How to Read Literature Like a Professor

by Thomas C. Foster

  Two of the most notorious novels of that same period of the late 1950s and early 1960s, Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (1962) and Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1958) are famous for bad sex. Not bad as in unsatisfactory; bad as in evil. The protagonist of Burgess’s novel is a fifteen-year-old leader p. 148 of a gang whose specialties are theft with violence, violence without theft, and rape, to which he refers as “the old in-out in-out.” The rapes we “see” do in fact take place in the narrative, but they are strangely distanced from us. For one thing, as many potential readers already know, Alex narrates in a patois he calls Nadsat, a mix of English and slang words, many of them of Slavic origin. The effect of this linguistic mode is to describe things in such alien ways that the acts themselves seem alien as well. For another thing, Alex is so interested in his own delight at stage-managing the violence and rape, and in the terror and cries of the victims, that he almost neglects the sexual particulars. His most straightforward narration of a sexual scene is when he picks up two prepubescent girls; even then, he’s more interested in their cries of pain and outrage than in the activity occasioning them. Beyond that, Burgess is interested in depravity, not prurience. He’s writing a novel of ideas with an attractive/revolting main character, so his chief concern is not to make the sex and violence interesting, but to make Alex sufficiently revolting—and he succeeds admirably. Some would say too well.

  Lolita is a slightly different case. Nabokov has to make his middle-aged protagonist, Humbert Humbert, depraved, certainly, but part of the revulsion we feel at his interest in his underage stepdaughter Lolita lies in the way our sympathy is co-opted by this monster narrating the story. He’s so charming we are nearly taken in, but then he reminds us what he is doing to this young girl and we’re outraged again. Nabokov being Nabokov, though, there’s a kind of “gotcha!” in it: we’re disgusted by Humbert, but sufficiently fascinated to keep reading. The sex, then, like the narrative, is a kind of linguistic-philosophical game that ensnares us and implicates us in the crimes we would officially denounce. Nor is there that much sex in the novel. Only a small amount of pederasty is even p. 149 remotely tolerable. Much of the novel’s notoriety, actually, beyond the fact that it has any pederasty, lies in its triple-X imitators. The word “Lolita” almost immediately became a staple in titles of a certain kind of pornographic film: Teenage Lolitas, Wanton Teenage Lolitas, Really Wanton Teenage Lolitas, titles like that. Really original dirty-movie titles. There, presumably, the sex is strictly about sex.

  What’s that? You think it’s just a guy thing?

  Definitely not. Djuna Barnes, a contemporary of Lawrence and Joyce, investigates the world of sexual desire, fulfillment, and frustration in her dark classic, Nightwood (1937). The poet Mina Loy could have made T. S. Eliot faint. Modern women writers—as diverse as Anaïs Nin, Doris Lessing, Joyce Carol Oates, Iris Murdoch, and Edna O’Brien—ever since have investigated ways of writing about sex. I suspect O’Brien holds the distinction of having more books banned in Ireland than any other Irish novelist. Sex in her books nearly always takes on a political cast as characters explore their sexuality while at the same time throwing off the restrictions of a conservative, repressed, religious society. O’Brien’s writing about sex is really writing about liberation, or sometimes the failure of liberation; it’s religious or political or artistic subversion.

  The queen of sexual subversiveness, though, must be the late Angela Carter. Like O’Brien, Carter can write a very convincing sex scene. And also like her, she almost never lets it be only about sex. Carter nearly always intends to upset the patriarchal apple cart. To call her writing women’s liberation is to largely miss her point; Carter attempts to discover paths by which women can attain the standing in the world that male-dominated society has largely denied them, and in so doing she would liberate all of us, men and women alike. In her world, sex can be wildly disruptive. In her last novel, Wise Children, when the main character and narrator, Dora Chance, engages p. 150 in sex, the aim is usually self-expression or exertion of control over her life. As a woman and a minor entertainer, she has comparatively little control, and as an illegitimate orphan whose father refuses to recognize her and her twin, Nora, she has even less. Taking some form of control once in a while therefore becomes all the more essential. She “borrows” Nora’s boyfriend for her sexual initiation (he’s none the wiser). Later she makes love to the boy of her dreams at a party during which her father’s mansion burns to cinders. And finally, as a septuagenarian, she makes love to her hundred-year-old uncle, again while a very considerable shock is being delivered to her father, who is her uncle’s twin. I’m not sure I can decode all the things that scene means, but I’m pretty sure it is not primarily about sex. Or aesthetics. If nothing else, it is a radical assertion of the life force. It can also be attacked from almost every angle on the psychological and sexual-political compasses. Also, right after their lovemaking, her uncle makes his twin nieces mothers for the first time, presenting them with orphaned twins, grand-nephew and -niece. In Carter’s experience, human parthenogenesis remains somewhere in the future, so sex is still required to produce babies. Even symbolically.

