The Naughty Bits (4 page)

Sir, I believe that first one kisses her on the mouth
As such a kiss makes descend
To the heart a sweetness which embodies
The great desire they have for each other.
A joy lights her heart
That no lover can conceal or suppress
So he will thus make himself happy
When he kisses the mouth of his love.

Look, Baudoin, I won’t lie to you,
Whoever wants first to kiss his woman
On the mouth does not love from the heart—
For that is how you’d kiss a shepherd’s daughter.
I think it better to kiss her feet and thank her
Than to do something so outrageous.
You have to believe your lady is wise,
And good sense tells us that humility
Will help to make you better loved.

But sir, I’ve heard many times that
Humility helps the lover along,
But when the lover—through humility—
Is enough advanced that she gives him his reward,
And he has what he loves and holds dear,
Then I’d say he’d be foolish
Not to pay his homage on her mouth,
For I have also heard, and you know well,
To bypass the mouth for the feet is a bit precious.

Baudoin, look, I’m not saying
That one should neglect the mouth for the feet,
Only that I want to kiss her feet right away
And then, when I’m ready, I’ll kiss her mouth
And her beautiful body, which should never be in the dark,
And her beautiful eyes and face
And her blond head, next to which spun gold is nothing.
But you are brash and mix everything up;
It’s pretty clear you know little of love.

Sir, you’d have to be both cowardly and lax
Having been allowed to kiss and enjoy
The sweet solace of a long, plump body
To remain nonchalant near the mouth’s sweetness
In order to kiss the feet; it makes no sense.
God only wants us to do whatever
One must to win a lady’s grace,
And it is a thousand times better to savor
Her mouth than her feet!

Baudoin, whoever keeps up the chase until he gets
What he wants, errs if he does not fall at her feet;
I say he’s a devil who does not.

Sir, a man who is bound up in love can’t help but forget
Given the room to realize all that he wishes
All about the feet in favor of the mouth.

—translated by Jack Murnighan

from
“The Rape of Lucrece”

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

The most explicit sex in the writings of Shakespeare takes place in his most conventionally moralizing work: “The Rape of Lucrece.” This is hardly surprising. To be didactic, literature relies on the seductiveness of evil: first it needs to entice readers in order then to be able to scold them for their impurity. Milton’s
Paradise Lost
is the crowning achievement of this technique: Generations of readers were sold on the allure of Satan, but the perspicacious realized later that they’d fallen for a siren song. Like Eve, you’re supposed to resist the viper; if you are unable, then you open yourself up to moral coaching.

The story of “The Rape of Lucrece” works in a similar fashion. Told and retold by Livy, Ovid, Chaucer, and Shakespeare, it is a classic Trojan horse, wrapping sex appeal in a cloak of moral propriety and political history. Ostensibly recounting the central events that caused the Romans to banish the Tarquin kings and elect public consuls, “The Rape of Lucrece” clearly remained popular more for its sexual narrative than its historical one. (A similar situation took place with the movie
The
Accused,
where droves of cretins went to the cinema just to see Jodie Foster get raped.)

I say this as if I was immune to the poem’s power, but the sad truth is that it’s hard not to get aroused by the representation of rape. One doesn’t need to believe in the Freudian id or the Jungian shadow to know that we all have a dark side, and violence often creeps up in our fantasies no matter how far it is from our daily lives.

Which leads to a difficult question: does literature encourage rape by portraying it in a titillating way, or does the fact that the representations are fictional allow one’s violent impulses a safe and victimless outlet? I’ve found myself persuaded by both sides of this debate, and I think it’s very hard to say. It is true that over time my sexual fantasies have gotten more involved and elaborate—as has my waking sex life—but this doesn’t seem to have brought me closer to trying to merge the most extreme discrepancies between the two. I hope the same is true for other men, though I fear it is not always so.

Another difficult question, then, is whether literature like “The Rape of Lucrece” is actually didactic or whether the ersatz morality is but a front to permit a lot of licentious versifying. I have to think the latter. The moral that one takes away from Shakespeare’s poem is so banal and obvious it would hardly be informative to anyone. And if you wanted to recount the fall of Tarquin, you could simply say he was a rapist and a murderer and eventually the people got fed up. The details are unnecessary to the story and seem to be there just to please the reader.

But how explicit is “The Rape of Lucrece”? Both more and less than one might expect. To maintain the veil of propriety, the physicality of the rape itself had to be underplayed, but that only directed Shakespeare’s descriptive efforts elsewhere. It’s the setup that creates the excitement, drawing itself out by a long series of stanzas dedicated to Lucrece’s beauty, in extended internal monologues by Tarquin on the lust and will that drive him forward, and, finally, in a long debate between Lucrece and Tarquin over whether or not he would rape her. I have often noted how suspense seems relatively underutilized as a device in premodern literature; here is the reverse: an early modern example of plot sequencing at its most nail biting.

Not innocently or guiltlessly do I excerpt the lines below—the most physically explicit part of the poem. They concern Lucrece’s breasts, which Tarquin sees and gropes while Lucrece is sleeping. In doing so he wakes her but also wakes a certainty that he will carry out his treacherous plan. My selection is not an endorsement; it is a chronicle. And if you find it arousing, let it remind you of the twin-edged power of the pen and the need to retain separation between reality and the outer corners of the imaginable.

