Totalization, origins, and centers that aren’t. Or; Derrida, meet Fanny.

“The center is not the center.” Still on page 1 of Derrida’s “Structure, Sign, and Play” and already I start thinking about origins, Yeats, and stability. Derrida’s discussion of the center as both inside and outside the structure it centers combined with the discussion of totalization got me thinking about canon-building and representative texts, particularly where Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure fits into the conversation. Here’s how:

Derrida quotes Lévi-Strauss’s discussion of how “totality is never closed” and that it’s impossible to ever grasp the whole of anything (9). Maybe this is because the center is both inside and outside of the structure it creates. Yet grammar can be made from “an absurdly small number of sentences”; I’d agree with both Lévi-Strauss and Derrida here that you don’t need to have everything in order to figure out the structures (9). So as a writer, I can never hope to read everything, right? But I can draw and support conclusions made from a sample of texts. This appears to be the rationale behind writing a dissertation: using a selection of works, you make an argument that’s bigger than just those texts themselves. The same goes for a survey course: hit the highlights and you have a view of a period or genre by its end. Either way I can craft an argument that is not total, but pretty good, about more than just the examples at hand.

Then things get sticky. What should be in or out? How does choosing a center shape a project?

I feel like this is one reason why literary canon-building creates such anxieties. Because what texts become the center then dictate the sweeps, assumptions, and other glossing mechanisms of the era. But then again, the center is not the center. *Mind blown.*

How does all of this relate to Fanny Hill in Cleland’s novel? For one, she performs some keen social observation after her arrival to London, learning that although the madam Mrs. Brown says she can “take [Fanny's] looks for a sufficient character,” Fanny cannot trust the bawd’s attire and manner (Cleland 7). Fanny also draws sweeping conclusions about pleasure and sex from a relatively small sample of experiences that she both watches and participates in. Her moral claims are fairly conservative, but her sexual experiences are wide and varied: tribadism, multiple partners, watching her fellow prostitutes have sex with their clients, S&M – it’s all there. But she has no understanding of male homosexuality—“I could not conceive how it was possible for mankind to run to such a taste”—though she watches two young men secretly meet at an inn (156–7). Their acts anger Fanny so much she leaps to raise the alarm, crashes down, and passes out from hitting her head (159). These pages underline her revulsion, yet how different is this from her being whipped or masturbating with another woman? Maybe it’s a strange example of excess going too far. That even though Fanny’s sexual adventures are many and varied, she retains a conservative morality. What purpose does this serve the text?

I’m also thinking about origins. Some scholars categorize the novel as “the first pornographic novel in English.” What’s at stake when making this claim? Why does this particular origin matter? Is Memoirs a center in that it creates the structure to talk about certain kinds of novels, writers, and the eighteenth century yet is totally outside of all of that? What happens to the history of the early novel if we put smut as the structuring mechanism for the period and/or genre?