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romance/pornography
21 Apr 06
Steiner, Wendy. Venus in Exile: The Rejection of Beauty in 20th-Century Art. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2001.
These attitudes toward value produce opposite plot structures in romance and pornography. The romance plot is teleological, proceeding single-mindedly toward a much blocked and delayed end that validates all the preceding struggles. Pornographic plots, in contrast, are picaresque and meandering, characterized by desire ignited, consummated, and reignited in an endless series. . . . The two genres tend to comment on each other. Romances embed accounts of lechery—for example, the House of Fame in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene—as an ordeal or a temptation that a romance hero must overcome. Knights errant and quivering virgins, in their turn, are the most delicious targets of pornographic seduction. (108)
Steiner goes on to discuss ways in which modern artists (Joyce, Picasso, Pynchon, Warhol, and Nabokov as examples) have comingled these genres, so it would hardly be original to do so, but there may still be some fun ways to bend or blend the two (tee hee).
Posted by pzed on April 21, 2006 at 12.27pm
Categories: fragments, scripture
