Last week I talked a bit about how John Barth's 1972 novella "Dunyzadiad" in his collection Chimera suggested a relationship between sex and story. This week, I want to call your attention to another novella of that era, William H. Gass's Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife, which appeared in Triquarterly in 1968 and in hardback in 1971. It was reissued this past spring by Dalkey Archive Press.
The extended metaphor that Gass uses throughout the book is
that the lonesome wife is the book itself, that very subjective object which we
hold in our hands when we read and enter with excitement, pleasure, joy, and
yes, even fear. As love/literature, she speaks to the reader as she seduces him
with her body, the page:
"how I love you now I have you here…I've
got you deep inside of me like they say in the songs, fast as a ship in Antarctic
ice, and I won't need to pinion your arms, lover, butt you or knee, you'll
stay, you'll want to, you'll beg me not to go and take my myth, my baffling
maze, my sex, my veils, my art away…and I shall shave you so close and sand you
so sensitive, so scarce and smooth, that when I put you at last up in public in
the light of my lights, then anyone—anyone who's paid his buck in—will be
easily able, just by looking, to lick the sweet heart out of your heart, the
life from your living, and the daylights out of your cage."
At the conclusion of the book,
however, when the reader has left her, the lonesome wife complains:
"he did not, in his address, at any
time construct me. He made nothing, I
swear—nothing. Empty I began, and empty
I remained…. These words are all I am…. Oh, I'm the girl upon this couch, all
right, you needn't fear; the one who's waltzed you through these pages, clothed
and bare, who's hated you for your humiliations, sought your love…. Could you
love me? Love me then…then love me…. Yes, I know I can't command it. Yet I
should love, if ever you would let me, like a laser, burning through all the
foolish ceremonial of modesty and custom, cutting pieties of price and
parentage, inheritance and privilege, away like stale sweet cake to sick a
dog. My dears, my dears…how I would
brood upon you: you the world; and I, the language."
I used Gass's William Masters Lonesome Wife and John Barth's "Dunyazadiad"
as an introit to a presentation I made many years ago in Los Angeles at the
annual meeting of the California Association of Teachers of English. Both novellas explore a basic relationship between sex and storytelling suggested by
the frame story of Thousand Nights and a
Night—a relationship between what Coleridge called "Suspension of
Disbelief" and sex researchers Masters and Johnson called "sensate
focus."
In chapter 14 of Biographia Literaria Coleridge explains the division of responsibilities
between Wordsworth and himself in The
Lyrical Ballads. Coleridge says that Wordsworth was to focus on the things
of everyday life and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural "by
awakening the mind's attention from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to
the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us," a world that had
been covered over by "a film of familiarity and selfish solicitude."
Coleridge says that his own task was to
direct attention to persons and actions supernatural "so as to transfer
from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to
procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief
for the moment which constitutes poetic faith."
Critic Norman Holland in his book The Dynamics of Literary Response
devotes a chapter to the relationship between art and sex, citing many artists
and critics who use the language of sexuality to describe the aesthetic
response. Philosopher Gaston Bachelard, for example, talks about the poem's
"possession" of us completely; director Tyrone Gutherie says that a
good director does not so much try to create the illusion of reality as he tries
to interest the audience so intensely that they are "rapt" and
"taken out of themselves"; and aesthetician Bernard Berenson says
that the aesthetic experience is a brief, timeless moment when the spectator is
"at one" with the work and the two become one entity."
All of this suggests that the reading
experience assumes a dual notion of reality that has been noted by many
different thinkers. For example, psychiatrist Arthur Deikman has discussed the
difference between what he calls "the action mode," which is a state
of striving toward achieving personal goals; and "the receptive
mode," which is organized around intake of the environment instead of its manipulation. Because the action mode has been developed
for insuring survival, we have been led to assume that it is the only proper
adult mode and to think of the receptive mode as being pathological, regressive,
or childish. Deikman suggests that love is experienced in the receptive mode.
