A reader on reading - Alberto Manguel 2010
The gates of paradise
The ideal reader
“Come, we shall have some fun now!” thought Alice.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter 7
ONE OF THE OLDEST VERSIONS of Beauty and the Beast, told in Latin by Apuleius sometime in the second century, is the story of a princess ordered by an oracle to become the wife of a dragon. Fearing for her life, dressed in mourning, abandoned by her family, she waited at the top of a mountain for her winged husband. The monster never came. Instead, a breeze lifted her and bore her down into a peaceful valley, in which stood a house of gold and silver. Disembodied voices welcomed her, and offered her food and drink, and sang to her. When night fell, no lights were lit, and in the darkness she felt someone near her. “I am your lover and your husband,” a voice said, and mysteriously she was no longer afraid. The princess lived with her unseen spouse for many days.
One evening, the voices told her that her sisters were approaching the house, searching for her, and she felt a great desire to see them once again and tell them of the wonderful things that had taken place. The voices warned her not to go, but her longing was too great. Crying out their names, she hurried to meet them. At first the sisters seemed overjoyed, but when they heard her story they cried and called her a fool for allowing herself to be deceived by a husband who required the cover of darkness. “There must be something monstrous about him, if he will not show himself to you in the light,” they said, and felt pity for her.
That night, steeling herself for a hideous revelation, the princess lit an oil lamp and crept to where her husband was sleeping. What she saw was not a dragon, but a young man of extraordinary beauty, breathing softly into the pillow. Overjoyed, she was about to extinguish the lamp, when a drop of hot oil fell on the sleeper’s left shoulder. He awoke, saw the light, said not a word, and fled.
Eros vanishes when Psyche tries to perceive him.
As an adolescent, reading about Eros and Psyche one hot afternoon at home in Buenos Aires, I didn’t believe in the moral of the story. I was convinced that in my father’s almost unused library, where I had found so many secret pleasures, I would find, by magic chance, the startling and unspoken thing that crept into my dreams and was the butt of schoolyard jokes. I wasn’t disappointed. I glimpsed Eros through the chiffonnerie of Forever Amber, in a tattered translation of Peyton Place, in certain poems of Federico García Lorca, in the sleeping-car chapter of Alberto Moravia’s The Conformist, which I read haltingly at thirteen, in Roger Peyrefitte’s Particular Friendships.
And Eros didn’t vanish.
When a couple of years later I was able to compare my readings to the actual sensation of my hand brushing for the first time over my lover’s body, I had to admit that for once, literature had fallen short. And yet the thrill of those forbidden pages remained. The panting adjectives, the brazen verbs were perhaps not useful to describe my own confused emotions, but they conveyed to me, then and there, something brave and astonishing and unique.
This uniqueness, I was to discover, brands all our essential experiences. “We live together, we act on, and react to, one another,” wrote Aldous Huxley in The Doors of Perception, “but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude.” Even in the moment of greatest intimacy, the erotic act is a solitary act.
Throughout the ages, writers have attempted to make this solitude a shared one. Through ponderous hierarchies (essays on gender etiquette, texts of medieval love courts), through mechanics (lovemaking manuals, anthropological studies), through examples (fables, novels, poems), every culture has sought to comprehend the erotic experience in the hope that perhaps, if it is faithfully depicted in words, the reader may be able to relive it or even learn it, in the same way that we expect a certain object to preserve a memory or a monument to bring the dead to life.
It is amazing to think how distinguished a universal library of this wishful erotic literature would be. It would include, I imagine, the Platonic dialogues in which Socrates discusses the types and merits of love; Ovid’s Arsamatoria of imperial Rome, in which Eros is considered a social function, like table manners; the Song of Songs, in which the loves of King Solomon and the black Queen of Sheba become reflections of the world around them; the Hindu Kama Sutra and the Kalyana Malla, in which pleasure is regarded as an element of ethics; the Arcipreste de Hita’s Book of Loving Well in fourteenth-century Spain, which pretends to draw its wisdom from popular sources; the fifteenth-century Perfumed Garden of Sheik al-Nefzawi, which codifies the erotic acts according to Islamic law; the German Minnereden, or medieval amatory discourses, in which love, like politics, is given its own rhetoric; and poetic allegories such as the Roman de la rose in France and The Faerie Queene in Britain, in which the abstract noun Love acquires once again, as Eros had, a human or divine face.
