CUMMING SOON! THE PORNOGRAPHIC AURA

. . . she is driven like a hunted animal, C to C and F again, she findeth no rest.

The Adventures of Lucky Pierre

(Cantus.)—“first” in an endless unspooling, the word opening The Adventures of Lucky Pierre says it, already has, all there is, can be, to say. One letter, redoubled by the somewhat flattened opening of a parenthesis, will have been enough: the initial C to which you are promised in the text’s structural refrain—C to C and F again—to be back, and back again, as you go up the scale, splitting it open right in its middle, as a pair of thighs would spread to welcome you; the initial C designing genitals—Cock to Cunt and Fuck Again (367)—setting the mode and mood of a narrative, driven by them, that comes and goes, to and fro, to and fro, between the parentheses that pillow it; the initial C behind which, in obscene filigree, you catch a glimpse of an(t)us, before the word, before your eyes, seems to shift and change into Cunts with the passing, deceiving reminiscence of the book’s full title: The Adventures of Lucky Pierre; Directors’ Cu[n]t[s]. “First” in an endless unspooling, barely hiding the “last” at the “end” of a “first” reel it conducts to, liminal preliminaries of sorts. (Cantus.)—discant . . . Ah. Dis-cunt, then, death-cunt, yes, and its inseparable prick-song, looping the loop. Rewind and unspool. Again. C to C and F again. She findeth no rest . . .

“You know, I’ll bet you’re the sort of man,” [Alison] said, as though having come to some sort of decision, her voice gloved in intimacy and, yes, a kind of awe (I felt this and drew closer), “who used to believe, once upon a time, that every cunt in the world was somehow miraculously different.” (Gerald’s Party, 10) Sex and pornography, in Coover’s fictional universe, contaminate everything, from fairy tales (once upon a time) to Hollywood classics alike (A Night at the Movies), along with religion; the title of the play “A Theological Position,” for instance, initially refers to the theoretical position of the Church when faced with the unconceivable eventuality of a second Incarnation resulting from a new Immaculate Conception; hence the necessity of rupturing the hymen at all costs—a task, all other options having failed, that the priest from whom the unfortunate couple seek advice will have to undertake himself, thus altering in the process the play’s title . . . Coover’s writing often indulges in long, minute, explicit, graphic, and crude descriptions of bodies penetrating each other, merging and “simplifying,” as Rick’s and Ilsa’s do in “You Must Remember This,” the story closing A Night at the Movies, as both characters surrender to animal appetite (fierce, grunts, whinnies): Faster and faster they slap their bodies together, submitting to this fierce rhythm as though to simplify themselves, emitting grunts and whinnies and helpless little farts, no longer Rick Blaine and Ilsa Lund, but some nameless conjunction somewhere between them, time, space, being itself getting redefined by the rapidly narrowing focus of their incandescent passion— (164). Pornography, as a specific mode of representation willing to strip reality to its bare essentials, entertains a complex relationship with the real. In dehumanizing, before the cold eye of a camera, its characters/actors, “You Must Remember This” focuses attention onto the stagy, artificial, illusory nature of the world it depicts, progressively doing away with the bodies it stages, with being and identity, until you realize that, playing before your eyes, is an image deprived of substance, some light dancing, to and fro, on a blank screen—as always with projection, the screen, the only hard thing in view, tends to vanish, surrendering its substance to the image, which is only floating light. The spectral animation of desire. (The Adventures of Lucky Pierre, 331) Mere words coupling together following syntactic proclivities, couched on blank, enticing paper. Casablanca, Michael Curtiz’s film that “You Must Remember This” parodically takes on, might be but a pretext in the end, just as the cinema, as a formal as well as a thematic structuring device, its actors, characters, and techniques, might be: a pretext to fiction, that is. At bottom, then, pornography, you feel, might have very little to do with sex and its representation, but would perhaps tend, in Coover’s treatment of it, to the invention of a new literary language, a new grammar, a new syntax of fiction, as suggested by the bodily dialogues it stages: for a moment they seem almost to float, suspended, unloosed from the earth’s gravity, and then—whumpf!—they hit the floor again, their bodies continuing to hammer together, though less regularly, plunging, twitching, prolonging this exclamatory dialogue, drawing it out even as the intensity diminishes, even as it becomes more a declaration than a demand, more an inquiry than a declaration. (164) As a language of variation, enacted and fleshed out in a multiplicity of (pro-)positions and—because it is always-already geared towards consummation and climax as to its point of departure—likewise inexhaustible, pornography in Coover’s fiction celebrates the force and energy behind language, the erotics of words that penetrate each other, caress each other, flirt and toy indefinitely, setting everything off into motion, recombining being, time, space, memory itself, whether Gerald’s, more and more faulty as his narrative moves on, or Ilsa’s, who inexorably forgets, [is] already forgetting (187) everything in the to-and-fro movement of the text, like so many waves crashing only to withdraw from the shore to the rhythm of insatiable desire—A barren landscape, sparsely grassed. Near the sea, for waves can be heard softly lapping an unseen shore. (The Adventures of Lucky Pierre, 23) The text gets carried away, carries you away, moving you, to and fro, to and fro, on its generous pages. Desire, satiated, unsatiable; spent, expensible. The peculiar thing about love—says Gerald—[ . . . ] is that one is overwhelmed by a general sense of wanting before he knows what it is he wants—that’s why the act, though like all others, seems always strange and new, a discovery, an exploration, why one must move toward it silently, without reason, without words, feeling one’s way . . . (Gerald’s Party, 10) To desire—intransitive verb; thrusting of white language, irrational and silent (silently, without reason), discovering itself in its very absence (without words), outside itself (an ex-ploration); a discovery, an uncovery . . . Alison resumes: “Ah, but it’s true, Gerald! Each one is . . . ” (11). You desire, therefore you read. Therefore, again you open the book as you would tenderly open a pair of thighs, snuggling into it as you would into them, thrusting your gaze into it, skimming and caressing it between your hands, peeling off one page at a time, without reason, without words; a sexploration of, a discovery of . . . what, if not reading itself?

