Jonathan Franzen - How to Be Alone - Essays

Like the pop-sexers, Benedict congratulates our age on its enlightenment and congratulates her readers on their good fortune in having come of age after the publication of Fear of Flying . She alludes to the “incalculable tragedies of self-censorship” that befell authors in the dark ages before i960, and she hints at the evil forces (Puritanism, fundamentalists, sexually repressive governments) that threaten our precarious liberty. Although she, like Dr. Block, briefly acknowledges the excitement that taboo generates (“Now that we can say anything, what else is there to say?”), pursuing this argument would undermine her project, and so she doesn’t. Similarly uneasy is her recognition that divorcing sex-scene technique from the larger challenges of writing good fiction is as useless as divorcing sexual technique from the challenge of loving someone. Good sex writing, it turns out, is a lot like good fiction writing in general. It has, she says, “tension, dramatic conflict, character development, insights, metaphors and surprises.” These qualities are the Slow and Fast One-and Two-Handed Strokes to which Benedict returns, in various combinations, throughout the book. Avoid clichés, she advises — or at least “give them a unique twist.” Try to “make the writing interesting.” Don’t forget: “You need not be explicit but you must be specific.” And if it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.

Although Benedict believes that she can liberate the reader from the “demons” of self-censorship, she’s vague on exactly how this occurs. At one point, she implies that liberation is simply a matter of gumption: “Question: Who are your censors and how do you silence them? Answer: Just do it.” But a book that intends to give us “permission to indulge” new possibilities requires an exemplary performer, and, as with Betty Dodson, whose Sex for One: The Joy of Selfloving mainly retails the professional triumphs of Betty Dodson, the work that most interests Benedict is her own. She includes four substantial excerpts from her fiction, and she praises them with charming artlessness. (“These are emotionally complex scenes. .”) At the same time, she takes care to remind us that her skills didn’t come from any manual. In her own work, she says, she didn’t “consciously try to create conflict or to inject surprises”—although, sure enough, she now realizes “how important those elements are.

The fraud of The Joy of Writing Sex is meaner than the fraud of sex manuals, since every man can be a king in bed and every woman a queen but not everyone can be a successful novelist. Nietzsche said, “Books for all the world are always foul-smelling books; the smell of small people clings to them.” The truth, of course, may be that I’m no larger than the next man. But who wants to know a truth like this? Just as every lover at some level believes that he or she makes love as it’s made nowhere else on the planet, so every artist clings for dear life to the illusion that the art he or she produces is vital, necessary, and unique.

Aesthetic elitism, sexual snobbery: these are not the reprehensible attitudes that our culture makes them out to be. They’re the efforts of the individual to secure a small space of privacy within the prevailing din. All people should be elitists — and keep it to themselves.

THE ONE WELCOME SERVICE that Benedict performs in Joy is her surgical removal of sex scenes from their context. The more sincerely explicit a novel’s dirty bits, I think, the more they beg to be removed. When I was a teenager, novels were Trojan horses by means of which titillation could sometimes be smuggled into my sheltered life. Over the years, though, I’ve come to dread the approach of sex scenes in serious fiction. Call it the orgasmic collapse: the more absorbing the story, the more I dread it. Often the sentences begin to lengthen Joyceanly. My own anxiety rises sympathetically with the author’s, and soon enough the fragile bubble of the imaginative world is pricked by the hard exigencies of naming body parts and movements — the sameness of it all. When the sex is persuasively rendered, it tends to read autobiographically, and there are limits to my desire for immersion in a stranger’s biochemistry. A few geniuses — Philip Roth may be one of them — have the skill or bravado to get away with explicit sex, but in most novels, even otherwise excellent ones, the corporeal nomenclature is hopelessly contaminated through its previous use by writers whose aim is simply to turn the reader on.

Jacques Derrida once demonstrated, in his sublimely contortionist essay “White Mythology,” that language is such a self-contained system that even a word as basic as “sun” cannot be proved, by anyone using language, to refer to an objective, extralinguistic Sun. A candle is like a small sun, but the sun is like a large candle; examined closely, language turns out to operate through the lateral associations of metaphor, rather than through the vertical identifications of naming. So what is “sex”? Everything is like it, and it’s like everything — like food, like drugs, like reading and writing, like deal-making, like war, like sport, like education, like the economy, like socializing. In the end, however, every orgasm is more or less the same. This may be why writing about sex is at once effective and boring. Language of the nominal, hot-slippery-cunt-ramrod-straight-dick variety both aims for and achieves its own closure. The orgasm is a kind of consumer purchase, and, one way or another, the language that attends it always remains a kind of ad copy.

Language as sex, on the other hand, is fraught with the perils of an open-ended eros. When I’m in bed with a novel, I hope its author will be faithful to me. Right now I’m reading Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity , an enjoyable sendup of male anxiety in which the narrator’s girlfriend leaves him for his upstairs neighbor, a man he now remembers was “something of a demon” in bed:

“He goes on long enough,” I said one night, when we were both lying awake, staring at the ceiling. “I should be so lucky,” said Laura. This was a joke. We laughed. Ha, ha, we went. Ha, ha, ha. I’m not laughing now. Never has a joke filled me with such nausea and paranoia and insecurity and self-pity and dread and doubt.

When a full-blown sex scene finally looms on the narrative horizon, a hundred pages into a novel that’s almost entirely about sex, my distaste at the prospect of orgasmic collapse is mitigated by a rare circumstance: I’m actually finding both the female love object (an American folk-rock singer) and the setting (a barren flat in a barren London neighborhood) quite sexy. Though I’m not looking forward to the hardened nipples and spurted semen that seem likely to follow, I’m prepared to forgive them, maybe even enjoy them. But when, after one last eight-page delay for awkward negotiations and precoital anxiety, Hornby gets his lovers into bed, the narrator abruptly declares: “I’m not going into all that other stuff, the who-did-what-to-whom stuff.” Facing a choice between fidelity to “what happens” and fidelity to his reader, Hornby doesn’t let the reader down. In one simple, curtain-dropping sentence he proves to me that he himself, at some point in his reading, has experienced the same uncomfortable suspense that I have just experienced, and for a moment, though I’m alone in bed with a book, I don’t feel alone. For a moment, I belong to a group neither as big as a statistically significant sample nor as small as the naked self. It’s a group of two, the faithful writer and the trusting reader. We’re different but the same.

[1997]

On a chilly morning in late September, by the side of a truck-damaged road that leads past brownfields to unwholesome-looking wholesalers, a TV producer and his cameraman are telling me how to drive across the Mississippi River toward St. Louis and what, approximately, I should be feeling as I do so.