I’m officially declaring myself the one-woman fan club of Charles Taylor. He’s really outdone himself with his piece about Houellebecq’s novel. The way he nails the book’s critics for their failure to understand Houellebecq’s sexual world view is superb. Namely:
The primary objection seems to be that the relationship is based on the couple’s sexual chemistry, and some critics have found the fact that Valérie is bisexual, adventurous and enthusiastic makes her little more than a male fantasy. There may be an element of truth to that (what straight man wouldn’t want a woman like that?). But what seems foreign to Houellebecq’s critics is not just the idea that a woman’s sexual appetite can equal a man’s (which is just the old Victorian notion of a woman’s proper lack of interest in sex done up in new feminist garb), but that a relationship can sustain itself if the sex is good. If that’s true for people who don’t get along out of bed, why shouldn’t it be true for people who do? [Boldface, mine.]
Valerie may well be Houellebecq’s vision of the sexual ideal, but seeing modern critics dismiss it that ideal without examining it and the reasoning behind its invention is, just as Taylor says, mired in Victorian prudery. Worse, they can’t even conceive of a more modern notion that good sex can carry a relationship where commonalties fail. Good, intimate sex, in whatever form it takes, can bind a couple together. It can provide a motivation for meeting each other half way because it gives rise to the recognition that, colloquially, it don’t get any better than this. I know. I have an enduring relationship, couched as much in good sex as in pleasant, compatible personalities. Heck, we don’t even have a lot in common, but we’re able to appreciate our differences without problem or resentment because what does bind us — great sex — is so celebratory.
But less about me. More about Houellebecq’s critics:
They employ “pornographic” in the frequent and lazy manner used to dismiss the explicit. Webb inadvertently betrays the prejudice of the critics when he refers to the “adolescent” quality of the sex. Sex, it still seems, is the one major area of human experience considered unworthy of intellectual respect, as if we should all live entirely in our heads instead of equally in our bodies. And if we acknowledge that we have penises or vaginas that get hard or moist, we’ve immediately marked ourselves as unworthy of adult consideration.
Yes! Someone else sees what I’ve been saying about a lack of respect for erotic language in fiction. It’s this very thinking that’s marginalized the dirty book — now known as the erotic novel, if you look check out the shelves of your local Borders bookstore — and what’s kept the genre down in terms of growth. Now I know Taylor is employing this argument in a different direction, but I must point out how it parallels the condition of the erotic novel, a genre that should be as large as the Romance section or, better yet, the Science Fiction/Fantasy section of every bookstore. But it doesn’t because it is marginalized well beyond Houellebecq’s (and others’) literary works. But thank you, Charles Taylor, for making the point.
Why are we in such a cultural state? Easy to define, Talyor says.
In the book’s view, Westerners have become alienated from their own bodies, and when reviewers claim shock at lovers who enjoy the taste of their partner’s vagina or sperm, or the look on their partner’s face when he or she is on the brink of orgasm, they are inadvertently affirming Houellebecq’s view.
And that, my friends, is Taylor’s money shot. Bravo.
I’m sure those of you attuned to my own proclivities are wondering who I felt about Houellebecq’s depiction of S/M sex. Taylor encapsulates it as such:
What depresses Michel (and Houellebecq) is the type of sex divorced from the human connection that is possible even in casual encounters. That’s what leaves him unsatisfied with Western prostitutes, and it’s what repulses him on a trip to a hardcore S/M club (where neither he nor Valérie participate). Houellebecq rides roughshod over the justification that the clubgoers who are shackled or have hooks inserted into their scrotums are consenting adults. They may be, but in his view what they are consenting to is the invasion of the soullessness that inhabits too much of our lives into sex as well, the place that is the greatest source of pleasure. S/M becomes, as Houellebecq has Valérie say, the perfect metaphor for a society that has become divorced from pleasure, alienated from its physical self. “What scares me about it all,” she says, “is that there’s no physical contact. Everyone wears gloves, uses equipment. Skin never touches skin, there’s never a kiss, a touch, or a caress. For me, it’s the very antithesis of sexuality.” Michel sums it up, “When there’s no longer any possibility of identifying with the other, the only thing left is suffering — and cruelty.” Later he says, “Organized S&M with its rules could only exist among overcultured, cerebral people for whom sex has lost all attraction.”
I’m of two minds, here. First, Houellebecq is using S/M as a metaphor — perhaps an ultimate sexual metaphor — for Western detachment. I have no problem with that from a creative standpoint. In fact, I probably would do the same in certain storytelling circumstances because ultraPC, gloved and body fluid phobic sex does look like this. However, coming from the sex positive school of thought and existence, it’s almost impossible for me to write from this bleak state of observation. I can appreciate where Houellebecq is coming from and what he’s trying to impart, but I cannot detach myself from my own worldview of sex to write like he does. Besides, if I did, wouldn’t I, like his critics, be guilty of furthering Western detachment from the self?
Let’s leave that as rhetoric for now. But what about this passage from a practicing perv’s standpoint? Shouldn’t I decry it as inaccurate?
Well, let me say this: It isn’t inaccurate, at least in part. A small segment of ultraPC S/M does exist and it does look like this in its most extreme form. I know people — and I’m talking married couples, even — who won’t mix S/M with sex. To them, S/M conveys one experience while sex conveys another. S/M is a thrill, sex is intimacy, and never the twain should meet. I’ve noticed that the more they ritualize this distinction, the firmer the line of demarcation becomes, right down to the gloves and the antibacterial dry soaps when they play outside their fluid-bonded primary relationships.
Houellebecq is likely guilty of portraying a practice in its extreme to make a point and he does risk categorizing it too narrowly. But let me read the book and see the greater context of the work before I comment further.
Getting back to the original object of my affection, Charles Taylor’s piece covers a lot more ground than just Houellebecq’s view of Western sex, and I can’t do justice to it in its entirety. It deserves your time and contemplation. Go read it, then join the fan club. Me, I’ve moved the book to the top of the ToRead pile and stuck a bookmark in it, ready to go.
