Part of the explanation for our own lit’s thematic poverty obviously includes our century and situation. The good old modernists, among their other accomplishments, elevated aesthetics to the level of ethics—maybe even metaphysics—and Serious Novels after Joyce tend to be valued and studied mainly for their formal ingenuity. Such is the modernist legacy that we now presume as a matter of course that “serious” literature will be aesthetically distanced from real lived life. Add to this the requirement of textual self-consciousness imposed by postmodernism 29 and literary theory, and it’s probably fair to say that Dostoevsky et al. were free of certain cultural expectations that severely constrain our own novelists’ ability to be “serious.”
But it’s just as fair to observe, with Frank, that Dostoevsky operated under cultural constraints of his own: a repressive government, state censorship, and especially the popularity of post-Enlightenment European thought, much of which went directly against beliefs he held dear and wanted to write about. For me, the really striking, inspiring thing about Dostoevsky isn’t just that he was a genius; he was also brave. He never stopped worrying about his literary reputation, but he also never stopped promulgating unfashionable stuff in which he believed. And he did this not by ignoring (now a.k.a. “transcending” or “subverting”) the unfriendly cultural circumstances in which he was writing, but by confronting them, engaging them, specifically and by name.
It’s actually not true that our literary culture is nihilistic, at least not in the radical sense of Turgenev’s Bazarov. For there are certain tendencies we believe are bad, qualities we hate and fear. Among these are sentimentality, naïveté, archaism, fanaticism. It would probably be better to call our own art’s culture now one of congenital skepticism. Our intelligentsia 30 distrust strong belief, open conviction. Material passion is one thing, but ideological passion disgusts us on some deep level. We believe that ideology is now the province of the rival SIGs and PACs all trying to get their slice of the big green pie … and, looking around us, we see that indeed it is so. But Frank’s Dostoevsky would point out (or more like hop up and down and shake his fist and fly at us and shout) that if this is so, it’s at least partly because we have abandoned the field. That we’ve abandoned it to fundamentalists whose pitiless rigidity and eagerness to judge show that they’re clueless about the “Christian values” they would impose on others. To rightist militias and conspiracy theorists whose paranoia about the government supposes the government to be just way more organized and efficient than it really is. And, in academia and the arts, to the increasingly absurd and dogmatic Political Correctness movement, whose obsession with the mere forms of utterance and discourse show too well how effete and aestheticized our best liberal instincts have become, how removed from what’s really important—motive, feeling, belief.
Have a culminative look at just one snippet from Ippolit’s famous “Necessary Explanation” in The Idiot:
“Anyone who attacks individual charity,” I began, “attacks human nature and casts contempt on personal dignity. But the organization of ‘public charity’ and the problem of individual freedom are two distinct questions, and not mutually exclusive. Individual kindness will always remain, because it is an individual impulse, the living impulse of one personality to exert a direct influence upon another… . How can you tell, Bahmutov, what significance such an association of one personality with another may have on the destiny of those associated?”
Can you imagine any of our own major novelists allowing a character to say stuff like this (not, mind you, just as hypocritical bombast so that some ironic hero can stick a pin in it, but as part of a ten-page monologue by somebody trying to decide whether to commit suicide)? The reason you can’t is the reason he wouldn’t: such a novelist would be, by our lights, pretentious and overwrought and silly. The straight presentation of such a speech in a Serious Novel today would provoke not outrage or invective, but worse—one raised eyebrow and a very cool smile. Maybe, if the novelist was really major, a dry bit of mockery in The New Yorker. The novelist would be (and this is our own age’s truest vision of hell) laughed out of town.
So he—we, fiction writers—won’t (can’t) dare try to use serious art to advance ideologies. 31 The project would be like Menard’s Quixote. People would either laugh or be embarrassed for us. Given this (and it is a given), who is to blame for the unseriousness of our serious fiction? The culture, the laughers? But they wouldn’t (could not) laugh if a piece of morally passionate, passionately moral fiction was also ingenious and radiantly human fiction. But how to make it that? How—for a writer today, even a talented writer today—to get up the guts to even try? There are no formulas or guarantees. There are, however, models. Frank’s books make one of them concrete and alive and terribly instructive.
