like a sex machine

I've been reading about Victorian pornography recently. I've always wanted to know more about Victorian sexual ethics after learning about curators painting penises off Greek pots. Came across (ahem) this post about the history of vibrators: pretty cool. Just as I thought I couldn't justify doing reading that was in no way related to my research, one of my students pointed me to The Reenchantment of the World. From the synopsis:

What we aim to show, in this edited volume, is that modernity produces an entirely new array of strategies, compatible with secular rationality, for re-enchanting a disenchanted world.... Those who desire a universal order (kosmos) may find it, now in intermittent fashion, in secular epiphanies, moments of being in which, for a brief moment, the center appears to hold; those who, on the other hand, require a reason for their existence and effort, find it in the last place they would have looked: science, not merely a destroyer of beliefs but also, as Renan understood, their replacement.... for a hierarchy of significance, there is the genre of detective fiction, in which everyday objects become, once more, potentially salient; for mystery, there is the perennial fact of our bafflement in face of the world, a fact which enlightenment, ironically, serves more and more to confirm. And the hankering for other worlds, once satisfied by visions of paradise, is now satisfied by the creation of “secondary” or “virtual” universes (J.R.R. Tolkien and Star Trek providing respective examples)—universes whose fictitiousness is, at the same time, always acknowledged. Just like their premodern predecessors, these rational forms of enchantment are also catalyzers of community.

So, a movement from the eighteenth century to the present in which genre fiction, imaginative engagement with it, and fan community fills the gap in our hearts left by the loss of religion. I listened to an interview with the editors of the book on Stanford's Entitled Opinions podcast (which promises to be very interesting, despite the portentious tone, and the fact that I'm not sure they could have come up with a title that made me more inspired to smack them in the face), and they talked about Sherlock Holmes fandom, how Conan Doyle was a lapsed Catholic turned spiritualist who believed in fairies. The early fan community, the Baker Street Irregulars, and their essays about Holmes, arguments over canon, etc. "Sherlock Holmes was the first fictional character whom people talked about as if he was real." And how Moriarty was an allegory for the devil.

They came *so close* to saying that Holmes was an allegory for Christ - and then, are the fan essays about him, the obsessive biographing and arguments over canon all really like the same communities, the same communal practices for Christ? I've been thinking, experimentally, about medieval receptions of the gospels as fan texts for a while now, and I think if I were to write a giant history of the fan which would, in part, be the history of the religious, and had wondered about Holmes fandom as a moment where religious faith in Christ and the imaginative fleshing-out of a character on the page are confused, or blurred, or are revealed to be the same. Did you know that many of the Baker Street Irregulars were Bible critics?

So, I am not finished reading about Victorians. Maybe I'll move on to a slightly less sexually explicit form of love. (Although Holmes and Watson were totally doing it.)