On Literary Sex

Posted 4 March, 2008 in Literary Criticism |

A couple of weeks ago, I quoted approvingly Russell Smith’s desire to see more sex in novels. Here’s the counterargument, from the Guardian:

When novelists try to make their sex scenes literary, when they try to orchestrate each moan and groan into the book, wasting all that time trying to create the perfect scene, trying to make it seem believable, they fail miserably. The literary approach to writing a decent, believable sex scene is the most embarrassing thing about contemporary literary fiction today.*

To illustrate his argument, the author of the Guardian piece, Lee Rourke, makes reference to the novels of Michel Houellebecq, which he claims are “saturated with badly written sex scenes.” Houellebecq’s sex scenes are nevertheless “a joy to read,” because “if sex is to be used at all, it should be mechanical, dreary and, most importantly, clichéd, which is precisely what you get with Houellebecq.”

This is disingenuous, because Houellebecq’s novels are nihilistic dissections of modern anomie; they’re about the lack of human connection in a world riven by consumerism, technology, and fanaticism. The “mechanical” sex scenes are manifestations of this; complaining that they are “badly written” is akin to complaining about Patrick Bateman’s compulsively detailed descriptions of the sex in Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho — it’s an indication that the complainant has pretty much missed the entire point.

Rourke goes on to complain about the sex in Ian McEwan’s novella On Chesil Beach, which he finds self-consciously literary and “laughably unreal.” (By contrast, the “mechanical,” “dreary,” and “clichéd” sex in Houellebecq “seems real” to Rourke.)

Granted, sex in novels is very difficult to pull off. Done badly, it becomes unintentionally funny or embarrassing. Not for nothing is the Bad Sex Award presented every year, and always finds a full roster of candidates to choose from. Russell Smith highlights the difficulties involved in writing sex in his introduction to Diana: A Diary in the Second Person:

The English language is not suited to graphic descriptions of passionate acts. … [T]here are only so many words for body parts and the actions they perform (for in fact, there are only so many actions), and constant use of them becomes repetitious. And really, none of these words is satisfactory: if you use the correct, everyday word for a body part — penis or vagina, say — you risk sounding cold and clinical, like a medical textbook or a how-to guide. Slang words, on the other hand, tend to be either ugly or humorous. Cock and pussy are harsh and, well, childish, and from a register of language that I suppose you’d have to call proletarian; that register does not suit every scene and every character.

It is perhaps this limitation of language that rouses the ire of people like Rourke. Certainly it has stymied writers, even otherwise talented and worthy ones. John Updike, whose influence in breaking down barriers in terms of descriptions of erotic acts in mainstream literary novels is enormous, has always evinced difficulty in this regard. His 1968 novel Couples was scandalous at the time for the explicitness with which it threw back the veil on the sexual lives of middle class American suburbanites. However, much of the sex in that novel seems to be cut from the self-consciously literary cloth that Rourke has such disdain for:

She showed behind and between her legs a wealth of listening curves and damps. She tugged her gown to her throat and the bones of her fingers confided a glimmering breast to his mouth, shaped by an ah of apprehension; when with insistent symmetry she rolled onto her back to have him use the other, his hand discovered her mons Veneris swollen high, her whole fair floating flesh dilated outward toward a deity, an anyoneness, it was Piet’s fortune to have localized, to have seized captive in his own dark form.

The overly clinical term “mons Veneris” would no doubt have Smith cringing, but the “wealth of listening curves and damps” is equally disconcerting, as are the fingers that “confided a glimmering breast to his mouth” (”glimmering”?) and the overly twee alliteration of “fair floating flesh.” This, safe to say, is not writing that one could get lost in.

Part of the difficulty with passages such as the one above is that there is no sense of exuberance to it, nor a sense of danger. In short, it doesn’t feel as though anything is at stake. In Amy Sohn’s novel My Old Man, Powell, the screenwriter who has an affair with the book’s much younger protagonist bristles at the thought of wearing a condom during sex: “I believe people should feel that every time they have sex they could die from it.” Powell understands that sex needs to have an edge, which is often what is missing from literary depictions of the act, which frequently feel too dryly intellectual, stripped of all passion and spark.

