A Plea for Eros (6 page)
Authors: Siri Hustvedt
A photograph of a place is not a real place any more than a book is, but we inhabit photographs nevertheless as spectator or as identifying actor. Words are more abstract than images, but images are inevitably born of them. The pictorial drama of reading corresponds to the one of writing. You cannot have one without the other. Reading is active, but writing is more active. Making fiction is making a place for the reader in the text, and this brings up the eternal question of making a book: what to put in and what to leave out. One can argue that there are two kinds of writers in the world: the ones who put it all in and the ones who leave a lot of it out. Sweeping claims can be made about history and these impulses. Inclusion and volume can be understood as a literary idea that began in the eighteenth century, developed in the nineteenth, and lasted through Joyce. (He may have turned literature on its head, but he kept a lot in.) Exclusion, too, can be seen as essential to late modernism, most notably Kafka and Beckett. But these are not useful categories “here.” (The reader is “here” with me if he or she has come this far.) There are times when a detailed description of a living room and all its furnishings is annoying, when it gets in the way of reading, and then there are times when it does not. Austen is spare in description. Had she described every object in the Bennet parlor, Paul never would have squeezed in his New Jersey living room among all that clutter, and it seems to me the moral resonance of that book would have been partly lost. On the other hand, I cannot imagine Dickens without his full descriptions of places—-the stinking Thames and Mr. Venus’s ghastly workshop in
Our Mutual Friend,
for example; but these descriptions, like Sterne’s clock in
Tristram Shandy,
are always to a purpose. They accelerate the book. They don’t bog it down in pointless novelistic gab. Good books usually say enough about where they happen, but not too much. Enough can be more or less, but it’s bad books that treat the reader to his expectations about what a novel or a story or a poem is or
where
it is. There is something comforting about bad books, which is why people read them. Surprise can be a wonderful thing, but, on the whole, people don’t want it, any more than most children want their rooms changed. They want what they already know to be confirmed, and they have been richly supplied with these fictional comforts since the late eighteenth century, when the novel became popular with the rise in mass literacy. But the good reader (a quality not at all determined by literary sophistication) wants room to fill in the blanks. Every reader writes the book he or she reads, supplying what isn’t there, and that creative invention becomes the book.
For the past four years I’ve been writing a novel set in my hometown, or rather in a fictional version of Northfield. The town in the book is not the real town, but it resembles it strongly. It has another name, Webster, and although it resembles the real town, its geography is askew. I have taken real places—the Ideal Cafe, the Stuart Hotel, Tiny’s Smoke Shop, the Cannon River, and Heath Creek, with their names intact—but I relocated some of these places and gave them new inhabitants. Oddly enough, these changes weren’t made for my convenience, and I didn’t make them without seeing them in my mind first. The collapsing and shifting of that known landscape came about because it “felt right.” The map of fictional Webster isn’t identical to the map of Northfield, because the one departs emotionally horn the other. Since I began writing the book, I have been back to Northfield several times, every Christmas and once during the summer. When I walk past the Ideal Cafe, where Lily Dahl, the heroine of my novel, works, I don’t feel much, I find myself looking closely at it, examining the windows on the second floor, behind which is Lily’s imaginary apartment, but it just isn’t the place I made for myself in fiction. That place exists in memory, but it isn’t “real” memory. My best friend, Heather Clark, and my sisters Liv and Astrid all worked in the Ideal Cafe in the 1970s, when it was in its heyday, and they told me stories about their customers. I stole some of them. I have eaten breakfast and lunch and wolfed down pieces of pie in the Ideal Cafe, and I think I remember pretty well what it looked like when I was in high school, but the imaginary cafe where Lily works has supplanted the one I remember and become more “real” to me. Writing fiction is like remembering what never happened. It mimics memory without being memory. Images appear as textual ground, because this is how the brain works. I am convinced that the processes of memory and invention are linked in the mind. Homer evokes the muse of memory before beginning his tale. And the ancient memory systems developed to enhance recollection were always rooted to places. The speaker wandered through houses in his mind, either real or invented, and located words in various rooms and objects. Cicero articulated an architecture of memory dependent on spaces that were well lit. Murky, cramped little hovels wouldn’t do as spatial tools for recollection. Every new draft of a book is the work not only of shrinking and expanding and shrinking again but of finding the book’s truth, which means throwing out the lies that tempt me. This work is like dredging up a memory that’s been obscured by some comfortable delusion and forcing it “to light,” a process that can be excruciating. Fiction exists in the borderland between dream and memory. Like dreams, it distorts for its own purpose, sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously, and, like memory, fiction requires an effort of concentration to recall how it
really
was. There have been a few extraordinary books written in the present tense, but by and large it’s an awkward form. Fiction usually takes place in the past. Somehow that’s its natural place.
