Above the pulp-line — but the exact boundaries are impossible to draw — lies the world of erotica, of sexual writing with literary pretensions or genuine claims,” writes George Steiner in Language and Silence, a collection of his essays dating from the 1950s and 1960s. “This world is much larger than is commonly realized.” (Below the pulp-line, of course, is plain pornography.) There is much more of this kind of writing than one might be aware of, Steiner says, because little of it is published or disseminated. “[T]here is hardly a major writer of the nineteenth or twentieth centuries who has not, at some point in his career, be it in earnest or in the deeper earnest of jest, produced a pornographic work”.
A glimpse of this heaving but silent world is afforded to us Indians in a collection, assembled by Ruchir Joshi for Tranquebar Press, of short, allegedly erotic new fiction by 13 South Asian writers. (An interview with Joshi was carried on this page two weeks ago.) Several are big names. But even among the experienced writers, Steiner’s “pulp-line” is not marked — the contributions range from pornography with the barest slip of narrative (Samit Basu) to psychological games (Niven Govinden) to the deftly sensual and oddly lingering (Rana Dasgupta). As to whether there’s any literature in this collection, well, I’m old-fashioned about things like that.
Steiner begins by pointing out that “Despite all the lyric or obsessed cant about the boundless varieties and dynamics of sex, the actual sum of possible gestures, consummations, and imaginings is drastically limited.” In other words, there’s little truly new to say about the sex act itself, whether the description is set in elite or lumpen prose. Those very few writers who do manage to “enlarge our actual compass of sexual awareness” — including, Steiner says, Dostoevsky, Proust, Mann and Nabokov — do so by other means than that of describing the sex itself.
“After fifty pages of ‘hardening nipples’, ‘softly opening thighs’ and ‘hot rivers’ flowing in and out of the ecstatic anatomy,” writes Steiner in anguish, “the spirit cries out, not in hypocritical outrage, not because I am a poor Square throttling my libido, but in pure, nauseous boredom. Even fornication can’t be as dull, as hopelessly predictable as all that!”
Boy, do I agree. If you’re going to read anything but the best, take it in small doses. Steiner’s essay was occasioned by the publication of The Olympia Reader, a collection of extracts from various books published by Maurice Girodias in the 1950s. Girodias ran the Olympia Press in Paris, which was in its time the foremost publisher of quality porn — porn with pretensions. Some of his contributors were or became stars. Girodias was the first to recognise Nabokov’s Lolita as something special, J P Donleavy’s The Ginger Man, some works of Jean Genet, and so on.
One other who essayed on the basis of Girodias’s collection at roughly the same time was Gore Vidal, the brilliant American whose notoriety was at least partly based on his terrific promiscuity. In his essay “On Pornography”, Vidal writes that “Mr. Girodias’s sampler should provide future sociologists with a fair idea of what sex was like at the dawn of the age of science.” Before, “sex was a dirty business since bodies stank and why should any truly fastidious person want to compound the filth of his own body’s corruption with that of another?” Modern sanitation and medicine took the risk out of sex (this was pre-AIDS), so Americans’ real and imagined sexual lives could come a mite closer to alignment.
Now that middle-class Indians can count on reasonable sanitation and medical care, is our sexual universe opening up? Is hypocrisy easing? Is Ruchir Joshi’s book a sign of the times? Yes, perhaps, and yet... its overwhelming banality suggests that our sexual imagination is still impoverished. Perhaps we’re still at the talking stage: the doing, the literature, may or may not follow.