Grub Street Snob by Terry Eagleton

. . .In a perceptive chapter on literary form in Cleland’s work, Gladfelder recognises that pornography finds it hard to tell a story. Sex is too repetitive a business for that. The sexual repertoire of human beings is severely constrained by the nature of their bodies. Like debates in parliament, it gives rise to endless variations on the same old positions: biology is at odds with narrativity. Anxious for the reproduction of the species, however, Nature has wisely ordained that its repetitiveness should do little to abate our enthusiasm for it. As with the legendary amnesia of the goldfish, we come to it perpetually fresh.. . .



London Review of Books, 13 September 2012