the last time I saw you we'd just split in two

[lotesse]

Meta's been converging on my brain lately. This was jumpstarted by the conversation over at cathexys' place here, but there are bits of both the conversations on gayness/sexualization and critical/celebratory vidding that are going on in fandom floating around in my brain.

One of the things I really want to figure out, both in my fannish life and in any academic career I may ever have, is how to negotiate the nonsexual pleasures of text. And okay, already here I’m going to start definitioning, because there are no good words for anything and language is such a damn blunt instrument. By nonsexual I mean pleasure not derived from any sort of intercourse—not the arousal achieved by watching characters have sex, or through character’s pretty, or anything involving either intra- or extra-textual fucking. Not wanting the characters to fuck each other, and not wanting, as a reader, to fuck them yourselves.

But still libidinous pleasure. Because reading turns me on sometimes. You can call it gut-clenching, but I suspect it has more to do with orgasm than anything else …. I don’t know how this works in a male body, but in my own girl body gut-clenching is what happens at the point of orgasm, the contraction of pelvic muscles around the uterus. When I read certain passages in the last parts of RotK, for example, in the most h/c bits of the Frodo/Sam arc where they’re falling apart and holding each other in the night, my breath physically shortens, comes faster. Lots of times, I have physiological responses to what Tolkien called eucatastrophe.

Sometimes I just love my characters so much that I can’t breathe.

And we’ve got a physical response to pleasure, here, and a desire for more—I know I’m not the only fangirl who reads certain sentences five or six times in a row because the emotional punch/libidinal stimulus only increases with each repetition. This, in my mind, is the definition of fannish pleasure. That’s what I come here to talk about, because other people don’t seem to grok what I’m talking about. We have no critical language for nonsexual libidinal narrative pleasure.

This is where I actually do have some sympathy with the whole “you’re sexualizing everything” complaint. Because a lot of the time it’s not the sex I’m getting off on, it’s the intimacy, or the fantasy of extreme love, or the embodiment of suffering, or something that I still don’t think I really have a name for. It’s not “oh my god they’re fucking,” it’s “oh my god they love each other so much and they can’t tell where the one begins and the other ends.” And that sort of emotionality isn’t necessarily a prelude to sex, not necessarily foreplay, but I think that’s the only language we have for it. Fandom uses and transforms the structures available for the communication of literary libidinal pleasure, but I feel like there are other ones out there that we haven’t properly described.

It frustrates me, because I’m writing on Jane Eyre for class right now, and what I really want to talk about is the intense pleasure I get from the reunion scene at the end, when the blind Rochester finally recognizes Jane. It’s not solely romantic, because they get together long before this point, and while I enjoy that scene I don’t get the same charge from it. I feel like the only way I have of talking about that incredible moment, one of my favorite things ever, is through this veiled, metaphorical sexual discourse. But it’s intensely clumsy, because that Jane/Rochester scene also has a literally sexual charge, one that coexists with whatever the nameless other thing is, and talking about that nameless pleasure in sexual language elides and tangles it up with the literally sexual in a way that I’m really not happy with.

This is true with regard to irl interactions also: we only have access to the language of sex, thus everything is sexualized and only the sexual has value. My parter, who has OCD, gets very insecure sometimes about sex because it's the only way he knows to value our relationship. When he's obsessing, the only way he has of measuring our relationship is by the frequency of sex, and he overlooks all the other important parts of what our relationship is about. When he's obsessing, it doesn't matter if we're having fun, or thinking good thoughts together, or talking, or snuggling, as long as we're not having sex. I think the two issues are maybe connected. I don't think we have very good paradigms for pleasure, and I think it can actually really mess us up.

My stories make my heart hurt, and I don’t mean that metaphorically, and it’s intensely pleasurable even though it has nothing to do with sex in any real way. We use the language of the sexual, but I don’t know that it’s really applicable. Thing is, I don't know how else to talk about it. We seem to have managed in fandom, because we all feel the same way. But I have no idea how to tell my classmates, or my academic advisers, or my mother, about the thing that I love in my stories.

