Pornographic Fiction, Implicature, and Imaginative Resistance

Abstract

Having discussed issues of methodology in Chapter 1 and introduced the requisite philosophy of language in Chapter 2, we are now ready to pursue the central arguments of the book, the arguments to the conclusions that (1) the Reformation in its Puritan form was, in Weber’s language, an “adequate cause” of the emergence of pornographic narrative fiction as a distinct genre in the modern West and (2) that this genre constitutes a self-deceptive vehicle for sexual or blood-lustful arousal. (Here we shall confine ourselves to sexual pornography. The phenomenon of violent pornography will be addressed in Chapter 4.) An adequate cause according to Weber, it is essential to recall, is a causal condition that is neither necessary nor sufficient, but raises the probability of some event’s occurrence. We begin in Section 3.2 by considering the uneasy relationship between pornographic literature and Anglo-American law. Section 3.3 takes up Erich Auerbach’s influential idea of Stiltrennung, or “separation of styles,” in the literature of the West and its relations to Christianity, Protestant Christianity, the modern novel, and pornographic writing. Section 3.4 explicitly ties the concerns of the present chapter to the issues of conversational implicature and perceptive equilibrium broached in Chapter 2 by introducing the important notion of imaginative resistance. Section 3.5 uses results gleaned in these discussions to frame John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure as the first genuinely pornographic Western literary work. Section 3.6 considers the relationship between pornography and prostitution, and Section 3.7 summarizes the chapter and poses a question concerning pornography as cultural construction or psychological universal, a question taken up in detail in the following and final chapter.