Loved this eloquent exploration of how various writers approach the deepest mystery of the human condition. Or, at least, mine. There is nothing like sexual impulses for teasing out a desire for constant moral calibration, which often seems to be the externalisation of fear, shame and resentment. The determination to police what turns people on seems to be hard-wired, which suggests that it has an evolutionary basis. That makes it a minefield for writers. Thanks for this unusually thoughtful and dispassionate approach to the issue.
This is a thought-provoking essay. Thank you. I appreciate that this is pointing at the mysterious and transcendent root of our desires and emotions. We are mysterious creatures with feelings and urges and cognitive short-cuts and heuristics. But our emotions don't come with an error code that points to an owner's manual with pages explaining where the feeling came from, why we evolved to feel that way, or what we're supposed to do about it. So there's a lot of ad hoc reasoning, and trial and error, as we try to make sense of our experience. So there does seem to be a sense that to get underneath explanations is tapping into something real.
On the other hand, to focus only on the biologically-mysterious aspect of sex seems like a kind of selective attention. Is there an implicit argument there, that if you just don't write about the social or ethical aspects of sexuality, then you reveal the real, amoral, biological foundations of it? If the writer limits their focus to only the “real” amoral conditions of sexual desire, then you don’t have to talk about the ethical? Several times, you wrote about the importance of shedding shame, or writing without shame. But isn’t shame also a part of the mysterious human experience of sex? And also an important ethical aspect of sex? Had Blake Bailey's harmful and coercive desires been constrained by a stronger sense of shame, that seems like an overall positive. To that end, I appreciate the link from Anya to the story by Eve Crawford Peyton as a kind of counterpoint to the perspective of the essay.
I don't want to lose the unflinching stare into the abyss, to see and describe aspects of the human experience that blow apart our expectations and desire to control the uncontrollable through explanation and categorization, our desire to split things into dualities of right and wrong. And yet those are also aspects of our experience, and I'm not convinced that avoiding it really allows you to bypass ethical considerations, or account for the harm caused by unconstrained desires. What starts out sounding like a brave, unvarnished look at the realities of human sexuality, starts to look like Blake Bailey's excuse that he just couldn't help himself, the heart wants what it wants, and he wanted all of those women he raped from the very first moment he laid eyes on them… and wouldn’t it have been great had higher-order, regulating emotions and cognitions have intervened at some point? And why are those thoughts not also fair game for writers?
Thanks for the thought-provoking comment, Joe. I'm not here to defend Blake Bailey as a human being. You say he's a rapist. Yes, some of his victims say he raped them. The courts haven't corroborated that, as far as I know. So who do we believe? I leave that up to whoever wants to take a stand on the issue. My point in the essay is that his book fails when he tries to explain himself, even obliquely, with the parallel narrative about his relationship with his dad. My hunch is that, for the novelist or the memoirist, explaining or judging sex never convinces the most curious readers, only describing sex does that. And I'm not talking about pornography, but rather a detailed account of thoughts, actions, and dialogue, without bais--like in the scene I excerpt from DAYBOOK. Only then can the reader judge, drawing conclusions, for example, about shame or shamefullness. If you read the sex scenes in THE FUCK BUSINESS, THE LOVER, DAYBOOK, or even CANCELLED LIVES (when he just presents his facts) they are far more revealing than, for example, that scene I quote in THIRST FOR SALT, where the author seemed to want to influence my opinion, approving of the sex as correct, but almost on the sly. The description is so gushy and tendentious. You speak of shame. Knapp is quite eloquent on shame in DAYBOOK, and Troy quite eloquent on his odd lack of it, but neither of them weighs down his sex scenes by trying to explain them. They describe the act and then the aftermath, which are both messy, very messy. Maybe I'm only saying that sex is always so messy, so complicated.
Thanks for the reply. My apologies for leaving your reply hanging, and for mischaracterizing your argument. I didn’t mean to imply that you were defending Blake Bailey.
I’m interested in how a reader’s beliefs about sex might be related to how a description of sex might register differently. I’m also curious about the philosophical implications of it.
