The abstraction of words enhances suggestion and lets the talesman deal more easily with unpalatable subjects.
Sensuous
Tales that treat of the erotic, whether erotica or pornography, belong to the third kind of tale — the ‘Sense Tale’ or tale of experience. As such, the more dramatic media such as the theater, movies, or video, have a strong advantage over tales that are told with words alone. Word-tales do have an edge, however, when the talesman can appeal to the imagination of his audience, or where his subject matter is so disagreeable to his audience that if he were to depict it directly on stage or screen, many of his audience would reject it; and he might want to get them to stick around in the hope that they might become enlightened.
Wink-wink and Fill in the Blank
Whenever a tale is told in the more-concrete arts of drama, choices are made on every level; the characters are embodied by actors who have certain specific characteristics; they are guided to perform in a certain specific manner; they are dressed in a specific way and play out their scenes on specific sets dressed in specific ways. Because these choices are made, the audience experiences the tale with a heightened sense of reality (and the advancement of the technical background of the dramatic arts has, thus far, sought ever more realistic ways to present their tales). But the audience is also denied all the other possible choices that might have been made. The characters, played by these actors, can only look like these actors, and can’t look like other people. Once the costumes have been put on, the audience is forbidden from seeing the characters wearing different garb. The look of the sets must be what is given us; we can’t see them in any other way.
When on the other hand the tale is told in words, the abstract nature of words allows each of us in the audience to ‘flesh out’ the characters and settings in our own way, each to our own taste, and as specifically as we wish and are able. We can ‘fill in the blanks’ which the abstract words by their nature must leave behind (and of which a master talesman will make full use).
This is of course a matter of media: in whatever media the master talesman works, he will seek to heighten its strengths and lessen its weaknesses. But it has particular advantages in tales of erotica (at least in the unhappy Christian lands), because audiences that are guilty over sexual pleasure, and ashamed that they are sexual animals at all, will shy away from the full expression of their sexuality, while at the same time feeling an irresistible attraction for it, which we are given as part of being what we are.
Let us take that part of the ‘line you must not cross’ that involves how extreme are the acts we will invoke, and consider it from the ghetto side of the street, as though we were good working pornographers. We must deal with the limits of taste and our audience’s forbearance, knowing all the while that some in our audience will be ready for more, others will be more chaste and tentative. If we worked with a dramatic medium, we would have to choose just how graphic we want to be, and just how far we lead our performers in their dance. But as talesmen working in words alone, we can hint at and imply and suggest, and in so doing lead our audience to the brink, and then encourage them to partake and slake their thirsts, each in his own manner and to his own taste.
This principle applies to all kinds of tales, of course, and is best seen when we the audience go from a book we love to its dramatic or filmed adaptation, and see that the actors who play the characters don’t look the way we pictured them when we read the book, and the setting seems also different.
Dis-Tasteful Things
Sometimes the subject matter of our tale by its very nature goes beyond what our audience will willingly swallow. Presenting this in the more-concrete terms of drama or video, will push our audience right up against it so forcefully that they may well push right back again, and stop watching, or leave the theater. This is their right, and yet the talesman may have most of all wished to reach this very part of his audience, in order to show them that the thing that repulses them is not so terrible after all, and that those who indulge in it are not monsters but only human after all. And this goal is lost when the audience refuses to continue.
Again the abstract nature of words comes to the good talesman’s aid, and by ‘squinting’ his narrative eyes, as it were, and implying more, and telling less, he may so work about the edges of the unhappy subject matter that he just might hold on to the audience that otherwise would reject it.
Consider Mary Renault’s novels of ancient Greece for an example. She has no qualms or special repugnance for male homosexuality, and was convinced that it (or at least a bisexuality that preferred homosexual love for its intellectual companionship and conviviality) was pronounced in the period. Miss Renault wrote for a general audience, many of whom were strongly opposed to homosexuality both on moral and aesthetic grounds. To many of us men, the sight of two men passionately kissing onscreen is enough to make us squirm, even when we profess no moral or intellectual objection to the act (and that’s just the kissing part). Miss Renault, working in words, was able to work around this in such a way that her novels became big international best-sellers.
(Of course Miss Renault was not writing pornography, and in novels such as The Last of the Wine she may have had as one of her main goals to advance tolerance for male homosexuality. I don’t know if that was the case, but even so, her main goal was not the sexual arousal of her audience, and so for her, consideration of the general audience and its dislikes was important.)
(Composed on keyboard Sunday, April 13, 2008)
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