Gaetan Brulotte and John Phillips, editors
ENCYLOPEDIA OF EROTIC LITERATURE
Two volumes, 1,104pp. Routledge. £225.
978 1 57958 441 2
Dallying with these youths is like seeing wolves beneath scattering cherry
blossoms, whereas going to bed with prostitutes gives one the feeling of
groping about in the dark beneath the new moon without a lantern”, as Ihara
Saikaku, the seventeenth-century Japanese short story writer put it. The
Encyclopedia of Erotic Literature takes one into some relatively unfamiliar
sexual territories – Japanese, Chinese, Arab, Zulu, Thai and Catalan. Some
of the biographical entries are so strange that I wondered if some of these
writers had not been made up. (It is common practice in reference books to
insert a bogus entry or two in order to establish copyright in any future
plagiarism case in court.) Was Pierre Albert-Birot a real person? Did he
really write Les Six Livres de Grabinlour (1991)? In its first book,
Grabinlour is “an indulgent observer of the sexual activities, from passing
moments including a queen and a cowherd, a marchioness and ‘a luxury hotel
negro’ to a king and shepherdess . . . . In the second book, Grabinlour is a
courteous host when the Angel Gabriel spends twelve hours in Paris, largely
comprised of eating, drinking and sex”. And so on.
Gershon Legman, the scholar tramp and author of Unprintable Ozark Folklore,
sounds pretty fishy, too: “Over his long career he championed origami,
attacked the initiation rites of the medieval order of the Knights Templar,
critiqued the typography of the fifteenth-century printer William Caxton,
translated Ubu Roi by Alfred Jarry, and compiled a bibliography on the
economist David Ricardo, but he devoted himself chiefly to the study of
sexual humor and folklore”. Then there are René Depestre, the erotic voodoo
novelist, and Felipe Guaman Pomo de Ayala, the Incan essayist. The Chinese
Dengcao Heshang Zhuan (“The Candlewick Monk”), a long novel about a little
fellow who leaps out of candles and expands to fill the desires of the women
he falls on, has one of the strangest plots I have ever come across.
I also finished my reading of these two volumes with the feeling that sex was
a lot less fun than I had hitherto supposed. Even thinking about sex has
become difficult and it is being made more difficult year by year. For
example, the American writer Pat Califia’s work “promotes lust in all its
forms and her work contributes to the growing theoretical complexity about
sexuality, both in relation to queer studies and the pornography debates”.
The Argentinian writer Julio Cortázar’s “works narrate a desire for an
impossible plenitude beyond the binary oppositions and hollow conventions
which structure mundane bourgeois reality”. The novelist Kathy Acker’s
narrators “look directly into and through the bodies of desire in ways that
shock traditions of reading and invent political realities that rage against
the law of genre”. Acker made “books dangerous again” and “her writing
breaks apart the infrastructure of capitalism and patriarchy”. Georges
Bataille is a key maître à penser for many of the contributors in this
reference book and, for Bataille, “sexuality is anguish”. The Marquis de
Sade is at least as popular among intellectuals looking for guidance on sex.
Surrealists feature prominently in the Encyclopedia, which is ironic when one
considers what a narrow-minded puritan André Breton was. In general, the
entries tilt towards the intellectual, the magical realist, the
transgressive and the gay. In the article on the novelist Jack Fritscher,
Fritscher is quoted: “The gay erotic writer is to gay non-erotic writers
what Ginger Rogers was to Fred Astaire: gay erotic literature does
everything gay literature does, but it does it backwards and in high heels
adding to its Olympic degree of difficulty and pleasure”. This is a striking
but puzzling metaphor. What sort of shoes is the non-gay erotic writer
wearing and for what sort of dance?