When I read your piece the first time, I was ready to agree that the “Thirst for Salt” description was loaded because I was looking to see what you were pointing at and trying to understand your argument. I don’t find it so obviously objectionable now (I'm not trying to be obtuse). I’d be really curious to see a poll of random reader reactions to a selection of descriptions (including the ones you’ve chosen). More to the point, I wonder to what extent a reader’s beliefs about sex influence or determine their perception of which descriptions sound objective.
I’m not sure exactly how to approach the philosophical roots of the topic, but I want to start with Quine’s argument about the underdetermination of language. That might seem bizarrely far afield, but I'm hoping it will seem relevant after a brief description. The argument is that “for any given set of empirical evidence, there can be multiple, logically incompatible theories that equally well explain that evidence.” To translate this to an argument about language, as I understand it, is that there is not a direct correspondence between beliefs (or theories) and utterances (or evidence), especially from the perspective of the listener. The act of interpretation includes an assumption about the beliefs of the person doing the uttering. It also suggests that there are an endless number of possible explanations for what someone says, and the only thing that constrains it is what we as listeners or interpreters attribute to the speaker. (There’s a great, brief description of this here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1467-8675.00193, by Joseph Heath, but I’m not sure if you can access the full text.)
I think there might be a softer version of this that arises in practical experience, in that we typically believe that others see the world as we do, and hold similar beliefs. If we didn’t, we couldn’t make sense of what they’re saying. But occasionally it will become clear over multiple exchanges that it’s no longer possible to assume that you share beliefs with another person just by how they describe things, or what they say about them.
A basic example is if I’m trying to arrange a coffee date with a friend, and we decide to meet on Thursday. If over the course of conversation I start to think they believe that today is Tuesday, when I believe it’s Monday, then I’m no longer confident that our coffee meetup is going to happen. That is a difference of belief about just one part of the exchange. If I stop believing that they share my beliefs about days of the week, or what coffee is, or how sentences work, I completely lose any sense for what is happening in their mind. The possibilities are endless.
The upshot of this is that maybe descriptions of sex as messy and complicated and involving potentially troubling power dynamics appear clear-eyed and dispassionate to everyone who believes that sex is messy and complicated, and involves potentially troubling power dynamics. For those who hold that sex is sacred, then descriptions of sex as sacred will accord with their beliefs, and similarly for those who believe that it’s beautiful and harmonious and akin to rushing water, or surreal and absurd, and so on.
A description of sex, then, contains a lot of information about the writer, their beliefs about the people around them, and their relationship to the background beliefs of their culture or subculture. Likewise, the interpretations and reactions of readers contain a lot of information about them, and their own beliefs, relationship to their community, and so on. We can never know for certain, but we begin with the principle of charity (i.e., the beliefs of other people are predominantly true) to even begin to understand what others are saying, and then move to more and more finely tuned guesses about what others believe, and how they perceive things, based on differences in our descriptions.
Again, I’d be really curious about a poll of selections, because it’s possible that you would see a variety of responses indicative of a diversity of beliefs. Or you might find a much stronger consensus, so that your goal of giving advice, and being able to evaluate writing as better or worse, is on solid ground, in which case I would be totally wrong about all of this.
I apologize for the length of my response. If I had more time, it would have been shorter (as the saying goes). I'm not positive about this, but I'm curious to know if there's a potential connection between these things.
Thanks again for the very interesting and thought-provoking essay.
Hey, Joe. I totally agree that “a reader’s beliefs about sex [are] related to how a description of sex might register differently.” I also agree that the interpretation of language complicates the matter even more. The writer has one set of beliefs and assumptions about both the subject and the language surrounding it, and the reader has another. No way can we get around that. Wildly different interpretations will emerge, for exactly reasons you say. You argue your point with philosophy, and I simply don’t have the chops to debate you in that sphere. My expertise, if I have one, is literature, simply from years and years of reading it and trying to write it. To me, there is nothing “objectionable” about Lucas’s description of sex in THIRST FOR SALT. It’s actually quite pleasing and well put-together, but cloyingly so, in my opinion. I write “in my opinion,” because I bet a lot of—maybe even most!—readers loved it. So, granting a variety of responses to that sex scene, I got the sense that the author was trying too hard to control readers’ responses to the narrative there, rather than letting the narrative speak for itself. The meat and majority of Lucas’s book—about a love affair between a very young woman and a middle-aged man—is very well done and deserves to be read. But the subject of age-gap romance is charged; it’s controversial. Writing about such subject matter, and then raising the stakes even more by adding sex, will naturally make lots of writers self-conscious, because the sex has the potential to put readers off, and I suspect that Lucas meddled too much, rather than bravely forging ahead and letting the story—specifically the sex—tell itself. With all potentially controversial material, too many writers feel the obligation to tacitly endorse or condemn, and this almost always—in my opinion!—undermines their work. Personally, I don’t believe that artists create, but rather channel. And when they are channeling well for a long stretch—as Lucas does in THIRST FOR SALT—but then that channeling takes them to uncomfortable territory, they begin to rein in the controls and to simplify, to editorialize. How do I know they do this? Because I have done it, and my friends who are literary artists have also done it, and I believe it gets in the way of our art.
