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The subject of this essay is not how the erotic is depicted in literature and art but rather the use of words in a specific language to suggest the erotic.

The connoisseur and collector of erotic art is well aware that literary and visual depictions very often result in turning an erotic book into something that has its own libidinous properties – into a sexual object that evokes lust or sustains it. In this sense, might the genitalia themselves be nothing more than the executive organs of literary imagination?

Citing and quoting erotic books in erotic art and literature is partly a gesture of self-consciousness. Whilst entertaining the intellect, it is also “name-dropping” – showing the author’s wide knowledge, but also acknowledging the worth of previous works. Illustrations in such a book allow for the expression of unrestrained imaginations. And the fact that they are illustrations, specifically referred or referring to the text, ensures that the reader perceives it all as a duality – the printed page of text and the printed image – so that it can never be forgotten that erotic literature is first and foremost literature and not an immediate portrayal of reality.

During the 19th century especially, the sexually explicit and the erotic were removed from the open view of formal society. They were relegated to where imagination was allowed to roam freely, exiled to the less-available field of erotic literature and art. Anybody researching the history of literature and art and scouring the archives of museums and libraries will discover how precarious an aesthetic existence such exiled spheres implied. If these literary asylum-seekers could expect no public response, it is hardly surprising that they at least developed a subterranean communications network with one another.

Just as potatoes propagate through the subterraneous tuber, erotic literature seems to propagate through quoting and citing other erotic works. It thus comprises its own excellent reference system within the scope of a closed society.

Books are usually regarded as symbols of cultural development. Their underlying power to undermine culture, however, is not apparent until made evident in an erotic book. What has been banned from public view may then be seen in a sublime form to entice and call for revolt against the bane of the civilisation process: corporeal desire. And of course such desire finds expression also in pictorial images. But with pictures, although sensuality may be more immediate, it remains at an unbridgeable distance because of the depicting medium.

The image, after all, solicits the most abstract of all sense organs – the eye. Smell and sound are senses for close proximity; the eye, on the other hand, is a remote sense. The gap between the requirements of cultural development and the primary desires of the physical body can be bridged only in a voyeuristic way. For an image to refer to the text, or for an erotic text to quote from another erotic text, reinforces that apparent hiatus between body and intellect.

What was shut away from the public gaze and kept hidden following human society’s intellectual decision to adopt a language- and book-oriented culture can now only return in a form of literature and art regarded as “under-the-counter” and libertine.

Western thought shies away from bodily connotations. Intellectual pursuits demand the control and suppression of physical urges. The body is virtually unmentionable. Yet now “libertine” literature has become more widely available, the erotic is no longer banned from intellectual understanding. Books may now openly talk about the processes and needs of the body. Words may once again become the magic wand of desire.

To the intellectual, a book represents the body in a verbal form. “Libertine” literature uses the intellect as a medium to emphasise the opposite. Words and sentences are used to reveal the body and its desires, to lay bare and unclothed all its physical needs and propensities.

Seven women apparently wrestling for a penis, 17th century.

Oil painting. Netherlands School. This is a Freudian concept which is extraordinary for its date and (comparatively puritanical) cultural background.

A mendicant friar, featuring his supposed preoccupation, c. 1900. Vienna. Bronze.

Woman who lifts from her skirt to reveal nudity from the hips down, Meiji period (1868–1912), c. 1880. Satsuma porcelain.

Tibetan sculpture, 17th-18th century. Gilded metal.

Under the death goddess, there is a demon couple making love.

Still, however, words and sentences can only present a form of reality and not the reality itself. Words can only be words. And that is why the wide scope of “libertine” literature has the depiction in words of what is essentially indescribable as its aim. In contrast to the utter reality of the real world, the vocabulary of the physical body employed by “libertine” literature remains inevitably that of the imagination.

Once-banned corporeality has indeed regained a position for its depictions of bodily urges in literature, then, but it does not break free of the unreality of literary fiction. Literature is not a substitute for action; rather it is an arena for virtual action.

The subject of this book – effectively a “book about books in books” – is to some extent the equally esoteric overlap of book-collecting (involving the private collection of rare texts) and the collecting of erotic works. The book focuses on select erotic texts of the 18th to the 20th centuries. These are texts that have their own significance within an erotic context, and the book thus constitutes either a mode of defence – as in the motif of The Temptation of St Anthony, which leads to the reappearance of what has been rejected – or a direct vehicle into the imaginary world that is the erotic.

The sections of quotations within this book – arranged in chronological order – feature many excerpts from works of erotic literature in which other erotic works are cited. They comprise a colourful medley of quotations from erotic literature of the 18th to the 20th centuries, listing references where erotic literature mentioned in erotic literature has special significance.

