A few words on sex

Sex in literature, like sex in real life, doesn’t mean what it used to mean. In the post-feminist and post-postmodern world, sex is so loaded with assumption (who’s being exploited? who empowered?) that writers and readers censor themselves, regardless of gender or who (or what) we eroticize. We’ve reached a point where, in an orgy of political correctness, everything is true, and nothing is permitted.

We’re swimming in a sea of sex, and most of it seems to be oppressive or egomaniacal or, worse, cliched. Religious barriers to the erotic have been replaced by a kind of creative embarrassment -- as though we should come up with some better form of communication than sex. Men are confused, turned on and depressed. Women are unsatisfied, turned on and depressed.

Yet no one trusts a world without sex. Sex is humanizing. And in contemporary literature, real sex is what’s missing.

There’s plenty of new writing with sex in it, but with a few notable exceptions, most everything being published is of the “Sex and the City” or “Bridget Jones’s Diary” variety -- girlfriend novels, basically. And of course, there are infinite tomes of “erotica,” which, badly done, becomes simply pornography.

But lovers of literature long for passages that capture real desire in all its frailty, unseared by cynicism, describing the compromised circumstances of the act while protecting the hope invested by the reader. Literary sex, it seems, is best defined by enthusiasm for the characters, the act and the language -- be it as celebratory as Henry Miller’s, as funny as Philip Roth’s, or as steely as Mary Gaitskill’s.

Where is our D.H. Lawrence? Today’s situation could benefit from acute observation of passages such as this one, from “Lady Chatterley’s Lover”: “She still wanted the physical, sexual thrill she could get with him by her own activity, his little orgasm being over. And he still wanted to give it her. Which was enough to keep them connected. And enough to give her a subtle sort of self-assurance, something blind and a little arrogant. It was an almost mechanical confidence in her own powers, and went with a great cheerfulness.” Anais Nin, another great poet of the erotic, said of Lawrence: He “began to give instinct a language, he tried to escape the clinical, the scientific, which only captures what the body feels.”

Giving language to instinct -- this should be the Big Project in an increasingly proscribed world. There are even strange new brands of sex, like the apocalyptic coupling that occurred after the World Trade Center fell, to drive new plots, to widen the erotic imagination. So where are the books?

There are some hot books coming out in 2003. But few of these describe a world we’d recognize. Indeed, the sexiest and most enjoyable book of the year may be a new translation of a bawdy 16th century Italian libertine text. Similarly, the neo-transgressive work of Rikki Ducornet takes us to an imaginary past. And the “pornosophy” of French writer Michel Houellebecq gives the contemporary moment a French context.

The real hope for writing about modern sexuality in familiar settings may lie with the work of short-story writers such as Steve Almond and ZZ Packer. In brief but literary bursts, they show us an arousing and welcome desire, muddied but not neurotically strangled.

The bigger question is: In a world where trash is king, will readers accept the real deal?

The girlfriend novel

“Wouldn’t it be great if we really had a popular novel that captured contemporary feelings about love and sex?” asks Michael Silverblatt, host of KCRW-FM’s literary talk show “Bookworm.” “Unfortunately, there’s not one that we can agree is a great book.” And part of the problem, he says, is the publishing world’s affinity for the girlfriend novel.

These include the cynical shoppers’ guides of Candace Bushnell, author of “Sex and the City,” the girlfriend guides of Cynthia Heimel (“Sex Tips for Girls”), and the brace of self-absorbed confessionals like Elizabeth Wurtzel’s “Prozac Nation” and “Bitch.” We also have to throw in the clever lifestyle reportage of “Bridget Jones’s Diary,” with its canned jokes. Which are, after all, truly at our own expense.

Publishers’ salacious marketing hype would have you believe that girlfriend novels are the sexiest thing going. But these books, Silverblatt says, are only the less-accomplished descendants of what was called the yuppie novel in the 1980s, work from Bret Easton Ellis, Jay McInerney, Tama Janowitz and the rest of the “brat pack” that created a desire for an audience novel: books about people “just like us.”

