A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art, Sex, and the Mind

by Siri Hustvedt

  Maes’s introduction to his subject is excellent, and he asks important questions throughout. He misses entirely, it seems to me, what Bell is about here: low taste is directly yoked to men’s desire for women. Those illiterate ruffians of the lower classes (all of whom are presumably male and heterosexual) confuse beauty with the women who get them hot. How crass of them. Their loins have led their puny, plebian minds astray. Such a thing is impossible for the Clive Bells of this world, champions of pure, formal, cerebral contemplations of genuine beauty. If high aesthetics is to remain high, it must not be sullied by the body—that thoughtless cesspool of urges and its resultant fluids.

  The idea that a woman might be a spectator of a work of art or that her sexual desire might be at stake when she looks at art is nowhere to be found. (This perspective was adopted, I might add, despite the fact that Bell was married to a painter, Vanessa Bell, and was privy to myriad Bloomsbury “liberations” of a homoerotic nature.) Disinterested, formal considerations of art—analyses of aesthetic objects as things that have no relation to the viewer’s or reader’s body—are absurd. They are theoretical evasions born of fear, the fear of sexual desire itself and the human need, sometimes desperate, for another person. We, all of us, men and women, with our diverse sexual appetites, longings, and wishes, are not beings that can be cut in two, as minds and bodies, as the lingering Cartesian legacy would have it, and we are not beings that can be cut off from others either without dire consequences. The thought that pornography can be aesthetic and arousing remains dangerous even today because it forces an admission that human beings are body subjects and that the old division between man as more-mind-than-body and woman as more-body-than-mind is nonsense.

  Betty Dodson is no doubt right that most porn is “shitty.” At the same time, the pornographic does not always lie outside “art.” Egon Schiele made a lot of work that is sexually exciting, to take a single example. Bell would insist that contemplation of Schiele and sexual arousal must be separable. I should have been looking at “the lines” and analyzing the palette of the paintings. But why? When I was nineteen, I read Samuel Richardson’s Pamela and was surprised to find it downright titillating. Later, I would discover that my reaction was hardly unique. In his rollicking Shamela, Henry Fielding made much of the barely concealed element of sex game in Richardson’s novel between the virginal Pamela and the determined Mr. B. Pamela is more than novel as tease. Still, it contains what might be called pornographic tendencies.

  Objectification, idealization, and distance are all at work in the pornographic imagination, and it is hardly an imagination owned by men. I vividly recall strolling on Christopher Street sometime in the late seventies and wandering into a small bookstore. I paused in front of one of those revolving postcard racks and found myself captivated by an image of a beautiful young sailor looking seductively over his shoulder at me, his pants lowered just enough for me to glimpse a lovely part of his round ass. I knew perfectly well that I was not the intended audience for this card, but it did the trick nevertheless. I was too shy to buy it. I remember thinking, however, as I stared at the adorable sailor, that the failure of magazines such as Playgirl, which had always struck me as at once ridiculous and somehow wrong, was that the brawny centerfolds were not objectified enough, that despite their efforts to parody Playboy, they had nevertheless failed to glorify, idealize, and eroticize the male body. The objectified sailor, intended for the delectation of a gay man, had far more power over me, a woman who likes men, than the silly images in that magazine of grinning naked guys with their hands over their penises.

  I have read that there is now pornography with feeling and subjectivity and inner reality. I suspect it might not be to my liking, but then, my experience of pornography is limited, much of it historical. I read quite a bit of Sade in graduate school, but I don’t have much of a stomach for him and do not intend to return to the marquis’s brutal world, however informative it may be about the historical moment. I’ve read Fanny Hill and My Secret Life, Anaïs Nin’s racy stories, Sacher-Masoch’s novella Venus in Furs, Bataille’s brutal excursions into erotic dirt, Genet’s The Thief’s Journal, which has explicit passages, the Story of O, and have had a few adventures, mostly in hotel rooms, with journeyman porn—in other words, pornography for heterosexual men.

