Hogg

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Hogg

Samuel R. Delany

FOR MICHAEL PERKINS

THE SCORPION GARDEN

Editor’s Note: Hogg, the novel “The Scorpion Garden” prefaces, is Delany’s second experiment in pornography. The first, Equinox, was published by Lancer Books as The Tides of Lust in 1973. Maurice Girodias of The Olympia Press expressed interest in Hogg before he quit publishing; no other publisher, however, has stepped forward to repeat M. Girodias’ offer. At present, there appears little likelihood that Hogg will be published.

—Douglas Barbour

“But how, Mr. Auden,” the interview from Life continued, “do you know if what you are reading is really pornography?”

“That’s simple,” replied the poet. “It gives me an erection.”

Questions of “author’s intentions,” “the leer of the sensualist,” and “lewd and lascivious thoughts” aside, I am content with this as the informal emblem, if not the formal definition, of pornography—with all its contingent ambiguities: What is pornographic for X may not be not be pornographic for Y. What is pornographic for Z at six o’clock may not be pornographic for Z at quarter to seven. What is pornographic for the reader may not have been pornographic for the writer; and vice versa.

Hogg is a work of pornography—that is, it was pornographic for the writer at the time of its writing. Rereading the many-times reworked manuscript, however, it strikes me that, in many places, it accomplishes many things I should like to see in any novel and—you must allow for the writer’s bias towards his latest work—in the rest is preparing to, or recovering from, accomplishing them, with varying skill. Yet, it is only a novel.

Somehow, with such material, or, rather, material from such volatile places in the psyche, one is surprised it is no more.

It does not twitter, bong, flash nor, in general, show any signs of life other than aesthetic. After all that was undergone in its creation—after all, it is pornography—one might expect the manuscript itself to quiver and vibrate beside the typewriter, sending out rays to alter the lives of passersby on the street! But, while it is pornography, it is only a novel. And the pornographic novel is only a novel of a particular type.

Two years ago (well after Hogg’s initial draft, and well before its final) I listened to a member of the Académie Française, at a small New England University, deliver a lecture (I translate the title freely): “Sade, The Compleat Bourgeois.” It was a lecture of great humour, quite a tour de force. To have belabored, during our discussion following, the fact that its main points, well embodied in its title, stood against all historical evidence, as well as the literary and scholarly consensus of the past three hundred years, would have been to attack wit with a jackhammer. But when our discussion gave way to the inevitable sherry party, where the professor received our compliments, someone did remark, now that our avowedly socialist scholar had finished with his dismissal of the Divine Marquis as a mere bourgeois moralist: Granted Sade’s bourgeois morality, perhaps his particular type of it is the only admirable aspect of the bourgeoisie—the aspect which, when one bourgeois recognizes it in a second, the second is immediately clapped into jail or an asylum; for it is that aspect which can ignited the fuel of revolution garnered by the world’s oppressed.

To define any of this more rigorously, we must, of course, throw out the initial premise and start again seriously—Sade was an aristocrat. But that leads me from, not to, my point.

Pornography is didactic. That is one of its intrinsic qualities—a quality that has more to do with the type of attention we pay to it than the intention of the writer. Better, then, a pornographer like Sade who at least tries, however clumsily, to take advantage of this quality and, more importantly, takes responsibility for what he preaches. This is certainly preferable to the bulk of modern pornographers who, convinced they are writing healthy, liberating, sexually un-hung-up entertainments, are actually espousing, when their work is examined, the most conservative and reactionary Weltanschauung, one that no Victorian patriarch would have argued with.

The didactic purpose of Sade’s major work, that diptych of novels the first of which has been ubiquitously available in one form or another since I learned to read, and the second of which has been nearly unobtainable since its composition (only paragraphs of it had been translated into English as late as 1968), was “to bring to birth the New Woman.”

And what stranger sister volumes are Justine and Juliette!

For almost three centuries, people have taken the former as the virtual synonym for pornography. For much of the same period, people could never quite agree whether or not the latter was even extant.

