Sex and Literature

[NivKay]

As far as i know, there is no thread in Lit that deals with the representation of sex in literary texts, and so i thought it would be nice to offer excerpts from the canon, and texts that hover around that cosmic constellation, and perhaps, inspire some of us. Comments are welcome, discussion is encouraged, and please feel free to post your favourite excerpts from novels you have read!

My first entry is from Rachel Kushner's, "The Flame Throwers."

As we continued to watch the movie he began to unbutton my skirt. One button at a time, slowly, methodically, with no hesitation. He knew how to unbutton buttons. There was no fumbling, which was part of why I couldn’t find the courage to say, “Hey, what are you doing?” The other reason I couldn’t find the courage to stop him was that I didn’t want him to. No one was in our row, or behind us. My skirt unbuttoned, he took off his coat and placed it over my lap, chivalrous and careful. His hand slipped under the coat that covered me, and found its way through the unbuttoned skirt. He pressed his warm palm firmly against my underwear. I looked at him. He looked straight ahead, his face suggesting only that he was engaged in watching this Chinese movie, in Cantonese or Mandarin, who could say? I tried to watch, too, but was distracted by the warmth of his hand, and the protective sensation of being covered by his coat, denim lined with wool, its unfamiliar scent and feel, which promised a whole world, one I wanted a place in. He concentrated on the film, or seemed to, never looking at me once, as his fingers crept into my underwear. In this manner, both of us watching the film, the act of what he did with his hand was not just erotic but also slightly melancholy, even a little grave. I leaned my neck against the back of the seat and tried to relax, to not be nervous or self-conscious. I focused on the round gold of the gongs, the rice-white faces and wax-red mouths, bleached complexions with artificially rosy cheeks that looked pinched or slapped or scalded. I watched these images in gold and red and white as Sandro’s fingers fluttered and moved.

When my body began to tense, his hand understood and slowed itself down, its rhythm matching mine.

 

[mildlyaroused]

I like the way Haruki Murakami presents sex (I like a lot of what he does, which has been posed as criticism towards my own writing in the past. Am I derivative? they ask).

This is an excerpt from 'Norwegian Wood.' The sex here is understated. It's uncomfortable. It's erotic in places - but not as a whole. What I like is that Murakami uses sex as an opportunity for character exploration and growth, but not in a wholly-positive way. Sex is flawed. Sometimes it's wrong. Sometimes it's awkward. Sometimes it feels like the appropriate way to release emotions, and even if we know we'd do better to talk or abstain, we indulge because we're drawn to do so. Sex connects us, even when it's (maybe) wrong.

I slept with Naoko that night. Was it the right thing to do? I can't tell. Even now, almost 20 years later, I can't be sure. I suppose I'll never know. But at the time, it was all I could do. She was in a heightened state of tension and confusion, and she made it clear she wanted me to give her release. I turned the lights down and began, one piece at a time, with the gentlest touch I could manage, to remove her clothes. Then I undressed. It was warm enough, that rainy April night, for us to cling to each other's nakedness without a sense of chill. We explored each other's bodies in the darkness without words. I kissed her and held her soft breasts in my hands. She clutched at my erection. Her opening was warm and wet and asking for me.
And yet, when I went inside her, Naoko tensed with pain. Was this her first time? I asked, and she nodded. Now it was my turn to be confused. I had assumed that Naoko had been sleeping with Kizuki all that time. I went in as far as I could and stayed that way for a long time, holding Naoko, without moving. And then, as she began to seem calmer, I allowed myself to move inside her, taking a long time to come to climax, with slow, gentle movements. Her arms tightened around me at the end, when at last she broke her silence. Her cry was the saddest sound of orgasm I had ever heard.

I'll just add quickly: I think the women in Murakami's work can lean towards underdevelopment. Sometimes they are more so vessels or conduits for his protagonists' characterisation and journeys than they are people in their own right, at least from my readings. Though I don't think Naoko is the biggest offender in this regard.

 

[NivKay]

I like the way Haruki Murakami presents sex (I like a lot of what he does, which has been posed as criticism towards my own writing in the past. Am I derivative? they ask).

This is an excerpt from 'Norwegian Wood.' The sex here is understated. It's uncomfortable. It's erotic in places - but not as a whole. What I like is that Murakami uses sex as an opportunity for character exploration and growth, but not in a wholly-positive way. Sex is flawed. Sometimes it's wrong. Sometimes it's awkward. Sometimes it feels like the appropriate way to release emotions, and even if we know we'd do better to talk or abstain, we indulge because we're drawn to do so. Sex connects us, even when it's (maybe) wrong.



I'll just add quickly: I think the women in Murakami's work can lean towards underdevelopment. Sometimes they are more so vessels or conduits for his protagonists' characterisation and journeys than they are people in their own right, at least from my readings. Though I don't think Naoko is the biggest offender in this regard.