I knew Willie Masters’ missus before becoming acquainted with the gentleman himself, knew her, that is, in the Biblical sense, which is the only way any of us knew her or can know her, and as I am knowing her now (10), Phil Gelvin admits in “On Mrs. Willie Masters.” He—unless he be Mike, Sam, Charles, Bill himself, Wally, even Chucky, Bob, or you (why not?); nothing is certain: To impress Willie and his missus, I’ve laid claim to being Mike, Sam, Charles, Bill, Phil and Wally all in one, but in truth I am only one of these, I’ve whitely lied, this my first and only time upon her, if indeed I really am—(22)—Gelvin, then, recently disbarked from William Gass’ Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife, offers a parodic image of the reader; and not just any reader—the critic, having to comment on the text. Of Howard in Gerald’s Party, caught with his appreciative hand in the late Ros’s panties, Gerald says by way of excuse and legitimation: I understood what the others could not: that there was nothing mischievous or prurient about what he had done, that for him it was simply a matter of aesthetic need. He was an art critic. A good one. He had to know. (130) In the Biblical sense, that is. Of course. For, as Gelvin puts it in a falsely rhetorical question in “On Mrs. Willie Masters”: Biblical knowledge, what is it but a bookish thing? (22)

“Pornography,” a word here emptied of all moralistic connotations that you use merely to refer to a specific mode of discourse on and/or representation of sex, and, beyond, as a particular aesthetic, has often haunted the guarded mansion of philosophy, whose buried foundations (philein) partly rest on notions of love and desire. A story like “You Must Remember This,” for instance, can in part be read—now, of course, the question raised by the text, one of them, is precisely what “value” each discourse can be attributed: how to distinguish between the pure, outside, reified surface exhibited and exacerbated by pornography, and the intimate, personal, “deep” reflections traversing the characters’ overflowing consciousness, aesthetically incompatible with the generic demands of pornography? Or, for that matter, between parodied and parodying? The trivial and the serious? “You Must Remember This” thus pursues the work started with “The Phantom of the Movie Palace,” the opening story of A Night at the Movies, whose main character, the projectionist of an abandoned movie theater, goes about “collapsing boundaries”: He knows there’s something corrupt, maybe even dangerous, about this collapsing of boundaries, but it’s also liberating, augmenting his film library exponentially. And it is also necessary. (23) As the character intuits, it is in its violent challenge of well-defined boundaries, or in its poetics of transgression, that “pornography” lies: He recognizes in all these dislocations, of course, his lonely quest for the impossible mating, the crazy embrace of polarities, as though the distance between the terror and the comedy of the void were somehow erotic—it’s a kind of pornography. And it is in this sense too, more than in its graphic depiction of sex, that “You Must Remember This” (or The Adventures of Lucky Pierre, for that matter) appears as a pornographic story, by doing away with the frontiers that you, once upon a time, held dear, and that enabled you to tell apart different levels in the text: what, in that sense, is more “obscene” or voyeuristic to the naked, reading eye—having to witness the sexual frolics of the characters, or to plunge into their most intimate thoughts? And in the absence of all frontiers, aesthetic, discursive, and ontological, where would you draw the line between pornography and philosophy, image and word . . . ? In that sense, then, “You Must Remember This” reads, in its pornographic dimension, like a reciprocal fictionalization of philosophy and a philosophizing of fiction, both penetrating and equally gratifying each other, thus drawing new, tenuous, shifting contours for themselves; in the act of love, Rick’s thoughts—he is still thinking about time as a pulsing sequence of film frames, and not so much about the frames, their useless dated content, as the gaps between—impregnates Ilsa’s—oh! she thinks as the blood rushes in two directions at once, spreading into her head and sex as though filling empty frames, her heart the gap between: what a strange dizzying dream time is! (173)—as writing folds back upon the film (your memory of it) that embraces and yields to it. And so the distance separating the words from the world, the text from you, momentarily seems to—“seems to” only, for this distance inevitably reappears elsewhere, as in the resistance that language, in its immediate apparition on the page, opposes, refusing to yield to your reading—disappear, as soon as you realize that to the question diversely raised by Lucky Pierre, Rick, or Ilsa—something inside her was screaming, “Who am I?” (169)—there is, can be only, one answer; a string of noises, after all—nothing more really—an arrangement, a column of air moving up and down, a queer growth like a gall on a tree, a mimic of movement in silent readers maybe, etc.