  Now here’s the thing about that: you’re going to figure it out. You don’t need me to tell you that this scene involving sex among the very old means something. Moreover, your guess is as good as mine when it comes to what it means. Maybe better. The image of these two elderly people making violent (the downstairs chandelier sways alarmingly) love in the bed of their father/brother is so rich with possibilities that you almost can’t go wrong, and perhaps no one can extract all its possibilities. So go for it.

  That’s generally true. You just know that these scenes mean something more than what’s going on in them. It’s true in life as well, where sex can be pleasure, sacrifice, submission, rebelp. 151lion, resignation, supplication, domination, enlightenment, the whole works. Just the other day a student mentioned a sex scene in a novel. “What’s up with that?” she asked. “It has to be about something else. It’s just so weird and creepy that it has to be about something else. Does it mean . . .” And then she told us exactly what it meant. All I could add was that it’s not only true of weird sex. Sometimes even good literary sex is about something else.

  Oh, right. You can’t really write about modern literary sex and skip over it, can you? Here’s the thing. Lawrence didn’t approve of strong language in private life and was almost prudish in some ways on the subject of promiscuity. Yet very near the end of his life, only in his early forties and dying of tuberculosis, he pens this outrageously frank, open novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, about love and sex between members of two very different classes, between a peer’s wife and her husband’s gamekeeper, a man who uses all the Anglo-Saxon words for body parts and functions. Lawrence knows he won’t write many more novels, he’s coughing up his lungs, and he’s pouring his life into this dirty story that’s so far beyond anything he’s already written—and had censored—that he knows, even if he pretends not to, that this thing will never have a wide readership in his lifetime. So now it’s my turn.

  What’s up with that?

  18 – If She Comes Up, It’s Baptism

  p. 152 QUICK QUESTION: I’m walking down the road and suddenly I fall into a pond. What happens?

  You drown?

  Thanks for the vote of confidence.

  Or you don’t?

  That pretty much covers it. Now what does it mean?

  Does it really mean anything either way? I mean, if you drown, you drown. If you get out, maybe all it means is you can swim.

  Fair enough. For a character in a novel, though, the case is different. What does it mean if he drowns, or if he doesn’t? Have you ever noticed how often literary characters get wet? Some drown, some merely get drenched, and some bob to the surface. What difference does it make?

  p. 153 First of all, let’s take care of the obvious. You can fall into the water in an instant, from a bridge that gives way, for instance,
or you can be pushed, pulled, dragged, tripped, or tipped over. All of which have their own meanings, of course, and can be taken quite literally. Beyond that, drowning or not has profound plot implications, as do the means by which a character does or doesn’t drown.

  Consider, just for a moment, that a disconcertingly large number of writers meet their ends in water. Virginia Woolf. Percy Bysshe Shelley. Ann Quin. Theodore Roethke. John Berryman. Hart Crane. Some walked in, some jumped, others swam out and didn’t come back. Shelley’s boat capsized and Frankenstein’s author became a very young widow. Iris Murdoch, who drowns enough characters that it seems like a hobby, herself nearly drowned in the sea fairly late in her career. Young Sam Clemens, years away from being Mark Twain, repeatedly had to be fetched out of the Mississippi. So maybe on some level tossing characters into the river is (a) wish fulfillment, (b) exorcism of primal fear, (c) exploration of the possible, and not just (d) a handy solution to messy plot difficulties.

