The
Naked and the Conflicted
ESSAY By KATIE ROIPHE
For a literary culture that
fears it is on the brink of total annihilation, we are awfully cavalier about
the Great Male Novelists of the last century. It has become popular to denounce
those authors, and more particularly to deride the sex scenes in their novels.
Even the young male writers who, in the scope of their ambition, would appear
to be the heirs apparent have repudiated the aggressive virility of their
predecessors.
After reading a sex scene
in Philip Roth’s
latest novel, “The Humbling,” someone I know threw the book into the trash on a
subway platform. It was not exactly feminist rage that motivated her. We have
internalized the feminist critique pioneered by Kate Millett in “Sexual
Politics” so completely that, as one of my students put it, “we can do the math
ourselves.” Instead my acquaintance threw the book away on the grounds that the
scene was disgusting, dated, redundant. But why, I kept wondering, did she have
to throw it out? Did it perhaps retain a little of the provocative fire its
author might have hoped for? Dovetailing with this private and admittedly
limited anecdote, there is a punitive, vituperative quality in the published
reviews that is always revealing of something larger in the culture, something
beyond one aging writer’s failure to produce fine enough sentences. All of
which is to say: How is it possible that Philip Roth’s sex scenes are still
enraging us?
In the early novels of Roth
and his cohort there was in their dirty passages a sense of novelty, of news,
of breaking out. Throughout the ’60s, with books like “An American Dream,”
“Herzog,” “Rabbit, Run,” “Portnoy’s Complaint” and “Couples,” there was a
feeling that their authors were reporting from a new frontier of sexual
behavior: adultery, anal sex, oral sex, threesomes — all of it had the thrill
of the new, or at least of the newly discussed. When “Couples,” John Updike’s
tour de force of extramarital wanderlust set in a small New England town called
Tarbox, came out in 1968, a Timemagazine
cover article declared that “the sexual scenes, and the language that
accompanies them, are remarkably explicit, even for this new age of total
freedom of expression.”
These novelists were
writing about the bedrooms of middle-class life with the thrill of the censors
at their backs, with the 1960 obscenity trial over “Lady Chatterley’s Lover”
fresh in their minds. They would bring their talent, their analytic insights,
their keen writerly observation, to the most intimate, most unspeakable
moments, and the exhilaration, the mischief, the crackling energy was in the
prose. These young writers — Mailer, Roth, Updike — were taking up the X‑rated
subject matter of John O’Hara and Henry Miller, but with a dash of modern
journalism splashed in.
In Philip Roth’s
phenomenally successful 1969 novel “Portnoy’s Complaint,” the Jewish hero
sleeps his way into mainstream America through the narrow loins of a series of
crazy harridans and accommodating lovelies. But are the sex scenes meant to be
taken seriously? In “The Counterlife,” Roth’s alter ego, the writer Nathan
Zuckerman, calls himself a “sexual satirist,” and in that book and others
Roth’s sex scenes do manage to be both comic and dirty at the same time: “The
sight of the Zipper King’s daughter sitting on the edge of the bathtub with her
legs flung apart, wantonly surrendering all 5 feet 9 inches of herself to a
vegetable, was as mysterious and compelling a vision as any Zuckerman had ever
seen.”
Roth’s explicit passages
walk a fine, difficult line between darkness, humor and lust, and somehow the
male hero emerges from all the comic clauses breathless, glorified. There is in
these scenes rage, revenge and some garden-variety sexism, but they are — in
their force, in their gale winds, in their intelligence — charismatic, a
celebration of the virility of their bookish, yet oddly irresistible,
protagonists. As the best scenes spool forward, they are maddening, beautiful,
eloquent and repugnant all at once. One does not have to like Roth, or
Zuckerman, or Portnoy, to admire the intensely narrated spectacle of their
sexual adventures. Part of the suspense of a Roth passage, the tautness, the
brilliance, the bravado in the sentences themselves, the high-wire performance
of his prose, is how infuriating and ugly and vain he can be without losing his
readers (and then every now and then he actually goes ahead and loses them).
