The Naughty Bits, page 12
“Oh God,” she said, flinging her arms around me, “if only . . .”
“If only what?”
“You know what I mean . . . Was it my fault,” she said, “that this never happened before? Was I such a squeamish creature?” She looked at me with such frankness and sincerity I hardly recognized the woman I had lived with all these years.
“I guess we were both to blame . . .”
from Rabbit Redux
JOHN UPDIKE
In the film Strange Days, set on New Year’s Eve 1999, there is a device called the squid deck that can record one person’s experience onto a minidisk and then play it back for another. I saw this film in Florence, Italy, and emerged to the cobblestone streets feeling that I had seen a dramatization of the end of subjectivity in the very birthplace of Humanism. What I had always felt made humans human—the inability, ultimately, to communicate the depths of our experience and individuality—would be lost with the advent of this technological bridge. I did not see this as an advancement. For what lends poignancy to the fact of consciousness is the difficulty, the impossibility, in expressing its quiddity. Poetry most conspicuously, but all human interaction really, is constantly butting up against the fact of incommunicability. But the struggle, the exertion and friction of the asymptotic approach, is what has always given literature, and life, its meaning.
I thus imagined that the invention of the squid deck would signal the death of literature. Yet that day has not yet come and might never come. And in the meantime we beat on, aching to express and taking solace in the provisional achievements of others.
It was with this in mind that I read and marveled at John Updike’s portrayal of a conflicted wife masturbating alongside her sleeping husband in the second of his famous Rabbit books. Updike enters Janice Angstrom’s mind, as Joyce had Molly Bloom’s, and returns with the layer-on-layer imbrications of her desire for her husband and her lover, for her free and fixed lives, for her future and her past, all of which rush over as her hand moves between her legs. If the experiences of other people are truly unknowable, Updike has come as close as one can get. Her body feels tense as a harp. She wants to be touched . . . How sad it was with Harry now, they had become locked rooms to each other . . . She’d been with him so many times she could be quick in coming, sometimes asking him just to pound away and startling herself, coming, herself her toy, how strange to have to learn to play . . .
This is silly. This thinking is going nowhere, there is tomorrow to face . . . at lunch [she] can go over to Charlie’s apartment, the light used to embarrass her but she likes it best in the day now, you can see everything, men’s bottoms so innocent, even the little hole like a purse drawn tight, the hair downy and dark . . . Determined to bring herself off, Janice returns her hand and opens her eyes to look at Harry sleeping, all huddled into himself, stupid of him to keep her sex locked up all these years, his fault, all his fault, it was there all along, it was his job to call it out, she does everything for Charlie because he asks her, it feels holy, she doesn’t care, you have to live, they put you here you have to live, you were made for one thing . . . it feels like a falling, a falling away, a deep eye opening, a coming into the deep you, Harry wouldn’t know about that, he never did dare dwell on it, racing ahead, he’s too fastidious, hates sex really, she was there all along, there she is, oh: not quite. She knows he knows, she opens her eyes, she sees him lying on the edge of the bed, the edge of a precipice, they are on it together, they are about to fall off, she closes her eyes, she is about to fall off: there. Oh. Oh. The bed complains.
from Crash
J. G. BALLARD
Maybe you saw the movie; I hope you didn’t. Crash the movie is dreck; Crash the novel is pure butter. Written in 1973, Ballard’s novel traces the psychopathology of a modern world we are still emerging into. It’s as if he sat the adolescent version of late-century Western culture on his therapist’s couch and flawlessly predicted the neuroses of its adulthood. Through Ballard we see that the merging of technology and eros always involves a prosthetic interface, some augmentation or externalization of the body, be it an automobile or a computer monitor, through which we are forced to cathect in order to feel our own bodies. This is fetish in its true sense: the need for an external trigger, a gateway to the self that exists outside of the self. Desire emerges in a circuit, a passage, a trip, giving extra meaning to the word drive. If the threat of technology is that we become ever more onanistic, the greater threat is that we become onanists alienated from the very selves that are meant to give us pleasure.
This is the world already inhabited by the characters of Crash. Each is the victim, willing or not, of a series of car wrecks, and their individual and collective libidos grow increasingly dependent on the automobile, and the collision of automobiles, to facilitate their sexual response. In the excerpted scene that follows, in the backseat of a paraplegic crashvictim’s specially equipped vehicle, Ballard’s protagonist realizes that his old set of erotic triggers have been replaced by a new one. We, meanwhile, get a window on the fallout of a full-bore techno-fetish.
