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lotesse(at this time of the night?)
first part of some sort of thought-like thing: Fredric Jameson argues that scifi uses "elaborate strategies of misdirection" to allow fiction to address the present. We modern things, he says, can't get to the world around ourselves straightforwardly, because every apparatus of our lives serves to otherwise channel our attention/energy. So we take our world, wrap it up in space ships and warp drives, and fling it out toward Saturn in order to gain enough perspective to see the bloody thing. Which makes a certain amount of sense (corrected typo:sex).
I'm in research mode at prisint, reading about masturbation (in connection with reading/reverie more than strict biopolitics). And contemporary criticism keeps struggling with the repressive hypothesis: the old way of thinking about sex oppression, which was to assume that sexual material was actively suppressed and silenced and excess sexual activity squirted out the top in the form of porn/decadence/whathaveyou. Which the Victorians get way too much of. But they all talk a blue streak about sex - as do we. Repression in that way is manifestly not what we're looking at. The thing about Victorian novels that makes them easy to characterize as repressed is the way they displace sexuality - Jane Eyre comes into Rochester's room in her nightgown and the bed is on fire, and a little later the hawthorn tree is riven by lightning, but there's not a bit where the text actually straight-up tells you that they want to fuck/are fucking. Which looks like repressive eruption, sure, but is also kind of an amazing textual erotic technique. Victorian sexual misdirection is really hot - and it's entirely possible that they knew that, and were doing it ON PURPOSE. So the buttoned-up puritans might actualfax be the most skilled pornographers of all, utilizing a sort of Jamesonian misdirection to successfully write about sex. Like the gorgeous bit in Midnight's Children when Rushdie describes the "indirect kiss" the bollywood lovers give one another on screen: "kiss[ing] - not one another - but things." Which is really hot.
Considering the existence of the Bad Sex in Fiction Awards, this doesn't seem to be something that we liberated luckies are having any great success in. I'd always thought of the eroticism boost of indirection as a sort of positive side effect, the last little bit in Pandora's box that makes it not all horrible - they couldn't write about sex, but at least their novels still managed to be hot. But now I'm wondering if they didn't really have something going on there, something that we've actually kind of lost. Turning over the traditional relationship of past to present a bit - kind of cool & attractive as a concept.
first part of some sort of thought-like thing: Fredric Jameson argues that scifi uses "elaborate strategies of misdirection" to allow fiction to address the present. We modern things, he says, can't get to the world around ourselves straightforwardly, because every apparatus of our lives serves to otherwise channel our attention/energy. So we take our world, wrap it up in space ships and warp drives, and fling it out toward Saturn in order to gain enough perspective to see the bloody thing. Which makes a certain amount of sense (corrected typo:sex).
I'm in research mode at prisint, reading about masturbation (in connection with reading/reverie more than strict biopolitics). And contemporary criticism keeps struggling with the repressive hypothesis: the old way of thinking about sex oppression, which was to assume that sexual material was actively suppressed and silenced and excess sexual activity squirted out the top in the form of porn/decadence/whathaveyou. Which the Victorians get way too much of. But they all talk a blue streak about sex - as do we. Repression in that way is manifestly not what we're looking at. The thing about Victorian novels that makes them easy to characterize as repressed is the way they displace sexuality - Jane Eyre comes into Rochester's room in her nightgown and the bed is on fire, and a little later the hawthorn tree is riven by lightning, but there's not a bit where the text actually straight-up tells you that they want to fuck/are fucking. Which looks like repressive eruption, sure, but is also kind of an amazing textual erotic technique. Victorian sexual misdirection is really hot - and it's entirely possible that they knew that, and were doing it ON PURPOSE. So the buttoned-up puritans might actualfax be the most skilled pornographers of all, utilizing a sort of Jamesonian misdirection to successfully write about sex. Like the gorgeous bit in Midnight's Children when Rushdie describes the "indirect kiss" the bollywood lovers give one another on screen: "kiss[ing] - not one another - but things." Which is really hot.
Considering the existence of the Bad Sex in Fiction Awards, this doesn't seem to be something that we liberated luckies are having any great success in. I'd always thought of the eroticism boost of indirection as a sort of positive side effect, the last little bit in Pandora's box that makes it not all horrible - they couldn't write about sex, but at least their novels still managed to be hot. But now I'm wondering if they didn't really have something going on there, something that we've actually kind of lost. Turning over the traditional relationship of past to present a bit - kind of cool & attractive as a concept.
no subject
Date: 2011-11-27 06:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-11-27 01:06 pm (UTC)Metaphorising the undepictable sexual/erotic doesn't stop with the Victorians - cite here to C20th movies involving waves crashing on shore, trains rushing into tunnels, etc - or Garbo's Queen Christina getting sensual with the bed curtains.
I note that your citation of successful erotic metaphor is C Bronte: given the preponderance of male writers in the nominations for the contemporary Bad Sex Award, I think one might want to interrogate e.g. what kind of erotic metaphors were happening in Dickens, e.g. (some weird grotesquerie going on there, I think)
no subject
Date: 2011-11-27 01:45 pm (UTC)i so believe the sexual symbolism is there, no question, but i don't think (speaking as a writer here tho of course I"M NO CHARLOTTE BRONTE OMG) that the writer would have thought that out and intentionally put it in there. Maybe on revision they would have tinkered with it, noticed it, but the critic way of approaching the meaning of a text and the writer way of approaching the meaning of a text are so very different, in my experience.
I think it is true that science fiction allows us to treat our own problems differently, but again, writers approach this (in my experience anyway) from the standpoint of plot, and it's freeing to not be in Earth Timez in order to play with the What Ifs. Really great writers can extrapolate from a beginning scenario or setup and get to amazing places in SF.
But all this happens at a conscious analytical level, using tools of historical context, etc., from the scholarly side, and I think that so rarely happens in the fiction PROCESS.
You make me want to root around for writers who can do both, like Umberto Eco, and see what he says about it.
Thanks for the thinky as always.