After I finished reading Emmanuelle, I was very hesitant to discuss the book on my blog, because normally I don’t get into 18+ material here. However, that said, when it comes to the topic of literary erotica, Emmanuelle is the 500 lb gorilla. 50 Shades of Grey couldn’t dream of provoking a multi-million dollar film franchise lasting decades, complete with a big-budget high profile reboot in production with (at least previously) a major actress attached in the title role. Only D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover even remotely comes close to the level of impact. But in the year 2024, approaching 60 years since its initial publication, does it hold up?
Content Warning: There will be some descriptions of explicit content in this review – described less explicitly than the source material, but still explicit enough that you couldn’t say it on the radio.
It is vitally important to mention, approaching this book, if your knowledge of the material is solely related to the films and television series, you will find yourself in to something of a surprise. All of the adaptations to the screen to date (with a handful of exceptions), undoubtedly including the upcoming reboot, were not only softcore in their content, but served to set the standard of mainstream softcore pornography (sold as “erotica” the way that people sell comics as “graphic novels” in an attempt to elevate the medium) that continues through platforms like Cinemax/Max, and through other platforms to this day. Indeed, those films and series were fixtures of those platforms.
This is why I must say, in terms of explicitness, the novel isn’t that. It is definitely what would be described in filmed pornography as “hardcore”. The very first chapter of the novel – which is what you’ll get if you get the preview chapter on any digital storefront – has a pair of incredibly explicit sex scenes, that very much get into the territory of hardcore porn. We get descriptions of multiple “money shots” – including descriptions of semen running down Emmanuelle’s leg after a person ejaculated inside, that sort of thing. It was the kind of situation where, as I read it, I found myself legitimately surprised that Bob Guccioni of Penthouse had optioned Caligula instead of this. This would have been absolutely what he was aiming for (as opposed to doing a non-pornographic film and adding porn to it in an attempt to “elevate” hardcore porn), and it definitely would have been cheaper.
The ultimate concept of the novel – Emmanuelle travels from France to Thailand to join her husband, and there joins a community of Western expatriates and goes on a journey of sexual self-discovery, is good. There’s a lot there in the novel that’s connected to this that works as well – with her developing homosexual relationships with several women, after having sex with a couple men on the flight in (I’ll get back to this). The problem is the third act and the introduction of the character of Mario. At which point the novel just yanks the handbrake, and manages to find multiple points to just slow the novel down so Marco can go on big speeches about how we need to “divest eroticism from love”, even in the middle of sex scenes, while sex is happening.
It’s just bad writing. It’s also accompanied by a very Orientalist perspective on Thailand. It shows the place as somewhere that Westerners can be freed of the sexual restrictions that come from continental European society, without examining that much of this is due to their political, financial, and racial privilege. Those issues, combined by the desire to just shoehorn a series of mansplaining patriarchal monologues into the final third of the book, can make it tiring. It’s enough of an issue that I absolutely understand why people suspect that the novel was written not by Marayat Rollet-Andriane, who is of Thai-French parentage and was born in Thailand, under the pen name of Emmanuelle Arslan, but rather by her husband under that name.
Now, there are weird patches other than this, but they are relatively minor by comparison. The first chapter alone has a depiction of air travel that could only be written by someone who had never travelled by air, and assumed that the passenger areas of aircraft were just like the passenger areas of a train. In that chapter, we have the passenger compartment with berths that have doors that close – or not quite close all the way so Emmanuelle can see that two adolescents are watching while she has sex. Or that there are showers where Emmanuelle can clean up after sex, or spare clothing available that Emmanuelle can use while her clothing is washed because it was stained with seminal fluid during the sex scene. Or that there’s a communal area that is completely empty at night, where Emmanuelle can meet another passenger for sex.
It reached a point, in that first chapter, where I had to stop and research the history of passenger air travel, to see if there was something, anything I was missing that would imply that air travel had these sorts of amenities. They don’t – they never did. Now, rail travel has berths like that. And showers. And even communal areas that aren’t in use at night. That said, the inclusion of those elements does work to create scenarios for sexytimes to happen. I am sympathetic and supportive of the idea that when you’re writing a work of erotic fiction, no matter the medium, the creator or creators are allowed to fudge the world to allow for sexytimes, so long as the changes would either have no larger repercussions in the fiction beyond allowing sexytimes (nobody noticing people having noisy sex in a changing room), or if they would have larger repercussions they stick and have some sort of narrative effect (pollen allergens are anthropomorphized and rather than causing runny noses and coughing, they have sex with people).
That said, the problems with the Orientalist depiction of Thailand and screwing up the pacing to heck up the story just sucks. The latter is especially bad because while the first uses unexamined racism to build eroticism for the sake of erotic fiction (which is still kinda gross). With the second – well, part of the point of erotic fiction is eroticism – it’s for the reader or viewer (if it’s filmed) to get their rocks off. While the greatest sin of a work of fiction is to be boring, works of erotic fiction have the additional sin of not being sexy. Sometimes that’s by squicking the reader, but even there sometimes that yuck can be someone else’s yum. But if you’re leaving the reader hanging in a non-sexy way, if you’re interrupting the sexytimes themselves for your patriarchal monologue, it ruins the flow and will turn off the audience.
Ultimately, I came away from Emmanuelle respecting what the work represents. It’s a work of erotic fiction that established a framework for the genre that writers for decades have been in conversation with. It launched an entire genre of cinema. It helped build up the structure of the “Woman on a journey of specifically sexual self-discovery” – a sort of “Live, Laugh, Make Love” narrative. However, it’s a work of erotic fiction that also steps on a few messy rakes before plowing right into a wall.
It’s also a work where I really wonder what would have happened if the creators of the film adaptations of the series had kept the same level of explicitness as the source material, what it would the state of erotic cinema be? We currently live in a world where porn with a narrative is a niche market compared to porn with relatively context-free sex (outside of the title of a video clip). I’d like to see what somebody who specializes in narrative adult materials (like, for example, AdultTime), was to do with this story. Unfortunately, unless the estate of the author decides to release the work into the public domain, Emmanuelle isn’t going to go into the public domain for decades, so who knows if this will ever happen.
Please support my Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/countzeroor
Buy me a coffee at Ko-Fi: https://ko-fi.com/countzero
Watch my Live-Streams on http://twitch.tv/countzeroor
Check out my Let’s Plays at https://www.youtube.com/@CountZeroOrPlays