Because pornography, independently of its grotesque, parodic, caricatural staging of bodies, mere pretext in the end, appears, as defined in A Night at the Movies, as the collapsing of all boundaries, it, as a mode of representation, radically short-circuits all mimesis at the exact moment when it affects to be revealing the real in an immediate way. For the actors do not play, and their performance represents nothing beyond itself; the “characters” they supposedly embody soon fade and melt into the background—perversely, you do not see Ilsa and Rick, so much as Bergman and Bogart . . . The boundary between make and make-believe vanishes; what you are made to watch has nothing of a mimetic representation or an act, and yet everything—for you know (it shows) that what you are watching is staged; what you see, on the other hand, what you merely see, is all too real. What pornography in that sense does away with is the boundary between the real and its representation, the singular and its double, the model and its copy, as both come and go, to and fro, merging and fusing one into the other, irreducible one to the other, undifferentiable one from the other. You see one, the other, not knowing anymore which is which, as fiction penetrates the real which dizzyingly penetrates it back . . . ummm . . . imagine the imagination imagining itself imagining: this, you feel, or something like this, might be the tour de force of pornography: turning around upon itself, deliciously biting its own tail, to create a world all its own, a complete fabrication, yet all too real for that, a world rid of all boundaries, yet at an untouchable remove . . . Pornography, in that sense, might be but an intensification, a radicalization of the very principles of fiction at its most realistic: it affects to represent the real while what it does is to make it present in all its immediacy, its singularity, and irreducibility. Slowly, characters crumble down, actors fade from view, and what you see, what you then get, is sex, mere sex; what you read, what you get then, is text, mere text. Here, right here, in front of you—ungraspable and immediate as can be; the real.

Actor/character: such distinction is challenged within the precepts of pornography, actors never really impersonating any character but their own. The ontological indetermination that riddles Lucky Pierre’s trajectory—AVATAR OF THE SELF-SEEKING SELF (The Adventures of Lucky Pierre, 143)—might be but the exacerbation, through pornography, of the intrinsic consequences of all cinematic practice. Things have changed (what does not?), yet you remember that originally any film actor must have felt as if exiled, not only from the stage he or she used to perform onto, but from his or her own person, too, sensing an inexplicable void, stemming from the fact that his or her body lost its substance, volatilized, stripped of reality, turned into a mute image that flickers for a moment on the screen, then vanishes into silence; a detachable, transportable image . . . In pornography, more than any other cinematic genre, though, the actor is eventually denied the reassuring opportunity of identifying with a role. The actor’s body becomes an image, as it were, for nothing, a loss of ontological substance unalleviated by any aesthetic or dramatic concerns, for on the most elementary of levels, you know (it shows) that the pornographic actor is not playing, not just pretending. Hence, no doubt, Lucky Pierre’s self-alienation, his irreparable estrangement, endless exile from his sense of self. As an actor, that is. But of course this exile is, in The Adventures of Lucky Pierre, lived and experienced from the other side of the screen, the loss of substance, the theft of reality made all too literal for this projected shadow, detached and astray. In the absence of “role” to play, the pornographic actor ceases to be one in any conventional sense, as though the initial loss of substance resulting from the passage in front of the camera were itself redoubled in the irremediable loss of lost substance: not just an actor playing a role, Lucky Pierre already is, albeit unbeknownst to him, a role playing the role of the actor, from the start deprived of substance, the mere embodiment of fantasies (“Et mes fesses, tu les aimes mes fesses?”). In other words, like the standard film actor, but in an exacerbated, more radical way, the porn actor is, and is only, an image on screen, forever deprived of reality and substance beyond the screen (for Lucky Pierre, there is nothing beyond or outside Cinecity), and all the more real for that: pornography has nothing of a realistic genre; it is real by presenting on screen just an image, having no concern for a just image. Relying on clichés and pre-conceived scripts, discarding verisimilitude and narrative motivation, pornography thus paradoxically comes, in its endless, mechanical reenactment of the same paradigms, to produce pure, empty images, images in and for themselves, deprived of any “truth” outside themselves, a truth consisting in being and performing—and affecting nothing else—what they are: images. Where pornography succeeds is in pointing to a self-sufficient, irreducible reality by contenting itself with merely, purely “imaging” its contents—an image, just an image, autonomous and detached, in advance precluding commentaries and interpretations. If pornography—the immediate, unveiled presentation of sex for sex’s sake: its mechanics and antics, often far removed from any concern for titillation as exemplified by Spanking the Maid—recurrently and conspicuously pervades Coover’s work, it might be because it opens onto an integral form of realism disconnected and purged from any stale mimetism.

Eighteen minutes of his life: how to judge them? And how judge the eighteen minutes just spent watching them? Or these passing ones, reflecting on reflections? (The Adventures of Lucky Pierre, 37) What then, of all this time spent reflecting on the reflection of reflected reflections, trying to locate, somewhere amid them, the possibility of anchoring the tentative beginning of a commentary upon them? “If that’s what life is, Gerald, just a hall of mirrors [ . . . ]—Alison asks in Gerald’s Party—then what are we doing out here in the lobby?” (103) Gerald, in answer: “I don’t know,” I said—his reflection interrupted by another, parenthetical one—“they never seemed very happy.” (103-4) Right. How quickly you forget these things: Of course, all conversations were encased in others, spoken and unspoken, I knew that. It was what gave them their true dimension, even as it made their referents recede. (103) What was it all about?

