PISANUS FRAXI
101
contains several literate touches. But beneath its surface one detects
an endless searching for "new" terms or equivalents. For though
repetition is a central formal attribute of pornography, this repetition
is set within a context which also demands that
it
be accompanied
by minute, mechanical varia tions in both general arrangement and
language-thereby delivering it from the onus of "mere" repetition.
Like the murder mystery and Hollywood movie, pornography is an
extremely conventionalized form of expression. Departures from the
convention are confined to a limited number of formulae, and any–
thing more radical is likely to end in violation of the convention and
failure rather than
in
transcendance and transformation. Ashbee's
prose, it can be seen, falls well within the boundaries of the conven–
tion, and it is therefore not a prose we can count on for its strong
grasp on the actual. In the passage I have cited, Ashbee's prose flows
smoothly, without a halt, bump, or interruption about the incident
of the little girl falling on the stake. What this indicates, simply, is
that he has accommodated himself to the reality of the convention–
in
the pornographic fantasy, as in the comic cartoon, one can be
destroyed or dismembered without being hurt. To some extent, of
oourse, any experience of any art requires such an accommodation;
in
pornography the degree of envelopment by the fantasy tends to
be
larger, the submission of one's sense of reality to the fantasy more
peremptory and absolute. (It may be able to succeed in this require–
ment because the threshold for such fantasies is in most men quite low.)
This confusion of fantasy and reality, this interfusion of various
levels of perception is not in Ashbee confined to those areas I have
already referred to. The process continues to generalize itself and
invade other parts of his intellect. In the end Ashbee is unable to re–
sist his own impulses, and what began as investigation of a literature
concludes as propaganda for a reality. Ashbee devotes a great deal
of space in his three volumes, for example, to the extensive literature
of flagellation. And he does start some effort to sort out fantasy from
reality, introducing material from personal memoirs, letters, interviews
with friends as a kind of evidential check on the literature. But at
last he is overpowered by the literature, by the strength of the fantasy,
that is by the strength of desire. "Women," he concludes, "delight in
administering the birch; and innumerable are the tales of schoolmistresses
whipping their pupils, mothers, and especially mothers-in-law, their
children, and taking grim pleasure in the operation. Indeed women
are more cruel and relentless than men...." The logic of this passage
is
instructive. That children were beaten as punishment cannot be
doubted; it is no less true that sexual fantasies of flagellation were
