It beats me
Let’s start with a confession. I haven’t read Fifty Shades of Grey. Well, not from cover to cover. But I’ve read enough over people’s shoulders to know I want more, especially now I realise it’s not the sequel to Sebastian Faulks’ Second World War French Resistance novel Charlotte Gray. It will be all mine to devour, just as soon as I get my hands on the copy I ordered from my local independent bookseller over a week ago.
Already, I can say with confidence that E. L. James’ three-volume vagina monologue is a great book, despite the limitations of my intimacy with the text, and not withstanding my BA Honours degree in English and a passion for reading serious literature that has endured for 46 years so far. I shall keep you in suspense for a few paragraphs before I tell you why.
Fifty Shades of Grey (and to a lesser extent, the second and third volumes, Fifty Shades Darker and Fifty Shades Freed) are the stuff that new writers fantasise about – and that digital media make possible in a way none of us could have even dreamed of in the dull days of paper porn. Any writer who claims not to have wanted to write a book that hits the spot and then some is almost certainly not being entirely truthful, bound by a heavily boned corset of modesty.
Rampant downloads, mounting bookshop sales, cash flowing in uninhibited – an alleged £6.5 million in just a few months, if you include the sale of the film rights – orgies of debate and disagreement in multiple corners of the physical and virtual worlds: what writer could resist topping the sales of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code and J K Rowling’s Harry Potter books? How much does quality of writing matter when what you write brings in money in quantity?
That E. L. James is no mistress of characterisation or purple prose is not in dispute. In the month since my obsession with Fifty Shades began, I certainly haven’t caught a hint of any on online forums or Amazon reader critiques, in emails from friends and Facebook posts, through chance conversations on street corners and buses, and during casual encounters in church halls and theatre dressing rooms. There is some relief to be had in this, for were E. L. James being widely hailed as a writer of promise, it would be right to have serious concerns about the critical faculties of the reading public. What most readers do agree on is that she is endowed with the gift of being able to structure a narrative and keep the reader reading – not something to be sneezed at.
A fundamental question, and one that E. L. James may or may not ever have asked herself, is whether writers should even try to describe the sexual act. Martin Amis has made a fine living for himself as a writer, trying, over and over again and with varying degrees of success, to do what he says cannot be done. E. L. James has turned her hand to it, apparently without a qualm.
In 1993, The Literary Review introduced the Bad Sex in Fiction Award, set up by Auberon Waugh, and won over the years by ‘good’ (for which read ‘literary’) writers including A A Gill and David Guterson. I shall wait breathlessly to see whether as a ‘bad’ (for which read “without pretensions to be being ‘good’”) writer, E. L James will see her name on the shortlist come the autumn. If over the summer your fancy is taken by a beach full of bikini-clad bodies glistening with sun oil, or by the rippling muscles of a mountaineer hoisting himself up a sheer rock face, you could do worse than while away an idle five minutes thinking of who you would nominate for OCA’s Summer Sex Awards. Nominations, please, for examples of writing about sex which are Over-the-top, Crass and Awful.
Now let me release you from your torment by telling you why I think Fifty Shades of Grey deserves the serious attention of people who care about writing and reading. It’s got people thinking and talking about things that really matter. If the highest aim of the writer is to challenge the reader to question, to think, to talk and, possibly, to change, E. L. James has succeeded.
In heterosexual partnerships, so we are led to believe, some people are having better sex as a result of talking about the book. It’s got men thinking, again, about what women want from them in the bedroom (and in the garden, the multi-story car-park, the lift and on the park bench). The consequences are not always pretty. The Sun reported last week that 31-year old Raymond Hodgson was convicted of assault for squirting his girlfriend in the face with brown sauce. He was fed up with her reading Fifty Shades of Grey and says: ‘I did what I did to show her what saucy really means.’
Reviewing the book in the current issue of The London Review of Books, Andrew O’Hagan’s proposition that ‘each era gets the erotic writing it craves, or deserves’, is a compelling and convincing one. It’s a shame that he misses the point (of both the book and about the relationship between feminism and women’s physical desires) when he asserts that ‘It’s not that Fifty Shades of Grey and E. L. James’ other tie-me-up-tie-me-down spankbusters read as if feminism never happened: they read as if women never even got the vote.’ Women themselves have not been slow in coming forward to talk about the books’ role in liberating them to become much more assertive in their sexual relationships with men. I’d be surprised if any of them has mentioned the ballot box.
