PATTERSON’S PORNOGRAPHIC PORTRAITS: A DECONSTRUCTION OF THE SEX SCENES IN THE NOVEL THE CHILDREN OF SISYPHUS

Abstract

The literary depiction of sex, and by extension pornography, in early modern Caribbean literature has been neglected by literary academicians. Using Susan Sontag’s theorisation of the pornographic imagination, this paper analyses sex scenes in Orlando Patterson’s The Children of Sisyphus in order to determine whether or not they could be labelled as ‘pornographic’. The analysis is done with reference to other pornographic texts and novelists from various time periods. The link between literature and pornography is discussed and its relevance to the novel under discussion explained. The sex scenes assessed are pornographic because of the gratuitous nature of the sexual details which amount to a deliberate attempt at sexually arousing the reader. Such gratuitous detail is evident in the obsessive descriptions of the sex scenes, the use of fetish, and literary foreplay.