Tuesday Flash Focus: The Fight at the Center of Almond's "Pornography"
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In either case, the confrontation forces the character to deal with forces whose power is much greater than his or her own. Here, the character battles against those aspects of the world the rest of us would prefer to remain blind to—and the courage the hero demonstrates in facing these darker, stronger aspects of our existence touches us. At the same time, we’re repulsed by such a battle, for the darkness revealed exists in us too, and it’s a darkness civilized folks have spent centuries hiding and denying. But the tragic conflict brings it back into the light, forces us—if not to deal with it—at least to acknowledge its existence.
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At the center of Steve Almond’s “Pornography” is a streetfight between two women in Athens, the birthplace of tragedy. Also, the roots of pornography are Greek—porne (prostitute) + graphein (to write). A dictionary definition would explain that pornography is “intended to stimulate erotic rather than aesthetic or emotional feelings.” Here, the narrator confronts those feelings of erotic stimulation and their association with violence, a confrontation that brings into the light, not only the narrator’s darker self, but that mixture of attraction and repulsion that is uniquely tragic.
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Of this story, Almond said, “Pornography is about the glands. Art is about the heart. You watch or read porn to elicit a physical response. You read literature—even the erotic stuff—to elicit an emotional one. The idea is to feel more than you did before. If I’m doing anything less than that with my work, whether it includes graphic sex or not, it’s an act of exploitation.” The external conflict—this fight between two women—leads the character into a confrontation with his own darker emotions, beginning with his physical response, the “buzz” in the knuckles, that “clench” in the groin. He stands “trying to make sense” not of the external violence he has witnessed, but his own troubling reaction.
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At the end—as he takes in the “sway of her body, her pale lovely breasts streaked with blood, her legs”—he leads us into a very dark, complex contemplation of male sexual desire. Connected to watching, to violence, to shame, to blood, to female bodies, to fulfillment and disappointment, this desire emerges from the depths of this story as a darker, more primal force than most of us recognize. Yes, shame results from such desire, a shame that awaits the very desire that caused it, for only during those moments—when the desire is fully fixated upon its object—does the shame move to the background, And that’s what such desire does, turn the world into objects that contain within them the possibility of satisfying the lust for watching, the need to dehumanize, the buzz, the clench.
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Now, your turn to give it a try. In his essay “Short Story Structure: Notes and an Exercise,” Douglas Glover describes a story as “narrative involving a conflict between two poles,” a conflict that is developed “through a series of actions in which A and B get together again and again” so that we are “drawn deeper into the soul or moral structure of the story” (164). For your story, make a powerful force—either in society or the world itself—be one of the “poles” which a character comes into conflict with—and have the conflict lead us to some dark truth either that we would rather not face about ourselves or that we would rather not know about our world.
Other articles in this “tragedy” series:
Say We Met Jeff Landon When We Were Wondering About Flash
The Postmodern (Short) Short & “The Mother”
Using Doom, Tragedy, and Hegel to Write (Short) Short Fiction
A Follow-Up to Hegelian Tragedy in the Short Short
Hegel, Diane Williams, and the Impossibility of Satisfaction
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