Barbara Kingsolver
Reader, hear my confession: I'm writing an unchaste novel. It's
a little shocking, even to me. In my previous books I've mostly
written about sex by means of the space break. One reviewer I'd
written the shortest sex scene in the English language. I know the
scene he meant; the action turns when one character notices a cellophane
crackle in the other's shirt pocket and declares that if he has
a condom in there, this is her lucky day. The scene then proceeds,
in its entirety:
He did. It was. (Space break!)
I think my readers rely on me for a certain reserve, judging from
the college course adoptions and the mothers who say they've shared
my books with their daughters. They may be in for a surprise this
time around. Not that the sex is gratuitous, I keep telling myself.
This novel is about life, in a biological sense: the rules that
connect, divide and govern living species, including their tireless
compunction to reproduce themselves. In this tale the birds do it,
the mushrooms do it, and the people do it, starting on Page 6 already.
I'm having a good old time writing about it, too. I've always felt
I was getting away with something marginally legal, inventing fantasies
for a living. But now it seems an outright scandal. I send my kids
off to school in the morning, scuttle to my office, close the door,
and hoo boy, les bons temps roulent!
Now that I'm closing in on a finished draft, though, I've begun
to think about the people who will soon be sitting in their homes,
on airplanes and in subways with their hands on this book. Many
people. My mother, for instance.
My writer-friend Nancy, a practical New Englander, offered this
counsel:
"Barbara, you're in your 40's now, and you have two children. She
knows that you know."
Yes, all right, she does. But what about the man from the Ag Extension
Service, whom I've asked to vet my book's agricultural setting for
accuracy? How do I hand this manuscript to him? And what about those
English Lit teachers? I don't mind that they know I know, or that
I think about it, in circumstances outside my own experience. Come
on, who doesn't? Most people I know couldn't construct a good plot
to save their souls, but can and do, I suspect, imagine detailed
sexual scenarios complete with dialogue (if they're female) and
a sense of place.
But they don't pass them around for others to read, for heaven's
sake. My dread is that people will take my book for something other
than literature and me for something other than a serious writer.
In anxious moments I've begun combing my bookshelves for fellow
offenders.
Yes, there are plenty of authors before me who have put explicitly
sexual scenes into literature. There's a particularly lovely one
in the center of David Guterson's "Snow Falling on Cedars," there
are sweetly funny ones in John Irving, and of course we have John
Updike, Philip Roth and Henry Miller. (Notice the dearth of women
on this list.) Even such distinguished 18th-century gents as Ben
Franklin and Jonathan Swift scored the occasional love scene in
their prose.
But I was surprised, on the humid afternoon I spent pulling down
books and looking for scenes that had burned themselves into my
memory, to see how often they were implied situations rather than
step-by-step enactments. Copious use of the space break, in other
words.
The scene in "Lady Chatterley's Lover" I've remembered down the
years, it turns out, was mostly invented by me, not D. H. Lawrence.
(And given Lawrence's knowledge of love from the female perspective,
is that any wonder?) In actual word count, if the literary novels
in my bookcase accurately represent human experience, it looks as
if people spend roughly half their time in intelligent dialogue
about the meaning of their lives, and 1 percent of it practicing
or contemplating coition.
Excuse me, but I don't think so.
Why should literary authors shy away from something so important?
Nobody else does. If we calibrated human experience on the basis
of television, magazine covers and billboards, we would have to
conclude that humans devote more time to copulation than to sleeping,
eating and accessorizing the hot new summer look, combined. (Possibly
even more than shooting one another with firearms, though that's
a tough call.) Filmmakers don't risk being taken less seriously
for including sexual content; in fact, they may risk it if they
don't.
But serious literature seems to be looking the other way, ready
to take on anything else, with impunity. Myself, I've written about
every awful thing from the death of a child to the morality of political
assassination, and I've never felt fainthearted before. What is
it about describing acts of love that makes me go pale? There is,
of course, the claim that women who make a public show of being
acquainted with sexuality are expressing deviance, but that's also
said about women who make a show of knowing anything, and I can't
imagine being daunted by such nonsense.
