Book review
Burn my shadow: a selective memory of an X-rated life
By Tyler Knight.
Los Angeles: Rare Bird Books, 2016.
Porn performers' autobiographies and memoirs present themselves as a completely separated literary and theoretical category, as they act as a double mirror for two perpendicular duplicities of personal vs private: just like porn is a "private moment" filmed to be watched, autobiographies and memoirs present an "intimate" facade of a public persona while it is being written to be read by someone else. On top of that, for narrating a clearly constructed identity – the pornographic one, opposite to the ‘civilian’ one carried out in daily life – autobiographies and memoirs written by pornographic performers could disappear in the gap between the definitions of autofiction and autobiographical narratives for reasons that set them apart from those which make up the bulk to autobiographical writings yearly published. It is because it unfolds in itself, twice constructed narratively, that these autobiographies and memoirs do a mirror play upon their own image, making it impossible for the spectator / reader to distinguish between what is the real image and what is a mere reflection, therefore generating a game of unending unfolding of false imagery which cannot be deciphered, making for a permanent transit between illusion, fiction, and realistic imagery, as it intentionally dissolves the boundaries between fictional and real.
Tyler Knight opens Burn my shadow: a selective memory of an X-rated life already advising the reader that he is an unreliable narrator. He is aware of the impossibility of being trusted due to his proximity with the ‘facts’ to be narrated: his intention is not to function as a register nor as a token of a pornographic performer. On the contrary, Knights eliminates the gaps between performers and other professions, recovering ‘the human condition’ as the ‘line that unites us all’, regardless of any sorts of categorization.
However, through his writing Knights sets himself apart from the vast majority of autobiographical authors, independently of their profession. The 23 chapters of Burn my shadow present the reader with independent façades of a same industry through a narrative that is precise and sharp as a surgical scalpel, making the scenes bleed copiously and without mercy. Knight is relentless in his falsely candid approach to the pornographic industry, its participants, the referential dimension in the specific discourse of pornographic literature (MAINGUENEAU, 2007) secured by the two main requirements to place a discourse as pornographic: the configural dimension, which allows the reader to easily picture the scene; and the ‘euphoric affections’ dispersed throughout the many consciences in Knight’s writing. His language is an unapologetic performative spectacle, echoing the sexual aggressiveness expected from the derivation of the pornographic – in a narrative that does not deliver only the plenitude proposed by the pornographic device, but provides through void and descriptive scenes a metaconscience of the entire pornographic discourse. Between what is said and what is represented is a mirror play in which Knight’s narrator undresses the language of all ornaments which might hinder the eye and hide the hard cored truth, exposing the raw matter of his life just like pornography presents a basal sexuality through the unveiling and manipulation of bodies.
Knight clearly cares about aesthetic function of his literature, therefore enabling it to migrate from the pornographic to the erotic – though it refuses to do so by complying with the structural format of pornography. In the gangbang scene, for example, he eliminates the heroic image of the self, expected by the doxa, by placing himself nameless, incognito, unidentified amidst all the other participants. The scene ends within the emptiness found in entire experience itself. And here lies one of the most valuable aspects of Burn my Shadow: it claims its place in the realm of pornographic writing while attentive to the aesthetic morality of the so called higher – erotic – literature unapologetically, because it is honest. Going against the debatable pornification of literature, Knight constructs his memoirs the other way around: by literalizing his pornographic self, turns his literary aphrodisiac (NIN, 1977) into porn poetry without rhymes.