1996
Personal Acknowledgments
The following people deserve special thanks for their help with the foregoing: Marian Berelowitz, Karen Carlson, Mimi Bailey Davis, Susanna Einstein, Jonathan Franzen, Steven Geller, Karen L. Green, Colin Harrison, Ben Healy, Glenn Kenny, Ron Lindblom, Joel Lovell, Martin Maehr, David Malley, Bessmarie Moll, Marie Mundaca, Cullen Murphy, Michael Pietsch, Ellen Rosenbush, Lee Smith, Martha Spaulding, Harry Thomas, Monona S. Thompson, Bill Tonelli, Betsy Uhrig, James D. Wallace, Sally F. Wallace, Evan Wright, Zainab Zakari, and Jocelyn Zuckerman.
1 One porn production company, Caballero Home Video, has its headquarters in a big Van Nuys duplex whose other half is the soundstage for Beverly Hills 90210. (back to text)
2 The passive mood here’s a bit disingenuous — the release itself is announcing them. (back to text)
3 At, say, an average of 90 minutes per movie, this means that some person or persons put in 1.4 years of nonstop continuous porn-viewing. Hence your correspondents’ alternative for US males so tortured by carnal desire that they are tempted to autoneuter: Volunteer as a judge for the AVN Awards and spend 1.4 years gazing without rest at the latest in adult video. We guarantee that you will never thereafter want to see, hear, engage in, or even think about human sexuality ever again. Trust us on this. All five marginal (and male) print journalists assigned to cover the 1998 AVN Awards concur: Even just watching the dozen or so “big” or “high-profile” adult releases of the past year — Bad Wives, Zazel, A Week and a Half in the Life of a Prostitute, Miscreants, New Wave Hookers 5, Seduce & Destroy, Buttman in Barcelona, Gluteus to the Maximus — fried everyone’s glandular circuit-board. By the end of the Awards weekend, none of us were even having normal biological first-thing-in-the-morning or jouncy-bus-ride-between-hotels erections; and when approached even innocently by members of the opposite sex, we all now recoiled as from a hot flame (which made our party a kind of strange and challenging breakfast gig, according to our Sunday-AM waitress). (back to text)
4 (Mr. Peter North, in particular, delivers what seem more like mortar rounds than bioemissions.) (back to text)
5 Yes: “Software” is a funny misnomer here. It’s going to be a constant temptation to keep winking and nudging and saying “no pun intended” or “as it were” after every possible off-color entendre, of which there are so many at the AAVNAs that yr. corresps. have decided to try to leave most of them to the reader’s discretion as matters of personal choice and taste. (back to text)
6 St. Croix’s background is that he apprenticed as a mason but then couldn’t get union work. He’s got great dark satanic-looking eyebrows and has won several AVN Awards. (back to text)
7 (meaning both men habitually wear fedoras) (back to text)
8 Dick Filth reports that a couple years ago the big industry trend was Heavy Metal and that everyone at the Adult CES had very long hair and wore black tanktops and iron crosses, etc. (back to text)
9 Vivid is one of the industry’s great powers, a company famous for having billboards that sometimes cause traffic accidents in downtown LA. (back to text)
10 Here, if you’re interested, is D. Filth’s out-loud on-site peripatetic expansion re t
he camaraderie between XPlor and South Park:
XPlor is a kind of an anomaly type of thing in the porn business. By and large the industry is still run by these dim grim cigar-smoking numbnutses who’ll just stare blankly at you if you should ever even like attempt a bonmot [pronounced as one consonant-intensive word] or whatnot. You get me? In contrast to how XPlor are more of your hippieish dope-smoking bunch of Gen Xers who are always up for a good gag. Like, after Trey [Parker, the Groening-type figure behind South Park] and Farrel [Timlake] became pals [via Parker’s hanging out at XPlor to do research for his and Matt (Stone, Parker’s partner on South Park)’s Orgazmo, an upcoming movie about which your correspondents know nothing], XPlor was doing a video shoot at Buck Henry’s place [?!? Explanatory details unavailable — everyone simply acts as though Buck Henry’s place being available for hard-core porn shoots were a matter of wide and public knowledge]. Richard Dreyfuss and I think Carrie Fisher also were at the shoot [?!? But no kidding, according to Filth, who