The books have made people confront the fact that our mothers and mothers-in-law are interested in sex. A Facebook friend found out through reading a post of her sister’s that their mother was reading Fifty Shades of Grey. Taken by surprise, she retorted: ‘I thought mum was more M&S than S&M.’ Another relates that his mother-in-law exclaimed, when he saw a copy of the book on a weekend visit to her house: ‘It’s not porn. They’re selling it in Sainsbury’s.’
It has made people who are not older women confront the fact that older women have sex – despite the suggestion, voiced and unvoiced, that we probably shouldn’t. The July issue of Woman and Home (target readership ABC1 women aged 35+) included an interview with E. L. James. The same issue features Joanna Lumley, predictably airbrushed, on its front cover. The tension between the reality of women’s faces and bodies and their depiction in the media is a hoary old chestnut that more than 80 years of female suffrage has made more, not less, troublesome.
In The Evening Standard last week, Brian Sewell took the opportunity to launch a legitimate assault on the technical aspects of this year’s BP Portrait Award winner, Auntie by Aleah Chapin. Straying beyond the brief of an art critic and moving quite firmly into the realm of misogyny, he then asked: ‘Did Miss Chapin not see that in her obsession with the ghastliness of ageing flesh, she had enlarged this repellent body beyond the scale of the head and given primacy, not to the implications of the face – the eyes purblind, the slight smile a rictus, the tousled hair perhaps some indication of character – but to the belly-button and the breasts?’ By contrast, the same portrait is described by the OCA’s Jane Horton as ‘an open and intimate portrait (that) draws you towards the details of her ageing body in an empathetic way.’ Careful timing or carelessness, Mr Sewell, when Fifty Shades of Grey is proving a catalyst for intelligent talk about sex and ageing?
I started with a confession and will end with three predictions. A work acquaintance says that within a month, copies of Fifty Shades of Grey will be piled on the book shelves of charity shops across the land. Another anticipates a generation of ‘grey’ babies next spring. Now one of my own. Writing, like sex, is usually a private act. Reading is best enjoyed alone. That’s why I wonder whether Fifty Shades The Movie will be as successful with the mummy porn audience as the books are proving to be. If we accept the generalisation that when it comes to sex, women are turned on more by words and men more by images, E. L. James may find herself the foster mother of ‘daddy porn’.
22 thoughts on “It beats me”
Leave a Reply
> Next Post Oh Superman…
< Previous Post Soothing nostalgia from France
OCA’s Online Degree Show Showcase 2023
0 Comments
Welcome to our online Degree Show Showcase 22/23 where we are celebrating a number...
Read more
OCA Degree Show Showcase 21/22
0 Comments
Welcome to our online Degree Show Showcase 21/22 where we are celebrating a number...
Read more
OCA News: Student Fees from August 2022
8 Comments
We are announcing today, Tuesday 17th May 2022, the fees which will apply to...
Read more
Augmented Reality – what place does this have in art?
8 Comments
The primary focus for Artivive, going by their website, appears to be its use...
Read more
I have to admit that I did buy it (made by my husband) but have not started it. One of the things that puts me off is the actual cover; but hey I could just make my own. Right?
Thank you, I’ll be picking it up and check the saucy read.
By the way, did I detect an ENORMOUS amount of innuendo in this post? 😛
Yes. *wink*
Indeed Yiann, you could just make your own – or make your own and read E. L.James too! I know what you mean about the cover, but of course cover designs are selected with sales in mind, so it’s doing a good job that way, whether people actually like it or not. You are right to detect an enormous amount of innuendo in the post. To add a little more, I have to tell you I don’t normally have quite so much fun with my keyboard.
Now that made me laugh… go Elizabeth!
The book is available here in the mainland, will probably get my hands on a copy of it at some point.
Not quite sure it’s my cup of tea, but now I want to know why Yiann doesn’t like the cover. It’s the tie cover, with all the shades and textures?
And I want to know why that cover was chosen… it had to have connection with the content.
The tie was used in a sexual act involving the main characters. safer to put on the front than a more explicit scene I guess.
As the book was originally self-published as an e-book, Dewald, it became successful without marketers considering what visual image would make it sell. In other words, the words did the sales job unaided.
