mary gordon says

at the behest of my superiors, i am posting my formerly retracted concerns regarding the following quote from mary gordon's otherwise not-as-terrifyingly (insert adjective here - i'm thinking "papal") essay on moral fiction.

she says:

“Fiction that aspires to the condition of art must work in a way exactly opposite to the way pornography works. Pornography offers images to elicit a very direct and very predictable response: sexual stimulation resulting in orgasm. The pornographer knows his market, and knows to what use his product will be put. Fiction writers have no such luxury."

while i was otherwise quite pleased with the article (particularly as it dealt with moral complexity, role models, and john gardner's perhaps overly rigid stance on moral fiction), this bit of business seems wrong to me. i'm struck by the apparent oversimplification of pornography, the over-complication of literary art. maybe i'm nit-picking for the sake of argument. maybe i've taught too many sections of 102.

BUT:

it seems to me that gordon simplifies the line from viewing the picture in the magazine to having the orgasm by deleting masturbation, which would sort of be the equal of deleting the reader's imagination and participation in creating meaning in the text (visualizing the scenes, hearing the dialogue, et cetera). filling in the blanks. she also acts as if market for pornography is much less complicated and diverse than it probably is. i would imagine that the pornographer - much like gordon, when she had her oddball experience on the beach - runs into some surprises in his or (more often than i imagine we are led to believe) her audience.

does an anecdote of a racist/sexist woman mary gordon met on the beach provide enough compelling evidence to support her argument? by that rationale, would not a cache of pornography under dahmer's bed lead us to believe that a pornographer faces the same dilemma gordon faced in that instance, only on a much greater and more morally complex scale?

i'd like to think i strive to do something more sophisticated and more interesting than pornographers. but it's not exactly the opposite, anymore than writing a resume is exactly the opposite. i put words together in order to achieve an effect. it's just that what i do strives to be "serious literary art," and what they do strives to be pornography.

and the suggestion that this woman on the beach saying "that book changed my life" was something about "putting the book to (an unpredictable) use" (while pornographers know what use their work will be put to) makes me uncomfortable. i'm not sure pornographers count on being held up as examples of misogyny, and i certainly don’t think they count on having their work described as art: camille paglia, although routinely and dismissively labeled a “reactionary nut” by feminist scholars who disagree with her, is one feminist scholar, at least, who has actually described pornography as “art.” in any case, i hope i’m right in assuming that pornographers do not expect men to kill and rape because of their products, and i know i'm right when i say that - if someone does rape and murder after looking at pornography - it's not because of the pornography.

so i'm not sure that when one woman says "that book changed my life," it really means that she "put (gordon's) book to use."

what use, exactly? is gordon being a bit self-important, here? what is meant by "use." we know pornography is often "used" as visual stimuli for masturbation. it is also used to teach classes in gender theory. so as writers we should perhaps be sensitive to what words mean, and what they can mean.

i do not know that i agree with camille's assertion that pornography is art. it seems a bit far fetched, if only because, like gordon, paglia makes too broad a generalization. but i think it's disingenuous to suggest that literary artists are unlike pornographers because they don't try to elicit direct and predictable responses from their readers. they may not always be predictable to the readers, but the artist tries to predict them, at least to one degree or another, yes? to plan, to manipulate, to play puppet master. i mean, maybe not on the first draft, but on revisions, i often try to augment what seems to be there, in the hopes i will be able to "break the reader's heart." perhaps that's why my writing seems a bit stifled and wooden and dull at times. my failing, of course, but i don't think it's like hemingway and faulkner and camus had no idea how they wanted their readers to react. and, come to think of it, the reader does - it seems to me - go into literary work looking for something specific: "heartbreaking... funny and sad... tragic and beautiful... deeply moving..." these are all things that show up in the blurbs on the back of literary novels, especially the ones that win awards and/or sell. granted the response sought - by both reader and writer - may at times be more complicated than the response to pornography (what do the blurbs that advertise pornography say? not "heartbreaking," perhaps, but some equally trite and packaged bit of rhetoric, to be sure).

so, really, the response to literary art is not so much more complicated. especially not if it's successful, right? i mean, faulkner said "the human heart in conflict with itself," and i believe that, so i think that - intellectually and emotionally - there's often a great deal of complicated business that leads to the response we seek as literary artists. but the response itself - "the horror, the horror," - is often quite visceral, and often not much more complicated than orgasm. ideally, it's an almost - or, even better - an actual physical response. laughter, tears, a sinking or swelling of the heart.

and who knows what kind of fantasy a man or - let's be fair – woman is having when he or she is "using" pornography to masturbate? maybe he or she has a rich fantasy world, stocked with dialogue in the laundry room? in the garden? the back of the car? a wedding, a divorce, make up sex in the grass by a dirt road in soso mississippi.

is mary gordon suggesting that all people who look at pronography are truck drivers? that all truck drivers are simpletons? jerking off machines? with simple worlds? what about people who watch the qvc channel? what generalizations can we make about them?

aren't these generalizations that we, as "literary artists," should avoid?

so the audience issue is a troubling one for me. because i think it's safe to say that a tour of the tables at awp can offer us a pretty good view of our own market, as can a look at awp chronicle, or even a glance at the slick mags (new yorker, atlantic, harper's, esquire), and some of the titles on the bestseller list (though perhaps less often), and the prize winners and nominees, the list of new york times notable books, et cetera.

is it a more complicated market? we don’t know, because the market for pornography is WAY further out on the margins (not in terms of the money it makes, but in terms of whether or not the people who buy it want to show their faces in public as buyers of pornography).

finally, it strikes me as odd that gordon begins her essay by pointing out that literary work is "on the margins." it seems a bit contradictory (and perhaps - i don't know - i want to say arrogant, or maybe just "dim") to procede from point a ("we're on the margins") to point b: "we don't have the luxury of knowing our market." it's like saying "my readers are generally the kind of people who read literary work," then saying, "i don't have the luxury of knowing who my readers are." culinary translation would be: "our customers like sauteed chicken with dill, but we can't count on them to eat poultry." fashion equivalent: "our customers shop at banana republic, but we don't really know whether or not they're looking for the type of clothing we sell at banana republic." huh?