Her breasts, like ivory globes circled with blue,
A pair of maiden worlds unconquered,
Save of their lord no bearing yoke they knew,
And him by oath they truly honoured.
These worlds in Tarquin new ambition bred;
Who, like a foul ursurper, went about
From this fair throne to heave the owner out.
His drumming heart cheers up his burning eye,
His eye commends the leading to his hand;
His hand, as proud of such a dignity,
Smoking with pride, march’d on to make his stand
On her bare breast, the heart of all her land;
Whose ranks of blue veins, as his hand did scale,
Left there round turrets destitute and pale.

They, mustering to the quiet cabinet
Where their dear governess and lady lies,
Do tell her she is dreadfully beset,
And fright her with confusion of their cries:
She, much amazed, breaks ope her lock’d-up eyes,
Who, peeping forth this tumult to behold,
Are by his flaming torch dimm’d and controll’d.

Imagine her as one in dead of night
From forth dull sleep by dreadful fancy waking,
That thinks she hath beheld some ghastly sprite,
Whose grim aspect sets every joint a-shaking;
What terror or ’tis! but she, in worser taking,
From sleep disturbed, heedfully doth view
The sight which makes supposed terror true.

His hand, that yet remains upon her breast,—
Rude ram, to batter such an ivory wall!—
May feel her heart-poor citizen!—distress’d,
Wounding itself to death, rise up and fall,
Beating her bulk, that his hand shakes withal.
This moves in him more rage and lesser pity,
To make the breach and enter this sweet city.

from
Roughhouse

THADDEUS RUTKOWSKI

Although I normally find no ethical compromise in taking elitist potshots at all but the most rarefied of literary production, I can be won over by things outside the
Norton Anthology.
The stray song lyric strikes a chord (Cream’s “I’ll soon be with you my love / And give you my dawn surprise,” for example); once a blue moon I’m taken with something I read in a ’zine (
Bust
has always been a favorite); and every odd year I find myself capable of taking in a little Charles Bukowski and the like. But most of the time, being an editor, I think that writers need an editor. And in some cases the editorlessness is all too pronounced.

But perhaps it’s confession time. My virulence against mediocre writing is clearly backlash against the embarrassment I feel at my own earliest attempts. Truth be told, freshman year I arrived at my college dorm and, with a black indelible marker, proceeded to cover the walls in poems. And yes, Houston, they were bad. Real bad. Real good-god-does-anyone-still-remember bad. If memory allows me to dredge the floors of the great seas of shame, I believe that most of them were unapologetically Pink Floyd–inspired—as damning an epithet as could be attributed to any production of the pen. Had my roommate only been there to read them in advance, to help me see with an eye other than my own, then maybe I would have realized the error of my ways, capped the Mr. Marks-a-Lot and put up a few Vanilla Ice posters like everyone else.

All this was running through my mind when a friend suggested I go see S/M slam poet Thad Rutkowski. My first thought: slam poetry, S/M slam poetry—now there’s a subgenre. And a subgenre it is, but not without bright spots. Rutkowski live was quite compelling, so I got my hands on his novel,
Roughhouse.
And though it’s clear that he, like Eliot, could have used a Pound to tighten up his wasteland,
Roughhouse
definitely has its moments. My favorite was the crafted jewel that follows, as tight and nuanced a 123-word story as you’re likely to find anywhere— even in the
Norton Anthology.

I went with a girl to a lake. We walked on boulders that lined the shore. She stood on a rock a few feet above the water, put her hands behind her back and said, “If my hands were tied, you could push me in.”

I looked at her hands for a moment, then took off a sneaker lace and wrapped it around her wrists.

“You can untie me now,” she said.

I made no move to release her.

“I’m going to ask my mother if this is normal,” she said.

I took off my other lace and wrapped it around her ankles.

“No,” she said, then said my name.

As time passed, her voice got louder. I did not push her in.

from
Pan

KNUT HAMSUN

It is customary to think of madness as a desert, where solitude, isolation, and monomania join forces to turn the mind away from the world and into itself. Madness might also be thought of as a wood, where the constant hum and rustle of multiplicitous forest life intrudes on the sanctity of thinking, denying it peace, preventing rest. What would happen if the hum of the everyday suddenly became a bit louder? The continual hum of passersby, the buzz of the refrigerator, the dull rumble of each and every thing is normally audible only if you think about it. But if you started to think about it, weren’t able not to think about it, it would drive you crazy within a day. A day, then madness.

Consciousness is all about creating filters, sieves to reduce the too much of which we are ultimately given too little. Fine grit to polish down the edges of the too rough, the too raw, the too direct. I think of all this when I think of the writers who’ve gone mad, of those who’ve turned to suicide or alcohol. In the film
Barton Fink,
the aging, Faulkner-based character explains: “Writing is peace”; otherwise drink. Later in the film his lover elaborates, “We all need to be understood.”

Among memorable chronicles of the onset of madness—Poe’s “Tell-Tale Heart,” Shakespeare’s
Troilus and Cressida,
Nietzsche’s
Ecce
Homo
—Knut Hamsun’s fin-de-siècle
Pan
is the most environmental. The dark, living woods of northernmost Norway mirror the teeming fullness of the mind of Glahn, the solitary hunter. Having grown accustomed to his hermitage, he suddenly finds himself falling in love with the daughter of his only neighbor. And he begins to slip. He attends parties at her father’s house across the lake, and his animal nature both intrigues and grates against the society she represents. Then one night, he takes her shoe and hurls it into the lake. It is an unexplainable act, patently absurd. He is lost.

In the passage that follows, Glahn, in his loneliness, imagines a sexual encounter with mythic forest-goers Diderik and Iselin. Immediately after, he is found by a village girl who, having heard rumor of the barbarity in his eyes, wants to know what’s behind them. Glahn, losing the superego, becomes a primal enactment of the id.