yr. corresps. rather hope has a good attorney], and, as a goof, Trey and Farrel decide to switch identities, get it? So Trey pretends to direct, doing it in like big drama-queen persona — “I want more ASS shots, goddammit!” type of thing — while Farrel hung back and pretended to take notes. Get it? Then later at one point Trey orders Farrel, as Trey, to perform — because, oh, Farrel performs sometimes too, under the name Tim Lake, Tim Lake, get it? — and Farrel does, did, puts down the notebook and phone and dis, like, robes and dives right in, which you can understand this completely freaks out the assembled legit showbiz types [!?], like, they’re like “I can’t believe the guy from South Park is having sex in front of a camera!” Then at one point Trey gives the video rig to Carrie Fisher [?!] and tells her to try and do the close-ups as they’re getting close to money [see below for defs. of industry jargon]. Get me? What a couple of yucks. [End of expansion.] (back to text)
11 The average professional lifespan of a female performer is two years. Males, though lower paid, tend to last much longer in the business — sometimes decades. (back to text)
12 Silvera, who broke in way back in the ’70s at Times Square’s old Show World, looks like a curly-haired and extremely fit praying mantis; he’s even weirder-looking now that his curls are mostly gray. He’s also famous for always showing up on the set with a small duffel bag filled with exotic vitamins and herbal and other supplements, all self-prescribed. (back to text)
13 What’s maybe even weirder is that you can then scuttle back to your hotel, if you wish, and watch Jameson and North have hard-core gymnastic sex in The Wicked One on payper-view for $9.95. (back to text)
14 Mr. Harold Hecuba, whose magazine job entails reviewing dozens of adult releases every month, has an interesting vignette about a Los Angeles Police Dept. detective he met once when H.H.’s car got broken into and a whole box of Elegant Angel Inc. videotapes was stolen (a box with H.H.’s name and work address right on it) and subsequently recovered by the LAPD. A detective brought the box back to Hecuba personally, a gesture that H.H. remembered thinking was unusually thoughtful and conscientious until it emerged that the detective had really just used the box’s return as an excuse to meet Hecuba, whose critical work he appeared to know, and to discuss the ins and outs of the adult-video industry. It turned out that this detective — 60, happily married, a grandpa, shy, polite, clearly a decent guy — was a hard-core fan. He and Hecuba ended up over coffee, and when H.H. finally cleared his throat and asked the cop why such an obviously decent fellow squarely on the side of law and civic virtue was a porn fan, the detective confessed that what drew him to the films was “the faces,” i.e. the actresses’ faces, i.e. those rare moments in orgasm or accidental tenderness when the starlets dropped their stylized “fuck-me-I’m-a-nasty-girl” sneer and became, suddenly, real people. “Sometimes — and you never know when, is the thing — sometimes all of a sudden they’ll kind of reveal themselves” was the detective’s way of putting it. “Their what-do-you-call… humanness.” It turned out that the LAPD detective found adult films moving, in fact far more so than most mainstream Hollywood movies, in which latter films actors — sometimes very gifted actors — go about feigning genuine humanity, i.e.: “In real movies, it’s all on purpose. I suppose what I like in porno is the accident of it.”
Hecuba’s detective’s explanation is intriguing, at least to yr. corresps., because it helps explain part of the deep appeal of hard-core films, films that are supposed to be “naked” and “explicit” but in truth are some of the most aloof, unrevealing footage for sale anywhere. Much of the cold, dead, mechanical * quality of adult films is attributable, really, to the performers’ faces. These are faces that usually appear bored or blank or workmanlike but are in fact simply hidden, the self locked away someplace far behind the eyes. Surely this hiddenness is the way a human being who’s giving away the very most private parts of himself preserves some sense of dignity and autonomy — he denies us true expression. (You can see this very particular bored, hard, dead look in strippers, prostitutes, and porn performers of all locales and genders.)
