Julian Davies takes issue with some of Kingsley Amis' writings.
IN HIS ESSAY WHY ARE YOU Telling Me All This? Kingsley Amis argues that sexually explicit writing betrays an unconscionable failure of tact that reduces its author "to the same moral level as the chap you make sure of avoiding at the pub".
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Central to Amis' argument is the view that reading and life are inseparable and that writing must therefore follow parallel conventions and employ similar kinds of discretion. He goes so far as to state that sexually explicit writing is implicitly dehumanising, that it allows no room for individuals with motives and reactions, only puppets created to titillate.
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This is life, but fiction, I would reassert, is something else. The laws and customs that govern social behaviour may well control the characters in a story, but not its telling. The telling of any story worth the writing obeys an altogether different set of rules, rules invented on the spot for that moment and then quite possibly discarded for ever. Fiction is a domain that often runs parallel to life but is governed by artifice. Call it artifice, call it craft, call it art, but by any name it is something else, something essentially separate. We accept it has the illusion of reality but we know, or at least sense, the conventions, tricks and special dispensations it employs. For instance, we can never know with complete certainty what another person thinks. In stories we are witness to the thoughts of innumerable characters. Nothing could be more private, more personal, yet no one complains that this is an intolerable intrusion into an inviolable realm. No one calls it dehumanising.
If sex is just a physical act, why is it more private than a thought? And if sexual intimacy contains thoughts and feelings, why are they less important or relevant to storytelling than other thoughts and feelings? Are there any other areas of life where we ask writers to censor or restrain themselves as Amis does for explicit sex? We even make less fuss about violence. Just look at the rating system for films; sex is consistently rated for a more mature audience than is violence. And yet, if there were an opportunity, which would we prefer to be rid of, sex or violence?
Davies goes on to point out that the success or failure of erotic writing comes with the skill which the writer uses to deliver his or her point, not necessarily with an imagined or possibly false sense of modesty.
The real tension, I would say, is not between clarity and tact, but between any chosen approach to writing sex and the success with which it is realised. If literary restraint has any value, it is an altogether different thing from any social stricture. It is about creative judgement not etiquette. In fact, whether writing about characters having sex or a cup of tea, there is a balancing act involved. This act is about avoiding cliche or a lecturing tone or overemphasis, about finding the keenest means of expression, about distilling the essentials.
I couldn't agree more. Comparing sex in the media with, say, violence, there is of course a certain necessity for tact or subtlety, especially when minors are in the picture. However, some grown-ups like subletly, and some like graphic images and languages. Amis' perceived prudery, I suspect, comes from a powerful sense of modesty and/or personal shame about sex. That's his hang-up. I have no problem with that. For those of us with different hang-ups, I'm a little put out by the suggestion that graphic = bad when it comes to sex. Hard-core porn is simply more entertaining than the Skinemax stuff, hands down. I've tried reading some of the more explicit romance novels and I just can't get past the flowerly language. I've also read graphic stuff that makes me burst out laughing. "She moaned as his staff of love filled her gates of pleasure" is just as ridiculous as "He pounded the slut's sopping fuckbox with his massive rock-hard tool." I just prefer calling a cock a cock and a pussy a pussy, thank you.
The quality of any writing, erotic or otherwise, depends upon the skill of the artist. Subtlety doesn't necessarily win out, nor is frank language automatically better or worse, either. I prefer Anais Nin to Henry Miller just because I think she's a better writer. Not because she's more or less subdued than is Mr. Miller.
In the end, as always, it comes down to "different strokes for different folks."
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