Paul often says that it’s a strange life, this sitting alone in a room making up people and places, and that in the long run, nobody does it unless he has to. Years ago, he translated a French writer, Joseph Joubert, whose brief but startling journal entries have become part of our ongoing dialogue about art. Joubert wrote: “Those for whom the world is not enough: poets, philosophers and all lovers of books.” When I read
Death on the Installment Plan
in my early thirties, the book in which I imagined the hero in my grandparents’ house, I loved it so much I was sorry to finish it. I closed the book and shocked myself by thinking, This is better than life. I didn’t mean or want to think this, but I’m afraid I did. Certainly this feeling about a book is the one that makes people want to write. I don’t know why I feel more alive when I write, but I do. Maybe I imagine that if I scratch hard enough into the paper, I will last. Maybe the world isn’t enough, or maybe the distinction between the world and fiction is not so clear. Fiction is made from the stuff of the world, after all, which includes dreams and wishes and fantasies and memory. And it is never really made alone, but from the material between and among us: language. When Mikhail Bakhtin argues that the novel is dialogical—multivoiced, conflicted, in constant dialogue within itself—he is identifying all those jabbering voices every fiction writer hears in his or her head. Writing novels is a solitary act that is also plural, and its many voices are forever placing us somewhere—here or there or yonder. At the same time, writing collapses these spatial categories. Like a heartbeat or a breath, it marks the time of a living consciousness on the page, a consciousness that is present and here, but also absent. The page can resurrect what’s lost and what’s dead, what’s not there anymore and what was never there. Fiction is like the ghost twin of memory that moves through the myriad cities, landscapes, houses, and rooms of the mind.
1995
A FEW YEARS AGO A FRIEND OF MINE GAVE A LECTURE AT
Berkeley on the
fentme falaie,
a subject he has been thinking about for years. When I met him, he was a graduate student at Columbia University, but now he is a full-fledged philosopher, and when it is finished, his book will be published by Galfimard in France and Harvard University Press in America. He is Belgian but lives in Paris, a detail significant to the story, because he comes from another rhetorical tradition—a French one. When he finished speaking, he took questions, including a hostile one from a woman who demanded to know what he thought of the Antioch Ruling—a law enacted at An-tioch College, which essentially made every stage of a sexual encounter on campus Legal only by verbal consent. My friend paused, smiled, and replied, “It’s wonderful. I love it. Just think of the erotic possibilities: ‘May I touch your right breast? May I touch your left breast?’“ The woman had nothing to say.
This little exchange has lingered in my mind. What interests me is that he and she were addressing exactly the same problem, the idea of permission, and yet their perspectives were so far apart that it was as if they were speaking different languages. The woman expected opposition, and when she didn’t get it, she was speechless. Aggressive questions are usually pedagogic—that is, the answer has already been written in the mind of the questioner, who then waits with a reply. It’s pretend listening. But by moving the story—in this case, the narrative of potential lovers—onto new ground, the young philosopher tripped up his opponent.
It is safe to assume that the Antioch Ruling wasn’t devised to increase sexual pleasure on campus, and yet the new barriers it made, ones that dissect both sexual gestures and the female body (the ruling came about to protect women, not men), have been the stuff of erotic fantasy for ages. When the troubadour pined for his lady, he hoped against hope that he would be granted a special favor—a kiss perhaps. The sonnet itself is a form that takes the body of the beloved apart—her hair, her eyes, her lips, her breasts. The body in pieces is reborn in this legal drama of spoken permission. Eroticism thrives both on borders and on distance. It is a commonplace that sexual pleasure demands thresholds. My philosopher made quick work of demonstrating the excitement of crossing into forbidden territory—the place you need special permission to trespass into. But there is distance here, too, a distance the earnest crusaders who invented the ruling couldn’t possibly have foreseen. The articulation of the other’s body in words turns it into a map of possible pleasure, effectively distancing that body by transforming it into an erotic object.
Objectification has a bad name in our culture. Cries of “Women are not sexual objects” have been resounding for years. I first ran into this argument in a volume I bought in the ninth grade called
Sisterhood Is Powerful.