  I am always suspicious of the refrain I have heard repeatedly from the mouths of sophisticates, more often women than men: “Pornography is so boring.” Really? Thick fortifications must be needed for a person to find images of coupling that fit his or her sexual tastes boring before he or she has had an orgasm. I think many people avoid pornography for the opposite reason. They worry that it may become too interesting and too exciting. The consumption of pornography can be habit-forming. It is there to be enjoyed, but addiction is frightening. Few people want to be wholly subjugated to its considerable allure.

  It seems that people are not alone in seeking out prurient materials. A primatologist, Pablo Herreros, wrote an article in the Spanish newspaper El Mundo about a chimpanzee named Gina in the Seville Zoo, who, when provided with a television and a remote control to entertain herself in the evenings, was discovered to prefer the porn channel. For reasons that beg many questions, she liked watching her human cousins “do it” better than anything else available on TV. On the other hand, as opposed to complex police dramas or blockbuster movies with car chases and explosions, porn might have been what Gina followed best. Although the chimp’s selective taste could be used to argue that pornography really is a bestial form, one that arouses our “animal nature,” I would say, well, we are animals, reflective art-making animals, but animals nevertheless. Herreros comments, “The truth is that human and non-human primates possess an intense sexual life.”

  And this intense sexual life can, as Sontag wrote, drive us mad. It can make us miserable, and it can fill us with intense joy, at least temporarily. Many people have broadened their tolerance for explicit depictions of sex of all persuasions in books and movies since 1964. Sontag’s well-articulated worries about pornography as a “crutch for the psychologically deformed” and its possible “brutalization of the morally innocent” are still with us, in part because the relation between a perceiver and what she perceives remains a philosophical riddle of borders. Everyone agrees that the constant consumption of junk food has ill effects on us. What does the daily consumption of media stereotypes do, inside and outside of porn? Who is vulnerable to brutalization or addiction or just losing himself in a fantasy that affects or even supplants his sexual encounters with real people, and why? What is the relation between the increasing exhibitionism that is inherent to social media and pornography? Is there a relation? All of these questions rest on the inside-outside problem. There are images of violence, even fictional violence, for example, that I do not want to see because I do not want them in my mental catalogue, but the way such images would be configured in memory are necessarily related to my own fears and fantasies.

  But what about Sontag’s argument against realism and her determination to move her audience onto a new terrain in which “the human” is not some absolute standard of the good? What about the values of shock and risk? What about transcendence? What are we to make of her claim that an easy identification with texts is shallow? What about the Orville Prescotts of this world? Have they disappeared?

  The truth is that the mingling of the human and inhuman was not new to the New Novel. In fairy tales, things, animals, and people mingle with promiscuous abandon. There is little description in fairy tales of psychological or emotional states except in the starkest terms. In Charles Dickens’s novels, objects jiggle with life and people are turned into repetitive machines. Houses, tables, and persons share traits. The border between the living being and the dead thing in Dickens is often so loose it collapses altogether. His is a literary landscape in which identities of all kinds, both human and object, are so restless, so fragmented that conventional categorization is blown to smithereens. Dickens’s novels
are far more radical, philosophical, and explosive than any work Robbe-Grillet produced. Dickens is not a realist, but his books were and remain popular. His work stands as an uncanny mingling of philosophical profundity and Victorian sentimentality heavily influenced by the mechanics of the fairy tale.

  In Wuthering Heights, the inhuman forces of nature and human character are not kept separate. Emily Brontë wrote a novel that continues to deliver shocks. Proust’s seven volumes surely count as realism, but it is a realism that opens the reader to the nuances of memory, and these are never obvious before the reader reads. Recognition occurs because the reader is reading. The problem is not genre. The problem is platitudes. Shallow, dull fiction—realist, fantastic, crime, historical, erotic—remains with us. Well-made, sturdy, and, in the United States anyway, often “workshopped” in fiction-writing classes four, five, six times with various instructors, these books are heavy with the gloss of shellacked conventions. They are as formulaic and unchallenging as the shittiest of shitty pornography. And they work, at least for some people.

