MINERVA ARMATA
Reblogged from
English Translation by Google
"Eroticism is one of the bases of self-knowledge, as indispensable as poetry."
(Anaïs Nin)
CATHERINE MILLET
& SHAMELESS WRITING
The approach with which I deal with this topic must be evaluated from a gnoseological point of view, I do not consider those who approach the pornographic novel, whether it is erotic or obscene, driven by playful necessity (which also often arises and is an integral part of such readings) but of those who approach it with the same intent with which one approaches any novel: the pleasure of reading and discovery.
For a woman, reading an erotic novel written by a man is a way of understanding, a mentality, an attitude, trying to enter an imagination that is mostly unknown to her; with the female erotic novel it often happens that there is a process of identification or detachment generated by the underlying question: Would I ever do such a thing?
I guess it's more or less the same for men. However, when one confronts the pornographic novel compared to a detective novel, for example, one enters a world in which personal involvement is much stronger, our desires, taboos, tastes, our inhibitions condition the reading; even when the tale is played out in the way of fiction. In the detective novel we can enjoy the plot, be the policeman or even identify with the mind of the murderer but with the reassuring idea that none of us will ever be a murderer. In the pornographic novel we know that sooner or later a situation could arise before us and the identification no longer becomes a hypothesis but a real fact. None of us assume we are a killer but we know we are a lover.
As I mentioned in this blog, literature is mostly about men narrating women, and although they often have sex with women, women have played a rather passive role in all of this, in bed and at the desk (in reality this passivity is more imaginary than real but especially as regards literature it was not easy for women to find a publisher; if we are talking about pornography, then, given the difficulties of men, imagine for them). The more pornographic literature has been a terrain of men who talk to other men, it could have been amusing reading for prostitutes in a brothel but we will have to, perhaps, get to the great ladies of the eighteenth century and the libertine spirit so that some would dare to show off knowing this literature, later write it!
In the words of Nietzsche, and with the title of an erotic novel written in the feminine “Man shall be trained for war, and woman for the recreation of the warrior: all else is folly.”
All the more if the women started talking about the contents of that recreation, all the more if the women started talking about what caused this activity of "recreation" in them. Obviously, the evolution, the struggles for equality have begun to upset certain attitudes and we can see this since women now speak and write about sex.
Yet something tells me that not everything is so simple, the author of Histoire d'O Dominique Aury writes under a pseudonym (Pauline Réage) and although already well known in the literary world with other works she will admit only in 1994 (the book is from 1954) to being the author; the diaries of Anaïs Nin already famous for her erotic novels will be published after her death, and this will probably cushion the scandal that a book like Incest should cause.
And let's get to the point: the annoyed reaction or the scandal. I happened to talk about Catherine Millet's novel, The Sexual Life of Catherine M., and I found myself mostly faced with a wall of negative judgments, such as: disturbing, a list of fucks, without an ending or rather a landing point, poorly written.
The comparison that is immediate to me, given the character of "confession", is with Nin's diaries: I have always been an admirer of Anaïs Nin, of her psychological attention to sex, to her own sexuality, of her elegant writing in which even the crudest elements, although not mystified, take on a lyricism without being cloyingly sentimental; cultured, cosmopolitan woman, she expresses the culture of her time (born in 1903).
The equally cultured woman Millet, art critic, expresses the culture of her own time (born in 1948) in which the path started by women like Nin has undergone further evolution, where the psychological aspects of sexuality are not abandoned but can afford a more shameless language. And although Millet's narrative is undoubtedly even more explicit than Nin's, it cannot be accused of being crude or incapable of even psychological analysis of one's own sexuality. Certainly where Nin is more lyrical, Millet remains prosaic, their viscerality is expressed on two different registers.
Then the doubt arises that female erotic literature still today, in the minds of some, must adapt to the mentality of women. Already; but what should be the character of a woman? What is her mentality?
The thought that is overwhelmingly revealed to me is that we are still judging the female mentality from the aspect of the male erotic-sentimental mentality and fantasy. A jumble of suppositions and impositions settled over the centuries that still today is part of the same female imagination, often also influencing the erotic way of putting oneself in the feminine. The educated woman will not express herself or behave like a whore, nor will the whore think of being educated; the woman will be available to experience forbidden erotic sensations as long as she is guided by a pygmalion to whom she is romantically linked; or else it will be a virago indifferent to love and, perhaps, also to sex, icy in the pleasure of making men suffer. There is always a combination.
And then Millet can be read as a catalogue of fucks because this woman does not hide a sexuality that leads her to try everything: multiple intercourse, prostitution, sometimes degradation; it can be read as inconclusive because it does not close a narrative (and how could it if it is still alive and why should it if there is the good and dear habit of the open novel that leaves you the doubt and the freedom to finish the story yourself); it can be said that her book is poorly written because it narrates her sexuality as she feels it, as she experiences it and acts on her own skin.
Beyond taste, which I would never allow myself to judge, in a completely impartial way Millet's writing is curated, the narration of her sexual adventures, also in the considerations of her physical and mental reactions, deepened and ordered through her own system mental and aesthetic (it would be enough to read the titles of the chapters). Millet's is not a declared philosophical system like that of De Sade which, among the descriptions of various couplings, lays the foundations for the upheaval, even through sexual perversion, of a society that does not approve; or at least it doesn’t admit to. The fact that it is disturbing (and I confess that despite my reading it at the age of thirty it created various questions in me) means that perhaps that way of talking about one's sexuality touches an uncovered sensitivity, because let's tell ourselves the truth in centuries of erotic literature we have become accustomed to couplings of any kind and the aforementioned De Sade drags us into his Hundred & Twenty Days of Sodom in a hallucinated cupio dissolve of cruelty. That jolt comes perhaps and often from the freedom of a woman, cultured and intelligent, who appears mentally above average, who describes herself as she "degrades" (the judgement is in quotation marks because it is not mine but of society) giving herself in a lay-by for all the men who want to use her in line. Yet she has her dignity in narrating her own sexual needs or demands by putting on a book a name that corresponds to a face. Nobody feels disturbed by the thoughts of the anonymous queue with member in hand who says nothing and has nothing to say, if not perhaps some crude comment on the girl available. But it is a question of mentality.
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