Anyway, I don’t know how well I addressed your issues, but I did my best. As a final note, I would also “be really curious to see a poll of random reader reactions to a selection of descriptions (including the ones [I’ve] chosen).” It would be illuminating.
Thank you for the thorough and thoughtful reply. Your description about the psychological experience of writing difficult pieces (feeling self-conscious, meddling, tacitly endorsing or condemning, etc.) really landed for me. This illuminated aspects of the craft of writing that I wasn't thinking about closely.
In particular, it has helped me think about the distinction between the aesthetics and the execution. Both sex-as-sacred and sex-as-grotty scenes, for example, could be done well. There are consistent aesthetic choices that could make either of them compelling.
But I think you're right that there are mistakes that can be made regardless of the aesthetic mode that will make a description ring hollow, and that readers are sensitive to manipulation.
It can't be easy to disentangle the more "universal" aspects of craft from the subjective differences between writers and readers. I suspect there is a lot of overlap. But the internal experience of the writer putting thoughts on the page, and how it feels, to notice when they're trying to nudge readers in some direction, seems like the right place to focus attention to improve the writing.
Thank you again for the substantive replies. I'll look for your essays in the future.
Loved this eloquent exploration of how various writers approach the deepest mystery of the human condition. Or, at least, mine. There is nothing like sexual impulses for teasing out a desire for constant moral calibration, which often seems to be the externalisation of fear, shame and resentment. The determination to police what turns people on seems to be hard-wired, which suggests that it has an evolutionary basis. That makes it a minefield for writers. Thanks for this unusually thoughtful and dispassionate approach to the issue.
I like your comment, Mike. Very well put.
This is a thought-provoking essay. Thank you. I appreciate that this is pointing at the mysterious and transcendent root of our desires and emotions. We are mysterious creatures with feelings and urges and cognitive short-cuts and heuristics. But our emotions don't come with an error code that points to an owner's manual with pages explaining where the feeling came from, why we evolved to feel that way, or what we're supposed to do about it. So there's a lot of ad hoc reasoning, and trial and error, as we try to make sense of our experience. So there does seem to be a sense that to get underneath explanations is tapping into something real.
On the other hand, to focus only on the biologically-mysterious aspect of sex seems like a kind of selective attention. Is there an implicit argument there, that if you just don't write about the social or ethical aspects of sexuality, then you reveal the real, amoral, biological foundations of it? If the writer limits their focus to only the “real” amoral conditions of sexual desire, then you don’t have to talk about the ethical? Several times, you wrote about the importance of shedding shame, or writing without shame. But isn’t shame also a part of the mysterious human experience of sex? And also an important ethical aspect of sex? Had Blake Bailey's harmful and coercive desires been constrained by a stronger sense of shame, that seems like an overall positive. To that end, I appreciate the link from Anya to the story by Eve Crawford Peyton as a kind of counterpoint to the perspective of the essay.
I don't want to lose the unflinching stare into the abyss, to see and describe aspects of the human experience that blow apart our expectations and desire to control the uncontrollable through explanation and categorization, our desire to split things into dualities of right and wrong. And yet those are also aspects of our experience, and I'm not convinced that avoiding it really allows you to bypass ethical considerations, or account for the harm caused by unconstrained desires. What starts out sounding like a brave, unvarnished look at the realities of human sexuality, starts to look like Blake Bailey's excuse that he just couldn't help himself, the heart wants what it wants, and he wanted all of those women he raped from the very first moment he laid eyes on them… and wouldn’t it have been great had higher-order, regulating emotions and cognitions have intervened at some point? And why are those thoughts not also fair game for writers?