Comments

[slashfairy.livejournal.com]

i have almost NO academic language for anything, particularly not for writing/reading, but this a) strikes a familiar note and b) sounds like something I recognize as true, both in the event of 'oh OH OH!' reading and in the impossibility of articulating what it is about what i'm reading that causes that response, or what the response is if it's not orgasm-relative-to-genital-stim...

keep going, keep going- and i'll think about this in my non-academic way and see if i have anything to contribute...

[theprimrosepath.livejournal.com]

We have no critical language for nonsexual libidinal narrative pleasure.

And not only the textual.

A quote from Wikipedia, regarding the sculpture The Ecstasy of Saint Theresa:

Some modern critics have derided the semi-syncopal religious experiences as veiled orgasmic phenomena rather than spiritual encounters; in particular, the body posture and facial expression of St. Teresa have caused some to assign her experience as one of climactic moment.


And from her own writings:

I saw in his hand a long spear of gold, and at the iron's point there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God. The pain was so great, that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it. The soul is satisfied now with nothing less than God. The pain is not bodily, but spiritual; though the body has its share in it. It is a caressing of love so sweet which now takes place between the soul and God, that I pray God of His goodness to make him experience it who may think that I am lying

The pain is not bodily, but spiritual; though the body has to share in it - I think that's it, the problem we have, and maybe why we have no words for it. We're taught that good description in text is about the senses - the reader should be able to hear, feel, see, taste, and smell what it was written on your page. This is what language does for us - it creates the tangible. It names. If we try to put tangibility to pleasure - humans almost invariably get sex. It's what our bodies know.

But your reaction to Jane Eyre and Tolkien, and mine to Madeleine L'Engle or the voice of Maria Callas, tugs at something deeper, something beyond the purely physical. Trying to put that to words is like trying to drag a goddess into mortal flesh: it will fit, but it will be limited. I think finding words to appropriately describe a mental or spiritual reaction to non-physical stimuli would require a shift in the way most humans view and understand pleasure.

[lotesse]

See, that's one of the things that really intrigues me with fandom - we don't need words in this space, because we all somehow feel the same way, and recognize our own experiences in those of other fen. I heart fandom.

I'll keep going - but right now I have to go back to work on my honors.

[lotesse]

Oooh, I love this! Connections to Saint Theresa! So cool!

[ithiliana.livejournal.com]

fascinating....

I make jokes about having a kink for complex plots and great figures of speech, and I think it's roughly in the same area you're talking about (although actually I guess I don't agree that all fandom feels or thinks the same thing, having seen far too many people claim totally with a straight face and I guess I have to trust their take on their own experiences! which isthat there's just nothing like that going on at all, at all, at all).

I do what I do for work and in fandom because I love language, I love reading, I love writing, and have completely physical responses to all of the above. And it can happen while writing fic, original poetry, or academic criticism (I've written a sentence or two that were orgasmic in the process of writing, a total out of body fantastic experience of pleasure).

I like the phrase nonsexual libidinal pleasures, or literary libidinal pleasures....There has to be more talking about these pleasures.

I think another part of a related problem is the incredibly narrow definition of sex, and the language of sex, especially in the U.S., where there's a sick mishmash of Puritanism/orignial sin, Enlightenment splitting of mind and body with intellectual pleasures gendered, raced, and put on the 'superior' side of the scales, and psychobabble added to a patriarchal/consumer market where "sex" (of the right kind) sells.

So the whole major conflict around "porn" and what that means and if it has any relation to some types of fan fiction is connected to the contexts and meanings of that word. (Some fans use it and claim the term; others abhor it.)

So it's hard to talk about pleasure in reading (especially in literature departments, although love can sometimes sneak in, the language that is), and in academia in general, and yes, there's very little language (and I know lots and lots of academic language, so I know how little exists)....but there's also very little language available to talk about sexualities in ways that don't fit the narrow/rigid mold.

[lotesse]

Agreed, though I feel like at least within the Academe the sexualities issue is being addressed. Well, sort of.

ITA with regard to the issues of Puritanism, though, and that's another rough spot for me. Because, of course, sometimes it is about the sex. I like my fannish porn as much as the next girl, and like the inverted gaze of fandom, and love love love the feeling of freely suspended sexuality that we get going. So, not trying to jaw down on the legitimately sexual. It's just that I feel like there's also something else, next to the sexual, like it but not at the same time, and I'd like it to get more recognition.