I carried that book around with me until it fell apart. Feminism was good for me, as were any number of causes, but as I developed as a thinking person, the truisms and dogmas of every ideology became as worn as that book’s cover. Of course women are sexual objects; so are men. Even while I was hugging that book of feminist rhetoric to my chest, I groomed myself carefully, zipped myself into tight jeans, and went after the boy I wanted most, mentally picking apart desirable male bodies like a connoisseur. Erotic pleasure, derived from the most intimate physical contact, thrives on the paradox that only by keeping alive the strangeness of that other person can eroticism last. Every person is keenly aware of the fact that sexual feeling is distinct from affection, even though they often conspire, but this fact runs against the grain of classic feminist arguments.
American feminism has always had a puritanical strain, an imposed blindness to erotic truth. There is a hard, pragmatic aspect to this. It is impolitic to admit that sexual pleasure comes in all shapes and sizes, that women, like men, are often aroused by what seems silly at best and perverse at worst. And because sexual excitement always partakes of the culture itself, finds its images and triggers from the boundaries delineated in a given society, the whole subject is a messy business.
Several years ago I read an article in
The New York Times
about a Chinese version of the Kinsey Report, the results of which suggested that Chinese women as a group experienced
no
sexual pleasure. This struck me as insane, but as I began to ponder the idea, it took on a kind of sense. 1 visited China in 1986 to find a place still reeling from the Cultural Revolution, a place in which prerevolutionary forms appeared to have been utterly forgotten. Maybe there can’t be much erotic life, other than the barest minimum, without an encouraging culture—without movies and books, without ideas about what it’s supposed to be. When I was fifteen, I remember watching
Carnal Knowledge
at the Grand movie theater in Northfield, Minnesota, my hometown. Jack Nicholson and Ann-Margret were locked in a mystifying upright embrace and were crashing around the room with their clothes on, or most of them on, banging into walls and making a lot of noise, and I had absolutely no idea what they were doing. It had never occurred to me in my virginal state that people made love
like that.
A friend had to tell me what I was seeing. Most teenagers today are more sophisticated, but only because they’ve had more exposure. I was thirteen before I stumbled over the word
rape
—in
Gone with the Wind.
I walked downstairs and asked my mother what it meant. She looked at me and said, “I was afraid of that.” Then she told me. But even after I knew, I didn’t really understand it, and I couldn’t imagine it.
My point is this: A part of me has real sympathy for the Chinese couple, both university professors, who married, went to bed with each other faithfully every night, and, after a year, visited a doctor, wondering why no child had come from their union. They thought sleeping
beside
each other was enough. Nobody told them that more elaborate activity was necessary. Surely this is a case of an erotic culture gone with the wind. (In China among the class that could afford to cultivate it, the female body had become a refined aesthetic object. In Xi’an I saw a very old woman with bound feet. She could no longer walk and had to be carried. Those tiny, crippled feet were the gruesome legacy of a lost art. Binding feet made them small enough to fit into a man’s mouth.) The famous parental lecture on the birds and the bees, the butt of endless jokes and deemed largely unnecessary in our world, never took place in the lives of the two puzzled professors.
But
where were their bodies?
We imagine that proximity would be enough, that
natural
forces would lead the conjugal couple to sexual happiness. But my feeling is that it isn’t true, that all of us need a story outside ourselves, a form through which we imagine ourselves as players in the game.
Consider standard erotic images. Garter belts and stockings still have a hold on the paraphernalia of arousal—even though, except for the purpose of titillation, they have mostly vanished from women’s wardrobes. Would these garments be sexy if you’d never seen them before? Would they mean anything? But we can’t escape the erotic vocabulary of our culture any more than we can escape language itself. There’s the rub. Although feminist discourse in America understandably wants to subvert cultural forms that aren’t “good” for women, it has never taken on the problem of arousal with much courage. When a culture oppresses women, and all do to one degree or another, it isn’t convenient to acknowledge that there are women who like submission in bed or who have fantasies about rape. Masochistic fantasies damage the case for equality, and even when they are seen as the result of a “sick society,” the peculiarity of our sexual actions or fantasies is not easily untangled or explained away. The ground from which they spring is simply too muddy. Acts can be controlled, but not desire. Sexual feeling pops up, in spite of our politics.