You are right in your concluding summary, Elizabeth; books that get people reading can never be all bad. However, as usual, there will be snobbery involved with these tomes. Which is why, like Yiann, if I get the book, I will definitely be covering it…any sort of wallpaper (not grey) will do..so long as no one knows I’m reading it…
Psst, Nina – the whole internet knows now 😉
News this morning, Nina, that ‘Fifty Shades’ is getting people reading Victorian novels too – specifically Thomas Hardy’s ‘Tess of the D’Urbervilles’. Sales of the book have tripled on Amazon since May, when ‘Fifty Shades’ was published in book form in the UK, and doubled at Waterstones. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jul/22/fifty-shades-grey-boosts-sales. Could it be that tempting people to read ‘serious’ novels is E.L. James real authorial intention….
I haven’t got a copy and haven’t read usually saying I’m not into porn and if I am then I want worthwhile issues and worthwhile writing as well.
So let me mention a book I picked up in a second hand bookshop in Johannesburg last week, Embrace by Mark Behr (a great writer, I read his Smell of Apples a few years ago.) It’s set in a Afrikaaner boys’ school in the seventies so we get all the political, racial issues, and the erotic homosexual details. I never thought I’d enjoy this sort of detail but Behr manages it so excellently because it’s well written.
Like everyone else on this post (somewhat ironically) I haven’t read the book. But I’d just like to weigh in on the issue of whether this kind of pornography is liberating for women. You mention O’Hagan’s article in the The London Review of Books, Elizabeth, and suggest that he’s missed the point about 50 Shades of Grey because he says that it (and E.L. James’ other novels) read as if feminism never happened. But I mean, it’s not all that clear cut that pornography – even written, pseudo-pornography – has a sexually liberating effect on women, is it? I don’t think that that idea has been in currency since the sexual revolutions of the 1960s. I mean, there’s been a lot of debate around this issue in recent years because of the wave of postmodern pornography in French cinema, but feminist writers like Sheila Jeffrey’s have argued that these types of representation of sex, rather than liberating a female erotic subjectivity, merely encourage women to experiment more and more in various sexual scenarios and positions, while sexual power structures remain in place. That might be what O’Hagan was getting at, who knows, I haven’t read his article either! But whether or not the book gets people talking may be beside the point; it might have to be judged on covert ideology instead.
The fact that people are commenting here on ‘Fifty Shades’ without having read it says something about its notoriety. (I still haven’t read it, Dehma, but am closer to reading them, as I collected all three volumes on Saturday. Had there not been problems with O2 recently, I might have read at least the first volume by now as I would have collected them as soon as I received the text message from the bookshop – but the message never reached me.)
Of course there must be many shades of impact or lack of impact on the sexual liberation of women by porn. I think it’s important not to make assumptions, though, about the impact of male power structures on women and their behaviour, sexual or otherwise. In 1995, I realised that my assumption that women’s decision to pay for cosmetic surgery was an example of exactly that was badly shaken with the publication of ‘Reshaping the female body’ by the medical sociologist Kathy Davis http://www.amazon.co.uk/Reshaping-Female-Body-Dilemma-Cosmetic/dp/0415906326/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1343047440&sr=1-1. The sub-title, ‘A feminist dilemma’ caused me some intellectual concern, as it had never occurred to me that there could be a dilemma over cosmetic surgery for any woman who identified herself as a feminist. Davis argues that cosmetic surgery, by giving women greater control over their own body image, does the very reverse of the feminist argument to which I had subscribed and still do: that cosmetic surgery ‘recreates’ women’s bodies according to a perceived male ideal. Reading the book didn’t change my view, but it did reminded me not to swallow ideologies whole.
I’m glad you’ve learnt not to swallow ideologies whole elizabeth. We seem to have stumbled into a discussion of hermeneutics.
On the issue of feminism though, it sounds like you’re agreeing with me that it’s not all that clear cut whether this sort of fiction has a liberating effect on women, which is great.
I like the tone of your blog by the way. I probably should have mentioned that in my first post to ease the criticism. I find your persistent championing of really low literature cringeworthy though, but that’s just my own taste.
I do agree with you, Demha, on the point about whether erotic writing of the ’50 Shades’ variety has a liberating effect on women or not.
It’s good to hear you like the tone of the post as I did enjoy writing it.