Thanks for the thought-provoking comment, Joe. I'm not here to defend Blake Bailey as a human being. You say he's a rapist. Yes, some of his victims say he raped them. The courts haven't corroborated that, as far as I know. So who do we believe? I leave that up to whoever wants to take a stand on the issue. My point in the essay is that his book fails when he tries to explain himself, even obliquely, with the parallel narrative about his relationship with his dad. My hunch is that, for the novelist or the memoirist, explaining or judging sex never convinces the most curious readers, only describing sex does that. And I'm not talking about pornography, but rather a detailed account of thoughts, actions, and dialogue, without bais--like in the scene I excerpt from DAYBOOK. Only then can the reader judge, drawing conclusions, for example, about shame or shamefullness. If you read the sex scenes in THE FUCK BUSINESS, THE LOVER, DAYBOOK, or even CANCELLED LIVES (when he just presents his facts) they are far more revealing than, for example, that scene I quote in THIRST FOR SALT, where the author seemed to want to influence my opinion, approving of the sex as correct, but almost on the sly. The description is so gushy and tendentious. You speak of shame. Knapp is quite eloquent on shame in DAYBOOK, and Troy quite eloquent on his odd lack of it, but neither of them weighs down his sex scenes by trying to explain them. They describe the act and then the aftermath, which are both messy, very messy. Maybe I'm only saying that sex is always so messy, so complicated.
Thanks for the reply. My apologies for leaving your reply hanging, and for mischaracterizing your argument. I didn’t mean to imply that you were defending Blake Bailey.
I’m interested in how a reader’s beliefs about sex might be related to how a description of sex might register differently. I’m also curious about the philosophical implications of it.
When I read your piece the first time, I was ready to agree that the “Thirst for Salt” description was loaded because I was looking to see what you were pointing at and trying to understand your argument. I don’t find it so obviously objectionable now (I'm not trying to be obtuse). I’d be really curious to see a poll of random reader reactions to a selection of descriptions (including the ones you’ve chosen). More to the point, I wonder to what extent a reader’s beliefs about sex influence or determine their perception of which descriptions sound objective.
I’m not sure exactly how to approach the philosophical roots of the topic, but I want to start with Quine’s argument about the underdetermination of language. That might seem bizarrely far afield, but I'm hoping it will seem relevant after a brief description. The argument is that “for any given set of empirical evidence, there can be multiple, logically incompatible theories that equally well explain that evidence.” To translate this to an argument about language, as I understand it, is that there is not a direct correspondence between beliefs (or theories) and utterances (or evidence), especially from the perspective of the listener. The act of interpretation includes an assumption about the beliefs of the person doing the uttering. It also suggests that there are an endless number of possible explanations for what someone says, and the only thing that constrains it is what we as listeners or interpreters attribute to the speaker. (There’s a great, brief description of this here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1467-8675.00193, by Joseph Heath, but I’m not sure if you can access the full text.)
I think there might be a softer version of this that arises in practical experience, in that we typically believe that others see the world as we do, and hold similar beliefs. If we didn’t, we couldn’t make sense of what they’re saying. But occasionally it will become clear over multiple exchanges that it’s no longer possible to assume that you share beliefs with another person just by how they describe things, or what they say about them.
A basic example is if I’m trying to arrange a coffee date with a friend, and we decide to meet on Thursday. If over the course of conversation I start to think they believe that today is Tuesday, when I believe it’s Monday, then I’m no longer confident that our coffee meetup is going to happen. That is a difference of belief about just one part of the exchange. If I stop believing that they share my beliefs about days of the week, or what coffee is, or how sentences work, I completely lose any sense for what is happening in their mind. The possibilities are endless.
The upshot of this is that maybe descriptions of sex as messy and complicated and involving potentially troubling power dynamics appear clear-eyed and dispassionate to everyone who believes that sex is messy and complicated, and involves potentially troubling power dynamics. For those who hold that sex is sacred, then descriptions of sex as sacred will accord with their beliefs, and similarly for those who believe that it’s beautiful and harmonious and akin to rushing water, or surreal and absurd, and so on.
