No Software

By John Skow

WE RESPOND TO STORIES WITH astonishing versatility of imagination. The three- year-old listening to his grandmother momentarily becomes Peter Rabbit; the geezer reading Patrick O'Brian's sea stories feels scared on the quarterdeck of a storm-blown frigate. But the distinction between what the reader imagines and what he actually experiences remains solid -- the geezer does not actually get seasick.

Over the whole range of literature, only erotica functions differently. If it works, sexual arousal is real, not imaginary. And if it doesn't work? The most recent example is Harold Brodkey's novel Profane Friendship (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 387 pages). The author tells of a long, intensely erotic affair between the narrator, an American novelist named Nino, and an Italian named Onni. The names are anagrams of each other -- different stirrings of the same ingredients, including the same sex.

If the drama is to succeed, the passion must not merely engage the reader intellectually; it must arouse him. For this heterosexual male, who has imagined himself to be the unconventional heroine Moll Flanders and that transcendent bird Jonathan Livingston Seagull, the failure is total. Such a statement will surely be called homophobia, but fear and disapproval are not operating here. In fact, nothing is operating. The reader's reaction is vague exasperation. His mind simply does not have the software to induce the intended physiological response to the author's erotic obsessions, and these are the essence of the book. Such thoughts, of course, must occur regularly to gays when they read about heterosexual sex. You don't have to be a rabbit to enjoy Beatrix Potter, but you may have to be either gay or straight to appreciate gay or straight erotica.