One-Handed Reading List

I found a little bit of money in my account the other day. There was a book sale at uni. I think you can see where this is going.

While I didn't go all-out bug-fuck crazy - that is, I left the Phaidon coffee table books on the trestle table where they lived after slavering madly over at least five of them - I did come away several kilos heavier in books. And it seems that at the moment I have a one-track literary mind, because apart from a Lester Bangs anthology and a Sylvia Plath volume this is what I bought:

The Rachel Papers, Martin Amis
Crash, J.G. Ballard
The Key, Junichiro Tanizaki
Les Enfants Terribles, Jean Cocteau
Fear of Flying, Erica Jong
The Sexual Life of Catherine M., Catherine Millet
Sex Drives: Fantasies of Fascism in Literary Modernism, Laura Frost.

I bought the Amis because I remember reading a review that was quite passionate about it. Unfortunately, I can't remember whether the reviewer loved it or hated the book, and now I suspect that perhaps they hated it, but I've always meant to read some Amis at least and this one is quite slim. The others I bought partly because I was in a saucy mood but mostly because I have been giving serious thought recently to a thesis based around sex, subjectivity and the abject in twentieth-century literature, and they seem to get more or less consistantly referenced in the readings I've been doing. (Ho ho, it's one-handed reading because you need the other hand to take notes! It's funny because I mean academic wanking and not wanking in the literal sense!)

I'm not sure that Sex Drives is really going to resolve many ideas for me, since it's based around Sontag's idea of "fascinating fascism", and (from a quick read of the introduction anyway) seems to focus the erotic appeal of fascism as sublimated by the subject - that is, cultural influence on the erotic imaginary - rather than the idea that libidinal urges are repeated at a national level, sublimated themselves as political discourse. That's not really a quibble. It's interesting to read something that approaches the topic in a way I probably never would, and certainly no-one is obliged to go around spouting Freud - it's way more complex than that. But at the moment I tend to believe that the political will of a country is reflective of its inhabitants' psycological nature, and not the other way around.

Anyway, there's an interesting-looking chapter called '"Every woman adores a Fascist": Margeurite Duras, Sylvia Plath, and Feminist Visions of Fascism' which should provide food for thought, particularly as Duras is one of the writers I want to focus on. If my French were better I'd even consider doing a comparative study between Duras and Pauline Reage. I guess the thing I'm getting at, which the French do better that I can, is exploring the link between sex and the broaching of subjective stability - either by the abasement (and therefore transcendence) of the subjective self as in The Story of O, or by sex's explicit (ha!) relationship to the abject and so its temporary abolition of psychological "order". I guess what I'm getting at is something like "jouissance" being translated as "orgasm" in the English version of L'Amant. I am getting at a thesis-length version of that very translation.

Also, when I say subjectivity, I mean I would want to look at both the character's psychological subjectivity as created by the author, and also the language in which sex scenes are written and the critical distance the author/narrator maintains - which I guess is more Lacan than Freud. It would be both. Am I even making sense anymore?

Dear God - this pseudo-intellectual yearning for a theoretical analysis of dirty stories is making me realise how much I've been missing study, and how slack my faculties have become from a few months of inactivity. It's a bit scary, and I think I need to go and read some Kristeva and stop posting my first-year-level observations (there's a lot of tension between the subject and the abject! sex both informs and is informed by politics!) on the internet lest any academics be reading this and laugh at me. You know - as bored academics are wont to do. In the meantime, why don't you go read a dirty novel? It's good for the constitution, you know.