Desire is always between a subject and an object. People may have loose, roving appetites, but desire must fix on an object even if that object is imaginary, or narcissistic—even if the self is turned into an other. Between two real people, the sticky part is beginning. As my husband says, “Somebody has to make the first move.” And this is a delicate matter. It means reading another person’s desires. But misreading happens, too. When I was in my early twenties in graduate school, I met a brilliant, astoundingly articulate student with whom I talked and had coffee. I was in love at the time with someone else, and I was unhappy, but not unhappy enough to end the relation. This articulate student and I began going to the movies, sharing Chinese dinners, and talking our heads off. I gave him poems of mine to read. We talked about books and more books and became
friends
(as the saying goes). I was not attracted to him sexually, nor did I glean any sexual interest in me from him. He didn’t flirt. He didn’t make any moves, but after several months, our friendship blew up in my face. It became clear that he had pined and suffered, and that I had been insensitive. The final insult to him turned on my having given him a poem to criticize that had as its subject the sexual power of my difficult boyfriend. I felt bad. Perhaps never in my life have I so misinterpreted a relation with another person. I have always prided myself on having a nearly uncanny ability to receive unspoken messages, to sense underlying intentions, even unconscious ones, and here I had bollixed up the whole story. No doubt we were both to blame. He was too subtle, and 1 was distracted—fixated on another body. Would the Antioch Ruling have helped us? I doubt it. A person who doesn’t reach out for your hand or stroke your face or come near you for a kiss isn’t about to propose these overtures out loud. He was a person without any coarseness of mind, much too refined to leap. He thought that dinner and the movies meant that we were on a “date,” that he had indicated his interest through the form of our evenings. I, on the other hand, had gone to lots of dinners and movies with fellow students, both men and women, and it didn’t occur to me that the form signified anything in particular; and yet the truth was, I should have known. Because he was so discreet, and because I lacked all sexual feeling for him, I assumed he had none for me.
Nineteenth-century conventions for courtship have been largely disassembled in the latter half of this century, bending the codes out of shape. People marry later. The emphasis on virginity for women has changed. Single women work and are not expected to give up their jobs once they marry. Men have been digesting a set of new rules that are nevertheless colored by the old ones. People still court each other, after all. They are still looking for Romance of one kind or another—short or long—and each one of them is alone out there reading and misreading the intentions of others. The Antioch Ruling was clearly a response to the chaos of courtship—a way of imposing a structure on what seemed to have collapsed—but ambiguity remains, not just in interpretation but even in desire itself. There are people, and we have all met them, who can’t make up their minds. There are people who say no when they mean yes, and yes when they mean no. There are people who mean exactly what they say when they say it, and then later wish they had said the opposite. There are people who succumb to sexual pressure out of a misplaced desire to please or even out of pity. To pretend ambiguity doesn’t exist in sexual relations is just plain stupid.
And then there are moments of interruption—those walls that block desire. I was absolutely mad about a boy in high school, but there was something about his nose when he kissed me, something about its apparent softness from that angle, that I disliked. To my mind, that nose needed more cartilage. I kept my eyes shut. I know of a woman who fell for a man at a party. She fell hard and fast. They returned to her apartment in an erotic fever, kissing madly, throwing their clothes off, and then she looked across the room and saw his underwear. If I remember correctly, it was some male version of the bikini bottom, and her attraction vanished suddenly, irrevocably. She told the poor man to leave. An explanation was impossible. What was she to say? “I hate your underpants”?
Sexual freedom and eroticism are not identical; in fact, freedom can undermine the erotic, because the no-holds-barred approach is exciting only if you’ve just knocked down the door. And despite the fact that dinner, a movie, and a kiss at the door have taken a beating in recent years, seduction is inevitably a theater of barriers, a playing and replaying of roles, both conscious and unconscious. Sincerity is not at issue here; most of us play in earnest. Through the language of clothes and gesture and through talk itself, we imagine ourselves as the other person will see us, mirroring our own desire in them, and most of what we do is borrowed from a vocabulary of familiar images. This is not a territory of experience that is easy to dissect legally.
Apparently, there is a new law in Minnesota against staring. It has been duly mocked in newspapers all over the world, but according to my sister, it came about because of the increase in the number of construction sites around Minneapolis, and women were weary of walking past them. Most women have experienced these painful, often humiliating excursions in front of an ogling, jeering crowd of men, and I don’t know of anyone who likes them. This event—the construction crew whooping and hooting at a passing woman—is a convention, a thing those guys do in a group and only in a group, to liven up the job, to declare their masculinity to the world
safely.
It’s the pseudo-sexual invitation. Not a single one of those men expects the woman to say, “Yes, I’m flattered. Take me, now.”
