How to Read Literature Like a Professor

by Thomas C. Foster

  Flash-forward a millennium or so. Hang a left at New York and go to Hollywood. There’s a moment in The Maltese Falcon (1941) when Humphrey Bogart’s Sam Spade, at night, is leaning over Mary Astor’s Brigid O’Shaughnessy, kissing her by a window, and then the next moment we’re looking at the curtains of the window blowing gently in the morning sunlight. No Sam. No Brigid. Young viewers sometimes don’t notice those curtains, so they want to know what happened between Sam and Brigid. It may seem a small detail, but it matters greatly that we understand so that we see how much Sam Spade’s judgment may be compromised, and how difficult turning her in at the end is going to be. For those who remember a time when the movies not only didn’t show people “doing it,” they also didn’t show people having done it or talking about having done it, those curtains might as well bear the following printed legend: yes, they did. And they enjoyed it. For people of that age, one of the sexiest shots in film consists of waves breaking on a beach. When the director cut to the waves on the beach, somebody was getting lucky. These abstractions were necessary under the Hayes Code, which controlled content in Hollywood films from around 1935 until 1965, more or less, throughout the height of the studio system. The Hayes Code said a lot of different things, but the one we’re interested in was that you could stack bodies like cordwood if they were dead (although usually without blood), but living bodies couldn’t get horizontal together. Husbands and wives were nearly always shown in separate beds. I noticed this once more the other night when I watched Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946), where Claude Rains and Ingrid Bergman have twin beds. The man has never been born who, finding himself married to Ingrid Bergman, would assent to sleeping in twin p. 138 beds. Even an evil Nazi like Claude Rains. But in the movies in 1946, that’s what happened. So film directors resorted to anything they could think of: waves, curtains, campfires, fireworks, you name it. And sometimes the results were dirtier than showing the real thing. At the end of Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959), Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint find themselves rescued from the face of Mount Rushmore when the good guys kill Martin Landau before he can send our heroes to their deaths. In one of the truly great cuts, Grant, who is struggling to hold Miss Saint on the rock face, is suddenly pulling her up into the sleeping compartment of the train (and referring to her as Mrs. Thornhill); this shot is followed by an equally famous one—the last shot of the film—of the train entering a tunnel. No need to comment on that one.

  Okay, you say, but that’s film. What about books?

  I barely know where to begin. Let’s try something tame first, Ann Beattie’s story “Janus” (1985). A youngish woman, married but not particularly in love with her husband, has had an affair with another man, the only tangible result of which is a bowl the lover bought for her. The woman, Andrea, comes more and more to identify with the bowl and to obsess over it. She’s a real-estate agent, and she often places the bowl in a prominent place in clients’ houses before she shows them; she gets up at night to check on it and make sure it’s all right; and most tellingly, she will not permit her husband to put his keys in her bowl. Do you see the sexuality embedded in that set of images? How do keys work? Whose keys are they? Where can he not put them? Whose talisman is the bowl he can’t put them in? Consider, for instance, that Hank Williams/George Thorogood classic, “Move It on Over,” and the complaint about his lady changing locks and leaving him with a key that no longer fits. Every American should know enough of the blues to understand exactly what keys and locks signify, and to blush when they’re referred to. That pattern of imagery is just part of the p. 139 much older tradition identified by Freud/Weston/Frazer/Jung about lances and swords and guns (and keys) as phallic symbols, chalices and grails (and bowls, of course, also) as symbols of female sexual organs. Back to Andrea’s bowl: it really is about sex. Specifically, it’s about her identity as a woman, an individual, and a sexual being, rather than as an extension of a lover or a husband. She fears being merely an auxiliary of some man’s existence, although her autonomy, as symbolized by the bowl, is made problematic by its having been purchased for her by . . . a man. He only buys it, though, after seeing that she really connects with the bowl, so it really is hers in the end.