She lifted her left foot so that the leg brace rested against my knee. In the inner surface of her thigh the straps formed marked impressions, troughs of reddened skin hollowed out in the form of buckles and clasps. As I unshackled the left leg brace and ran my fingers along the deep buckle groove, the corrugated skin felt hot and tender, more exciting than the membrane of a vagina. This depraved orifice, the invagination of a sexual organ still in the embryonic stages of its evolution, reminded me of the wounds on my own body, which still carried the contours of the instrument panel and controls. I felt this depression on her thigh, the groove worn below her breast under her right armpit by the spinal brace, the red marking on the inside of her right upper arm—these were the templates for new genital organs, the molds of sexual possibilities yet to be created in a hundred experimental car crashes. Behind my right arm the unfamiliar contours of the seat pressed against my skin as I slipped my hand towards the cleft between her buttocks. The interior of the car was in shadow, concealing Gabrielle’s face, and I avoided her mouth as she lay back against the head-rest. I lifted her breast in my palm and began to kiss the cold nipple, from which a sweet odour rose, a blend of my own mucus and some pleasant pharmaceutical compound. I let my tongue rest against the lengthening teat, and then moved away and examined the breast carefully. For some reason I had expected it to be a detachable latex structure, fitted on each morning along with her spinal brace and leg supports, and I felt vaguely disappointed that it should be made of her own flesh. Gabrielle was sitting forward against my shoulder, a forefinger feeling along the inside of my lower lip, her nail against my teeth. The exposed portions of her body were joined together by the loosened braces and straps. I played with her bony pubis, feeling through the scanty hair over her crotch. As she sat passively in my arms, lips moving in minimal response, I realized this bored and crippled young woman found that the nominal junction points of the sexual act—breast and penis, anus and vulva, nipple and clitoris—failed to provide any excitement for us.
Through the fading afternoon light the airliners moved across our heads along the east-west runways of the airport. The pleasant surgical odour from Gabrielle’s body, the tang of the mustard leatherette, hung in the air. The chromium controls reared in the shadows like the heads of silver snakes, the fauna of a metal dream. Gabrielle placed a drop of spit on my right nipple and stroked it mechanically, keeping up the small pretence of this nominal sexual link. In return, I stroked her pubis, feeling for the inert nub of her clitoris. Around us the silver controls of the car seemed a tour de force of technology and kinaesthetic systems. Gabrielle’s hand moved across my chest. Her fingers found the small scars below my left collar bone, the imprint of the outer quadrant of the instrument binnacle. As she began to explore this circular crevice with her lips I for the first time felt my penis thickening. She took it from my trousers, then began to explore the other wound-scars on my chest and abdomen, running the tip of her tongue into each one. In turn, one by one, she endorsed each of these signatures, inscribed on my body by the dashboard and surfaces of my car. As she stroked my penis I moved my hand from her pubis to the scars on her thighs, feeling the tender causeways driven through her flesh by the handbrake of the car in which she had crashed. My right arm held her shoulders, feeling the impress of the contoured leather, the meeting points of hemispherical and rectilinear geometries. I explored the scars on her thighs and arms, feeling for the wound areas under her left breast as she in turn explored mine, deciphering together these codes of sexuality made possible by our two car crashes.
My first orgasm, within the deep wound on her thigh, jolted my semen along this channel, irrigating its corrugated ditch. Holding the semen in her hand, she wiped it against the silver controls of the clutch treadle. My mouth was fastened on the scar below her left breast, exploring its sickle-shaped trough. Gabrielle turned in her seat, revolving her body around me, so that I could explore the wounds of her right hip. For the first time I felt no trace of pity for this crippled woman . . .
from The Canterbury Tales
GEOFFREY CHAUCER
Consider this an open challenge: I defy anyone to show me a more raucous, spirited, spicy rant on marriage than the Wife of Bath’s monologue in The Canterbury Tales. We’ve had over six hundred years to improve on Chaucer’s triumphant creation, but it’s never been done. Not even Shakespeare’s shrewish Kate (before her taming) can hold a candle to Chaucer’s Alison. She’s a kind of Mae West of the Middle Ages—loud, lusty, and eminently lovable (though, some might add murderous, as there are suggestions that she killed off her husbands).
In her celebrated Prologue, Dame Alison holds forth on how to get the upper hand in marriage, both in and out of the sack. Her philosophy is simple: women should have complete sovereignty over their men. And her tactics are sure-fire: “Until he paid his ransom to me, I wouldn’t give him my nicety.” Alison’s is a manifesto of a certain pro-sex, pro-power, pro-marriage feminism—on her terms, of course—whose wit and enthusiasm more than make up for its sometimes dubious ethics. After reminding men that “with an empty hand, you may no hawks lure,” she concludes with a prayer on behalf of women for “husbands meek, young, and fresh in the bed.” A final note: I modernized the following passage to remove the difficulties of Chaucer’s medieval English, but you should definitely read it in the original and in its entirety. This is but a taste.
Experience, even if it were no authority
In this world is right enough for me
To speak of the woe that is in marriage.
For, gentlemen, since I was twelve years of age
Thank the Lord who in Heaven does live
Husbands at church I’ve had me five . . .
God bade us to grow and multiply,
And that good teaching well know I! . . .
That wise king Solomon
He had more wives than one
Ah, would that God let me,
Be as oft refreshed as he!