In 1960, the 28-year-old
Updike solidified his emerging reputation as the author of eerily beautiful
stories with his novel “Rabbit, Run,” about a lanky ex-basketball player turned
kitchen utensil salesman, Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom, who runs off from his
family, has sex with a plump and promiscuous mistress and comes home to a wife
who has drunkenly drowned their newborn baby. A few years later, Norman Mailer told
Updike he should get back in the whorehouse and stop worrying about his prose
style. But that was Updike’s unnerving gift: to be frank and aestheticizing all
at once, to do poetry and whorehouse. In “Couples,” a graphic
description of oral sex includes “the floral surfaces of her mouth.” In
“Rabbit, Run,” we read of “lovely wobbly bubbles, heavy: perfume between.
Taste, salt and sour, swirls back with his own saliva.” The hallmark of
Updike’s sex scenes is the mingling of his usual brutal realism with a
stepped-up rapture, a harsh scrutiny combined with prettiness. Everything is
rose, milky, lilac, and then suddenly it is not.
For Rabbit, as with many
Updike characters, sex offers an escape, an alternate life — a reprieve, even,
in its finest moments, from mortality. In the Time cover article, Updike
describes adultery as an “imaginative quest.” In “Marry Me,” among other books,
he expands on the theme that leaving one marriage for another doesn’t resolve
our deeper malaise, but he is interested in the motion, in the fantasy, in the
impulse toward renewal: it is Rabbit running that he loves. As one of the
characters in “Couples” puts it, adultery “is a way of giving yourself
adventures. Of getting out in the world and seeking knowledge.”
Saul Bellow shared
Updike’s interest in sexual adventuring, in a great, splashy, colorful
comic-book war between men and women. Moses Herzog, he writes, “will never
understand what women want. What do they want? They eat green salad and drink
human blood.” Bellow’s novels are populated with dark, voluptuous, generous,
maybe foreign Renatas and Ramonas, who are mistresses; and then there are the
wives, shrewish, smart, treacherous, angular. While his sex scenes are
generally more gentlemanly than those of Roth et al., he manages to get across
something of his tussle with these big, fleshy, larger-than-life ladies:
“Ramona had not learned those erotic monkey-shines in a manual, but in
adventure, in confusion, and at times probably with a sinking heart, in brutal
and often alien embraces.”
In his disordered,
sprawling novels, Mailer takes a hopped-up, quasi-religious view of sex, with
flights of D. H. Lawrence-inspired mysticism and a special interest in sodomy.
In “An American Dream,” he describes a woman’s genitals: “It was no graveyard
now, no warehouse, no, more like a chapel now, a modest decent place, but its
walls were snug, its odor was green, there was a sweetness in the chapel.”
Mailer’s most controversial
obsession is the violence in sex, the urge toward domination in its extreme. A
sampling: “I wounded her, I knew it, she thrashed beneath me like a trapped
little animal, making not a sound.” “He must subdue her, absorb her, rip her
apart and consume her.” It is part of Mailer’s existentialism, his singular,
loopy philosophy, that violence is good, natural and healthy, and it is this in
his sex scenes that provokes. As in many of Mailer’s ventures, like his famous
campaign for mayor of New York, it’s not entirely clear how much he means it
and how much is for fun, for the virile show.
It would be too simple to
call the explicit interludes of this new literature pornographic, as
pornography has one purpose: to arouse. These passages are after several things
at once — sadness, titillation, beauty, fear, comedy, disappointment,
aspiration. The writers were interested in showing not just the triumphs of
sexual conquest, but also its loneliness, its failures of connection. In his
unruly defense of sexually explicit male literature in “The Prisoner of Sex,”
Mailer wrote: “He has spent his literary life exploring the watershed of sex
from that uncharted side which goes by the name of lust and it is an epic work
for any man. . . . Lust exhibits all the attributes of junk. It dominates the
mind and other habits, it appropriates loyalties, generalizes character,
leaches character out, rides on the fuel of almost any emotional gas — whether
hatred, affection, curiosity, even the pressures of boredom — yet it is never
definable because it can alter to love or be as suddenly sealed from love.”
In the intervening decades,
the feminists objected; the public consumed; the novelists themselves were much
decorated. And then somewhat to their surprise, the old guard got old. In books
like Roth’s “Exit Ghost” and Updike’s “Toward the End of Time,” they began to
take up the subject of impotence in various forms. Was it possible that the
young literary gods had fallen? Roth wrote in “Zuckerman Unbound”: “Life has
its own flippant ideas about how to handle serious fellows like Zuckerman. All
you have to do is wait and it teaches you all there is to know about the art of
mockery.”