It was precisely this edge that made Nabokov such a compelling writer when it came to sexual matters. Not just the fact that he took up taboo subjects — sex with an underage girl, incest — but that he wrote about sex with abandon, as though he were allowing his pure id free rein on the page. Van’s dream from Ada, or Ardor, for example:

Bad Ada and lewd Lucette had found a ripe, very ripe ear of Indian corn. Ada held it at both ends as if it were a mouth organ and now it was an organ, and she moved her parted lips along it, varnishing its shaft, and while she was making it trill and moan, Lucette’s mouth engulfed its extremity. The two sisters’ avid lovely faces were now close together, doleful and wistful in their slow, almost languid play, their tongues meeting in flicks of fire and curling back again, their tumbled hair, red-bronze and black-bronze, delightfully commingling and their sleek hindquarters lifted high as they slaked their thirst in the pool of his blood.

Nabokov is intentionally pushing buttons in passages such as this, and his description of the ear of ripe Indian corn could be read as a bawdy parody of Freudian dream analysis. It is the vibrancy of the language commingled with a sharp sense almost of discomfort — due in large part to his wanton flouting of the incest taboo — that gives the passage its full effect.

The energy — of both language and substance — that Nabokov displays is also apparent in Harold Brodkey’s masterful short story, “Innocence,” which features an extended, twenty-page description of a man trying to bring a woman to orgasm orally. Brodkey’s great insight — “Bad sex can sometimes be stronger and more moving than good sex” — is rhymed off almost as an aside, and the pitch of the story follows the ebb and flow of the lovers’ exertions. It is a bravura performance, and should be more than sufficient to put the lie to naysayers such as Rourke who believe that there is no such thing as a good literary sex scene.

(Thanks to Claire Cameron for pointing me in the direction of the Guardian article.)

*An odd redundancy, that.

1 comment to “On Literary Sex”

August, March 5th, 2008 at 4:10 am:

• I’m glad that you brought up Ada or Ardor; of the sixteen of Nabokov’s books that I’ve devoured it is far and away my favourite, though I think the sex in that book is linked to more than just the wild abandon you so rightly point out. The reason the sex works as much as it does in books like that is because it’s connected to something bigger. I mean, obviously there’s the incest, but even that points to something bigger. I don’t know about you, but that book sent me through an emotional roller coaster. I felt joy in the characters’ love, heartbreak at their problems, and incredible erotic rush from the sex, horrified at the knowledge of their sins, and most strongly, ashamed at myself for hoping they’d find happiness with each other anyway. No other author, and no other book, has done to that to me, and I feel very much like that was the greater purpose of the sex; to make me question my concepts of love and happiness, and to make me try and understand why I felt things like shame.

  As far as the sex goes in most other literary works, I feel like it’s mostly there because people have sex and it can only be avoided for so long before it just has to be there. It’s included because it’s merely human rather than because it has a place in the deep structures of the work, and I think that’s the real reason why it fails. As much as I hate Updike’s work (and I do), I think that his assessment of Nabokov’s prose that you find on the back of all the Vintage trade paperbacks is accurate, that he writes “ecstatically”, but I also think that even that tremendous, vigorous rush of language can still become funny and embarrassing if there’s not some greater purpose behind it all. Don’t get me wrong, I like sex and pornography as much as the next guy–maybe even more (and thank god my special lady thinks in much the same way I do), but in literary fiction, or any fiction other than straight-up erotica, I demand it be more than an end unto itself.

  I’ve got a whole stack of Canadian books on my shelf right now that I’ve chosen specifically because they put a little blood and sex in their picture of contemporary life (I’ve already reviewed Roxane Ward’s Fits Like a Rubber Dress, the first book to come off that stack), because I think that it’s something we need more of and I want to see what’s available right now, but something tells me I’m in for a disappointment, and mostly because of the demand I mentioned above.

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