Sex isn’t good unless it means something. It doesn’t necessarily need to mean “love” and it doesn’t necessarily need to happen in a relationship, but it does need to mean intimacy and connection…There exists a very fine line between being sexually liberated and being sexually used.
—
Laura Sessions Stepp
Although lately I’ve mostly been posting things about books and poems on here, this quote struck me … and then I immediately related it to books. And poems. And David Foster Wallace.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been making myself re-read Girl With Curious Hair. There’s other stuff I’m reading, too, like what I’m teaching, and Insides She Swallowed (by Sasha Pimental Chacon), and a creative writing textbook. For a while I’ve had difficulty with DFW’s fiction; for a while, I thought it was his difficult sentence structure/language, but then I realized that wasn’t it — after a while you get used to these mechanisms. And besides, I like how that language functions in his nonfiction.
When I read this quote, though, it made me realize that it’s this that is missing from his characters. They have sex — and sometimes their sexuality is an important plot point (“Little Expressionless Animals” “Lyndon”) — but the sex, as it happens in the story, never means anything. It never carries any intimacy or connection, even when it’s supposed to. And so the story feels … well, dishonest. Or unbelievable. From “Lyndon:”
“I asked what he meant as he spread cold gel on himself and then me. He opened me roughly, rudely. I winced into the pattern of the bed’s headboard. … He sodomized me violently, without one thought to my comfort or pleasure, finally shuddering and falling to weep against me.”
I could follow this scene, or believe it, if somewhere else in the story we had been giving a scene of these two men, who love each other very much, who get married (married!) in the 1970s, having sex that is meaningful, that shows the love between them, or at least the connection between them, a connection that we are supposed to believe transcends even language.
It can be difficult for a writer to write about sex. Some writers just avoid it entirely (see: Jonathan Safran Foer in Everything is Illuminated or Michael Chabon in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay). But avoiding it leads to weakness in the story; again, we have a gay character in The Amazing Adventure of Kavalier and Clay whose repressed sexual desires are presented … well, badly. (Disclaimer: I haven’t read the book since summer 2006, so I’m sure I don’t remember it well.)
Having characters whose sexual desires and urges are believable and present doesn’t mean you have to write an explicit sex scene, the way DFW attempts. Look at Anna Karenina. The desire between Anna and Vronsky is part of every one of their encounters; it is so woven into the fabric of the story that the circumspect scene when their love is consummated doesn’t need to be explicit:
“That which for Vronsky had been almost a whole year the one absorbing desire of his life, replacing all his old desires; that which for Anna had been an impossible, terrible, and even for that reason more entrancing dream of bliss, that desire had been fulfilled. He stood before her, pale, his lower jaw quivering, and besought her to be calm, not knowing how or why.
‘Anna! Anna!’ he said with a choking voice, ‘Anna, for pity’s sake!…’
But the louder he spoke, the lower she dropped her once proud and gay, now shame-stricken head, and she bowed down and sank from the sofa where she was sitting, down on the floor, at his feet; she would have fallen on the carpet if he had not held her.”
Anyway, I guess I should stop rambling about this. If your characters are having sex, and acting upon desire, and if they do so knowing that their desire can have terrible consequences, then the sex needs to be believable. But believable and explicit are completely different things. And believable often means that the sex has to mean something — not necessarily love — but intimacy and connection. It needs to communicate something between characters.
Flannery O’Connor: “I am always having it pointed out to me that life in Georgia is not at all the way I picture it, that escaped criminals do not roam the roads exterminating families, nor Bible salesman prowl about looking for girls with wooden legs.”
E.L. Doctorow and Dolly Parton mashup? Last night, for some reason, I kept listening to this song on repeat and imagining the Jolene from this E.L. Doctorow story.
“Is the art of caricature a lesser or secondary art, set beside what we might call the art of complexity or subtlety? Is ‘cartoon’ art invariably inferior to ‘realist’ art? The caricaturist has the advantage of being cruel, crude, reductive, and often very funny; as the ‘realist’ struggles to establish the trompe l’oeil of versimilitude, without which the art of realism has little power to persuade, the caricaturist wields a hammer, or an ax, or sprays the target with machine-gun fire, transmuting what might be rage — the savage indignation of Jonathan Swift, for instance — into devestating humor.”
Joyce Carol Oates, “The Parables of Flannery O’Connor”
” … [I]n my own stories I have found that violence is strangely capable of returning my characters to reality and preparing them to accept their moment of grace. Their heads are so hard that almost nothing else will do the work. This idea, that reality is something to which we must be returned at considerable cost, is one which is seldom understood by the casual reader, but it is one which is implicit in the Christian view of the world.”
- Flannery O’Connor, “A Reasonable Use of the Unreasonable”
a reasonable use of the unreasonable
“I often ask myself what makes a story work, and what makes it hold up as a story, and I have decided that it is probably some action, some gesture of a character that is unlike any other in the story, one which indicates where the real heart of the story lies. This would have to be an action of a gesture which was both totally right and totally unexpected; it would have to be one that was both in character and beyond character; it would have to suggest both the world and eternity. The action or gesture I’m talking about would have to be on the analogical level, that is, the level which has to do with the Divine life and our participation in it. It would be a gesture that transcended any neat allegory that might have been intended or any pat moral categories a reader could make. It would be a gesture which somehow made contact with mystery.”
- Flannery O’Connor, “A Reasonable Use of the Unreasonable”
If you start with a real personality, a real character, then something is bound to happen; and you don’t have to know what before you begin. In fact it may be better if you don’t know what before you begin. You ought to be able to discover something from your stories. If you don’t, probably nobody else will.
—Flannery O’Connor, “Writing Short Stories”
There are two qualities that make fiction. One is the sense of mystery and one is the sense of manners. You get the manners from the texture of existence that surrounds you.
—Flannery O’Connor, “Writing Short Stories”
If we admit, as we must, that appearance is not the same thing as reality, then we must give the artist the liberty to make certain rearrangements of nature if these will lead to greater depths of vision. The artist himself always has to remember that what he is rearranging is nature, and that he has to know it and be able to describe it accurately in order to have the authority to rearrange it at all.
- Flannery O’Connor, “Writing Short Stories”
a story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way
When you can state the theme of a story, when you can separate it from the story itself, then you can be sure the story is not a very good one. The meaning of a story has to be embodied in it, has to be made concrete in it. A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is. You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate. When anybody asks what a story is about, the only proper thing is to tell him to read the story. The meaning of fiction is not abstract meaning but experienced meaning, and the purpose of making statements about the meaning of a story is only to help you to experience that meaning more fully.
- Flannery O’Connor, “Writing Short Stories”
