The Naughty Bits (15 page)

Above the entanglement of their bodies he raised his head and threw it back. There was just enough light left for me to see his face, the mouth open in a broken, sing-song groan, waiting for the approaching pleasure . . . He was grimacing, smiling, dark with blood like a divine martyr . . . He was uttering staccato cries of surprise, as if he was dazzled by something magnificent and unexpected, as if he had not expected it to be so beautiful, as if he were astonished by the prodigies of joy which his body contained.

—translated by Robert Baldrick,
modified by Jack Murnighan

from
The Plaint of Nature

ALAIN DE LILLE

There is, sadly, no lack of gay bashing in the history of literature. But the fact that authors have felt the need to attack homosexuality signals that it has always had a certain presence and impact in their cultures. The Pearl poet’s fourteenth-century condemnation of same-sex practices (see page 147) is a testament to their prevalence in late medieval England; Alain de Lille’s
The Plaint of Nature,
written two centuries before, demonstrates that there was no lack of same-sex sex taking place in twelfth-century France either.

I’m less interested, however, in the fact that Alain’s text is conspicuously homophobic and more interested in the manner in which his homophobia is expressed.
The Plaint of Nature
is, to my knowledge, unique among literary texts in being a condemnation of homosexuality as an error of grammar. In Alain’s scheme, sex and Latin are made to be analogous, so the sexual practices that Alain doesn’t approve of correspond to grammatical errors and irregular Latin forms: male-to-male sex is a confusion of subject for object, masturbation is a reflexive verb that should be transitive, women on top are deponent verbs (passive forms that take active meanings), and gay men are the opposite. So, although the excerpt below isn’t sexy per se, it is certainly one of the oddest writings about sex I have ever read, and instructive of the lengths to which authors will go to attempt to denaturalize homosexuality.

By adopting a highly irregular grammar, the human race has fallen from its high estate and inverted the rules of Venus . . .

The plan of Nature gave special attention, as the evidence of the rules of grammar confirms, to two genders, namely, the masculine and feminine (although some men, deprived of the outward sign of sex, could, in my opinion, be classified as of neuter gender) . . . Reproduction demands that the masculine joins the feminine to itself. If irregular combinations among members of the same sex should come into common practice, so that members of the same sex should be mutually connected, those combinations would never be able to gain acceptance . . . For if the masculine gender, by a certain violence of unreasonable logic, should seek one of a gender entirely similar to itself, this bond and union cannot be called a graceful trope or figure of speech but will bear the stain of an outlandish and unpardonable linguistic error.

The regular procedure . . . should assign the role of subadjacent [bottom] to the part characteristic of the female sex and should place that part that is specific to the male sex in the prestigious position of superjacent [top] . . .

In addition to this . . . the conjugations should restrict themselves entirely to . . . the transitive and should not admit intransitive, reflexive or passive forms . . . Furthermore, the active type should not go over to the passive nor should the passive, laying aside its proper character, return to the active or adopt the rule of deponents . . .

With the signs of the discipline of grammar . . . my speech has now inscribed on the tablet of your mind an account of the ruination of Venus . . . In wretchedness and lamentation, I have sung my song of complaint.

—translated by James J. Sheridan,
modified by Jack Murnighan

from Sexus

HENRY MILLER

Marriage is the death of sex—or so the common wisdom goes. Grim tidings for one who, like me, not only wants to spend the rest of his life with a single person but wants to do it fused at the pelvis. And even though I need both hands to count my parents’ marriages, I still believe the institution has something to offer. As an old lover of mine once said, “The difficulty in getting out of a marriage encourages us to try our very best and not run away out of fear or weakness.” Backward as this argument may seem, it has a lot of pull. Our eyes stray, our patience tires, our hearts resist breaching, our deepest secrets fear the light: all these things can set us out the door. Marriage gives us pause. It doesn’t exactly deadbolt us in—a good thing, for there are many marriages that should sunder—but it puts a little rust in the old turnstile.

Yet even if the shackle of marriage is a good thing, it does not resolve the problem that the sex might wane. I was thus quite relieved to read Henry Miller’s account of an evening he spent back in the arms of his wife, whom he had left so that he could move in with his paramour. Now, granted, Hank never proves to be the model husband, but the scene below details not only the reawakening of the flame that had brought him and his wife together in the first place but, more instructively, his realization that the woman in his arms is quite unlike the person he long thought he knew. Breakdowns in communication had kept her from being as sexually free as she, and he, would have wanted. Finally able to be herself, she’s happier than she had ever been, and more appealing. Perhaps, then, we can learn from Miller’s experience (though not his method): be open to and open for your spouse and there will always be room for discovery.

She wants to lie down on the floor and put her legs around my neck. “Get it in all the way,” she begs. “Don’t be afraid of hurting me. I want it. I want you to do everything.” I got it in so deep it felt as though I were buried in a bed of mussels. She was quivering and slithering in every ream. I bent over and sucked her breasts; the nipples were taut as nails. Suddenly she pulled my head down and began to bite me wildly—lips, ears, cheeks, neck. “You want it, don’t you?” she hissed. “You want it. You want it!” Her lips twisted obscenely. “You want it. You want it!” And she fairly lifted herself off the floor in her abandon. Then a groan, a spasm, a wild tortured look as if her face were under a mirror pounded by a hammer. “Don’t take it out yet,” she grunted. She lay there, her legs still slung around my neck, and the little flag inside her began twitching and fluttering. “God,” she said, “I can’t stop it!” My prick was still firm. It hung obedient on her wet lips, as though receiving the sacrament from a lascivious angel. She came again, like an accordion collapsing in a bag of milk . . .

“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.