  Whatever its hardened conventions may be, this kind of literature imports cultural consensus into its pages. It matters little whether the text deals with vampires, human-like androids, or middle-class mothers struggling with bulimia. They are no threat to what are, in fact, the collective fictions of the moment. So-called realist novels, which these days often feature “dysfunctional” families surrounded by the sociological litter of the present or the recent past—the gadgets, pop culture references, and psychological platitudes familiar from the media—in prose that is not too far removed from journalism to discomfit the middlebrow ear, are embraced with gusto, but then, this is nothing new.

  The word used to describe comfort fiction in whatever genre is “accessible.” Accessibility is now curiously understood to be a good in itself. It is scarcely remembered that what is easily accessible, what is read without any effort, is usually very much like what we’ve read before. Without question, this kind of fiction answers a need. It is a need to have one’s own worldview confirmed, to participate in the lives of characters who drive the cars you drive, who ate arugula in the 1990s and a few years later took to kale and quinoa. There is nothing wrong with such details in themselves, of course. They ground narratives in time, place, and class. This minutia becomes desiccated and meaningless only when it serves fictions that give the reader nothing but a mirror of cultural clichés that have stiffened into dubious truths.

  And wholly conventional, well-wrought fiction is often held in far too high esteem by the Orville Prescotts of this world. The reason for this is simple. Unlike most readers, who are not asked to comment formally on the books they read, reviewers are more comfortable when they feel superior to the text they are reading, when it does not intimidate them or call into question their dearly held beliefs about the world. They are partial to books that reinforce what they already know and fit nicely into a preordained category. No one likes to feel or look stupid. Over and over, I have read pronouncements about how books should be written or pompous explanations of how fiction works. Certain reviewers make big careers of such declarations, declarations that result in jettisoning writers who don’t live up to one or another of their rules. And it is interesting that the Orville Prescotts of our contemporary literary scene seem to be equally attached to a kind of conservative realism, to detest “experiment” in favor of a literature that depicts “life,” as if there is some precise measurement for the relation between a book and the world, as if the “world” can be fully known, and as if life as it is lived is not itself enmired in fictions.

  There are good books in every genre, books that appropriate conventions and then invent anew from within them. Most of Shakespeare’s plots were borrowed. Austen’s comedies must end well. Language itself, after all, is a shared convention. We can love Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” because it is nonsense born of grammatical sense. Psychotic texts, such as Antonin Artaud’s caca poems, may depart from ordinary language to such a degree that they become gibberish. And yet, the beloved Emily Dickinson is often startlingly difficult. The Joyce of Finnegans Wake, that long, roiling prose poem filled with multilingual puns, is so dense that few people I know have been able to finish it. I never have.

  The older I get, the more I feel that all great books are written from a position of urgency and, unlike Sontag, I believe they must have emotional power. Emotional flatness does not endure because, however much we may admire a book’s textual gymnastics or sagacity in the moment, it is affect that consolidates memory and keeps a novel alive inside us. It does not follow from this, however, that such an emotional response requires “well-rounded” psychological characters or that literary somersaults or high jinx are forbidden, nor does it mean that great prose fiction has a single emotional register. The force of irony should not be underestimated. Think of Greek tragedy. Think of Don Quixote. Humor may partake of distance, but the belly laugh is memorable. Tristram Shandy has its lulls and frustrations, but this philosophical novel, which embodies coitus interruptus in its story and structure, is hilarious. Human beings like to feel their art. Feeling is the source of all primal meanings and colors all experience.

  On the other hand, saccharine literature in which love triumphs in the end and harrowing tales about sexual abuse or psychopathic serial murderers may deliver a strong affective charge, but that is all they deliver. Like bad pornography, these stories meet the reader’s expectations perfectly, and in this sense they succeed magnificently. Emotion, then, is no guarantee that a book is good. If the reader is left in exactly the same place she was when she began reading, why read? A person who weeps over the death of Anna Karenina may also shed tears over a sentimental television commercial. To argue that the tears shed for one are superior to the tears shed for the other is silly. Nevertheless, judgment of a work of art cannot be decided exclusively by tears or laughs or sexual arousal or any other feeling. As Sontag maintained, knowledge is dependent on the consciousness that receives it. I have repeatedly argued that the reader and text act in collaboration. Your past reading affects your present reading. If you live on a diet of best-selling thrillers, will you be able to feel the suspense in Henry James?