For decent folk of any gender, the official and legal position
of our culture is that sex takes place in private, and that's surely
part of the problem. Private things-newfound love, family disagreements
and spiritual faith, to name a few-can quickly become banal or irritating
when moved into the public arena. But new love, family squabbles
and spirituality are rich ground for literature when they're handled
with care. Writers don't avoid them on grounds of privacy, but rather
take it as duty to draw insights from personal things and render
them universal. Nothing could be more secret, after all, than the
inside of another person's mind, and that is just where a novel
takes us, usually from Page 1. No subject is too private for good
fiction if it can be made beautiful and enlightening.
That may be the rub right there. Making it beautiful is no small
trick. The language of coition has been stolen, or rather, I think,
it has been divvied up like chips in a poker game among pornography,
consumerism and the medical profession. None of these players are
concerned with aesthetics, so the linguistic chips have become unpretty
by association. "Vagina" is fatally paired with "speculum." Any
word you can name for the male sex organ or its, um, movement seems
to be the property of Larry Flynt. Even a perfectly serviceable
word like "nut," when uttered by an adult, causes paroxysms in sixth-grade
boys.
My word processing program's thesaurus has washed its hands of
the matter: it eschews any word remotely associated with making
love. "Coitus," for example, claims to be NOT FOUND, and the program
coyly suggests as the nearest alternative "coincide with?" It also
pleads ignorant on "penis" and suggests "pen friend." A writer in
work-avoidance mode could amuse herself all day.
I realize linguistic aesthetics may not be Microsoft's concern
here; more likely it's mothers. Roget's does much better, reinforcing
my conviction that the book is mightier (or at least braver) than
the computer. My St. Martin's Roget's Thesaurus obligingly offers
up 15 synonyms for coition-though some are dubious, like "couplement"-and
an impressive 28 descriptors for genitalia, though again some of
these are obscure. In a scene where lingam meets yoni, I'm not even
sure who I'm rooting for.
Nevertheless, the language is ours for the taking. Fiction writers
have found elegant ways to describe life on other planets, or in
a rabbit warren, or an elephant tribe, inventing the language they
needed to navigate passages previously uncharted by our tongue.
We don't normally call off the game on account of linguistic handicaps.
When it comes to the couplement of yoni, I think the real handicap
is a cultural one.
We live in a strange land where marketers can display teenage models
in the receptive lordotic posture (look it up) to sell jeans or
liquor, but the basics of human procreation can't be discussed in
a middle-school science class without sparking parental ire. The
same is true for evolution, incidentally, and I think the reason
is the same: our tradition is to deny, for all we're worth, that
we're in any way connected with the rest of life on earth. We don't
come from it, we're not part of it, we own it. It is deeply threatening
to our ideology, at the corporate and theological levels, to admit
we're constrained by the laws of biology. Sex is the ultimate animal
necessity. We can't get rid of it.
The harder we try to deny it official status, the more it asserts
itself in banal, embarrassing ways. And so here we are, modern Americans
with our heads soaked in frank sexual imagery and our feet planted
in our Puritanical heritage, and any novelist with something to
say about procreation or the lordotic posture has to negotiate that
territory. Great sex is more rare in art than in life because it's
harder to do.
To write about sex at all, we must first face down the polite pretense
that it doesn't really matter to us and acknowledge that in the
grand scheme of things, nothing could matter more. In the quiet
of our writing rooms we have to corral the beast and find a way
to tell of its terror and beauty. We must own up to its gravity.
We also must accept an uncomfortable intimacy with our readers in
the admission that, yes, we've both done this. We must warn our
mothers before the book comes out. We must accept the economic reality
that this one won't make the core English Lit curriculum.
Still, in spite of everything, I'm determined to write about the
biological exigencies of human life, and where can I start the journey
except through this mined harbor? It's a risk I'll have to take.
Reader, don't blush. I know you know.
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