But that gift of God he gave all his wives
Has no man one such that is now alive . . .
To make the perfect student, you must go to many schools,
And to make the perfect work, you must use a lot of tools,
Five husbands later, you know I am no fool!
So bring on the sixth, wherever he may be
For some keep chaste, but they sure are not me! . . .
Though my life you might well want to scold
Well you know that no household
Has every vessel made all of gold.
Some are wood, but have their place,
God loves us all in different ways . . .
So I’ll bestow the flower of my age
In the acts and fruit of marriage.
Tell me, to what other conclusion
Were members made of generation?
And so perfectly were they wrought?
It could not all have been for nought . . .
And why in all the books is it said
That the husband must pay his wife in bed?
And what should he use for the payment
If he doesn’t use his privy instrument? . . .
In wifehood I will use my instrument
As freely as the Lord it hath me sent.
If I hurt anyone, Lord give me sorrow,
My husband will have it both eve and morrow.
When I find one ready to pay the debt
I’ll marry that man, that you can bet.
He’ll be my debtor and my slave
And all his suffering he will have
Upon his flesh, while I’m his wife
I have the power for all my life . . .
I say in true, five husbands I had
And three were good, and two were bad.
The three good men were rich and old
But to the bond of marriage could hardly hold
And you know what I mean, without it told!
And help me God, I laugh when I consider,
How much I asked them to deliver! . . .
Now of my fifth husband I will tell
May God never send his soul to Hell,
And yet he was to me most severe
And made me pay a price so dear
That my ribs will feel it till my dying day.
But in our bed he was fresh and gay
And could me so truly understand
That when he wanted my belle chose at hand
Though he beat my every bone to pain
He could win my love again and again . . .
He was, in truth, but twenty years of age
And I was forty, and lust within me raged! . . .
And truly, as my husbands told me,
I had the nicest little thing that ever might be! . . .
So I followed my inclination
By virtue of my constellation
That made me never want to forgo
Giving my chamber of Venus to a good fellow.
—modernized by Jack Murnighan
from Justine
MARQUIS DE SADE
A few years ago, I excerpted from the Marquis de Sade’s Justine for a Nerve article on banned books. Soon thereafter, a reader wrote in to express her concern that Sade “glorifies sexual abuse and rape.” I wrote back indicating that I agreed and did not take such issues lightly. Why, then, would I include a passage of literature that glorified these things?
Here I have to admit that I tend to put aesthetic over ethical criteria in the assessment of fiction. If the writing is brilliant I am likely to forgive (if not be intrigued by) portrayals of even the most extreme evil. Cormac McCarthy’s novel Blood Meridian, for example, contains unspeakable violence, yet is among the greatest novels of the last twenty years. But I would also argue that it is art’s responsibility to acknowledge and explore humanity at its best and its worst. Perhaps the foremost of ethical imperatives is honesty, for only the honest and unblinking eye can expose us to the totality of experience and allow us to make the most informed ethical judgments.
My point in excerpting Sade both in the banned-book article and here is to say, Hey, look what literature can do. Books are banned because they affect people, and, to that extent, they show the power that great writing has. Sade, monster that he was, showed more than almost anyone else precisely how disturbing and intense literature can be. That, in my mind, makes his books both great and defensible.
Thérèse, you realize that there is no power which could possibly deliver you out of our hands, and there is neither . . . any sort of means which might . . . prevent you from becoming, in every sense and in every manner, the prey of the libidinous excesses to which we, all four of us, are going to abandon ourselves with you . . .
I fall at Dom Sévérino’s feet . . . Great God, what’s the use? Could I have not known that tears merely enhance the object of libertine’s coveting? Everything I attempted in my efforts to sway those savages had the unique effect of arousing them . . .
A circle is formed immediately. I am placed in its center and there, for more than two hours, I am inspected, considered, handled by those four monks who pronounce either encomiums or criticisms.
“Let’s to it,” says Sévérino, whose prodigiously exalted desires will brook no further restraint and who in this dreadful state gives the impression of a tiger about to devour its prey. “Let each of us advance to take his favorite pleasure.” Placing me on a couch in the posture expected by his execrable projects and causing me to be held by two of his monks, the infamous man attempts to satisfy himself in that criminal and perverse fashion which makes us to resemble the sex we do not possess while degrading the one we have. But either the shameless creature is too strongly proportioned, or Nature revolts in me at the mere suspicion of these pleasures. Sévérino cannot overcome the obstacles. He presents himself, and is repulsed immediately. He spreads, he presses, thrusts, tears; all his efforts are in vain. In his fury the monster lashes out at the altar at which he cannot speak his prayers. He strikes it, he pinches it, he bites it. These brutalities are succeeded by renewed challenges. The chastened flesh yields, the gate cedes, the ram bursts through, terrible screams rise from my throat. The entire mass is swiftly engulfed and darts its venom the next moment. Sévérino weeps with rage.
—translated by Richard Seaver
and Austryn Wainhouse