(You withdraw here, between parentheses—seems as good a place as any—seeking momentary refuge to pillow your usual qualms; for what is there, can there be for you to say “about” pornography that would not already be condemned by its very aesthetic? Tentatively, you suggest an idea or other, conceptually fumble, beating around the bush, most like, knowing—ah, Gelvin, Gelvin . . . —all the while that, on texts like these, the least—maybe . . . —futile commentary would be a performative one. And so, you plunge back into analysis and out of it again, thrusting a paragraph here, withdrawing again, to and fro, in the growing momentum of your fiction, coming about through the friction of your reading . . . Eventually, you plunge back in, withdrawing from your withdrawal . . . ) . . Here.

For such is the real revealed by pornography, precluding all commentaries and interpretations, sufficient unto itself, leaving not even the smallest of space, nor the least occasion, to anyone bent on authenticating it. Eighteen minutes in an actor’s life, redoubled, and again; one thousand and eighty seconds, twenty-five thousand nine hundred and twenty images flitting along on the screen before disappearing altogether, inescapably. How much time more, how many images, to fill up the gap, ever growing, between the recording and the projection? In your own turn, you now feel overwhelmed with the infinite regress that faces you as you wish to discuss the way the past moves away from the present: no matter how many words you put forth in the hope of conveying your sense of the recent past, the very act of formulating your ideas and writing them down takes up time—time during which new events serve to qualify your impressions, make them obsolete, leaving you stranded in time. And, already, you forget what you were about to say. Others who have struggled with this problem have concluded that the best policy in such cases is simply to acknowledge it and keep on writing, hoping that the gap between word and reality can at least be narrowed. It cannot. Rick, in “You Must Remember This,” is right; what matters are not the images as such, fully formed (the text or its commentary), so much as the blanks between them, separating them, while making them merge together—all those lapses, cracks, slacks in the story, infinitesimally small when looked at two-dimensionally, yet in their third dimension as deep and mysterious as the cosmos (A Night at the Movies, 173), within which, and without which, nothing happens; an irreducible vacancy, an unyielding blankness from which any commentary takes its cue, forcing the critic to leap into the abyss, from the top of a blank page you, for one, barely dare scrape, yet skim over in the unquenchable hope that you will get there in the end, reaching beyond, onto the other side, across the thickness of a book, all the way over there, the other end, that is, word after word after word paving the way as a makeshift bridge thrown above and over the void, blackening—and thus momentarily giving you the illusion that your movement through it is not as misguided, directionless, as you thought—the blankness you obliterate . . . Only to realize that the more you write, the wider the gap. For as you try to bridge it, thus making no progress, the real moves on, leaps on, always in unpredicted, unpredictable directions, taking for instance Ilsa far, far away from Rick: “It’s, I dunno, like the place has sprung a goddamn leak or something!” (183) It is all aleak, the text is inexorably leaking, through the words and their interpretations, too loose, too rigid. One should be able to step back and start over, Rick suggests, unaware that such may have been his initial mistake. [Ilsa] knows he is trying to understand what cannot be understood, to resolve what has no resolution. Americans are like that. (184) And yes, dear, critics too—you must remember this, so that past mistakes should not have to be repeated over and over again: Maybe we made some kinda mistake, I dunno, like when I put my hands on your jugs or something and if— (185). And if, what if, on the other hand, you forget it instead? Plunging into the blanks, the ellipses, what is left forever unsaid in a story’s nooks and crannies, in the suspenseful interruptions of a text still to come, un-read, literally un-predicted, un-cued. Should you not, you wonder, leave the text to its own leakings, let it leak, make it leak in all its singularity (a good story) and unpredictability (anything)? Let it keep “spilling,” dragging along with it its gaps, its blanks, not to fill them up so much or make up for putative absences, as to prolong the erratic movement of the writing; as in Noir, it is the blanks that keep the text moving, keep it inking itself in black (Noir’s moves) onto the whiteness of the page that spurs it on (Blanche’s game): Maybe going back isn’t the right idea . . .—Rick, acknowledging his mistake, realizes—[ . . . ] A good story, that may do it—anything that moves! [ . . . ] It’s almost like I’m remembering this. You’ve stopped, see, but I want you to go on, I want you to keep spilling what’s on your mind, I’m filling in all the blanks . . . (186-7) And it is almost as if you, too, now freed from all imperatives (must), were remembering it, with nothing to bridle the writing’s moves, protracting itself, withdrawing itself into its ellipses—“And then . . . ? Ilsa . . . ? And then . . . ?” (187)—into blanks still waiting, desiring for you to get lost within them, abandon yourself and rise up to the text’s own demands and challenges . . .

