Handmaid's Tale came out, the author insisted it wasn't "sci-fi" because she wanted literary folk reading it--and they wouldn't have if they'd thought it was science fiction; sci-fi was pulp literature for the masses, the sort of thing read by fans of Star Wars--not great minds. The same has been believed of mystery novels, horror novels, comic books, and, yes, erotica. They're considered to be low and common fare, not worthy of literary minds. Yet I distinctly remember making my way through Gravity's Rainbow by going from pornographic scene to pornographic scene. It had some of the most graphic BDSM I'd ever read at the time, no whitewashing it. Yet it had been given the "Literature" membership card.

It's a familiar game; you call the elegant woman a "Mistress" or "Lady of the Night" rather than a prostitute or whore. This semantic elevation allows you both to pretend that she'd not doing exactly the same thing as the girl on the street corner. In short, the argument you had in class was bogus. Erotica is erotica is erotica--it may be well written or poorly written, brilliant and "literary" or cheezy and popular, but it's still erotica. HOWEVER, those who like to say they read "Literature" don't want anyone to think that they're reading something so common as "erotica" so when an Anais Nin novel or D.H. Lawrence novel or Henry Miller novel grabs their attention as "literature" they simply say, "It's not Erotica!" Which is a lie. But it's how they keep the literary club *seeming* exclusive rather than admitting that it's membership isn't much different from that of the corner bar filled with rift-raft.

 

[rgraham666]

Ooo. Nice one, 3. Much better than my little screed, where I was trying to say much the same thing.

http://bestsmileys.com/clapping/2.gif

 

[cloudy]

Well, the answer, of course, is that it IS literature. Anything IS or can be literature that has the elements required to be defined that way. Like thematic layers, use of symbols, poetic style, etc., etc,. etc.

But those who decide which works of writing are allowed to be given that elite label are often horrible snobs who don't want to be associated with "common" things--including those forms of fiction that common folk read. To be fair, the whole idea of a literary cannon was created so that certain works would be taught to college students and not vanish from the face of the earth because everyone else was reading popular works of fiction and it was feared that literary works (with a capital "L") would become extinct. But once you label something as being important and worthy of great minds, once you create an exclusive club for these exclusive works and make membership cards hard to come by, you end up with this strange, semantic game.

I tell this story often: I went to a lecture about science fiction. The lecturer said that Frankenstein was science fiction, which, by definition, it certainly is. But one of the professors at the lecture went ballistic! Frankenstein, he argued, was "LITERATURE" and therefore could not be Science Fiction...because Science Fiction was not literature!

The argument made no sense then and still doesn't. But you get the gist of it. Something worthy of being given the literature-membership card could NOT be anything so "common" and lowly as "science fiction." Likewise, when Handmaid's Tale came out, the author insisted it wasn't "sci-fi" because she wanted literary folk reading it--and they wouldn't have if they'd thought it was science fiction; sci-fi was pulp literature for the masses, the sort of thing read by fans of Star Wars--not great minds. The same has been believed of mystery novels, horror novels, comic books, and, yes, erotica. They're considered to be low and common fare, not worthy of literary minds. Yet I distinctly remember making my way through Gravity's Rainbow by going from pornographic scene to pornographic scene. It had some of the most graphic BDSM I'd ever read at the time, no whitewashing it. Yet it had been given the "Literature" membership card.

It's a familiar game; you call the elegant woman a "Mistress" or "Lady of the Night" rather than a prostitute or whore. This semantic elevation allows you both to pretend that she'd not doing exactly the same thing as the girl on the street corner. In short, the argument you had in class was bogus. Erotica is erotica is erotica--it may be well written or poorly written, brilliant and "literary" or cheezy and popular, but it's still erotica. HOWEVER, those who like to say they read "Literature" don't want anyone to think that they're reading something so common as "erotica" so when an Anais Nin novel or D.H. Lawrence novel or Henry Miller novel grabs their attention as "literature" they simply say, "It's not Erotica!" Which is a lie. But it's how they keep the literary club *seeming* exclusive rather than admitting that it's membership isn't much different from that of the corner bar filled with rift-raft.

Amen.