There are 546 entries in this Encyclopedia and over 400 contributors,
including some well-known academics and writers. This is an exceedingly
serious work of reference and, despite the occasional burst of postmodern
pretension, the general quality of the entries is high. The thematic
subjects have been intelligently chosen. They include articles on syphilis
as a literary muse, the rhetoric of seduction, confession and guilt, fairy
tales, science fiction, slash fiction, grisettes, somatopia and furniture.
The (very interesting) article on furniture concludes as follows: “In the
fin-de-siècle, eros crosses over into sickness, and the furniture is caught
up in the epidemic: the chaise lounge [sic] itself is sick with desire and
pleasure. As the dominant notions of pleasure changed over time, so did the
furniture”.
For my taste, far too many obscure French hacks of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries have been awarded entries. To judge from the
Encyclopedia, France leads the world in the production of erotic literature,
with China a poor second. Just as every country should have its own airline,
so it should have its own pornography. Holland, The Happy Hooker
notwithstanding, “has produced but few writers of erotica of its own whose
works have been able to stand the test of time due to their inherent quality
and/or the extent of the scandal they caused”. Ireland, meanwhile, is “not a
country readily associated with the erotic”. Arabic and Persian erotica (the
area I am most familiar with) is well covered by learned and capable
authorities (except that I am not sure that all the erotica ascribed to the
sixteenth-century Egyptian religious scholar Jalal al-Din al-Suyuti really
is by him). It is good to come across Zakani’s definition of a “virgin” as
“a noun with no referent”. The articles on Persian erotica by Paul Sprachman
and Dick Davis relay many good things, including “the puff of desire” that
rises from the pages of the romantic epic Vis and Ramin, a description of
Vis’s brilliantly orchestrated accidental striptease, a defence of the
eroticism of the chador, and a quotation from a medieval mirror for princes
to the effect that boys are best for summer and girls for winter.
But I had been hoping that the Encylopedia’s coverage would be trashier. The
Canadian novelist Robertson Davies once remarked of pornography that it was
“rather like trying to find out about a Beethoven symphony by having someone
tell you about it and perhaps hum a few bars”. While there are many who read
erotic literature in order to get some sort of ersatz sexual pleasure out of
the reading, there have always been plenty of young people who read the same
books simply in order to discover what sex is. In the Encyclopedia’s rather
good article on “Women’s Magazines”, Janice Winship is quoted: “It was
disappointing that my mother had only Women’s Weekly. Mrs Marryat gave
little away on her problem page. But I used to love the romance and
adventure of the serials . . . mainly because of one (or so I remember it)
highly erotic scene in which the heroine lets down her sari to reveal and
offer up her nakedness to the man she loves”.
The Encylopedia’s entry on Pierre Choderlos de Laclos observes that “no
instruction in the mechanics of sex can be obtained from reading Les
Liaisons dangereuses, outside of the fact that it is often performed in bed
and often at night”. Most novels about initiation into sex do not perform
that task for their readers. I remember that in the 1950s and early 60s, it
was jolly difficult to learn about sex from reading novels. Books like
Peyton Place, Angélique and Forever Amber gave little away, though the
undressing scene in Richard Mason’s The World of Suzie Wong was more
helpful.
There are some odd omissions in the Encyclopedia, among them, Naguib Mahfouz,
(known to Egyptian schoolboys as “the sex teacher”), the lyrically erotic
John Updike and Andreas Embirikos, author of the fantastic sexual odyssey
The Great Eastern (published in Greek in 1990) and an expert on Edgar Allan
Poe’s necrophilia. And surely Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities is
one of the great erotic novels of the twentieth century? The volumes would
also have benefited from tighter copy editing. René Khawam (not Khawan)
translated Nafzawi into French. Mario Praz is credited with “The Romantic
Irony”, a critical study I would dearly love to read, and I am credited with
translating Là-Bas, whereas I merely wrote an introduction to the Dedalus
edition of that classic novel by J.-K. Huysmans.
Robert Irwin’s For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and their
enemies was published in 2006. He is the Middle East editor of the TLS.