This means that the author has in fact directed his research in the opposite way from the usual. When he was young he might have looked for erotic passages in books; now he is looking for literary passages, literary references, in erotic books.

To me, the erotic as a literary phenomenon requires understanding in a particular way. The requirements of reality in literature and literary depiction meant that those subjects of imagination and fantasy that no longer fit in with such requirements were banished to their own realm – a realm in which literature might freely depict a life filled with sensuality.

It is also a realm in which a reference to an erotic work may thus be an intellectual side-step taken with full consciousness, and outside all elements of sexuality, even in the midst of a description of a sexual exchange. This represents a heightened notion of the unrealisable: that which is possible in reality may still be surpassed by an imagined, fantastical unreality. Yet literary dreams – like daydreams – represent a form of wish fulfilment, taking on impossible forms and nonetheless blending with reality via our imaginations.

Julian Mandel, early postcard of Kiki de Montparnasse, c. 1925. 14 × 9 cm.

Lehnert & Landrock, Arabian female nude, c. 1910.

Vintage sepia-toned matte gelatin silver print on structured paper, 24 × 18 cm.

The Erotic as a Literary Phenomenon

The relationship between the power of the imagination and the erotic is, then, the subject under examination in this book. What cultural conditions foster the development of the imagination as an individual area of a person’s psychology? What share does rationality – the ability to reason, central to the philosophy of enlightenment – have in the development of erotic imagination? What is the function of what is then imagined? Moreover, to what extent do the forces of acculturation to a mode of life in which the erotic remains unexpressed affect the powers of the imagination?

1665/1666: Pierre de Bourdeille, seigneur de Brantôme, Lives of Fair and Gallant Ladies

Another type of people has corrupted girls severely; those are their teachers who have to teach them in the liberal arts, and if they want to be bad they will be: anybody can imagine what type of comforts they are granted when they are teaching, alone in a chamber or when studying; anybody can think of the types of stories, fables, and histories they sometimes teach the girls to arouse their imagination and once they see this excitement and desire in these girls, how they know how to take advantage of the situation.

I once knew a girl who came from a very good and prosperous family, I tell you, who came to ruin and made herself into a whore because her teacher told her the story, or actually fable, of Tiresias who, after having tried both sexes, was asked by Jupiter and Juno to settle the dispute of who enjoys the most pleasure when copulating, man or woman? He replied, contrary to Juno’s opinion, that this would be the woman.

Juno was so upset about being told he was wrong that Juno blinded the poor judge, taking his eyesight. It is no wonder that this story tempted the girl because she had heard from other women how crazy men were about sex and that they enjoyed it so much but considering the judgement made by Tiresias, women can enjoy it even more and thus it should be tried, they say. Really, girls should be spared such lessons! Are there no others?

Their teachers, however, are apt to say that they want to know everything and, since the girls are already studying, the passages and stories requiring an explanation (or those that are self-explanatory) have to be explained and told without skipping that page; and if they do skip the page, the girls will ask them why and if they answer that they skipped the page because it would corrupt the girls they are then so much more eager to learn about that passage, and they start pestering their teachers to such a degree that they have no choice but to explain it to them, because it is the nature of girls to want what is forbidden to them.

How many female students were corrupted by reading these types of stories, as well as with those including Byblis, Caunus, and many others written in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, up to the book Ars Amandi, which he also wrote.

In addition, there are many other risqué fables and lecherous speeches published here: French, Latin, as well as Greek, Italian, and Spanish. The Spanish saying goes: ‘Dear God, keep us from a horse that speaks and a girl that talks Latin’. God only knows if their teachers want to be bad and teach their pupils such types of lesson, how they can corrupt and dirty them so that even the most decent and chaste among them will fall.

Is it not true that the holy Augustine was gripped by pity and pain when he read the fourth book of Aeneis, which contains the affairs and the death of Dido?

I would like to have as many hundreds of coins as there have been girls, worldly as well as pious, who have become excited, dirtied, and lost their virginity when reading Amadis de Gaule. Anybody can see the damage Greek, Latin, and other books can cause when their teachers, these cunning and corrupted foxes, these miserable good-for-nothings with their secret chambers and cabinets in the midst of their laziness, comment on and interpret these types of stories.

Fish as a mobile or pendant, with an erotic scene inside, c. 1930. China. Porcelain.

Vincenzo Galdi, Female nude, c. 1900. Photograph, 16.4 × 22.5 cm.

Franz von Bayros, lesbian scene, 1907.

Illustration for Die Bonbonniere, by Choisy le Conin (Pseud. for Franz von Bayros), plate VII. Etching.

John Collier, Lilith, 1889. Oil on canvas, 194 × 104 cm.

Atkinson Art Gallery Collection, Southport.