There is very little in Coover’s treatment of pornography that could titillate the reader; you will not insist enough that your view of pornography is one utterly disconnected from the usual moralistic concerns associated with the label—as such, “pornography” might not be the right word. What you aim at is a specific aesthetic that, because it collapses reassuring boundaries, shatters all certainties and, beyond, the very authority the critic, as critic, as a “knowing reader,” endeavors to sustain. What, then, from a writerly perspective, pornography might tend towards, yield to, or meet, is the pure pleasure of textuality. Facing the pornographic text, you have only your own textual jouissance to offer in reply—your critique, in that sense, is your own bliss to which you cannot give shape as it is, within you, what you have no grasp upon. Your own bliss, in that sense, is critical, as it is the sign of a crisis to which you cannot respond—pornography is the (non-)site of an untenable text of bliss, an impossible text that, as such, remains forever outside criticism: you cannot speak “about” such a text, you can only speak on it in a literal sense, in it if you are up to it: entering into a desperate plagiarism, hysterically affirming the void of your bliss. Pornography is the obliteration of your critique at the very moment it makes it possible—in the form of a crisis.

To unveil the mystery, disclose, ungarb the real, strip it essentially bare; to appropriate it, in all impropriety, from all angles, in all positions. Not unlike Gordon who, in John’s Wife, photographs the inert, dead body of his dying mother; then Pauline’s, lively and generous. Now [Pauline] showed Otis those photos, mostly huge blowups that turned her body into a kind of vast rolling landscape, gigantic in scale yet minute in its details, distant and dreamy as desert dunes yet intimate as a pubic freckle, a wet nipple, an anal pucker. And the point was, they were, many of them, exact positional replicas of his photos of the old lady. It was spooky. It was as though, you know, as though . . . (125) Words end up powerless in front of such pornographic revelation, comparisons fall short—somewhere else, a reporter feels his own language and his being, through it, dissolve in “The Photographer,” as though progressively erased from the real and consumed in the photographs taken by his silent lover: He sits to write about this, but the words dissolve before they reach the paper (his story, whatever it is, as he might have written when he still dared to write, has died within her), and as they do, so do the structures of his world, the one out there in which he writes, once wrote, and he feels like he’s slipping beneath the worded surface of things—and nothing’s there below. (“The Photographer”) In John’s Wife, Gordon’s photos might be attempts at mapping the unmappable, beneath the worded surface of the text, his lens focused on Pauline merely to reach, through her, John’s wife herself: for beyond the lover and beyond the mother, coexistent with the one and contemporary with the other, lies the never-lived reality of the Virgin, as Otis himself is prone to discover. For these photos cannot be seen in and for themselves—Otis cannot help but relate them to something other, turning them into the doubles of previous images; despite the blowups, all distances are not barred. The real manifests itself here in its very resistance, in its irreducible, paradoxical ambiguity (gigantic . . . yet minute / distant . . . yet intimate), its artificiality, as suggested by the alliterations rhythmically ordering the similes—distant and dreamy as desert dunes yet intimate as a pubic freckle, a wet nipple, an anal pucker. Like “John’s wife” herself, the real eludes all attempts at description or imaging, mere artifices superimposing themselves grotesquely onto, overexposing it, the slippery abstraction that the real, moving on, leaves behind, inadequacies caricaturally parading as parodic, childish memories: [Otis] could not get his eyes off the giant enlargements of Pauline’s intimate parts. It was like some kind of magical voyage. He felt transported back to his childhood, until this moment all but forgotten, and to the stories of Merlin and Buck Rogers from the comicbooks, Sinbad and Plastic Man. (125) To disclose the real, ungarb it, strip it essentially bare: this might be, in itself, irrelevant—Lennox, momentarily empowered, watches “John’s wife” remove her clothes to find out there is nothing behind them—the real, as such, perhaps already partakes of the “pornographic,” all there is, and all there is to see, essentially bare and satisfying itself with no external addition. All one could do, perhaps, and at best, might rather consist in removing, editing out, as it were, all conceptual scaffoldings, all rhetorical appendages surrounding it—what remains to be stripped off is not the real so much as the erroneous visions one has of it. The unmediated aspect of reality, the height of artifice; the vision of immediate reality, the blue flower in the land of rhetoric . . . Try as one might, there is no rupturing the hymen of reality—a blank reality; a blue reality, the color of flowers and movies, the color, too, untempered, of the Virgin from whom, for Otis, “John’s wife” is undistinguishable. And so, once more, Otis has to let her down: So, when Pauline unzipped him, Otis knew he’d have to let the Virgin down . . . (125)

The pornographic aura—a paradox; an absurdity. A trace, persistent in the graphy of the real. Removed. So close, on the tip of the tongue. An aftertaste. An aftertext.