A description of sex, then, contains a lot of information about the writer, their beliefs about the people around them, and their relationship to the background beliefs of their culture or subculture. Likewise, the interpretations and reactions of readers contain a lot of information about them, and their own beliefs, relationship to their community, and so on. We can never know for certain, but we begin with the principle of charity (i.e., the beliefs of other people are predominantly true) to even begin to understand what others are saying, and then move to more and more finely tuned guesses about what others believe, and how they perceive things, based on differences in our descriptions.
Again, I’d be really curious about a poll of selections, because it’s possible that you would see a variety of responses indicative of a diversity of beliefs. Or you might find a much stronger consensus, so that your goal of giving advice, and being able to evaluate writing as better or worse, is on solid ground, in which case I would be totally wrong about all of this.
I apologize for the length of my response. If I had more time, it would have been shorter (as the saying goes). I'm not positive about this, but I'm curious to know if there's a potential connection between these things.
Thanks again for the very interesting and thought-provoking essay.
Hey, Joe. I totally agree that “a reader’s beliefs about sex [are] related to how a description of sex might register differently.” I also agree that the interpretation of language complicates the matter even more. The writer has one set of beliefs and assumptions about both the subject and the language surrounding it, and the reader has another. No way can we get around that. Wildly different interpretations will emerge, for exactly reasons you say. You argue your point with philosophy, and I simply don’t have the chops to debate you in that sphere. My expertise, if I have one, is literature, simply from years and years of reading it and trying to write it. To me, there is nothing “objectionable” about Lucas’s description of sex in THIRST FOR SALT. It’s actually quite pleasing and well put-together, but cloyingly so, in my opinion. I write “in my opinion,” because I bet a lot of—maybe even most!—readers loved it. So, granting a variety of responses to that sex scene, I got the sense that the author was trying too hard to control readers’ responses to the narrative there, rather than letting the narrative speak for itself. The meat and majority of Lucas’s book—about a love affair between a very young woman and a middle-aged man—is very well done and deserves to be read. But the subject of age-gap romance is charged; it’s controversial. Writing about such subject matter, and then raising the stakes even more by adding sex, will naturally make lots of writers self-conscious, because the sex has the potential to put readers off, and I suspect that Lucas meddled too much, rather than bravely forging ahead and letting the story—specifically the sex—tell itself. With all potentially controversial material, too many writers feel the obligation to tacitly endorse or condemn, and this almost always—in my opinion!—undermines their work. Personally, I don’t believe that artists create, but rather channel. And when they are channeling well for a long stretch—as Lucas does in THIRST FOR SALT—but then that channeling takes them to uncomfortable territory, they begin to rein in the controls and to simplify, to editorialize. How do I know they do this? Because I have done it, and my friends who are literary artists have also done it, and I believe it gets in the way of our art.
Anyway, I don’t know how well I addressed your issues, but I did my best. As a final note, I would also “be really curious to see a poll of random reader reactions to a selection of descriptions (including the ones [I’ve] chosen).” It would be illuminating.
Thank you for the thorough and thoughtful reply. Your description about the psychological experience of writing difficult pieces (feeling self-conscious, meddling, tacitly endorsing or condemning, etc.) really landed for me. This illuminated aspects of the craft of writing that I wasn't thinking about closely.
In particular, it has helped me think about the distinction between the aesthetics and the execution. Both sex-as-sacred and sex-as-grotty scenes, for example, could be done well. There are consistent aesthetic choices that could make either of them compelling.
But I think you're right that there are mistakes that can be made regardless of the aesthetic mode that will make a description ring hollow, and that readers are sensitive to manipulation.
It can't be easy to disentangle the more "universal" aspects of craft from the subjective differences between writers and readers. I suspect there is a lot of overlap. But the internal experience of the writer putting thoughts on the page, and how it feels, to notice when they're trying to nudge readers in some direction, seems like the right place to focus attention to improve the writing.
Thank you again for the substantive replies. I'll look for your essays in the future.
I think anyone who wants to understand Blake Bailey should read what one of his victims wrote. https://slate.com/human-interest/2021/04/blake-bailey-former-student-sexual-assault-essay.html