Deikman uses the terms "automatization"
and deautomatization" to suggest this bimodality--terms that echo
Coleridge and Wordsworth's purposes in The
Lyrical Ballads. For Deikman says
what happens to the notion of reality during these periods of deautomatization
when one has suspended disbelief is that stimuli of the inner world become
invested with the feeling of reality ordinarily bestowed on objects. Through what might be termed "reality
transfer," thoughts and images become real.
Philosopher Ernst Cassirer notes a basic
difference between practical or theoretical thinking and mythical
thinking. He says that in our habit of
dividing lie into the two spheres of practical and theoretical activity we are
apt to forget that there is a lower substratum that lies beneath them both:
"Primitive man is not liable to such
forgetfulness. All his thoughts and feelings are still embedded in this lower
original stratum His view of nature is
neither merely theoretical nor merely practical; it is sympathetic…. Primitive
man by no means lacks the ability to grasp the empirical differences of
things. But in his conception of nature
and life all these differences are obliterated by a stronger feeling: the deep
conviction of a fundamental solidarity of life that bridges over the
multiplicity and variety of single forms."
When one is under the spell of
mythic thinking, says Cassirer, "it is as though the whole world were simply
annihilated; the immediate content, whatever it be, that commands his religious
interest so completely fills his consciousness that nothing else can exist
apart from it."
This, it seems to me, is the
paradigm of the suspension of disbelief and sensate focus. It takes as its prerequisite, continues
Cassirer, the "focusing of all forces on a single point." In applying this theory to literature, Philip
Wheelwright has noted that such experience is "most incontestably
evident" in one's relationship "at certain heightened moments"
with another person. "To know someone as a presence instead of as a lump
of matter or a set of processes, is to meet him with an open, listening,
responsive attitude; it is to become a thou
in the presence of his i-hood.' It is, of course, this sense of "presence,"
Wheelwright says, that poetic language hopes to capture.
It is Norman O. Brown's
interpretation of Freud that John Barth's genie has in mind in his analogy of
sexuality and literature, for Brown says language itself has its base in
infantile erotic play—that all art is actualized play, and that behind every
form of play lies a process of the discharge of sexual fantasies. "Original
sense in nonsense," says Brown, and "common sense a cover-up
job."
Rollo May in Love and Will notes that creativity is always an intense encounter
which involves being absorbed, caught up, for which sexual intercourse is an
appropriate metaphor.. Jose Ortega y Gasset in Love: Aspects of a Single Theme says that for the lover, the
mystic, the artist, attention is so focused on the object that for the moment
attention is withdrawn from everything else and the sense of union is
created. And Denis de Rougemont in Love in the Western World, notes that
love is both the best conductor and the best stimulant of expression.
What does all this have to do
with my examination of the relationship between sex and storytelling in Alice
Munro's stories? I am not completely
sure yet. I am just following a line of
thought and teasing out connections. I
think it has something to do with the distinction between "realist"
fiction and "fantasy" fiction.
Critical response to Munro's first few collections focused on her
realism, seeing her stories as relatively transparent depictions of the lives of
the people of rural Ontario. However, the more stories Munro pubvlished the
more critics began to sense the "artifice" in her work. My colleague Dorothy Johnston said in a recent
comment on this blog that the relationship between the "realist"
frame of 1001 Nights and the fantastic
stories that Shahrazad tells is of particular interest to her. It is of particular interest to me also, and
is related, I think to the study of Alice Munro's stories I am working on.
My reading of Marina Warner's
book on Thousand and One Nights has
further emphasized the distinction between the realistic and the fantastic in my mind and has reaffirmed
my long-held notion that, at least as far as the short story is concerned,
there is no such thing as "realism"—that the short story maintains
its allegiance to its ancestry in fantasy and fairytale, that it has always
been more aligned to the mythic view of reality as Ernst Cassier and others
delineate it, than to the so-called practical world of the everyday. It has always been more akin, to use Mircea
Eliade's terms, to the "sacred view of reality" than to the
"profane."
And Alice Munro is, first and foremost,
a short-story writer. No matter how ralistic her stories seem, they are always
highly patterned artifices that communicate by "storytelling" devices
rather than realistic devices.
More about this next time, when I talk about Marina Warner's book Stranger Magic and the issue of that "realistic" frame and the "fantastic" stories interrelated throughout The Arabian Nights.
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