Spoilers alert!!
The placing of a father's penis next to the face of his son, the rape of a young boy by his classmates and the cutting of vaginas make up the first three stories in the collection of erotica from Anais Nin. How to define pornography is difficult, at one end of the spectrum, books like Lolita fester, without doubt exploiting sexuality and the description of sexuality but still pretty decisively lying in the literary domain, at the other lies "Pirates".
Where do Nin's titilations penetrate the scale. On the one hand, it was coaxed towards the descriptive by the Collector who commissioned the tales, every time demanding more actual sexual escapades and less context. Yet he hired literary types and especially in the case of Delta, the writing inevitably strayed towards the artistic. The depravity infesting all the stories is unmistakably poking fun at the Collector but at the same time deeply contemplating the absurdity and necessity of sexual morality.
Why is it we react with such horror at notions of fathers sleeping with their daughters and sons? Is it right to care that women are murdered brutally by sadistic men? Should we happily let the weak get sexually abused by the strong and revel in the pleasure of it all? Should we embrace the darkness that seems to surround these acts, allow suffering to become our motivation. As should be reasonably evident to any person with any semblance of sanity, the answer is no.
The most magnificent tale in the book featured a man who found he gained sexual pleasure from exposing himself eventually finding love in a like minded soul. This did not as the others did, rely heavily on exploitative relationships. The cheap pleasure he derived from exposure would psychoanalytically speaking, probably originate somewhere in the power he gained from his sexuality without consent or effort. Yet he found familiarity and accepted it, and lived happily ever after. A silly little fable but one that used such ridiculous subject matter that it actually remains quite vividly in the memory.
In a few of her stories, Nin titilates and inspires satisfaction, in some she invokes horror and others, merely pleasure. As a book, it leaves one wanting for more substance and a suitable memory blocker to get rid of certain images.
If there can be any conclusion to this rant, it is that pornography can do more than titilate. The deep satisfaction derived from an excellent narrative can be compared very loosely with the strange, magnificent, animal stupour induced by the orgasm; yet few would choose a really good book over a really good orgasm. The strange pleasure in this little collection is that it manages to walk the line.
