A Real Short Introduction to Classical Reception Theory

Abstract

A Real Short Introduction to Classical Reception Theory JAMES TATUM There used to be a large bookstore in New York specializing in books and journals for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered readerships. There I once happened upon a publication that at first glance promised to be a Nostradamus prophecy for future studies in the history of human sexuality. It could also have had important connections with today’s thinking about the literature and culture of ancient Greece and Rome. To understand how all this came about I will need to begin with some bibliography. I make no apology for doing this. Everything has its specialized literature, not least bookstores, and for bookstores properly considered the dominant literary form is not so much the books being sold as the bibliographies that guide booksellers in their selections. Sometimes disdained for being of interest only to narrow specialists or retiring scholars, bibliography can in fact be as exciting and engaging as any poem or novel if the right questions are asked of it. the tale of the floating signifier I never met a language I didn’t like. —Will Rogers how-to-do-it manuals are a popular subject for such emporiums , and this book store in Manhattan dedicated to its LGBT clientele was more ecumenical than most. The full range of human sexuality was well represented, its parade of titles starting with copies of the latest edition of Alex Comfort’s The Joy of Sex. The many recipes about what it is possible to do with female and male bodies had made Joy a arion 22.2 fall 2014 best seller for years. (“Since 1972, more than 8 million people have come to this wise, witty, and uninhibited bestselling guide to lovemaking and found all they wanted to know about achieving greater sexual satisfaction.”) And these were recipes in no figurative sense, but candid how-to-do-it scenarios , each one focusing on every human orifice and useful body part, with detailed advice about the combinations possible for imaginative love-making. The Joy of Sex with its batterie de cuisine was a direct imitation of Irma Rombauer’s 1931 book The Joy of Cooking, probably the most influential and widelyread cookbook in America from the time it was published to the present, its only possible rival being the two volumes of Julia Child and her French colleagues’ Mastering the Art of French Cooking. As in Rombauer’s Joy there was also consoling advice about what to do in emergencies, as when a fallen soufflé is the unforeseen outcome of much preparation. There was also the revised edition of Doctor David Reuben’s 1969 bestseller Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask). It was an important predecessor for Comfort’s Joy, but it was not really a cookbook. Everything You Always Wanted to Know was aimed at readers who might be inhibited, inexperienced, or outraged by every aspect of human sexuality. Reuben’s book is still in print but is now best remembered as the inspiration of Woody Allen’s 1972 film with the same title. Allen concocted a series of mini-dramas inspired by the questions the good doctor had used to organize his book. Reuben imagined his patients and readers seeking answers to such inquiries as “Do Aphrodisiacs Work?” and “What Are Sex Perverts?” An appropriately climactic finale finds Woody and the male members of his cast dressed as cavorting sperm cells, to answer the question “What Happens During Ejaculation?” The most moving episode is the answer to the question, “What is sodomy?” Gene Wilder plays a successful Upper East Side MD who is visited one day by an Armenian shepherd in love with a sheep named “Daisy.” It happened because of all those lonely nights in the mouna real short introduction 76 tains, the shepherd explains. He would like to be cured of this love affair and a cousin in America had told him about the good doctor. Wilder at first resists, but finally sees her and unexpectedly falls for Daisy himself. In an increasingly reckless cycle of clandestine assignations and intimate dinners in elegant New York hotels he finally loses everything for the...