As for championing ‘really low literature’, I’m not sure that I do. What I am doing is rejoicing that people in their thousands want to read, no matter what they are reading (I point of view I know not everyone would agree with),especially if the alternative were to be passive consumption of even more cringeworthy reality TV.
After really not getting into the hype of these books, the girls at work were talking about them and I was intrigued, So after finding myself off work with a bad back (yes really), I downloaded all three onto my kindle and six days later they were all completed. Not normally my type of book, generally more of a historical novel or autobiography, but I couldn’t put them down. I think you see past the kinky bits and read into the story behind, a lovely well written love story. Give it a go it certainly opens your eyes 😉
“I haven’t read Fifty Shades of Grey. Well, not from cover to cover. But I’ve read enough over people’s shoulders to know I want more, especially now I realise it’s not the sequel to Sebastian Faulks’ Second World War French Resistance novel Charlotte Gray.”
Interesting that you mention Sebastian Faulks, Elizabeth. I’d rather reread his passionate novel ‘Birdsong’ than continue reading ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ beyond my free Kindle sample. I have to be seduced by the writing first. But perhaps my expectations of ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ were too high, given the book’s popularity!
Did you know that one of the OCA tutors has written two books for the erotic fiction publisher Black Lace? They are:
Intense Blue
Game for Anything
and both are by ‘Lyn Wood’.
Both books have received good reviews on Amazon for the quality of the writing: ‘The characters are all well drawn’ (Intense Blue) and ‘stylish, witty, sexy and even educational’ (Game for Anything).
Yes, we OCA tutors are a versatile bunch!
What a delightful, playful piece. Thank you Elizabeth, and the commenters. I have enjoyed reading this very much – thought-provoking and witty. I may even read the book.
I really recommend anyone, man or woman to read Fifty Shades…
I particularly do not classify this as “porn”, calling it that would be completely missing the whole point. And I have nothing against porn.
I’m on my second round at the moment, as Jayne – I couldn’t put them down; and it is one of the most romantic novels I’ve ever read – not that I’ve read too many romance novels or similar. Looking forward to the film version and it makes me think that it will make 9 1/2 weeks look like a Disney film! 😛
And as for the cover, now that I’ve read the books, I find myself even more displeased with them. They could have done better than a bland and too literal cover. But yes, they’ve already made the money… I’ll be making my own covers and they’ll certainly not be wallpaper!
Prediction number 1 in my original post, that copies of FSOG would be piled high on the shelves of charity shops by the middle of August, has not come to pass. The end of August approaches, and still this trilogy is unavoidable unless you close you eyes and ears.
A guest on Radio 4’s Broadcasting House last Sunday suggested a FSOG page in each of the broad sheets, given the same status as Business and Finance, so those not interested can avoid it.
In case anyone at OCA is still following this debate, Laurie Penny risked a feminist defence of it in The New Statesman http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/culture/2012/07/stop-being-mean-fifty-shades-grey.
Post links if you come across anything that gives a different and worthwhile perspective.
Sorry to come to this discussion so late when everyone is probably reading other things. I won’t go into too much detail about my views of 50 Shades.
Suffice to say: good on EL James for making so much cash out of writing something she clearly enjoyed. I have problems with what this (both the perception and the actual content) does to the feminist cause and I found it to be badly/tediously written (and not really erotic to be honest). One thing that mitigated it a bit for me though was when I discovered it was originally written as fan fiction for the show Twilight – the Christian Grey character was created as a vampire!
The main reason for me pitching in here is to share a fab comment from a student at the OCA day out at Press Association Images in July: “I can’t read 50 Shades of Grey, it will put me off my TAOP colour assignment!”
Thanks for contributing to the discussion, Helen, and for making me (and I hope others) laugh with your TAOP comment. Not everyone is reading other things. The evidence lies in the paperback fiction listings. All three volumes of E L James’ ‘Grey’ trilogy are still at the top, a whole season after they first landed there. Like you, I have concerns from a feminist perspective about what E J James has written and the way in which it has been received. It’s not a clear-cut for-and-against case, though, as the piece by Laurie Penny in The New Stateman, cited in one of my earlier posts, indicates.
Just for the record,I have now read the first two volumes but am not champing at the bit to read the third (although it is sitting waiting). That’s not because I don’t want to know how the story ends – I do; the narrative line is undeniably strong – but because half way through the second volume I had started to dread the sex scenes and was yearning for a little more variety, of vocabulary at least!