Sex and Politics (well, perhaps just sex)

The first lecture at Sewanee was by John Casey, and centered around sex in literature—how it is handled, when it is worth writing about, and what about it is worth fixating upon. He mentioned, by introduction, that Updike said he enjoys writing his own sex scenes much more than reading sex scenes of others, because of the excitement it gave him, and the energy—it’s fun to do, but hard to do well. Updike’s point was indirectly countered by Deborah Isenberg, who claimed that writing about sex is like asking an eight-year old to describe the plot of his favorite movie; there is often an over-reliance on universalities, which, because of the human fascination with sex, run the risk of making the scene seem blinding and cliché based. The physiology of sex, after all, is inescapably familiar. More interesting are the scenes where particular emotions are explored, so we learn things we did not know rather than being titillating by things we do. Casey gave the example of Vronsky’s helmet scene in Anna Karenina, where Anna inhabits all aspects of the scene, infusing its every motion, thought, and urge, despite her being wholly absent.

Casey extended this fixation on Anna, the complete emotional dedication on Vronsky’s part, rising above his physical fascination, to be representative of the psychological notion of Cathexis (sic), the Freudian idea of libidinal energy being fixated on a tangible analog—in this case, Anna. Casey pointed out that in a good sex scene (in any scene, really) two kinds of Cathexis occur—that between the characters and each other, and that between the reader and the words on the page. Throughout the second half of his talk, Casey presented discussions of several direct passages ranging from D.H. Lawrence to James Joyce to Frank O’Conner, and how these scenes were emotionally compelling and connective, often positing Eros as merely the first layer of carnal experience.

Posted by Alan Ackmann - Jul 26, 02:10 PM.
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