And so we come back to the
copy of “The Humbling” in the garbage can on the subway platform. The problem
with the sex scenes in Philip Roth’s late work is not that they are
pornographic, but that they fail as pornography. One feels that the author’s
heart is not in it, that he is just going through the motions; one feels the
impatient old master mapping out scenes (dildo, threesome), not writing them.
The threesome in “The Humbling” has none of the quirkiness, the energy, the
specificity of the threesomes in “Portnoy’s Complaint,” either the one where
“the Monkey” eats a banana and gets her name, or the one where they pick up an
Italian prostitute who later brings her son, all dressed up in his Sunday best,
to see them. In the stripped-down later novels (“Everyman,” “Exit Ghost,”
“Indignation”), Roth seems to have dispensed with the detail and idiosyncratic
richness of his earlier work. As he writes about old men failing at sex, and
raging about failing at sex, we see the old writer failing at writing about
sex, which is, of course, a spectacle much more heartbreaking.
At this point, one might be
thinking: enter the young men, stage right. But our new batch of young or
youngish male novelists are not dreaming up Portnoys or Rabbits. The current
sexual style is more childlike; innocence is more fashionable than virility,
the cuddle preferable to sex. Prototypical is a scene in Dave Eggers’s
road trip novel, “You Shall Know Our Velocity,” where the hero leaves a disco
with a woman and she undresses and climbs on top of him, and they just lie
there: “Her weight was the ideal weight and I was warm and wanted her to be
warm”; or the relationship in Benjamin Kunkel’s “Indecision”: “We were sleeping
together brother-sister style and mostly refraining from outright sex.”
Characters in the fiction
of the heirs apparent are often repelled or uncomfortable when faced with a
sexual situation. In “Infinite Jest,” David
Foster Wallace writes: “He had never
once had actual intercourse on marijuana.
Frankly, the idea repelled him. Two dry mouths bumping at each other, trying to
kiss, his self-conscious thoughts twisting around on themselves like a snake on
a stick while he bucked and snorted dryly above her.” With another love
interest, “his shame at what she might on the other hand perceive as his slimy
phallocentric conduct toward her made it easier for him to avoid her, as well.”
Gone the familiar swagger, the straightforward artistic reveling in the sexual
act itself. In Kunkel’s version: “Maybe I was going to get lucky, something
which, I reminded myself, following her up the stairs to our room and giving
her ass a good review, wasn’t always a piece of unmixed luck, and shouldn’t
automatically be hoped for any more than feared.”
Rather than an interest in
conquest or consummation, there is an obsessive fascination with trepidation,
and with a convoluted, postfeminist second-guessing. Compare Kunkel’s tentative
and guilt-ridden masturbation scene in “Indecision” with Roth’s famous
onanistic exuberance with apple cores, liver and candy wrappers in “Portnoy’s
Complaint.” Kunkel: “Feeling extremely uncouth, I put my penis away. I might
have thrown it away if I could.” Roth also writes about guilt, of course, but a
guilt overridden and swept away, joyously subsumed in the sheer energy of taboo
smashing: “How insane whipping out my joint like that! Imagine what would have
been had I been caught red-handed! Imagine if I had gone ahead.” In other
words, one rarely gets the sense in Roth that he would throw away his penis if
he could.
The literary possibilities
of their own ambivalence are what beguile this new generation, rather than
anything that takes place in the bedroom. InMichael Chabon’s
“Mysteries of Pittsburgh,” a woman in a green leather miniskirt and no
underwear reads aloud from “The Story of O,” and the protagonist says primly,
“I refuse to flog you.” Then take the following descriptions from Jonathan
Franzen’s novel “The Corrections”:
“As a seducer, he was hampered by ambivalence.” “He had, of course, been a
lousy, anxious lover.” “He could hardly believe she hadn’t minded his attacks
on her, all his pushing and pawing and poking. That she didn’t feel like a
piece of meat that he’d been using.” (And of course there are writers like Jonathan
Safran Foer who avoid the
corruptions of adult sexuality by choosing children and virgins as their
protagonists.)
The same crusading feminist
critics who objected to Mailer, Bellow, Roth and Updike might be tempted to
take this new sensitivity or softness or indifference to sexual adventuring as
a sign of progress (Mailer called these critics “the ladies with their fierce
ideas.”) But the sexism in the work of the heirs apparent is simply wilier and
shrewder and harder to smoke out. What comes to mind is Franzen’s description
of one of his female characters in “The Corrections”: “Denise at 32 was still
beautiful.” To the esteemed ladies of the movement I would suggest this is not
how our great male novelists would write in the feminist utopia.