Bushnell’s attempt to feed this phenomenon is best seen in her 2002 book, “Four Blondes.” It seems to promise some racy Jacqueline Susann-style hanky-panky, but instead of writing about relationships or sex, often there are only transactions. She pities her characters and their futile search for meaning, and so leaves their real libidos, fantasies, fears -- their true desire -- just outside the door.

“There’s always been this kind of junk, pop-sex novel,” Silverblatt says. “It’s only recently that they’ve invented a camouflage that makes them look literary.”

That camouflage is a kind of seriousness of language that allows only brief glimpses of the author’s true feelings to break through the detachment.

Many new novels by women have now been affected by this promise of the salacious and the camouflage of the literary. In Cynthia Gralla’s recent book, “The Floating World,” for instance, a beautiful American woman, Liza, whom we assume to be Gralla, in real life a doctoral candidate at Berkeley, interrupts her schooling to study butoh dance in Tokyo. Driven to “extreme” experience, she ends up working in a nyoutaisushi restaurant, where fetishists eat meals served on the bodies of nude women.

The book seems to promise what it does not deliver: a deep discourse on sex and the erotic imagination. Instead, it is a sometimes well-written story of a bulimic in Japan’s decadent underworld, marveling at the origins of words and traditions, but never really placing herself within it. Gralla “floats” in this world, wondering at her own detachment.

Mark, Liza’s sometime lover, scolds her for her work at the nyoutaisushi club, saying, “You do it because you think it will lead you to something. Something meaningful. You don’t care if you become nothing but a paper doll in the process.” He’s right. She’s found only an overachiever’s need to be more “intense,” a word Gralla uses often in describing Liza’s quest.

Maybe, though, it’s too easy to rail on the new authors. After all, there aren’t that many books like “Women in Love.”

“There hasn’t been a lot of really great erotic writing in history,” says Karen Croft, sex column editor for Salon.com. “ ‘Anna Karenina’ is supposed to be about this incredible love affair, but there’s one line about sex in that entire book: ‘They were satisfied.’ That’s it. It’s just beautifully written.”

The European tradition

European letters have a long tradition of “pornosophy” -- Rabelaisian and often graphic treatments of sexuality as philosophical discourse. These are often both literary and licentious, including works by the Marquis de Sade and, in this century, George Bataille (“Story of the Eye”).

More recently, this tradition includes academic bad boy Houellebecq, whose 1998 novel, “Whatever,” plumbed the depths of modern confusion about love and sex, finally arguing itself into a corner where love no longer exists. The book’s narrator, a 30-year-old computer geek, has analyzed sex to the point of dooming any interaction with women, and Houellebecq offers clever criticisms of psychoanalysis and political correctness. In his newest book, “Platform,” due in midsummer, a similar narrator abandons love for sexual escapism that also fails, this time disrupted by terrorism.

Reaching back to the origins of this type of libertine discourse, a book by Antonio Vignali, a Renaissance-era Italian, almost single-handedly restores all the joy of talking about sex as adults. Written in Siena in 1552, Vignali’s “La Cazzaria: The Book of the Prick” recently appeared in its first English translation, by Ian Frederick Moulton (a scholar whose context-setting notes take up half the volume). The book itself is downright filthy reading, using only the most crude descriptions of human genitalia and acts, and because it is such unabashed fun, it makes a sharp commentary on current writing about sex.

“La Cazzaria” -- which comes from the Italian cazzo, slang for “penis” -- is an imaginary dialogue between young studs Arsiccio and Sodo (both references to sodomy) in an academy in Siena. The text is remarkable for its frank assumptions of universal lust across all genders and social strata -- noblewomen for slaves and workmen, professors for their male and female students, students for whoever will have them. It is openly homosexual in a way that makes it seem as though, in 1520s Siena, there was really no distinction between homo and hetero: Sex only had one meaning, a raw, tooth-grinding satisfaction.