  But back to our soggy character. Is he rescued? Does he swim out? Grab a piece of driftwood? Rise up and walk? Each of those would imply something different on the symbolic level. For instance, rescue might suggest passivity, good fortune, indebtedness. The piece of driftwood raises issues of luck and coincidence, serendipity rather than planning.

  Remember the situation that begins Judith Guest’s Ordinary People (1976)? Most likely. If you’re over a certain age, you probably saw the film in a theater (almost everyone did, evidently), and if you’re under a certain age you had it assigned, at least, in high school English.

  So you know the deal. Two brothers go out sailing on Lake Michigan, a storm comes up, and one of them drowns. And p. 154 one doesn’t. Now the story works because it’s the older, stronger son, the swimming star and apple of his mother’s eye, the one who never dies except in family tragedies and war stories, who perishes. The younger one, Conrad, the one who would never survive, survives. And he’s tortured by his success at living, to the point where he tries to kill himself. Why? He can’t be alive. It’s impossible. His brother was “stronger” and didn’t make it, so weakling Conrad has to be dead, too. Except he’s not. And what he has to learn, through his sessions with the psychiatrist, is that he was stronger; he may not have been the athlete his brother was, but in the moment of crisis he had the tenacity or luck to hang on to the boat and not be swept away, and now he’ll just have to learn to live with it. This learning-to-live business turns out to be hard, since everyone, from the swimming coach to kids at school to his mother, seems to feel that he’s the wrong one to still be here.

  At this point you’re probably saying, “Yeah, he’s alive. So . . . ?”

  Exactly. So he’s not just alive. He’s alive all over again. Not only should he have died out in that storm, we can say that in a sense he did die, that the Conrad we meet in the book is not the same Conrad we would have met before the storm. And I don’t just mean in terms of Heraclitus, that you can’t step into the same river twice, although that’s part of it.

  Heraclitus—who lived around 500 B.C.—composed a number of adages, what are called his “apothegms of change,” all of which tell us that everything is changing at every moment, that the movement of time causes ceaseless change in the cosmos. The most famous of these sayings is that one cannot step into the same river twice. He uses a river to suggest the constantly shifting nature of time: all the little bits and pieces that were floating by a moment ago are somewhere else now and floating at different rates from each other. But that’s not really what I have in mind here about Conrad. True, when he is rescued from the lake and steps back into the stream of his life, p. 155 everything has shifted and changed, but there’s a more violent change in the universe where he’s concerned.

  Which is what?

  He’s reborn.

  See this in symbolic terms. A young man sails away from his known world, dies out of one existence, and comes back a new person, hence is reborn. Symbolically, that’s the same pattern we see in baptism: death and rebirth through the medium of water. He’s thrown into the water, where his old identity dies with his older brother. The self who bobs to the surface and clings to the sailboat is a new being. He goes out an insecure, awkward younger brother and comes back an only child, facing a world that knows him as that kid brother, as his old self. The swimming coach can’t stop reminding him how much better his brother was. His mother can’t relate to him without the filter of his brother. Only the shrink and his father can really deal with him as himself, the shrink because he never knew the brother and his father because he just can. Moreover, it’s not just everyone else who has a problem; Conrad himself can’t really understand his new position in the world, since he’s lost some key elements to placing himself in it. And here’s the thing he discovers: being born is painful. And that goes whether you’re born or reborn.

  Not every character gets to survive the water. Often they don’t want to. Louise Erdrich’s wonderful Love Medicine (1986) may just be the wettest book ever set on dry land. At the end of the novel Lipsha Morrissey, who’s as close to a protagonist as the novel comes, observes that once all the northern prairie was an ocean, and we realize that we’ve been watching the drama play out over the remnants of that sea. His mother, June, walks across the snow of an Easter blizzard “like water” and dies. His uncle Nestor Kashpaw has repeated thoughts of swimming to the bottom of Lake Matchimanito and staying there—an image conflating death and escape. The scene I want p. 156 to talk about, though, involves Henry Lamartine Jr. and the river. Henry Jr. is a Vietnam veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. He seems to come out of it a little when his brother Lyman damages their prized car, a red Chevrolet convertible, almost beyond repair. Repair it Henry does, though, and when he’s all finished they go on a picnic by the flooded river. They seem to be having a great time, talking and laughing and drinking beer, when Henry Jr. suddenly runs out into the middle of the roiling, flooded stream. He says, rather simply, that his boots are filling with water, and then he’s gone. When Lyman realizes he can’t save his brother, he feels that in dying, Henry has purchased Lyman’s share of the car, so he starts it and rolls it down into the stream to be with Henry. The scene is part personal tragedy, part Viking funeral, part Chippewa trip to the next world, all strange.

