Beyond Explicit: Pornography and the Displacement of Sex

9: Sex, Trauma, and the Authenticity Effect

9 Sex, Trauma, and the Authenticity Effect The Author Is Deceitful Above All Things? The scandal surrounding the unveiling of JT LeRoy—which I outlined in the introduction to this section—is intriguing for a number of diverse reasons. First, the strength of feeling provoked by the hoax, within the literary and intellectual community as well as within fan cultures, is perhaps somewhat remarkable. Figures such as the contemporary avant-garde writer Dennis Cooper, the novelist Joel Rose, and the radical pro-sex activist Susie Bright, for example, displayed evident irritation in response to the hustle, with Bright announcing that if “you’ve read Sarah, and The Heart is Deceitful, go unveil Dennis Cooper’s The Sluts and view the original source. Dennis is writing fiction, masterful fiction, which Leroy [sic] churned into an autobiographical persona and fan-imitation.”1 In the article that broke the scandal, Rose is reported as viewing the hoax as “a betrayal” (Beachy), whereas Cooper is said to “express anger [. . .] about how these revelations might affect JT’s fans” (Beachy). That this hoax should be capable of eliciting such intensity of feeling may seem remarkable considering twentieth-century developments in thinking about the concept of the author. After all, the importance of this figure has been widely questioned and steadily undermined by theoretical discourse for many decades now. As early as 1946, the New Critics were asserting that, as William K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley put it, “the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art” (1374–1375). Roland Barthes’ later claims that “the author is never more than the instance writing” (145), and that “a text is not a line of words releasing a 157 158 Beyond Explicit single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-God) but a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash” (146), are by now largely familiar to almost everyone with a basic undergraduate training in literary theory. The prominence of the author, her centrality and relevance to understandings of the text, has been challenged for many years, so why should the revelations about LeRoy’s identity provoke such a reaction? Why should a hoax that is founded on a simple disjunction between the actual author behind and the assumed authorial persona of a particular set of texts prove capable of stirring up so much controversy and fascination? In addition to these cultural shifts regarding the role of the author, it is worth remembering that the (related) cultural frameworks provided by postmodernism can further complicate understandings of authorial identity. Indeed, the notion of identity itself can be problematized by certain postmodern positions, as we see the possibility of the real or the authentic being increasingly questioned in relation to all areas of human existence, even as its importance is emphasized. As Neville Wakefield remarks, the postmodern world “is a world in which the gravitational pull of the ‘real’ has been thrown into crisis, as simulation increasingly corrodes any chance of spontaneous or unreflexive faith in any ability to ‘situate ’ ourselves within a new landscape of instability and flux” (116). The self, and its relationship with the world, is rendered increasingly unstable and complex, and the notion of the true or deep self is positioned as naïve and largely untenable in the face of postmodernism’s impossibly inflated standards of the authentic. Many postmodern thinkers view the self as being as mediated and unreal as the rest of the contemporary social world. Daniel Albright, for example, challenges the idea that the self is authentic, stressing the importance of the conscious and unconscious operations of mediation when it comes to shaping the self: We suppress extraneous parts of our being in order to show some lithe, smooth, shapely, consistent mask to the outer world—and perhaps to ourselves as well. How much of our remembered self is carefully, scrupulously edited in order to conform to some vision of how we would like our self to appear? If we speak of a remembered self, we should also speak of an editorial self that consciously or unconsciously selects the memories that wrap us round with the sense of our dig- 159 Sex, Trauma, and the Authenticity Effect nity, our erotic power, our nonchalance, our good will toward mankind, all those pleasures that our self-consideration...