Thank you! This was great! Murakami is lovely, and he seems to have spawned a whole generation of young japanese writers who write against the often suppressed Japanese psyche! I do think you're right about his women - a kind of solipsism, where women tend to be mediums, rites of passage mediums...

 

[yowser]

I find Nabokov's work extraordinary in this respect. He is not explicit, but his hints and descriptions inevitably deliver a jolt to some exquisite aesthetic organ or another for the reader. For me, his 'Ada, or Ardor: a Family Chronicle' is the most sensuous/sensual work I have ever read, and his recreation in the novel of a place surely shaped by his own early life in his family's summerhouse outside of St. Petersburg is vivid and unforgettable. Among other things he captures the sharp longing and built-in confusions of first love.

"To the average physiologist, the energy of those two youngsters might have seemed abnormal. Their craving for each other grew unbearable if within a few hours it was not satisfied several times, in sun or shade, on roof or in cellar, anywhere. Despite uncommon resources of ardor, young Van could hardly keep pace with his pale little amorette (local Frecnch slang.) Their immoderate exploitation of physical joy amounted to madness and would have curtailed their young lives had not summer, which had appeared in prospect as a boundless flow of green glory and freedom, begun to hint hazily at possible failings and fadings, the fatigue of its fugue—the last resort of nature, felicitous alliterations (when flowers and flies mime one another), the coming of a first pause in late August, a first silence in early September."

 

[NivKay]

Thank you taking the time and the interest to engage with this thread - will post my thoughts about your responses when i can find some time, but, I thought I'd start with another entry from J M Coetzee's novel Disgrace.

David Lurie, a Professor in Johannesburg South Africa is here, seen sleeping with his black student. Keep in mind that all that we read is from his perceptive, and while it seems she is partaking in the act as much as he is taking to it, there is, and will be later, a suggestion that is act was coerced. The allegory here is a political one, a postcolonial devouring of the Other.

What's interesting is the way he thinks about the act in terms of his own enjoyment, which strikes me as similar to the Murakami post earlier.

He makes love to her one more time, on the bed in his daughter's room. It is good, as good as the first time, he is beginning to learn the way her body moves. She is quick, and greedy for experience. If he does not sense in her a fully sexual apetite, that is only because she is only still young. One moment stands out in recollection, when she hooks a leg behind his buttocks to draw him in closer; as the tendon of her ninner thigh tightens against him, he feels a surge of joy and desire. Who knows, he thinks, there might, despite all, be a future.

 

[THBGato]

I like JM Coetzee, though he is always a tough read. There's something of Humbert Humbert in Lurie's character there - convincing himself the other wants him as much, that she is an eager participant. I suppose that's much like those revisionists who try to claim Africans wanted to be colonised and where "better off" under the Empire. Hence, as you say, the allegory.


I was thinking about which texts I might mention here, but then it comes down to the question of "What is canon"?

I can recall an incredible MFM threesome in Bret Easton Ellis' Glamourama: one of my Literature Professors at Uni was very much of the opinion it was canon.

And what of Fanny Hill by John Cleland? Literature or not? (I was considering posting the Lesbian seduction scene here, but then realised than Fanny is only 15 in that scene, so decided against it.)

 

[NivKay]

I was thinking about which texts I might mention here, but then it comes down to the question of "What is canon"?

You're right, absolutely right. I admit, I am guilty of pandering to some kind of predetermined value that defines Luterature as only being this kind or that, but the truth of the matter is, we rarely find women writers winning prizes (though that seems to be changing) or Asian or African or otyer writers of colour being mentioned, read,. studied in schools...

And who the hell decides any way?

Ellis is certainly a name to be reckoned with, and if we are going to allow for a Canon, I'll be the first to vote him in.

I was thinking of Cormac McCarthy's Outer Dark. Anyone read this? I don't think there are any sexual scenes here, but the sex is always there in the background. You can't escape its centrality, like a haunting presence behind the action of the novel. In fact, the novel's narrative arc is a direct consequence of that inaugural act.

 

[NivKay]

You're very persuasive at getting people to buy things. It had better be worth it.

Oh...I'm no salesman...but all I can say is that I was not a big fan of McCarthy, but I read Outer Dark, and I couldn't put it down...It reminded me of Faulkner's As I lay dying.

 

[NivKay]

@Plathfan have you read Outer Dark yet?