You do remember that the technological reproducibility that made possible the emergence of photography and the cinema has devalued the aura of the work of art, forever detaching it from the here and now of its experiential reception, its unique existence, not to say, subsistence, in a particular place. The aura gone, nothing anymore can attest to and verify the authenticity of the work. Eccentric, and no doubt blasphemous as it sounds, you have been wondering if the position of pornography, especially in Coover’s cinematic treatment of it—Coover’s take on pornography as a genre in both “You Must Remember This” and The Adventures of Lucky Pierre is coupled with a cinematic approach—might not be problematic in that regard. Granted, as a commercial genre, pornography has very little, if any, concern for aesthetic questions. However, whether deliberately or not, whether artistically or not, pornography does, or at the very least can say something worth listening to, albeit in a degraded and often unrecognizable form, reveal things and comment, in its own fashion, upon the real—a real it homes in, it stages, at its most basic, or least artificial (“characters” are flimsy, at best, unencumbered with psychological motivations, freed from the complications of plot, etc.). The Adventures of Lucky Pierre, even if parodically—pornography, as such, already is a form of parody—turns pornography into, uses it as a literary quest, aesthetic as well as philosophical, which may account for the text’s experimental aspect, “experimental” in the sense that the text quests for its form, experimenting (with) its diverse writing modes based on the rendition of several cinematic genres. In the end, then, the grotesque gap between the generic conventions of pornography and the ontological reflections rousing Lucky Pierre’s consciousness (or Rick’s and Ilsa’s, in “You Must Remember This”), may be only apparent. Sex, as the only motive for the pornographic imagination, the driving force behind the narrative, what little there is of it, might as such be but a metaphor, the attempt at a direct, unmediated grasp on the real—the pure unspooling movement of a reel it (almost) confuses with. Primarily, then, pornography might be concerned with “knowledge” indeed—or knowledge in deed, beyond, that is, its purely bookish aspect . . .

The Adventures of Lucky Pierre ironically opens onto, toying with them, mere traces—the persistence of audition—thus pointing, if not to its ephemeral nature, then to its performative rendering. What momentarily persists through and beyond these traces is an old, exhausted, allegorical lamentation, mere tatters of it ironically turned inside out, bringing the allegorical distance back down upon the pornographic letter of the text. The biblical landscape taking shape before you, the “solitary city” your eye uncovers and recognizes, merges with, becomes, is the forsaken body of an unclean lover: Black bars radiate from this turbulent arena, laid on the surrounding hills like the stripes of a rod in the day of wrath, and at the end of the black bars, like whipstocks for the maimed, letters. Flickering neumes: VAGINAL ORIFICE, LABIA MAJORA. And not a propylaeum: a perineum. anus: the afflicted pit. Alas, despised because they have seen her nakedness. (2) The “solitary city” (the depraved Jerusalem) is no more, utterly replaced by the naked body, the metaphor of yore, no longer one, and in the course of this literalization, as the letter takes over, all transcendence is abolished, whether semantically—in the text’s refusal to reach towards a transcendent signified made metaphorically or allegorically accessible—or metaphysically—in the short-circuiting of the allegory, never opening up onto another, superior reality. The description stumbles upon the female body, irreducible to anything but its own tautological self, as suggested by the “labeling” on screen of all bodily parts, like a musical score redoubling the melody playing it—VAGINAL ORIFICE, LABIA MAJORA, PERINEUM, ANUS, URETHRA, CLITORIS, MONS VENERIS (2).

From its very opening, The Adventures of Lucky Pierre underscores its self-sufficiency, the autonomy of its language, displaying itself in all its resistance—resistance to any critical penetration. So doing, the text, in its “first” reel, even with its “first” word, which turns the four hundred and some pages it opens onto into a series of mere, potentially endless variations, says, has already said it all, all there is, all there was to say. As a genre eminently repetitive, sometimes unto sickness even—The Adventures of Lucky Pierre, true to the genre, does not escape this and overtly plays with the very temporality of its reading—pornography is a genre of exhaustion and exhaustivity: The Adventures of Lucky Pierre, along with Spanking the Maid despite differences in scale, may as such be seen as true exemplars of a “literature of exhaustion” understood literally and self-reflexively, both aiming at exhausting their possibilities in a surfeit of purely linguistic energy. Yet despite the setting of an elegiac mood in the text’s first reel, pointing to an entropic depletion and post-coital libidinal collapse, pornographic energy is not spent in pure loss, never squandered—the female body the text opens onto makes hungry where most it satisfies: the exhaustion of desire is its own replenishment; Lucky Pierre’s erection never lets (him) down. Each word appearing in the text, like a furtive image on screen bound to disappear, going with the flow, exhausts itself while imprinting on the narrative its own momentum, producing the next in its wake, in endless, mechanical succession. For sex is nothing more than a fatal machine, Nature’s machine: blind, gravity-bound, and implacable. Once turned on, not unlike what happens in “Charlie in the House of Rue” from A Night at the Movies, there is no stopping the fatal machine until the reel has unspooled to the very last. As Calliope says of Lucky Pierre: He is our creation, an embodied trajectory that we have seen through from beginning to end. Or almost the end. An end whose finality appears all too arbitrary: You’d just have to make more films, and those films are over now, says Terpsichore, with her typical bluntness. There’s no further budget. (386) The absence of final period to the novel further stresses that if the course of the reel is over, the real again, and still, perpetuates beyond and outside it . . .