  What is fiction for? Is it now passé to argue, as Sontag did, that literature bears within it the power to alter a person forever, to shock us into another view of what we are? Why do some books continue to be interesting after hundreds of years and others disappear within a decade or a season? Booth Tarkington won two Pulitzer Prizes. Lauded, loved, celebrated as a great American author, where is he now? His work survives in two strong American films made from his work: Alice Adams and The Magnificent Ambersons. Booth Tarkington is not Flannery O’Connor. That said, how many great works of literature have been lost or are moldering in used bookstores, due to blindness, prejudice, or just plain stupidity? What, finally, is a great work of literature?

  These are very old knots that are not easily untied. I share Sontag’s opinion that great literary works carry within them something startling, if not shocking, a kind of recognition that could never have happened had you not read that particular book. They are transformative. They lift you out of the expectations that guide your perceptions of how things are and make a mark, sometimes a wound that never leaves you. Those marks are not left by clichés. What is fiction for? At its best it is an occasion to leave one’s self and make an excursion into the other, a form of travel as “real” and potentially revolutionary as any other. And, like sex, this movement into otherness requires openness to that other and a degree of emotional risk.

  Susan Sontag once gave me a high compliment, which nevertheless bears within it the complexity of her own positions about literature. At a small dinner party where she was seated next to me, she turned to me and said abruptly, “You wrote the best essay on The Great Gatsby ever written.”

  In every conversation I had with her I found myself amazed at the certitude of her opinions. This time I found myself the benefact
or of her stratifying mind. Had she actually read everything ever written on The Great Gatsby? Deeply flattered nevertheless, I thanked her.

  Then she said, “Do you know why?”

  This is an odd question to ask any author, who perhaps should know why what she or he has written might be good but cannot know why the other person believes it to be good. I said, “No.”

  “Because,” she said, “it was written from the inside, not from the outside.”

  She began a conversation with someone else then, and I was left to wonder about her comment, which was rather cryptic, after all. What had she meant by it? I have always been suspicious of the idea that there is a “best” of anything. I do not believe there are literary forms that are “better” than others either. There are no rules, no prescriptions, no single way to write. This does not mean that one puts judgment aside. There is good and bad literature, and there are good readers and bad ones, but establishing a fixed hierarchy is useless and perhaps even harmful. If my now vast experience as a reader counts for anything, it is that it allows me to identify with ease received knowledge, ideas lifted wholesale from other sources, and dead phrases. When Susan Sontag was at her best, she wrote from the inside out, not the outside in. When she spoke and wrote about the madness of sexual desire and the shocking transcendence that literature makes possible, her prose quickened because she was speaking from her own inner experience. She wanted to communicate the tumult, the strangeness, the passion of her own reading.

  I think The Benefactor was a book written mostly from the outside, manufactured from the ideas and principles and theories about what a modern novel should be. I think her comment about “the inside” was a genuine compliment to me that was simultaneously a critique of a quality that sometimes appeared in her own work, a willful modernity. Many books are written from the outside in. On the few occasions I have taught writing classes, half my time has been spent disabusing students of their fixed ideas. “But I thought you had to show not tell.” “My last teacher said that dialogue had to be . . .” Most books, built of external rules and regulations, are far more conventional than Sontag’s first novel. Some of them are extolled and sell hundreds of thousands of copies. This fact, however, does not make them any better. My bet is that they will go the way of Booth Tarkington. Dickens sold a lot of books. One can argue that his work is “accessible,” but his novels were most decidedly generated from the inside, from the hopping interiority of his hypomanic, indefatigable self.