Treading carefully
One of the (many) problems with sex
Last week’s article on metaphors left me thinking about other ways in which accomplished writers shape their readers’ understanding without telling them what to think. In particular I was drawn to look again at Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, and in particular at the chapters in which we travel with Anna on the way to her suicide.1 For me this is a tour de force of brilliantly sympathetic writing, in which Tolstoy evokes Anna’s state of mind entirely through presenting her point of view. Just one relatively brief quotation will, I hope, show you what I mean.
“When the train arrived at the station, Anna got off in a crowd of other passengers and, shunning them like lepers, stopped on the platform, trying to remember why she had come there and what she had intended to do. Everything that had seemed possible to her was now very hard to grasp, especially in the noisy crowd of all these hideous people who would not leave her alone.”
This catches with uncanny accuracy the scratchiness, the confusion, the loathing of others which can be a part of depression, without anywhere saying Anna is depressed. Another instance of Tolstoy’s empathetic writing in Anna Karenina is when Anna has post partum psychosis.2 Again, he shows us the world through Anna’s eyes, rather than telling us what she is feeling. A nifty trick if you can bring it off.
But then my mind went to another passage much earlier in the book, involving both Anna and Vronsky, the dashing cavalry officer who has been pursuing her.
“That which for almost a year had constituted the one exclusive desire of Vronsky’s life, replacing all former desires; that which for Anna had been an impossible, horrible, but all the more enchanting dream of happiness - this desire had been satisfied. Pale, his lower jaw trembling, he stood over her and pleaded with her to be calm, himself not knowing why or how….
… But the louder he spoke, the lower she bent her once proud, gay, but now shame-stricken head, and she became all limp, falling from the divan where she had been sitting to the floor at his feet…
‘My God! Forgive me!’ She said, sobbing, pressing her hands to his breast.”3
It seems to me a very odd passage, which leaves a kind of vacuum in the book. The momentous event, of Vronsky and Anna making love, is dealt with in cold, almost bureaucratic language - ‘this desire had been satisfied’. What Tolstoy is interested in is not the actual physical act of love, but its overwhelming psychological effect on Anna. And perhaps that’s wise.
As The Literary Review’s Bad Sex in Fiction Awards made plain, it’s all too easy to fall into some really unfortunate writing:
“Katsuro moaned as a bulge formed beneath the material of his kimono, a bulge that Miyuki seized, kneaded, massaged, squashed and crushed. With the fondling, Katsuro’s penis and testicles became one single mound that rolled around beneath the grip of her hand. Miyuki felt as though she was manipulating a small monkey that was curling up its paws.”4
I will never look at monkeys in quite the same way again.
Of course, there are other, far less uncomfortable ways for a writer to deal with sex scenes, though perhaps Thomas Hardy takes it to something of an extreme, in having the eponymous heroine of Tess of the d’Urbervilles fall asleep at every fateful juncture of her troubled life, from when Alec first rapes her through to her final snooze on the altar stone at Stonehenge. This convenient narcolepsy means that Tess can maintain her status as a ‘pure woman’ despite being a disturbing sexual object to the men in her life - and, I would argue, to her author.
There is an astonishing passage in the book when Tess first encounters Angel, which could not be more vibrant with imagery of stealth and threat, of stinking and loathing, of spoiling and staining - is this how Hardy really felt about sex (and women)?
“The outskirt of the garden in which Tess found herself had been left uncultivated for some years, and was now damp and rank with juicy grass which sent up mists of pollen at a touch; and with tall blooming weeds emitting offensive smells—weeds whose red and yellow and purple hues formed a polychrome as dazzling as that of cultivated flowers. She went stealthily as a cat through this profusion of growth, gathering cuckoo-spittle on her skirts, cracking snails that were underfoot, staining her hands with thistle-milk and slug-slime, and rubbing off upon her naked arms sticky blights which, though snow-white on the apple-tree trunks, made madder stains on her skin; thus she drew quite near to Clare, still unobserved of him.”
No wonder he was careful to knock Tess out every time she came anywhere near a lover’s arms.
As writers, we sometimes reveal more of ourselves than is entirely comfortable.
Part 7, Chapters XXX and XXXI
Autocorrect very helpfully altered this to ‘post party psychosis’ - that would be another kind of experience altogether…
Part 2, Chapter XI
The Office of Gardens and Ponds, by Didier Decoin and Euan Cameron, quoted in The Literary Review
I think the problem with sex scenes, and particularly the act of writing them, is the balance between too much detail and too little. With too much, you get into the realm of making it silly and almost awkward (if not too detailed for your target audience). Too little and you run into it being viewed as unimportant (or even too lyrical/metaphorical if too much flowery language is used).
I've read very few authors who can kind of bridge this gap successfully and even fewer who can make it comfortable when listening on audiobook in your car.