Graves’ Cool Web, Foucault’s Sexual Discourse and the Erotics of the Unnamed

”

…But we have speech, to chill the angry day,
And speech, to dull the rose’s cruel scent.
We spell away the overhanging night,
We spell away the soldiers and the fright.

There’s a cool web of language winds us in,
Retreat from too much joy or too much fear…”
The Cool Web, Robert Graves

I recently finished giving a very long online interview. Reading back through the final draft of the article, I was asked a question I didn’t quite know how to answer. We got onto the subject of whether I felt a responsibility to portray fictional acts of kink in a realistic manner.  Somehow I went on to babble – very badly – about how I didn’t like using the ‘words’ that are commonly used to identify acts. It wasn’t my most eloquent hour.

What I was trying to get at was that, in my fiction, I have instinctively shied away from the technical ‘terms’ for things, in the same way I shy away from using euphemisms.  This sounds like a contradiction, so perhaps a couple of examples are in order.

I don’t think I’ve ever used the word ‘bondage’ in a story, unless it was in dialogue. I don’t talk about handcuffs or nipple clamps or fisting or being paddled. I don’t use terms like ‘needleplay’ or ‘wax play’. I seldom even use the words dominant or submissive, or sadist, or masochist, or topping, bottoming, etc. in my fiction. I try to keep away from labels. In the same way I never describe sexual positions as ‘missionary’ or ‘reverse cowgirl’ or ‘doggy style’. I would never use the term ‘facial’. And, of course, I absolutely LOATHE the word ‘pussy’. I’ve used it strategically in order to avoid repetition, but only in extremis. I don’t have a furry cute baby animal between my legs. I have something utterly adult, sexual, hungry, engulfing. I won’t give power to people who want to make it into a Hallmark moment. I won’t give the institution of medicine power over my cunt, so I’m not going to call it a vagina, either. I’ve settled on cunt because it is a good, earthy anglo-saxon word with a hard k sound. It feels right to me. I’ll happily use slit, because that’s what the front of it looks like, and I’m perfectly good with hole, because I have one.

Any euphemism for sexual acts or parts also drives me fucking loopy. I don’t see the point in not calling a cock a cock. It may be a penis at the doctor’s office, but it’s not one when it’s between the legs of one of my characters. It’s not meat, it’s not a rod. It’s not an beaver cleaver or a muscle of love.

It’s taken me a long time to analyze why I’ve made these choices as a writer. When I write, I’m following my instincts, as a woman living in the here and now, as a user of language, as an interpreter of stories. But I’ve come to believe, in retrospect that there were two forces acting upon my unconscious in radical ways that led me to decide to write the way I write.

One of them is the poem I’ve quoted at the top of the page. The other is a chapter by Michel Foucault titled “The Repression Hypothesis’.

I will fully admit that the first time I read Foucault’s ‘The Repression Hypothesis’ (one of the chapters in his  History of Sexuality, Vol. 1.(you can download the whole first volume here). I really didn’t ‘get’ it. Well, I didn’t THINK I got it.

Foucault’s hypothesis is that the idea of sex being ‘repressed’ has been more complex than we think. He starts by reflecting on the rise in what we might call ‘repression’ in the 17th Century. He gives examples of how the Catholic church began to stress the importance of descriptiveness and attention to minutae in confession that had previously only been demanded of ordained members of the church. So, where once, in the 14th Century, you might have been able to walk into the confessional booth and say: “Bless me father, for I have sinned. Last week, I fucked my neighbor’s wife.” by the mid 17th Century, you were expected to recount your sin in a lot more detail. And even if you didn’t actually commit any adultery, you were encouraged to be detailed about any thought that might have strayed into the arena of sinful thought, any sensation you might have experienced that grew sensual, etc. Basically, what he is saying is that, culturally, we began to have a sexual discourse. Of this discourse, Foucault says:

What characterizes modern sexuality from Sade to Freud is not its having found the language of its logic or of its natural process, but rather, through the violence done by such languages, its having been “denatured”-cast into an empty zone where it achieves whatever meager form is be- stowed upon it by the establishment of its limits.

Preface to Transgression, M. Foucault. 1977

Even as the restrictions on how we spoke about sex became more restrictive, we talked about it more and more, in veiled ways which described its limits. We began to decide what was ‘acceptable sex’ and involved the law. We began to determine what was ‘healthy’ sex and involved the institutions of medicine. We became so obsessed about sex that we started building boys schools in such a way to ensure that they couldn’t find any cubbyholes in which to masturbate or get each other off. It affected our clothes, our furniture, our interior decor, our architecture, the design of our institutions, our literature, and theatre and music.

We began to codify and classify and specify what sex was and should be. We turned it into this dangerous thing that required controlling. And then we began to control it – publicly, institutionally, legally, in every way. It allowed authority to determine what was good sexuality, and what bad. What was normal. What was right.

Language allows for the control of a thing. You must name it in order to call it. The more you talk about it, the more ways you can exert power over it ideologically. And, the more terms and euphemism and labels you bestow on something, the more the established idea of what it is becomes static, inert and unfertile.

It seems odd to juxtapose Graves’ gentle poem with Foucault’s sharp-edged critical history of modernity, but I see a very strong relationship in their understanding of language and its power to control and sublimate, both internally and externally.

As an erotic writer, I’ve always been wary of using the nomenclature of BDSM and the vocabulary of pornography for a few reasons.

The first is because it’s just a cheap trick. What I mean by this is that these words have accreted such imagery and predictability around them. They are so semiotically clogged up with pornographic detritus that it is too easy to elicit a quick sexual response from the reader. But it’s a superficial one. It’s a leap in the groin, not a glow in the head.

The second reason is because the meanings of these words have been established and limits imposed on what they can mean. If I say ball gag – we have an instant understanding. Immediately an image pops into your head of some photo you’ve seen of a blonde with gooey lipstick and an appropriate amount of drool running down her chin. But where is the depth? How much deeper I can take you if I don’t use the word. If I describe the sticky wetness on her cheek, the ache of his jaw, the tongue sore from its effort to push against the thing in his mouth that feels after time, enourmous, entrapping. All those words trapped behind the thing lodged between her teeth, like sylabled emotions fighting to erupt.

If I use those labels, those terms, those familiar names for things that are so much larger inside… I give others, society, control of the power of the eroticism I want to invoke in my reader. I allow others – not you or I –  to set the boundaries of what that act, that sensation, that thing can be to us.

So instead, I try to just describe things. I try to use eloquent imagery and powerful metaphor. And perhaps it takes me a lot more words to weave the scene for you, but at least I know the only person deciding what blooms in your mind when you read it is you.

And, ironically, just like Graves, I must use language to tell you how language damps our experience. I must use language because I am a writer. But, I can do my very best to offer you my stories in a language that allows the reader to bring as much of themselves as they can possibly fit into the reading.

…But if we let our tongues lose self-possession,
Throwing off language and its watery clasp
Before our death, instead of when death comes,
Facing the wide glare of the children’s day,
Facing the rose, the dark sky and the drums,
We shall go mad, no doubt, and die that way.