Throwing Rice at Brad and Janet: Illicit, Delinquent Pleasures

Abstract

This is a book about popular fictions and pulp fantasies. At one level this is also a book which attempts to redirect a certain critical attention toward ‘trash’ art, situate it within popular culture generally and consider its aesthetic. On another level this is a book about taste and popular perception in a social as well as artistic history determined by commercialism and urbanization but lived in the sphere of the acutely personal and private. Just as with all popular arts, pulp is a moveable feast since it can be appropriated by and on behalf of the hierarchists of taste at any particular time and thus taken out of its pulp status. Pulp is both a desire for respectability and a refusal. As I argue later, its legitimacy as pulp is correlative with its illegitimacy as ‘serious’ art. Hence it is both forced into illicitness and is always illicit.¹ But the delights of trash art are always contrary — at once risqué and conformist — always out of the grasp of legitimation. When you have defined them, then, like street talk, they slip away to appear elsewhere in their own secret language of seduction.