  To talk about sex in literature almost inevitably leads to discussion of D. H. Lawrence. The great thing about Lawrence, from my point of view, is that you can never go wrong bringing sex into the analysis. Partly because sex had been taboo for so long and therefore was a largely untapped resource for the novelist, he worked tirelessly to explore the subject. His work has plenty of mentions of sexual relations, some oblique, some explicit, and in his last novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), the great forbidden reading-fruit of everyone’s youth, he pushes right past the limits of censorship of his time. The sexiest scene he ever wrote, though, is not a sex scene. It’s wrestling. In Women in Love, the two main male characters wrestle one evening, in language in which the sexual charge is ferocious. They’ve been going on about blood brotherhoods and the closeness of their friendship, so the wrestling is not all that surprising. Lawrence isn’t comfortable making them openly homosexual but he wants a relationship—and a physical expression—that is nearly as close as the love-and-sex relationship between man and woman. Ken Russell certainly understood what the scene was about when he filmed the novel back in 1969; I hadn’t understood it, being too conditioned not to look for anything homoerotic and, I suppose, too insecure as to what that might say about one of my favorite writers. Once I p. 140 saw the film, though, I went back and reread the scene, and Russell got it right.

  My favorite Lawrence story, bar none, is called “The Rocking-Horse Winner” (1932), about a little boy who wants to please his mother. His father is a failure in business and therefore a great disappointment to the materialist mother. The son, Paul, senses the desperation for money in the house, senses his mother’s dissatisfaction, senses the inability of his mother to love him, or anyone, in the face of her own colossal self-absorption. He connects the lack of his mother’s love with the lack of money, then discovers that he can pick the winners of upcoming horse races if he rides his rocking horse to the point of exhaustion. Here’s what Lawrence has to say:

  He wanted luck, he wanted it, he wanted it. When the two girls were playing dolls in the nursery, he would sit on his big rocking horse, charging madly into space, with a frenzy that made the little girls peer at him uneasily. Wildly the horse careered, the waving dark hair of the boy tossed, the eyes had a strange glare in them. The girls dared not speak to them. . . . He knew the horse could take him to where there was luck, if only he forced it. . . . At last he stopped forcing his horse into the mechanical gallop and slid down.

  Say what you will, I think he’s talking about masturbation. When I teach this story, I try to lead the students to this idea without insisting on it. Usually there is one hardy and perceptive soul who gets it and asks, with something between a smirk and a cringe, the question I’m hoping for. One or two others nod, as if they sort of thought that but were afraid to think it through. Thirty-five others look like the ceiling is about to fall.

  Is it really?

  Let’s look at the pattern that’s set up: child wants to supplant p. 141 father in his mother’s affections, child desperately wants mother’s approval and love, child engages in highly secretive behavior involving frenetic, rhythmic activity that culminates in transporting loss of consciousness. What does that sound like to you? This is one of the clearest Oedipal situations ever captured in fiction, and for good reason. Lawrence was part of the first generation to read Freud and so, for the first time, to consciously employ Freudian thinking in literature. The notion of sublimation kicks in here, for both character and writer. Obviously, sexual engagement with the mother is not an option, so Lawrence sends the boy, Paul, in search of the luck his mother desires so terribly. The means of his search is sufficiently creepy that it frightens his presexual sisters and causes consternation among the adults, who feel that he’s too big for a rocking hor
se.

  Is it really masturbation? Not literally. That would be icky and not particularly interesting. But symbolically it fulfills the function of masturbation. Think of it as a surrogate for a surrogate for sex. What could be clearer?

  Why? Part of the reason for all this disguised sex is that, historically, writers and artists couldn’t make much use of the real thing. Lawrence, for instance, had numerous novels suppressed and undertook a monumental battle with the British censors. Same as in film.

