Fifty Shades of Great Prose: Erotica for the literary cognoscenti

With the onslaught of the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy and the range of spin-offs it inspired, erotic literature seems to have gotten a particularly bad rep (not that it was ever terribly good to start with), which personally I consider a great pity. While I understand the frustration of avid readers with the repetitive vocabulary and bland action of E.L. James' fiction, I'd like to contend that erotic literature does *not* have to read like Shakespeare, Whitman, and Joyce are jointly rotating in their graves. 

Quite the contrary - in the best of cases, literary erotica gives you double the pleasure: titillating images in your head AND lush, gorgeous prose that satisfies your logophilic appetite. Plus, since most of my suggestions below are considered "classics" by mere virtue of their date of publication, they tend to have very demure covers, which means that you can safely read them on the subway, during lunch break, or on a crowded beach. Here are some of my favorite picks for your hot and steamy summer read!

Picture found here.

Teleny, or the Reverse of the Medal (1893, Anon.)

If you only read one erotic novel in your life, make sure it's this one. Whether this piece was written by the one and only Oscar Wilde whom it is frequently attributed to is subject to vigorous academic debate, but frankly, it should be of little to no consequence to us: What is vital is that it reads an awful lot *like* it sprang from the mind of the genius who gifted the world with The Picture of Dorian Gray, and indeed Teleny seems set to explore the dark and seductive underworld of fin-de-siècle Europe that Wilde's 1891 literary sensation only ever so delicately hints at. 

The prose is absolutely stunning, opulent, and lexically complex; there's an array of sensuous, eccentric metaphors and similes to describe the action, but they never sound embarrassing or out of place. As regards language and character development, Teleny is unmistakably a product of the aesthetic movement of the late 1800s, of which Wilde himself was a chief proponent. 

Apologies for the slightly blurred focus. I must have been distracted when snapping this shot...

The novel contains ample scenes of both straight and gay sex, loosely held together by a dark love story, but it definitely leans towards the man-on-man (or men-on-men...) action, which makes it the perfect read for all you slash fiction enthusiasts our there. What I love about this book - apart from the obvious - is that it firmly shakes our notions of prudish, conservative Victorians who would be perfectly scandalized by lady's bare ankle. John Fowles' metafictional novel The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969) nicely taps into the tension between nineteenth-century alleged morals and the unrestricted, because officially tabooed sexuality that was enabled to bloom underneath society's coy surface, and Teleny could clearly be cited as a prime illustration of this tension. Let's just allow ourselves the harmless fantasy that Mr. Wilde had his long-term lover Lord Alfred 'Bosie' Douglas (featured below - and played by young Jude Law in the 1997 biopic Wilde) in mind when writing this 'anonymous' piece of erotica. Not too shabby, amirite?

Picture found on a lovely tumblr site dedicated to Lord Alfred Douglas, 
who was also a (mildly successful) poet and translator.

L'histoire de l'oeil (trans. Story of the Eye, 1928, Georges Bataille)

If this were the pornographic online streaming platform of your choice, we would have firmly landed in the fetish section. Bataille's novella is bizarre, to say the least, but also strangely erotic if you let yourself enjoy all the kink. It details the sexual adventures of a teenage couple, told by the guy looking back at the events several years later. Most of the action takes place during summer on the beach, so you even get a nice vacation vibe with it. The different vignettes of which the story is composed are at times disgusting, at times comic, and always on the verge of surrealism. Sex, death, horror, and the abject are closely entwined in Bataille's fiction, and sometimes indeed indistinguishable from each other. Themes range from orgies to torture to mutilation, so beware that this truly Freudian read is not for the fainthearted. It's not without reason that Story of the Eye has remained Bataille's most notorious work. 

You can download the complete work here for free. There's also an English language edition (Penguin, 1982) with critical commentary by Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag, and my German edition  (rororo, 1977) featured above has a Michel Foucault quote on the blurb - isn't this just too good to be true? And frankly, if Roland, Michel and Susan could read and enjoy this, so can you.

Les liaisons dangereuses (trans. Dangerous Liaisons, 1872, Pierre Choderlos de Laclos)

For all the 90s kids out there: This is what Cruel Intentions (the 1990 drama with teenage heartthrobs Ryan Philippe and Sarah Michelle Gellar which received, among other accolades, MTV's Best Kiss Award and sparked my entire clique's sexual awakening) is based on, so yes, it's goood. Liaisons is an epistolary novel, detailing the exchange of letters between mainly two characters, the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont. The Marquise and the Vicomte are ex-lovers, but have become bitter rivals in a game of seduction and manipulation. 

The letters describe their (largely successful) attempts at corrupting the virtuous characters they are contrasted with, such as the honorable Madame de Tourvel, whose husband is away on a business trip and who is hence left utterly defenseless in the face of the Vicomte's advances. Needless to say, the story ends tragically for all parties involved...

From the vantage point of literary criticism, Laclos' novel is a highly engaging read because of its superb use of unreliable narration: The same writer will present conflicting perspectives on the same event, depending on the recipient he or she addresses in the letter. It is left to the reader to untangle the actual story underneath the many layers of conceit and duplicity, which resonates nicely with the overall theme of shady characters and their hidden motives. There is also 1988s movie version that stays closer to the original than the teen flick, directed by Stephen Frears and starring Glenn Close, John Malkovich, Uma Thurman, and Michelle Pfeiffer.

Delta of Venus (1978, Anaïs Nin)

Finally, a feminist read to round off this so far exclusively male line-up. Delta of Venus by Cuban-French author Anaïs Nin is a collection of fifteen short stories that relate a variety of sexual encounters. Characters range from choir boys to male nude models to housewives and prostitutes. Nin's stories are not too blatant or explicit, but emotionally charged and intensely powerful. Her style is deeply poetic and embellished, and one senses that underneath the happy debauchery and carnal pleasure lurks a deep despair over the human condition.
 
Many of the stories focus specifically on the woman's perspective and her desires, fears, hopes, whims and struggles. The fusion of emotionality and physicality, of the intellectual and the physical, is one of the sustained tropes that bind the otherwise unconnected encounters together. This is particularly noteworthy, considering that Delta of Venus was commissioned by a wealthy book collector who originally wanted Henry Miller, Nin's lover and confidant, to "write erotica at a dollar a page." Miller's ego was apparently gravely injured by such a request (Nin describes his reaction as close to feeling "castrated" - what a drama queen old Henry was...), but his girlfriend happily pitched in, not without taking a somewhat ironic and caricaturing stance towards the task at hand. Writing the stories was rendered increasingly difficult by the collector's repeated requests to remove from the draft anything that might distract from the sex proper, including philosophical reflections and poetic descriptions. In Nin's words:

"[H]e almost made us lose interest in passion [...] because what he wanted us to exclude was our own aphrodisiac—poetry." 

I hear you, girl. Fortunately for us, Nin didn't pay much attention to those ignorant demands and delivered an array of marvelous tales, imaginative and full of surprising ambiguities. Download the full collection for free here.

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And other literary erotica you can recommend to your fellow book lovers? Let me know in the comments below!