"Pornography is rather like trying to find out about a Beethoven symphony by having somebody tell you about it and perhaps hum a few bars"
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Davies lands the jab with the politeness of a dinner guest and the cruelty of a music critic: pornography, he implies, isn’t just morally suspect or socially awkward, it’s aesthetically inadequate. The Beethoven comparison is a trapdoor. A symphony isn’t reducible to plot summary or a catchy motif; its meaning lives in texture, pacing, recurrence, tension and release - the total architecture of experience. By pairing porn with the act of “having somebody tell you about it and perhaps hum a few bars,” Davies frames it as secondhand sensation masquerading as the thing itself, a cheap proxy for intimacy and eros the way humming is a proxy for an orchestra.
The subtext is less prudish than it first sounds. He’s not staging a sermon about sin; he’s staging a complaint about mediation. Porn promises immediacy while actually increasing distance: bodies become information, desire becomes a checklist, sex becomes content. That “rather like” is crucial - a British-Canadian shrug that lets him smuggle a hard claim under conversational understatement. Porn, in this reading, flattens the human complexity it pretends to deliver, the way a hummed snippet flattens Beethoven into a tune.
Context matters: Davies wrote from a mid-20th-century literary culture that prized depth psychology, ritual, and the slow accrual of meaning. He’s defending the irreducible: not sex as scandal, but sex as artful, lived, and untranslatable in the full.
The subtext is less prudish than it first sounds. He’s not staging a sermon about sin; he’s staging a complaint about mediation. Porn promises immediacy while actually increasing distance: bodies become information, desire becomes a checklist, sex becomes content. That “rather like” is crucial - a British-Canadian shrug that lets him smuggle a hard claim under conversational understatement. Porn, in this reading, flattens the human complexity it pretends to deliver, the way a hummed snippet flattens Beethoven into a tune.
Context matters: Davies wrote from a mid-20th-century literary culture that prized depth psychology, ritual, and the slow accrual of meaning. He’s defending the irreducible: not sex as scandal, but sex as artful, lived, and untranslatable in the full.
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| Topic | Music |
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