The primal scene of the obscene joke from Freud’s Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious is perhaps overly familiar: Born out of a man’s frustration with a woman’s resistance to his sexual advances, the joke’s “exposure” of the woman’s body serves as an outlet for his libidinal aggression. This paper wagers that there is more to this scene’s misogynistic heterosexuality than meets the eye, however. As Freud suggests in a passage immediately prior to that in which he describes the primal scene, the obscene joke is also motivated by a desire to “see” “what is common to both sexes and to which the feeling of shame extends” – that is, not the vagina, but the anus. To admit the anal erotic dimensions of this primal scene, I argue, is to also inscribe its “exposure” of the woman as an act of orifice-confusing, sodomitical violence.

            The ethical questions this revision raises are considerable, and to pursue some of them I turn to Thomas Nashe’s tale of the trickster page Jack Wilton, The Unfortunate Traveller (1594). I argue that Nashe predicates the visual economy of his text on a series of obscene spectacles that collapses the excremental into the erotic while also collapsing generic boundaries between comedy and pornography. Wilton himself confronts the “primal scene” of these spectacles as he witnesses Heraclide’s rape; and rendered complicit in the rape through his act of spectatorship, he thereafter falls into “purgatory” (his punning word) to be purged of similar anal erotic “sins” committed as a trickster. Crucially, however, Wilton’s own pornographic narrative also implicates us, his audience, for the same crimes. In the very act of also witnessing violence, we readers become as guilty as Wilton of a sex crime. Whereas most critics understand The Unfortunate Traveller to be profoundly skeptical or neutral, even nihilistic, in its ethics, I thus argue to the contrary that it attributes the ultimate culpability for its violence to its reader’s desire for anal erotic enjoyment.