But it’s also true that occasionally, in a hard-core scene, the hidden self appears. It’s sort of the opposite of acting. You can see the porn performer’s whole face change as self-consciousness (in most females) or crazed blankness (in most males) yields to some genuinely felt erotic joy in what’s going on; the sighs and moans change from automatic to expressive. It happens only once in a while, but the detective is right: The effect on the viewer is electric. And the adult performers who can do this a lot — allow themselves to feel and enjoy what’s taking place, cameras or no — become huge, legendary stars. The 1980s’ Ginger Lynn and Keisha could do this, and now sometimes Jill Kelly and Rocco Siffredi can. Jenna Jameson and T.T. Boy cannot. They remain just bodies. (back to text)
15 Whether the framers of the US Constitution might, in their very wildest imaginations, have been able to foresee things like Anal Virgins VIII or 900-666-FUCK when they were thinking of expression they wanted to protect is obviously a thorny question and outside this article’s purview. (back to text)
16 (set previously in 1994, by one Amber Chang, at 251 males) (back to text)
17 According to Dick Filth, the imbroglio started when Hecuba crashed the party and was spotted by Ms. Nici Sterling, about whom Mr. Hecuba had said in a recent film review that it was “unclear whether she’d win any beauty contests, but she sure could suck cock.” It was apparently the beauty contest crack that had hurt Ms. Sterling’s feelings, and on seeing H.H., and suffering the relaxation of social inhibitions for which entertainment parties of all kinds are famous, the starlet made a beeline for Hecuba, uttered two high-volume expletives, and attempted to strike the print journalist with an open-handed right cross, whereupon H.H. had the presence of mind (aided perhaps by the six-inch heels that made Ms. Sterling’s balance precarious and forced her to telegraph the blow) to grab her hand before it could knock his trifocals off. Whereupon in turn Ms. Jasmin St. Claire, seeing Harold Hecuba clutching the upraised hand of an agitated and off-balance Nici Sterling, performed a set-pick off the three-foot width of Ron (“the Hedgehog”) Jeremy and leapt on Hecuba’s back and deployed what Filth averred was a pretty authentic- and impressive-looking LAPD-style chokehold, prompting Hecuba to whirl 360º in an effort to dislodge Ms. St. Claire while he still had the cerebral oxygen to do so, inadvertently whipcracking Ms. Sterling into Randy West and mussing Mr. West’s coiffure for the first time in industry memory and (to the best of Filth’s recollection) simultaneously dislodging H.H.’s special autotint trifocals and sending them out in an arc across the room and into the forbidding décolletage of Ms. Christy Canyon, never to be recovered (the glasses) or even seen ever again.
Filth also reports that the Sterling Incident had been just either the iceberg’s tip or the camel’s straw so far as Jasmin St. Claire and Harold Hecuba were concerned. H. Hecuba had evidently also conducted a recent interview with J. St. C. in which she had confided t
hat she was taking the rather staggering amount of $ she was making from World’s Biggest Gang Bang 2 and investing it in a (pretty dubious-sounding) string of pornographic gumball machines all up and down the CA coast, and Hecuba had chosen to include this confidence in the published interview, and Ms. St. Claire was reportedly furious that Hecuba had publicized her “secret investment strategy,” believing that now everyone and his brother were going to want to get into adult-themed-gumball-vending and it would glut the market, and so Jasmin St. Claire had had it in for Harold Hecuba for some time, and may well have viewed the Sterling Incident more as a convenient excuse than as the rescue of what appeared to be an endangered colleague — D. Filth says that debate over the motives behind the Chokehold-360º-Hair-Cleavage fiasco has been vigorous and multiform for 20 months now.