  Another reason is that scenes in which sex is coded rather than explicit can work at multiple levels and sometimes be more intense than literal depictions. Those multiple levels have traditionally been to protect innocents. Dickens, who could be very suggestive, was aware that his novels were often read around the family breakfast table, and he wanted to protect children from anything luridly sexual, as well as to provide wives with plausible deniability. With a scene of encoded sex, Mother could pretend not to notice that something untoward was going on while Father was enjoying his private smirk. p. 142 There’s a scene in Our Mutual Friend (1865) in which the two villains, Mr. Venus and Silas Wegg, are plotting evil. In fact, Silas Wegg is reading some financial news of a very tantalizing nature to the seated Mr. Venus, whose pegleg begins to rise from the floor until, at the moment of greatest excitement, it is pointing straight out in front of him. And then he falls over. Various family members could see this as either slapstick buffoonery or as quite suggestive slapstick buffoonery. In any case, everybody gets a giggle.

  Even in our highly permissive age, though, sex often doesn’t appear in its own guise. It is displaced into other areas of experience in much the same way it is in our own lives and our own consciousnesses. Ann Beattie’s character Andrea doesn’t think of her problems as being chiefly sexual or romantic. But they are, as we and her creator can see. So it’s unlikely that her sexual issues will present themselves in terms of sexual organs and acts; much more likely they’ll look like . . . a bowl and some keys.

  17 – . . . Except Sex

  p. 143 EVER TRY TO WRITE A SEX SCENE? No, seriously. Tell you what: go try. In the interest of good taste, I’ll request that you limit yourself to members of the same species and for clarity that you limit yourself to a mere pair of participants, but aside from that, no restrictions. Let ’em do whatever you want. Then when you come back, in a day, in a week, in a month, you’ll have found out what most writers already know: describing two human beings engaging in the most intimate of shared acts is very nearly the least rewarding enterprise a writer can undertake.

  Don’t feel bad. You never had a chance. What are your options? The possible circumstances that lead two people to sexual congress are virtually limitless, but the act itself? How p. 144 many options do you have? You can describe the business clinically as if it were a do-it-yourself manual—insert tab A into slot B—but there are not that many tabs or slots, whether you use the Anglo-Saxon names or their Latinate alternatives. Frankly there just isn’t that much variety, with or without the Reddi-Wip, and besides, it’s been written in the mass of pornography ad nauseam. You can opt for the soft-core approach, describing parts and movements in a haze of breathy metaphors and heroic adverbs: he achingly stroked her quivering skiff as it rode the waves of her desire, etc. This second sort is hard to write without seeming (a) quaint, (b) squeamish, (c) hugely embarrassed, (d) inept. To tell the truth, most writing that deals directly with sex makes you wish for the good old days of the billowing curtain and the gently lapping waves.

  I honestly believe that if D. H. Lawrence could see the sorry state of sex scenes that developed within a generation of his death, he would retract Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The truth is that most of the time when writers deal with sex, they avoid writing about the act itself. There are a lot of scenes that jump from the first button being undone to a postcoital cigarette (metaphorically, that is) or that cut from the unbuttoning to another scene entirely. The further truth is that even when they write about sex, they’re really writing about something else.

  Drives you crazy, doesn’t it? When they’re writing about other things, they really mean sex, and when they write about sex, they really mean something else. If they write about sex and mean strictly sex, we have a word for that. Pornography.

  In the Victorian age, sex was nearly impossible to find in polite literature, due to rigid censorship both official and self-imposed. Not surprisingly, there was plenty of impolite literature. The era was unsurpassed in its production of pornography. Maybe it was that mountain of dirty writing that used up all the possibilities of writing about sex.

  p. 145 Even in the modernist period, though, there were limits. Hemingway was restricted in his use of curse words. Joyce’s Ulysses was censored, banned, and confiscated in both the United Kingdom and the United States, in part for its sexual references (lots of sex thought, even if the only sex act shown in it is onanistic). Constance Chatterley and her lover, Mellors, really broke ground in plainly shown and plainspoken sex, although the novel’s obscenity trial, effectively ending censorship in the United States, did not take place until 1959.

  Strangely, with less than a century of sexual writing as standard practice, there is almost nothing left but cliché.

