Avoid All Metaphors!

Having read a lot of John Updike in the past few months, I wonder why he is generally thought of as a particularly egregious describer of sex. Not that there aren't plenty of moments, especially in the Rabbit books, where I noticed he had probably overstepped the boundaries of good taste. But does that qualify as bad sex/writing when he starts applying his omnipresent lens for parsing out detail on parts of the human anatomy? What other ways of describing sex are there, and what should we find acceptable?

Auberon Waugh, the son of Evelyn, established the Literary Review "Bad Sex In Fiction" award in 1993. The odd thing about this award is that many of our greatest writers have since won the prize. This year, the nominees included Philip Roth, John Banville, Amos Oz and Nick Cave (for his novel The Death of Bunny Munro). I've read Roth's The Humbling, so I know that the book's occasional foray into nauseating scenes of lesbian-hetero experimentation are far from the worst thing about the book. But still, Roth is a great writer, and if he can't write something light or funny or profound about this certain action, how is anyone ever going to be able to write a tolerable sex scene?

Meanwhile, Katie Roiphe wrote a piece in the New York Times Book Review lamenting the passing of a certain machismo attitude toward sex in writing, most clearly exemplified by Roth, Updike and Mailer. A new breed of writers, including David Foster Wallace (curiously) and Dave Eggers, are more inclined toward describing extreme acts of "cuddling." Are they simply avoiding the trap of being eligible for next year's Literary Review award? Roiphe doesn't really talk about that, so concerned is she with this new trend of treating women with respect, or in Benjamin Kunkel's case, with a perhaps unhealthy level of attachment.

I was glad to find, then, Andrew Sullivan's post directing me to an essay written by Sonya Chung that includes some advice about how to avoid the mistakes of Roth and Mailer without feeling sheepish or cuddle-dependent. Here are her ideas:

1. Beware of sensory descriptions which include food analogies – “honeydew breasts” (Styron), “like a spoon scraping the inside of a soft-boiled egg” (Littell), “the oysterish intricacy of her” (Anthony Quinn), “he felt his cashew become a banana, and then a rippled yam” (Updike) – or “wet” verbs like smear, suck, lick, slither, slide.

2. Be sparing with anatomical terminology for sexual organs, whether scientific or slang; and if your passage does contain such words, beware of mixing and matching high diction and low diction, i.e. it’s nearly impossible to get away with raunchy lyricism. (Here I will spare the reader specific examples, but suffice it to say that sex-organ diction, both high and low, is apparently like neon paisley; it doesn’t go with anything.)

3. Avoid spiritual-religious metaphors – “salvation” (Palahniuk), “rapture” (Ayn Rand), “magical composite / weird totem” (Roth), “on the edge of a precipice beyond which can be glimpsed a dark-green distance in a reeking mist and something shining out at them, a pulsing point of light” (Banville), “my licking a primitive form of language in a simple prayer” (Theroux) – or any language that gestures toward the grand or the epic: “weeping orifice” (Ann Allestree), “Imperial pint of semen” (Neal Stephenson), “Defile her” (Roth), “like a torero…trailing his cape in the dust before the baffled bull,” “gravid tremulousness of her breasts” (Banville).

4. Be hyper-vigilant about clichéd metaphors and similes, particularly oceanic ones: “like a tide determined to crash against those ancient rocks” (Simon Van Booy), “it was as if he were splashing about helplessly on the shore of some great ocean, waiting for a current, or the right swimming stroke to sweep him effortlessly out to sea” (Sanjida O’Connell).

5. Avoid machinistic metaphors: “with his fingers, now experienced and even inspired, he starts to steer her enjoyment like a ship towards its home port” (Amos Oz), “I’m going to pull the lever, I’m going to let the blade drop” (Littell), “he enters her like a fucking pile driver” (Nick Cave).

These are mostly well-illustrated cautionary examples, and I hope to come back to this list frequently, but I really like the last one about entering someone "like a fucking pile driver" and I now want to read The Death Of Bunny Munro quite badly.

Besides, "machinistic metaphors" are the wave of the future, right?