Should you, then, conclude to the irreducibility of the real to the reel? Probably, yes. In a conventional sense. In which case, the real ironically reaffirms itself with an orgasmic vengeance at the end of The Adventures of Lucky Pierre, eluding its recording, dodging all mimetic renderings of it, by appearing too late, elsewhere, when and where one does not expect it anymore, when the means of recording it have been exhausted. In that sense, the real is image-free, forfeiting in advance all representations, repetitions, duplications of it. On the other hand, though, the real may not be irreducible to the reel. If the reel is taken in and for its very motion, in its performativity, that is. In which case, as a pure succession of fleeting images, or, rather, as a fleeting succession of pure images emptied of all mimetic contents, the film, the text, is real. Purely pornographic images—giving you to see all there is to see, nothing more, nothing less. What you see is what you get. Bodies, the flesh of the text, flesh made words, referring to nothing behind or beyond them. Because, in a way, pornography is an unambitious, unpretentious genre, it might very well succeed where other metaphysical discourses and philosophies irremediably fail; for what pornography displays, it does so in and for itself, thereby eschewing any extrinsic connection, any recourse to something “other” than what it is; while unlike pornography, what a non-pornographic film gives you to see when a sexual intercourse is staged and played, is always something other than what it, at core, is—never some sex, but an adultery, passion, boredom, etc.

And so, in spite of, or even because of pornography’s propensity to rely on clichés, and caricature, and unrealism, verging on, and flirting with the simulacrum as it does, it might eventually be able to provide some sort of immediate grasp on the real. That pornography as a genre is repetitive does not necessarily infirm it. Or as much seems to be suggested by the musical structure of The Adventures of Lucky Pierre, organized around a “theme,” or chorus—C to C and F again—that acts as a kind of ritornello throughout, a mode of repetition which, properly speaking, as some have observed, repeats nothing, nothing aside from what it says at the very moment it says it for the “first” time; as such, the ritornello appears from its very “first” apparition as an effect of duplication, the repetition of something that has not yet been expressed, probably cannot be. Lucky Pierre, in all his forgetfulness, is haunted by a similar type of effect each time he has a fuck; and it might be the same type of repetition effect that makes Alison say, in Gerald’s Party, that every cunt in the world [is] somehow miraculously different. (10) Tirelessly reenacted, the sex act always appears and is always carried out for the “first” paradoxical time, and despite or because of their experience—I feel like I just lost my virginity! [Lucky Pierre] wheezes (113), while Ilsa, in “You Must Remember This,” thinks Rick is an innocent man, after all; this is probably his first affair. (A Night at the Movies, 184)—Lucky Pierre and Rick Blaine remain utterly innocent, doing the act each time for the first time, what they “repeat” having as such not taken place yet. Both being built on the idea of repetition, as made clear by their very titles, The Adventures of Lucky Pierre (also the title of a Herschell Gordon Lewis nudie cutie film) and “You Must Remember This” repeat, properly speaking, nothing at all, nothing that ever took place as such—you read “You Must Remember This” with the same lingering impression of déjà-vu or déjà-lu, in part influenced by the story’s title extracted from the lyrics of the soundtrack, as you would listen to Ravel’s Boléro, for instance, paradoxically “remembering” its insistent theme with its first occurrence, given from the start as a mere repetition effect of nothing per se, nothing pre-existent to it. The scene from Casablanca that “You Must Remember This” rewrites is, of course, one that literally does not exist in the original movie.

In their repetitive dimension of nothing in particular, both The Adventures of Lucky Pierre and “You Must Remember This” plunge their characters within a profoundly comic and grotesque world, a world that looks familiar though they fail to recognize it, which, far from occulting its raw reality, rather reinforces it.

Fiction, the real—pornography, as it comes and goes between both, moving to and fro, to and fro without cease, undifferentiates them, one exhausting the other as they both consume, consum-mate each other—And so all boundaries dissolve and even of the self, as surfaces are by other surfaces consumed, all edges gone, skin less integument than vestibule, their limbs on view now eight, now none, their passions and their dreams [ . . . ] as raveled as their organs and their bird’s-nest veins. (“Touch”) A unique knotted strand with multiple ramifications (raveled) that you, among others, can still exploringly pull on, as you unfurl, moving on and through it, fleshing it out, this single sentence opening the story “Touch,” making up on its own the whole first paragraph that comes and goes, coming, yes, and going, from one partner to the other—They meet, without touching, at the edge of two stories, his unfolding, hers under revision, or perhaps hers rising, his falling, etc. As you unfold, too, this “last,” endless sentence that keeps unreeling, from reprise to rupture, before The Adventures of Lucky Pierre stops. This state of things, the narrator of “Touch” says, cannot go on, yet cannot not go on, their stories, story, fused to one, spun out anew from knotted viscera and running on without their leave, even their imagined dialogues of release [ . . . ] imagined whole by this compounded creature that they’ve become yet cannot long remain, the world having no place for tormented soup-spilling two-headed and-hearted eight-limbed things, even if not always all at once on view. The difference between the protagonists’ initial stories (plural), the space between them, their bodies, the language fleshing them out, is abolished, fusing them, coupling them into a single story when they “touch,” a story refreshed, “spun out anew” through the (falsely) narrative inter-course between them; properly speaking, nothing happens, nothing takes place nor shape aside from the writing itself, the text itself as textus, woven, weaving etymon, metafictionally redoubling itself and spinning, unfurling its language, a “veiled medium,” opaqued by the story’s constant folding back upon itself, its storying in another sense, thus referring to nothing outside itself, bypassing all reliance to a referential background it passes by; a veiled, though transparent, immediate medium, all the more real as the world around the fused characters, as world, collapses: they pitch and tumble through a world less a world to them than mere veiled medium for their convulsions, wistfully storying as they go their implausible escape and dreaming of those bygone tranquil days of obscure bump and jostle . . .