  There’s a very famous sex scene in John Fowles’s French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) between the two main characters, Charles and Sarah. In fact, it’s the only sex scene in the novel, which is odd, given the extent to which the novel is about love and sex. Our lovers enter her bedroom in a seedy hotel, he carrying her from the sitting room because she has sprained her ankle. He lays her on the bed and joins her amid frenetic shifting and removal of clothing, which, this book being set in Victorian times, is considerable. Soon the deed is done and he lies spent beside her, at which point the narrator points out that “precisely ninety seconds” have elapsed since he walked from her to look into the bedroom. In that time he walked back, picked her up, carried her to the bed, fumbled and groped, and consummated their love. Now there are several possible constructions we can put on this particular description of the act of love. Perhaps Fowles wants to address, for reasons unknown, the shortcomings of Victorian males in the ardor department. Perhaps he wants to ridicule his poor hero. Perhaps he wants to make some point about male sexual inadequacy or the fallibility of desire. Perhaps he wants to accentuate the comic or ironic incongruity between the brevity of the sexual act and its consequences. Of the first of these, why bother? Besides, he admits in a famous essay on the crafting of the novel that he p. 146 really has no knowledge of nineteenth-century lovemaking, and in depicting sex between a Victorian man and woman what he’s really writing is “science fiction.” Of the second, it seems needlessly cruel, particularly when we’ve recently seen Charles in the arms of a young prostitute, where, rather than making love, he vomits into a pillow. Must he always be beset with performance issues? Of the third, sixty thousand words seems rather a lot with which to surround a tiny treatise on male sexuality. Of the fourth possibility, we know that incongruities, comic or otherwise, fascinate the novelist.

  Let’s consider another possibility, though. Charles has traveled from Lyme Regis, in the southwest, to London, where he has met with his future father-in-law, Mr. Freeman. Charles is horrified at the ill-judged marriage he has brought upon himself, complete with an offer of a job in business (anathema to a Victorian gentleman). He sees that he does not love the woman he is engaged to nor the conformity which she and her father, as members of the rising middle class, covet. He seems to be on a tether between the poles of his restricted future, with Mr. Freeman and the horrors of a life in commerce at one end in London, and his fiancée, Ernestina, at the other in Lyme Regis. Charles has come back through Exeter, where the seedy hotel is located, in full-panic flight. Sarah, the “fallen” woman (although we find out she probably is not), represents both the forbidden fruit, always tempting, and the way out of the marital disaster that he envisions awaiting him. His fascination with Sarah, which has been buil
ding throughout the novel, is a fascination with the unconventional aspects of himself, as well as with the possibilities of freedom and individual autonomy she represents. Sarah is the future, the twentieth century, for which Charles may not be ready. He carries not a woman but an entire constellation of possibilities into the bedroom. What chance does his sexual performance have?

  p. 147 For the most part, even our sexiest writing doesn’t have all that much sex in it. Okay, except Henry Miller’s novels, which really do have that much sex in them, and it’s pretty much about the sex. But even with Miller, the sex is on one level symbolic action claiming for the individual freedom from convention and for the writer freedom from censorship. He’s celebrating the removal of restrictions and writing hot sex.

  But look at Miller’s sometime pal Lawrence Durrell. (What is it about people named Lawrence and sex, anyway?) His Alexandria Quartet—the novels Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, and Clea (1957—60)—is chiefly about the forces of politics and history and the impossibility of the individual escaping those forces, although it registers in readers’ minds as heavily slanted toward the sexual. A lot of sex talk, of reports of sex, and of scenes taking place immediately before or immediately after sex. I would maintain this is not from trepidation on the writer’s part (it’s hard to find any evidence of Durrell being inhibited about much of anything) but from his sense that in novels so overheated by passion, the sexiest thing he can do is show everything but the lovemaking itself. Moreover, the sex that occurs is invariably tied up with something else: cover for espionage, personal sacrifice, psychological neediness, desire for power over someone else. He presents virtually no sexual encounters that can be described as healthy, robust meetings of lovers. Sex in Alexandria is really pretty creepy when all’s said and done. And it’s all done.