 

[NivKay]

This one is from Nicholson Baker's Vox (1992):

'… I run my fingers just down the long place where the insides of your thighs touch, all the way to your knees, and then I’d let go of your legs, and they’d fall slightly apart, and as my hands started to move up inside them, with my fingers splayed wide, they’d move farther and farther apart, and then I’d lift your knees and hook them over the arms of the armchair, so that you were wide open for me, and in the darkness your bush would still be indistinct, and I'd look up at you, and I’d move on my knees so I'm closer, so I could slide my cock in you if I wanted, and I touch your shoulders with my hands, and pass my fingertips all the way down over your breasts and over your stomach and just lightly over your bush, just to feel the hair, and then say, ‘I’m going to lick you now,’ and I lick both your nipples once very briefly good-bye, and I breathe my way down, and I pass over your bush this time with my mouth, and I see where the tan stops, and where the hair begins, and I keep going, and your legs are spread wide, and so I kiss inside one knee, and then across to the other, and up, back and forth, and at the end of each kiss I give a little upward lick with my tongue, up lick, lick, lick, back and forth, moving closer and closer to where your thighs meet.'​

Hope you like this one, whosoever passes through!

 

[Annelih]

What a lovely thread. Love the idea!

 

[Tio_Narratore]

The conclusion of Molly's Soliloquy and of Ulysses itself:

. . . I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish Wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

 

[NivKay]

I felt for Leopold, but I also thought Molly was the loneliest being! How tragic the lives of these two, how like shadows they roam…

Stephen Daedalus, Evelyn, the boy in love with Mangan’s sister, what a universe of loneliness!

Thank you for the post, @Tio_Narratore

 

[NivKay]

Another interesting, though, uncomfortable. Description of perversion. Even absurdity - the notion that our intinctive drive is so banal, without any of v the exquisite ornamentation we tend to equip such things with in films:

Michel Houellebecq, “The Elementary Particles.”

“He arrived at the shower block, Body Space 8. He had more or less resigned himself to the women being old and decrepit and was taken aback to see teenagers. There were four of them near the showers, all between fifteen and seventeen, opposite the sinks. Two of them wore bikini bottoms and waited as the other two played under the shower like otters, chatting and laughing and splashing each other: they were completely naked. The scene was indescribably graceful and erotic. He did not deserve such a thing. His cock was hard in his boxer shorts; with one hand, he took it out and pressed himself against the sink as he cleaned between his teeth with a toothpick. He stabbed himself in the gum, removed the bloody toothpick. The head of his penis tingled unbearably; it was hot and swollen, a drop forming at the tip.

One of the girls, graceful and dark-haired, stepped out of the shower, grabbed a towel and began to contentedly pat her young breasts dry. A little redhead slipped off her swimsuit and took her place under the shower – her pussy hair was golden blonde. Bruno moaned a little, and was beginning to feel dizzy. In his head, he could imagine walking over, taking his shorts off and waiting by the showers. He had every right to go and wait to take a shower. He imagined himself beside them, his cock hard, saying something like “Is the water hot?” The showers were fifty centimeters apart; if he took a shower next to the redheaded girl she might accidentally brush against his prick. At this thought he felt increasingly dizzy and had to hold on to the porcelain sink. At the same instant two boys arrived, laughing a little too loudly; they were wearing black shorts with fluorescent stripes. Suddenly Bruno’s hard-on was gone; he put his penis back into his shorts and returned to picking at his teeth.”

 

[NivKay]

The best literary sex is, in my opinion, unadorned, pure telling. Because sex is the least metaphoric. Unadorned, denuded of ornament.

So, Brett Easton Ellis’ Less Than Zero


“And one of them calls out to me, “Hey, punk faggot,” and the girl and I get into her car and drive off into the hills and we go to her room and I take off my clothes and lie on her bed and she goes into the bathroom and I wait a couple of minutes and then she finally comes out, a towel wrapped around her, and sits on the bed and I put my hands on her shoulders, and she says stop it and, after I let go, she tells me to lean against the headboard and I do and then she takes off the towel and she’s naked and she reaches into the drawer by her bed and brings out a tube of Bain De Soleil and she hands it to me and then she reaches into the drawer and brings out a pair of Wayfarer sunglasses and she tells me to put them on and I do.

And she takes the tube of suntan lotion from me and squeezes some onto her fingers and then touches herself and motions for me to do the same, and I do. After a while I stop and reach over to her and she stops me and says no, and then places my hand back on myself and her hand begins again and after this goes on for a while I tell her that I’m going to come and she tells me to hold on a minute and that she’s almost there and she begins to move her hand faster, spreading her legs wider, leaning back against the pillows, and I take the sunglasses off and she tells me to put them back on and I put them back on and it stings when I come and then I guess she comes too. Bowie’s on the stereo and she gets up, flushed, and turns the stereo off and turns on MTV. I lie there, naked, sunglasses still on, and she hands me a box of Kleenex. I wipe myself off and then look through a Vogue that’s lying by the side of the bed. She puts a robe on and stares at me. I can hear thunder in the distance and it begins to rain harder. She lights a cigarette and I start to dress. And then I call a cab and finally take the Wayfarers off and she tells me to be quiet walking down the stairs so I won’t wake her parents.”