It happens very often, even more in literature, that people misuse these two labels, generating even more confusion among those who don't manage the concepts. For example, it can be the case of a person for whom any painting or narration about a nude or a sexual encounter is something pornographic. And conversely, another person can categorize as "artistic nude" or "erotic" something that is nothing more than mere and gross pornography. In this post I will defend my opinion about it and I will try to draw a line that separates both lands; but I'll do it by the hand of two great writers: Vladimir Nabokov and Mario Vargas Llosa.

Although the debate can be taken to the fields of cinema, painting and photography, I will focus on the literary field for three reasons. First: my biggest passion are books and I have enough knowledge to reinforce my arguments. Second: my testimonies come from two great writers whose experience, obviously, comes from literature. Three: the elements that allow to differentiate pornography and eroticism are also identifiable in other disciplines, as well as in literature, so the analysis is applicable to those other areas. For the author of Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov, the pornographic novels are vain and are limited to the sexual part:

"...in pornographic novels, action has to be limited to the copulation of clichés. Style, structure, imagery should never distract the reader from his tepid lust. The novel must consist of an alternation of sexual scenes. The passages in between must be reduced to sutures of sense, logical bridges of the simple design, brief expositions and explanations, which the reader will probably skip but must know they exist in order not to feel cheated (a mentality stemming from the routine of true fairy tales in childhood)..."

These logical bridges of the simplest design that are mentioned by Nabokov are a good guide to differentiate an erotic book from a pornographic one. If someone has read E.L. James or Megan Maxwell, can realize that both are closer to the second category than the first. The sexual scenes don't have to be graphic or very scandalous. It's enough that sex rules over all of the other elements and that these other elements are quite simple. 50 shades of Grey is a clear example of what is erroneously sold to us as erotic literature, because many people think all books are literature and all sex is erotic. If we pay attention to Nabokov, even Sade could look badly wrong:

"In addition, the sexual scenes of the book have to go in crescendo, with new variants, new combinations, new sexes, and (Sade's work, you go to the gardener) therefore, the end of the book should be more filled with lasciviousness than the initial chapters."

That is a characteristic of Sade's novels, in which a sexual encounter is followed by a threesome, a homosexual scene, until a great orgy explodes with all the characters. However, what I believe saves Sade is that these bridges mentioned by Nabokov have quite deep, philosophical ideas, defiant of the prevailing systems of his time. In my opinion, the flaw of the Marquis was that many times philosophy and sex ran as parallel narrations, like a novel with two separated lines in counterpoint. The best parts in erotic literature are those when the different elements merge as part of a whole and I don't have, so far, a better example than Mario Vargas Llosa's erotic novels.

The Peruvian, Nobel Prize winner, expressed in The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto: "Being eroticism the intelligent and sensitive humanization of physical love, and, pornography, its cheapening and degradation" and also calls pornography "Eroticism for the poor in pocket and spirit". The erotic is then a high degree of pleasure, an intelligent, sensitive, educated dimension, far above the animal pleasure represented by the mere copulation mentioned by Nabokov. Eroticism is measured, patient, passionate, it is "The slow, the formal, the ritual, the theatrical [...] a wise wait. Precipitation brings us closer to the animal". Instead, erotic pleasure elevates us to our condition of men. The Peruvian writer adds that the erotic goes hand in hand with art and all art implies a degree of consciousness, creation and of course, pleasure. On the other hand, pornography is a more carnal facet, more animal, much more basic.

“Pornography strips eroticism of artistic content, privileges the organic over the spiritual and the mental, as if desire and pleasure had as protagonists phalluses and vulvas and these gadgets were not mere servants of the ghosts that govern our souls, and segregates the physical love from the rest of human experiences. Eroticism, on the other hand, integrates it with everything we are and we have."

This integration is one of the keys. In The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto all parts of the human body are highlighted as equally erogenous zones: hands, feet, ears, nose, eyes, breasts, armpits, knees, glutes, legs, and not only those that surround the sexual organs. In the same line, the pleasure that is obtained through sex, can be equally obtained through the contemplation of art (books, paintings, musical pieces), through letters, dreams, fantasies, conversations, because the eroticism transcends the body, unlike pornography that is limited to it.

Any opinion on this issue will be well received because it will feed the debate and will help us to clarify the line, sometimes diffuse, between one area and the other. Already a little clearer, the invitation is to read. Look for works and authors that you have heard mentioned as erotic literature (it's the same for cinema, photography, painting), read Sade, Nabokov, D.H. Lawrence, Anaïs Nin, Fanny Hill by John Cleland, but also Megan Maxwell, Jodi Ellen Malpas or E.L. James (from these last three read only one, and only one book, it will be enough) and analyze where's that line that separates the erotic from the pornographic and which side of the border you want to stay in. Everything is allowed and nothing is condemnable in this matter, as long as we have the firmness to assume and recognize things as they are. What cannot be done is to proclaim yourself an admirer of something when the opposite is extolled. Honesty and coherence is everything that is asked for.