Sex and serious literary work make for uncomfortable bedfellows.
From this notion had grown out a peculiarly British form of disapproval towards the deluge of explicit sex in literary fiction, says Arifa Akbar in “Bad sex please, we're British: Can fictive sex ever have artistic merit?”, an article she wrote for the November 19, 2010 issue of
The Independent UK. “The priapic imaginings of otherwise revered writers – Philip Roth, John Updike, Amos Oz, John Banville – were selected and sneered at for inducing the wrong type of grunts and groans, in the annual tradition that has become
The Literary Review’s Bad Sex Awards,” Akbar says.
Nominations to the Bad Sex Awards are for writers who fumble, “slip down when they stray into the bedroom,” and get it wrong when they start describing sexual intimacy in their literary work. However, Akbar observes that for all the vituperation that writers get for flubbing their sex scenes, there appears to be little consensus on how to get them right. “Some writers follow the forensic language of anatomy, others adopt metaphor and euphemism, while opponents of literary sex shun it for crass approximations with pornography,” he says.
So does this mean that sex is now on the way out as an important element of—and selling point for—literary work?
The British novelist Doris Lessing, winner of the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature, doesn’t think so, and she presents a simple convincing argument in favor of giving sex a rightful place in literary fiction. “The description of what happens in the bedroom, between the sexes with all the power-play between the genders is a vital and valid documentation in literature,” Lessing says in her introduction to Penguin Publishing’s 2004 edition of D.H. Lawrence’s
Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the novel that marked a decisive blow for literary freedom in 1960 when it was cleared of obscenity charges.
If only for this social documentation purpose, Akbar concludes, bad sex in literary fiction perhaps could be just as enlightening as good.
Read Arifa Akbar’s “Bad sex please, we’re British: Can fictive sex ever have artistic merit?” in The Independent UK now!