Lately I've found myself in several pairings where I want everything that you get in shipfic without the sex. Buffy/Giles, for one. I totally want the stories about the epic love of Buffy and Giles, overthetop melodrama and all, but not so much with the sex. Sometimes, also, Winchesters, though not always. It's funny: for all that smarm was weird as hell and politically ambiguous at best, I almost feel like the concept was on to something. When it wasn't getting buried by it's own sexual repression and homophobia, that is.

[lotesse]

Also, forgot a thing: I don't mean to say that all fen are like x, because yeah that one's been problematized. But I do think there are certain macro elements or patterns in fannishness that we can use as descriptors, not of the only way to be fannish, but of a certain way that many fen seem to participate in. We have genres, for one thing. Collective types of reactions. Which was where I was trying to go with that.

[fictualities.livejournal.com]

One of the reasons why I spend so much time in fandom is this: there really is very little talk in academia about the pleasure of reading. I think a lot of academics equate "reading for pleasure" with bad reading, with sloppy reading, with reading that is somehow "unprofessional." A couple of off-the-cuff wild theories about why this is so:

1. There's some turf-defending going on here. If reading is pleasurable, if it's mere entertainment, it perhaps is not serious enough to warrant a field devoted to its analysis. Of course there's no reason why fiction can't be both pleasurable and smart, and why the pleasurable itself can't be smart, but a) the puritanism that ithiliana mentioned above accustom us to thinking of pleasure and intelligence as antonyms, and b) the humanities do have genuine institutional problems with getting funding for disciplines that have (unlike the sciences) no immediate and obvious use; too much talk about pleasure will give opponents of the humanities ammunition for classifying the humanities as a form of recreation and eliminating their departments wholesale (classics and philosophy departments have found themselves cut or merged on similar grounds).

b) For complicated cultural reasons a lot of humanities scholars are committed to finding value in transgressiveness, and pleasure, hmmmmm -- isn't exactly transgressive. Sexual pleasure can be transgressive, easily. But other kinds of pleasure? That's a harder sell; in fact, if you talk too much about people taking genuine pleasure in genre fiction and in mass media, you risk being accused of complicity in forms of cultural hegemony that many humanities scholars find oppressive.

So much for academic politics. Beyond that -- hmmmm. Talking about pleasure (or any perceptual experience) is incredibly difficult as a descriptive endeavor anyway -- it's like trying to describe a color, isn't it? All you can do is either a) use a conventional name like "red" or b) describe one perceptual experience in terms of another (parade red, blood red, red as the sound of a trumpet, hot red anger, etc). So, if you're describing pleasure in narrative: sex is a convenient analogue that most people understand viscerally, and, erm, the rhythm is or can be similar (long stories tease and flirt and build to a climax.

I guess I'm saying that I can see lots of GOOD reasons for using the sexual metaphor. The metaphor does lose its usefulness, though, when it's mistaken for reality -- when, just as you say, all pleasure is understood to be a poor substitute for sex. God, what a lame idea, and so male. If Freud had been a woman we'd have inherited a theory that all pleasure is a poor substitute for chocolate, and that people who want to talk about sex are just repressing their chocolate instincts, or haven't progressed to the advanced developmental stage in which they understand the adult pleasure of nurturing as opposed to the childish and immature pleasure of merely begetting. Faugh.

[lotesse]

See, I tend to feel most of the time that pleasure in all forms is transgressive. I know I've run this loop with other women of my age with regard to food and dieting - eating for pleasure is immoral, a sign of weakness.

And in the same way, it connects to what you're talking about re: the humanities. Because literature is pleasurable, it's automatically devalued.

But ... these are our lives, you know? And we only get just the one. And I can see no better use for a life than the pursuit of genuine pleasure, because genuine pleasure is eucatastrophic. I am valuing here, because I don't mean hedonism as such. Hedonism is selfish, and frequently self-destructive. But good books are only of the good, I think. It's so totally Protestant Work Ethic to say that you're only spending your time well if you're doing something unpleasurable.

Not sure if any of that made sense. Ack.

[(Anonymous)]

Stop hack the program!!!