"The Obscenification of Everyday Life": Representing Pornography in Anglo-American Fiction since 1970

Abstract

The rollback of censorship in the 1960s broke any restraint on literary fiction in the U.K. and the U.S.A. in its representation of increasingly graphic sexual content on the page. In the decades that followed, technological advances in the recording and dissemination of explicit still and moving images fuelled the exponential expansion of the sex industry. This dissertation shows how pornographic motifs in fiction by four major writers reflect the incursion of pornography into the public arena. It follows two intertwined chronologies: the work of Englishmen J.G. Ballard and Martin Amis and Americans Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace, and the responses of waves of feminist critics to the rise of porno-driven media. The sexual image in photography, film and video was among the causes of the death of affect in Ballard’s fiction. Nevertheless, he advocated pornography’s proliferation without compunction and calculated its politically transforming value. Sex in Pynchon’s novels can be mapped onto contemporary pornographies after they crossed over from covertly gathered male audiences watching short, silent, underground stag films, first to mainstream cinemas openly showing adult features in the New York of the early 1970s, and later into suburban living rooms and bedrooms via VHS, DVD and streaming. Ultimately, Pynchon came to normalize the insidious influence of a sexualised mainstream colonised by hard-core. Martin Amis evolved from edgy exploiter into self-appointed feminist critic, and came to see Internet gonzo porno as occasioning real damage to performers and consumers alike. David Foster Wallace diagnosed pornography as a media addiction, with anhedonia as its primary symptom. Once literary fiction’s role as a ground-breaking purveyor of sexual content had been usurped, and its concomitant transgressive edge blunted, the writers examined here came to take as their subject the mechanisms and consequences of mediated sex.