For instance, Arsiccio begins one story nonchalantly: “I was in Pisa ... where many scholars of different nations were gathered for dinner, after we had spoken for a time on various subjects, the conversation turned to buggery, as always happens when young men and scholars gather.”

Even more refreshing, given the current disregard for the pleasures of sex, is Vignali’s relish in discussing every nuance of the sex act. Every paragraph bursts with jokes and wordplay.

As infantile as it is, the text is hilarious and has no modern equivalent. Who would dare? Such a book, were it not of antiquity and thus nonthreatening, would probably be shunned by many publishers even today.

And, truthfully, it doesn’t shed as much light on the present as one might hope. Things have changed since Vignali’s day, when writing about sex was about politics and philosophy, but also about the act.

Today, says Eloise Klein Healy, a teacher of creative writing at Antioch University Los Angeles, “writing about sex is almost always about another agenda. I’m a lesbian poet, and there are a lot of different reasons why people in that community are writing about sex in poetry. It’s sometimes just pure exuberance, and it’s sometimes to create a language for something that isn’t there.”

Progressing toward a new language, but still a bit lost in exotica, is Ducornet’s novel, “Gazelle,” due out this month. Ducornet pursues what Silverblatt calls a “post-Sadean fairy tale,” using the tools of the transgressive and the libertine novel to build new sexual worlds.

In “Gazelle,” her heroine is an American girl of 13, living in Cairo where she rarely sees her wantonly sexual mother. Slowly, the girl awakens to her new sexuality under the guidance of her father’s close friend, a master perfumier. Ducornet’s language sometimes veers into a stilted Edwardian, but her imagination is sharp on detail. In “Gazelle,” she finds a compelling, if sometimes too-breathless, sexual dream world, built on scents and the condensed world of a child.

Short-story hopefuls

Aside from Don DeLillo or Denis Johnson, few novelists are reaching toward a new language -- or exuberance -- in mainstream sexual relations. However, some very good short-story writers are succeeding.

Steve Almond’s first collection, “My Life in Heavy Metal,” features quiet little stories, narrow in scope and experience, openly reveling in the new sexual confusion. He makes himself and his characters vulnerable as men without being weak or cartoonish, and portrays the women as complex without being overly neurotic or greedy. All the stories end up being about sexual experience, but in a male voice that can handle sadness without whining or flinching.

In “The Pass,” he explores in a dozen small vignettes the ways that strangers meet, driven together by opportunity or need, and how this delicate exchange still happens despite modern cynicism.

“Why such a bad era for the pass?” he writes, adding, “It is not that nothing is sacred anymore. On the contrary. More is sacred than ever before, because more of the self is hidden away than ever before. But the pass no longer aims in the direction of anything hidden. It has become overt, incurably so.”

Similarly, the stories of ZZ Packer, full of lightness and well-chosen language, have the subtlety to place finely observed emotions about sex and love where we can reach them.

In the title story of her first collection, “Drinking Coffee Elsewhere,” an isolated, motherless African American student at Yale explores an unexpected, close friendship with a white student who comes out as a lesbian. “Speaking in Tongues” follows a 14-year-old girl, Tia, running away to Atlanta to find her absent mother. There she meets a pimp and barely escapes becoming his newest girl.

But this is no blaxploitation piece, the titillation of dirty tales of the ‘hood. Instead, it’s about the articulated desires of a self-aware young girl, wanting love and salvation and tasting sexual awareness for the first time.

Perhaps, as Salon.com’s Karen Croft points out, that’s enough to expect for now. Maybe writers like Almond and Packer are the leading edge, and the major novels are close behind.

In the meantime, Croft says, half seriously, “there is a new edition of ‘The Joy of Sex.’ ”