Justine, or the Miseries of Virtue, for three hundred-odd pages, depicts a young woman who believes passionately that the myths of Womanly Virtue and Female Honor are sacred to God; she suffers every conceivable abuse and indignity at the hands of society in the impossible attempt to live up to these ideals till, moments after she finishes recounting the pathetic comedy of her life story to her sister, Juliette, she is struck down by lightning—by the God she was so sure would bring her at least one breath of peace before her death, in reward for her belief. That, anyway, would be Justine’s interpretation. But, Sade assures us, there is no such God. Her death came, as all of ours must, from chance; for the rest, she is the victim of stupidity, ignorance, and truly pernicious values.

Juliette, or the Riches of Vice, the sister volume (but what a sister!—over a thousand pages to Justine’s three hundred!) gives us the story of Justine’s long-lost sibling: Juliette quickly learned in childhood, she narrates, that womanly virtue and female honor—any trait society deigns to call “virtuous,” but the “womanly” ones in particular—are a sham and are only invoked at the expense of the “virtuous” person to the profit of those in the position to apply the label, even if they are applying it to themselves. Hiding behind the facade of “the virtuous,” unscrupulous men and women have exploited her as a child, body, soul, and fortune. Therefore, by the age of twelve, Juliette decides to commit any and every crime and violence to better herself, or simply for amusement: she indulges in theft, blackmail, a panoply of sexual pleasures and atrocities; she commits innumerable murders, some for gain, some for passion, and an amazing number from sheer caprice. Some are clever and sly; many are overt, violent, and gory. As a result of all this, she gains wealth, social prestige, personal happiness with her final husband and her remaining lovers, male and female—and lives to a ripe, joyous old age.

Shocking?

Far more than Justine. But, as Sade says in his Preface to Juliette, “… the New Woman will only emerge when she learns to commit every horror and violence that till now society has denied her as foreign to her temperament.” In short, though he talks of a personal revolution, it is still a real and corporeal one—as real as the one he lived through.

Why should such a revolution be necessary?

For a moment ignoring the overwhelming evidence of life, let us simply look at what literature makes so evidently manifest.

This is the moral stance that controls, totalitarianly, the modern novel in all its genres, high or low:

“It is the novelist’s duty to attack society, for its false complacency, for its repressive rigidity, and for its self-righteous insensitivity. Society is women. Therefore, the novelist must attack and punish women in his works.”

At first glance, this must look very similar to the moral template of Justine. It is, with this difference: Sade goes to great pains to show that the idea that women are the upholders of the values of society and civilization is an illusion fostered on them purely to get the better of them—so they may be raped, enslaved, and all money and economic power they may be fortunate enough to have inherited or actually to have earned by their own work can be stripped from them more easily. And the larger point, of course, is that Justine is only a fraction of the dialogue, the fraction that sets out this stance in order, at so much greater length, to demolish it by positive example. And it is this denial—Juliette, not Justine—that is Sade’s truly “banned” novel.^*

Understandably, the most successful novelists are not the ones who have espoused the novel’s moral stance intellectually, but the ones whose basic psycho-sexual mechanism holds them to it despite their more cerebral beliefs.

Reading the modern novel, one realizes all its energy, its bravura, its whole aesthetic life springs from this stance; both its art and its intelligence are straited by it, whatever its ostensible topic. Without it, novels would miss the very drive that propels them from incident to incident; and the novel as a form would deliquesce.