The younger writers are so
self-conscious, so steeped in a certain kind of liberal education, that their
characters can’t condone even their own sexual impulses; they are, in short,
too cool for sex. Even the mildest display of male aggression is a sign of being
overly hopeful, overly earnest or politically untoward. For a character to
feel himself, even fleetingly, a conquering hero is somehow passé. More
precisely, for a character to attach too much importance to sex, or aspiration
to it, to believe that it might be a force that could change things, and
possibly for the better, would be hopelessly retrograde. Passivity, a paralyzed
sweetness, a deep ambivalence about sexual appetite, are somehow taken as signs
of a complex and admirable inner life. These are writers in love with irony,
with the literary possibility of self-consciousness so extreme it almost
precludes the minimal abandon necessary for the sexual act itself, and in
direct rebellion against the Roth, Updike and Bellow their college girlfriends
denounced. (Recounting one such denunciation, David Foster Wallace says a
friend called Updike “just a penis with a thesaurus”).
This generation of writers
is suspicious of what Michael Chabon, in “Wonder Boys,” calls “the artificial
hopefulness of sex.” They are good guys, sensitive guys, and if their writing
is denuded of a certain carnality, if it lacks a sense of possibility, of
expansiveness, of the bewildering, transporting effects of physical love, it is
because of a certain cultural shutting down, a deep, almost puritanical
disapproval of their literary forebears and the shenanigans they lived through.
In a vitriolic attack on
Updike’s “Toward the End of Time,” David Foster Wallace said of the novel’s
narrator, Ben Turnbull, that “he persists in the bizarre adolescent idea that
getting to have sex with whomever one wants whenever one wants is a cure for
ontological despair,” and that Updike himself “makes it plain that he views the
narrator’s impotence as catastrophic, as the ultimate symbol of death itself,
and he clearly wants us to mourn it as much as Turnbull does. I’m not
especially offended by this attitude; I mostly just don’t get it.”
In this same essay, Wallace
goes on to attack Updike and, in passing, Roth and Mailer for being
narcissists. But does this mean that the new generation of novelists is not
narcissistic? I would suspect, narcissism being about as common among male
novelists as brown eyes in the general public, that it does not. It means that
we are simply witnessing the flowering of a new narcissism: boys too busy
gazing at themselves in the mirror to think much about girls, boys lost in the
beautiful vanity of “I was warm and wanted her to be warm,” or the noble purity
of being just a tiny bit repelled by the crude advances of the desiring world.
After the sweep of the last
half-century, our bookshelves look different than they did to the young Kate
Millett, drinking her nightly martini in her downtown apartment, shoring up her
courage to take great writers to task in “Sexual Politics” for the ways in
which their sex scenes demeaned, insulted or oppressed women. These days the
revolutionary attitude may be to stop dwelling on the drearier aspects of our
more explicit literature. In contrast to their cautious, entangled, ambivalent,
endlessly ironic heirs, there is something almost romantic in the old guard’s
view of sex: it has a mystery and a power, at least. It makes things happen.
Kate Millett might prefer
that Norman Mailer have a different taste in sexual position, or that Bellow’s
fragrant ladies bear slightly less resemblance to one another, or that Rabbit
not sleep with his daughter-in-law the day he comes home from heart surgery,
but there is in these old paperbacks an abiding interest in the sexual
connection.
Compared with the new
purity, the self-conscious paralysis, the self-regarding ambivalence, Updike’s
notion of sex as an “imaginative quest” has a certain vanished grandeur. The
fluidity of Updike’s Tarbox, with its boozy volleyball games and adulterous
couples copulating alfresco, has disappeared into the Starbucks lattes and
minivans of our current suburbs, and our towns and cities are more solid, our
marriages safer; we have landed upon a more conservative time. Why, then,
should we be bothered by our literary lions’ continuing obsession with sex? Why
should it threaten our insistent modern cynicism, our stern belief that sex is
no cure for what David Foster Wallace called “ontological despair”? Why don’t
we look at these older writers, who want to defeat death with sex, with the
same fondness as we do the inventors of the first, failed airplanes, who stood
on the tarmac with their unwieldy, impossible machines, and looked up at the
sky?
-
Katie
Roiphe teaches in the Cultural Reporting and Criticism program at New York University
and is the author of “Uncommon Arrangements: Seven Marriages.”
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