  What does the scene mean? I’ve been insisting that in novels things are rarely as simple as they seem on the surface. Henry Jr. doesn’t just drown. If that’s what it were about, Erdrich would simply have him fall in and hit his head on a rock or something. He elects to go in, thereby choosing not only his relation to the world around him but his manner of leaving it. In a sense, Henry has been drowning in life since he came back from the war—he can’t adjust, can’t form relationships, can’t leave his nightmares behind. In a manner of speaking, he’s already lost, and the issue for the novelist is how to have him physically depart the scene. There are a lot of deaths in Erdrich’s novels that are suicides or, at best, what a British coroner would call “death by misadventure.” If we take a straight sociological (or daytime-talk-showological) view, we have to say, “It’s terrible how hopeless and depressed their lives are.” Which is true, of course. But I don’t think that’s the point. The characters’ deaths are a form of choosing, of exerting control in a society that has taken control from them. p. 157 Henry Jr. decides how he’s going to leave this world, and in so doing offers a symbolic action—he’s swept away in the flood.

  So there are literary drownings like Henry Jr.’s, and near-drowning baptisms like Conrad’s, but a character’s baptism can also be less harrowing. In the wonderful Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison has Milkman Dead get wet three times. First he steps into a small stream while searching for gold in a cave, then he’s given a bath by Sweet, the woman he meets on his trip into his past, and then he swims with Sweet in the river. So he gets wet three times. There’s a religious or ritual association here—it resembles baptism in some sects, where the believer is immersed thrice, in the name of the Fa
ther, Son, and Holy Ghost. Of course, it is worth noting that Milkman is not inevitably more religious, or at least not in any conventional sense, but he’s clearly changed. Nicer, more considerate, less of a sexist pig. More responsible. More grown up. High time, too, since he’s thirty-two.

  So what happens to make him a changed man?

  Yes, he gets wet. Now, his getting wet is different from Hagar’s disastrous trip in the rain, in that he enters bodies of water. Rain can be restorative and cleansing, so there’s a certain overlap, but it generally lacks the specific baptismal associations of submersion. And Milkman does eventually go all the way in. But if characters reformed every time they got wet, no book would ever have rain. The thing about baptism is, you have to be ready to receive it. And what preps Milkman for this change is a steady process of divestiture. Literally. He leaves parts of his outer shell as he goes on this quest: his Chevrolet breaks down, his shoes give out, his suit is ruined, and his watch is stolen. All the things that mark him as a fine city fellow and his father’s son, gone. That’s his problem, see? He’s no one on his own when he starts out. He’s Macon Dead III, son and heir of Macon Dead II and inheritor of all his worst tendencies. In p. 158 order to become a new person, he has to lose all the outer remnants of his raiment, all the things he has acquired from being the son of his father. Then he’s ready to become a new person, to undergo his baptismal immersion. The first time he goes into water, he steps into a little stream he’s trying to cross, but since he’s just starting out, the experience only begins to cleanse him. He’s still after gold, and characters who seek gold aren’t ready for change. Later, after much has happened to change him gradually, he is bathed by Sweet, in a cleansing that is both literal and ritual. Of equal importance, he returns the favor and bathes her. Their intent clearly is not religious; if it were, religion would be far more popular than it is. But what the characters intend as erotic ritual can have spiritual implications in the novel. When Milkman swims in the river for his third immersion, though, he knows it’s significant for him: he whoops, he hollers, he laughs at danger, he’s a brand-new person and he feels it. Which is what dying and rebirth is all about.