These are the novels of Fielding and Tolstoy, of Flaubert and Hawthorne, of Lawrence and Joyce, of Hemingway and Faulkner and Scott Fitzgerald, of Mailer and Gaddis and Baldwin and Bellow, of Gide and Collette, of Kesey and Brautigan and Berger. Even Beckett, as his novels stray near plot, catches in the same gaping groove. These, to take the most random and easily replaceable of examples, are spectacularly the novels of Thomas Pynchon: Where is Oedipa Maas’s treasured collection of pre-thirties Coca-Cola bottles? What happened to her passion for discovering new junked car-yards? The major punishment is that novelists deny the very calculus of invention second nature in their creation of the male character to any and every female character. They cannot place her in a structural position in that completely artificial construct called “the story” so that, in her purposes, in her actions, and in her reactions, she resonates as a whole and autonomous creation. Whereas the male characters are automatically conceived as a matrix of purposeful, habitual, and gratuitous actions, the female characters, if they are “bad,” are all purpose, or, if they are “good,” are all gratuitous. It is not that female characters in the modern novel are characterizations of bad or limited people—although, incidentally, they almost always are—but that they are badly drawn, because the writers flatly refuse to apply the same complex of literary artifice in their character realizations to both males and females—out of habits that begin as a response to some terror that human individuation would make the female characters equal to the males. In a political field where men have declared women must be kept inferior, especially at the level of language, actually to show a woman as equal threatens the whole field with overthrow because it implies the possibility of superiority, which is so socially anathema that no one (except certain Radical Lesbian groups and Radical Effeminists) will even consider it. The proscribed limits on what is allowed women characters in novels are stricter than any Hayes Code or Lord Chamberlain’s Office. They define the novel. If the novel is dying, this above all (as Fiedler hinted at, but could never quite come out and say, in Love and Death in the American Novel) is what is killing it. And if no novelist, from Barthelme to Oates, from Didion to Gass, can break these strictures, then better it die! For it is always understood—it is worked into the texture of the language with which the novelists cover their pages—that the men in these books, no matter how formal a structure binds them, be it the Czarist Army arrayed against Napoleon’s troops or the intrigues of Left Bank Bohemia, are free; it is only the betrayal of this freedom that decides if they are bad men or good men; no matter how grudgingly, they are a fraternity of free beings. But they are not society, even when they have power over it. Often they are society’s victim. Through stupidity or malice, they may be society’s dupes. But society itself—no man in a novel is ever shown thus.

Those occasional all- (or almost all-) male extravaganzas, from Melville’s Moby Dick to Dickey’s Deliverance, ask to be considered, to the extent they are womanless, as complex prose poems whose significance is in their exploration of the sui generis existential embattlements of the free, male spirit, allegorically dramatized in landscape or decor. Kate Millett to the contrary, this is true even of Genet. But these books are never to be taken as social commentary, unless, like Kesey’s Cuckoo’s Nest, they contain one Awful Woman and/or, like Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, a herd of faceless, immoral ones. Should we mistakenly examine what we can of the author’s social ideas from his depiction of actual life on a nineteenth-century whaling voyage, or a twentieth-century canoeing trip, the picture seems oddly fascistic. And that certainly could not have been the author’s intention. …

The fictions of writers like Djuna Barnes, Virginia Woolf, or Ronald Firbank at first appear as a much needed respite from this standard stance. Is it that their casts are all- (or almost all-) female? Perhaps their characters simply tend to have what is so easily labelled a “female sensibility,” i.e., they seldom act or particularly think of themselves as apart from society and consequently seldom act or particularly think of themselves as “free.” Yet the socially marginal and the insane are important characters for all these writers. Take a second look: These are the “Uncle Remus” tales of a slave culture. “Society is women” is still their unquestioned supposition. They simply choose to ignore the attack that is the “novelist’s duty.”

But either in whole or in part, the moral stance of the novel is as absurd and self-perpetuating a lie as the one given by those Southern critics of American Slavery who claimed that the only flaw in the society of the American South was the appallingly weak character, lack of honor, laziness and scheming of its nigger chattel—who, according to them, had been given too much power and responsibility at every level already.

This is ridiculous.

In our society, men have all the real social power: men are society. Women, at best, are men’s viceroys in its administration. If some women think of this as freedom, few men will trouble to dispute them. Man has created the institution of womanhood, all to his own profit. And any woman who would move even slightly beyond the allowable margins of that institution is likely to become man’s hunted and hounded victim, economically threatened and jeopardized at every turn, jeered toward any slough of guilt and madness she can be shoved into: Man will commit any indignity upon those human beings he has set aside into that minimal social area he has reserved for women.

On observing the newborn infant, he notes the minutest physical distinction and sets all who bear it apart linguistically: They are “shes,” “daughters,” “girls,” “nieces,” who will grow into “ladies,” “women,” “females,” “aunts,” “mothers,” and “grandmothers,” forever cut from the linguistic collective of mankind. (Whoever claims the word “mankind” includes women is simply ignorant of the language’s history: “… she knew too much of the obstinacy of mankind to oppose any of their ridiculous humours,” writes Fielding in Tom Jones, Chapter 5, paragraph 2; it is only 1920, i.e., the year women forced men to cede them the vote, that, as an appeasing gesture, anyone even suggested the obviously masculine word might, on occasion, be interpreted with such generous inclusiveness.)