Forbidden Texts: Erotic Literature and its Readers in Eighteenth- Century France (review)

“To read a pornographic novel and to be subject to its influence is perhaps in some way to experience something of the essence of literature” (75): Jean Marie Goulemot’s study of erotic literature claims to strip the novel bare, exposing its seductive narrative structure as one basically rigged to rival and outclass reality. The erotic variety (not differentiated here from the obscene) merely does the job better, producing its heated effect upon the reader with astonishing immediacy, speed, and compellingness.

In six often probing but occasionally repetitious chapters, Goulemot explores the forms this relatively timeless genre, with its finite permutations, assumed in eighteenth-century France. “The Importance of Erotic Literature in the Eighteenth Century” affirms its undeniable omnipresence in the play of erotic complicity between licit and illicit texts, in the increasing verbal and visual sexual aggressiveness of political cartoons in the course of the century, and in the sheer quantity of pornographic materials peddled by the colporteurs. A meditative mood pervades the chapter on “The Effects of Reading Erotic Literature.” Using a print by Ghendt, Le Midi, of a young woman abandoned to her lascivious reading as a point of departure, Goulemot observes the operations of the reader’s “unidentified or even noticed” gaze (33), by which the “lover (of prints) . . . steals in secret from those bodies seized by desire” (35). He here passingly distinguishes between libertine fiction which seduces its object, and pornography, which assumes near universal accessibility. Then, concentrating on readerly response, he notes the patent analogy between the breathless intensity imposed by perusal of La Nouvelle Héloïse and that produced by a pornographic plot. Recognizing the limits of pornographic writing, he observes its resistance to all blurring of its basic scenario of fevered desire and release: Sade “fails” of such single-mindedness in his preachiness; his heroes just talk too much. Although heterosexual couplings may not entice gay readers, Goulemot sees that for the erotic text, no role or position is fixed: polymorphous desire defies gender categories and conventions. In fact, he affirms that lavish metaphors like those from the gallant vocabulary so ubiquitous in these texts (we find altars of Venus even in Sade) all but kill the extracultural, even bestial impulse that drives erotic prose. But he does not ask why erotic novelists were so enamored of their lavish use.

Goulemot completes his essay with: two chapters; a survey of paratextual practices of erotic fiction; titles, publishers (e.g. the Vatican Press), places of publication, (e.g. Couillopolis), epigraphs and frontispieces; and, the climax of his work, on the structure of erotic narratives. Here, while recapitulating much of his previous argument, he argues in more serried fashion that the erotic fiction’s hero, he of the furtive, distanced gaze, though perpetually absent, is subject to perpetual renewal of sexual energy: “Everything is reduced to a sort of action painting, to an unformulated discourse of jouissance ” (134).

Goulemot’s study, although certainly perceptive and useful to students of eighteenth-century fiction, nonetheless illustrates the limits of an approach exclusively centered on narrative. His abstract narratology sheds no light on such issues as the era’s conceptualizations of nature, of the sacred (hence of the will to blasphemy that informs so much of eighteenth-century pornography), or of its idea of knowledge, all of which impinge on the depiction of the erotic. If he notes that the Enlightenment used the erotic to serve its militant ends—it certainly served to lift the veils of Christian obscurantism about sexuality—he does not bring us any closer to grasping exactly how this basically extracultural art form weighed into the Enlightenment project. After all, the Voltaire, who in his Dictionnaire philosophique denounces those who engage in ecstatic states and take their dreams for reality as futile beings, mere enthousiastes, was also the author of La Pucelle d’Orléans. Neither does Goulemot’s study shed much light on Romanticism’s reaction against the eighteenth-century’s...