Yet cannot long remain . . . Lucky Pierre, for one, is all too aware of this: oh, it is inevitable, he knows, no reel is infinite (401). Yet, for all that, neither the film nor the text have to be oriented towards a definite, final ending. Of course, from a practical point of view, despite the intrinsic movement animating it, a sentence, a text, a film, is complete, has to be completed to come into existence, though, in theory, it remains infinitely catalyzable. Despite its complexity and elaborateness, the “last” sentence in The Adventures of Lucky Pierre is not yet one, its catalysis not complete by the end of the reel . . . In other words, the text’s finality is purely technical, rather than ontological—So everything is interruptus. Anyway, these are mere preliminaries. (402) The end, a precondition to perpetuation. More, perhaps, than a text about a sense of ultimacy, exhaustion, and death, The Adventures of Lucky Pierre might be seen as a text about interruption and discontinuity, about, that is, desire and pleasure, the pleasure of writing, of reading, the vital force of literature—for pleasure is almost exclusively lodged within its force of suspension; it is an epochē, a stoppage which congeals all recognized values. Ilsa perceives this in “You Must Remember This”: she sighs [ . . . ], gazing up at the ceiling above her, patterned with overlapping circles of light from the room’s lamps and swept periodically by the wheeling airport beacon, coming and going impatiently, yet reliably, like desire itself. (A Night at the Movies, 165) I am being discontinued, [Lucky Pierre] weeps. (396) Yet it’s precisely in his definitional discontinuity that he keeps moving on, as the film does, forever disseminating his seed, stoppage the surest way to continuation, as exemplified in the opening of a story like “Beginnings” from In Bed One Night & Other Brief Encounters—it is interruption, or intermittence, that is erotic in the end, the staging of a stoppage-as-perpetuation, of a disappearance-as-reappearance, not unlike the staging of Alison’s recedings and resurfacings throughout Gerald’s Party, focusing, yet eluding, much of Gerald’s attention, or the inscrutability of “John’s wife” herself at the origin of all men’s desires, an erased presence eventually erased from the text of John’s Wife, “there and not there” . . . Gerald’s Party, or the staging; John’s Wife, or the gaping—the furtive flash of desire; not an absence, an abstraction. A withdrawal into it, the movement of. Coming and going. Not an absence, a “radiance.” Much like a shapely bar of white light between [two] bodies on a photo, more real than what outlines it. (“The Photographer”) An aura of sorts, parodic as it might be. Something traversed by the rhythms of desire, that disappears to reappear, that fades, reshaped by light, by its radiance, there in front of you, ungraspable and immediate.

Phil Gelvin, a character for a while forgotten somewhere at the foot of a page in another’s text, reappears in his turn in “On Mrs. Willie Masters,” his consciousness stirred by doubts: But are these words really all that I am? Am I only, as she would say, a string of noises? (22) A sweet nothing, as it were, his life no longer than the time of your reading of it. He knows, or intuits this: I realize with dismay that I am about to be buried in a line from an old joke. (23) Again, you wish to add. Which, though—his consolation, perhaps—also inexorably commits him to a sort of eternity, the eternity of fresh starts and recommencements, first times and soundings beyond obliteration: By the time you encounter this, boobs, chin, teeth, and nipples may all be gone, if they ever were, yet you’ll be free again to sound them, and as if for the first time. Yes. It’s probably so. I succumb. Phil Gelvin, peerless shoe salesman, is no more. An echoey airiness displaces me . . . (22-3) Again, for the “first” time—as if: not so much in recognition of its duplicity, as, each repetition of it being radically singular in its strange tissue of time and space, always here and now embodied in the reader, no two repetitions exactly alike, the affirmation that the “first” time as such, in its absolutism, does not exist—Phil Gelvin and Babs Masters disappear, to reappear, surely, displaced and embodied elsewhere, elsewhen, wholly re-invented in the spasms of their orgasmic dissolution; and so does the text (on) which they perform, forever singular, the performative result of an “occasion”—I am a man, as I have said, of the occasion (23), Gelvin says; the occasion of a celebration—of an encounter, a love affair, assuredly, between words inked on a generous page and a reader voicing them, silently, electrified by their beauty, caressing, caressed by, them, from the tip of the tongue: I felt, Gerald remembers, as though I were shaping the words for her, rounding them, smoothing them, curling them in over the little gold loops: and that she felt them there, sliding in, caressing her inner ear, and that it made her breathe more deeply. (Gerald’s Party, 34) Ummm . . . Yes, good.

And then: pleasure’s fading blasts . . .

Spasms uncontrolled;

 

dissemination of

language

 

bodies—

 

Have you seen my, you know—the part that goes in here—?

Could that be what’s up by dose?

No, that’s my foot, I think, or yours.

Aha. Is this a parable or what?

A lobby, I believe. Or else a ballpark.

Oh my god, I feared as much. Do you have the coat checks?

Listen, who we are—

I know, I know! And what about this wriggly thing?

Just leave it on the plate . . . (“Touch”)

 

Now, here—

 

something near, removed beyond grasp,

Real.

    a composition coming

Abstracted.

    going fleshed out

        Nowhere;

           again to

              and

                   fro

.
.

. . . falling . . .