There would be other, even stranger works, in this ideal library: the ten-volume novel Clélie (1654—60), by Mademoiselle de Scudéry, which includes the Carte de tendre, a map charting the erotic course with its rewards and perils; the writings of the marquis de Sade, who, in prolix and tedious catalogues, noted the sexual variations to which a human group can be subjected; the theoretical books of his near-contemporary Charles Fourier, who devised entire utopian societies centered around the sexual activities of its citizens; the intimate journals of Giacomo Casanova, Ihara Saikaku, Benvenuto Cellini, Frank Harris, Anaïs Nin, Henry Miller, and John Rechy, all of whom tried to recapture Eros in autobiographical memoirs.
Curled up in an armchair in my father’s library and in other, later armchairs in more houses than I care to remember, I found that Eros kept appearing in all sorts of unexpected places. In spite of the singular nature of the experiences hinted at or described on the private page, these stories touched me, aroused me, whispered secrets to me.
We may not share experiences, but we can share symbols. Transported into another realm, distracted from its subject, erotic writing at times achieves something of that essentially private act, as when the swoons and agonies of erotic desire become a vast metaphorical vocabulary for the mystical encounter. I remember the excitement with which I read, for the first time, the erotic union described by Saint John of the Cross.
This is Roy Campbell’s translation:
Oh night that was my guide!
Oh darkness dearer than the morning’s pride,
Oh night that joined the lover
To the beloved bride
Transfiguring them each into the other.
Lost to myself I stayed
My face upon my lover having laid
From all endeavour ceasing:
And all my cares releasing
Threw them amongst the lilies there to fade.
And then John Donne, for whom the erotic and mystical act is also an act of geographical exploration:
License my roving hands and let them go,
Before, behind, between, above, below.
O my America! my new-found-land.
In Shakespeare’s time, the erotic borrowing of the geographical vocabulary had become sufficiently common to be parodied. In The Comedy of Errors the slave Dromio of Syracuse describes to his master the dubious charms of the wench lusting after him — “she is spherical, like a globe; I could find out countries in her” — and proceeds to discover Ireland in her buttocks, Scotland in the barren palm of her hand, America upon her nose, “all o’er embellished with rubies, carbuncles, sapphires, declining their rich aspect to the hot breath of Spain.”
William Cartwright, the nebulous seventeenth-century author of The Royal Slave (a play that once received praise from both Charles I and Ben Jonson), deserves to be better remembered for the following lines, which return spiritual love to its authentic source:
I was that silly thing that once was wrought
To Practise this thin Love;
I climb’d from Sex to Soul, from Soul to Thought;
But thinking there to move,
Headlong I rowl’d from Thought to Soul, and then
From Soul I lighted at the Sex agen.
Occasionally, in my haphazard reading, I found that a single image could render a poem unforgettable. These are lines composed by a Sumerian poet circa 1700 B.c. She writes:
Going to my young husband—
I’ll become the apple
clinging to the bough,
surrounding the stem
with my sweet flesh.
In a few cases, all that is required is an absence of description to convey the erotic power of that which has been lost. An anonymous English poet wrote this most famous of quatrains sometime in the late Middle Ages:
Western wind, when will thou blow,
The small rain down can rain?
Christ, that my love were in my arms,
And I in my bed again.
Fiction, however, is another matter.
Of all the erotic literary genres, fiction, I think, has the hardest time of it. To tell an erotic story, a story whose subject is outside words and outside time, seems not only a futile task but an impossible one. It may be argued that any subject, in its sheer complexity or simplicity, makes its own telling impossible, that a chair or a cloud or a childhood memory is just as ineffable, just as indescribable, as lovemaking, as a dream, as music.
Not so.
We have in most languages a varied and rich vocabulary that conveys reasonably well, in the hands of an experienced craftsperson, the actions and the elements with which society is comfortable, the daily bric-a-brac of its political animals. But that which society fears or fails to understand, that which forced me to keep a wary eye on the door of my father’s library, that which becomes forbidden, even unmentionable in public is given no proper words with which to approach it. “To write a dream, which shall resemble the real course of a dream, with all its inconsistency, its eccentricities and aimlessness,” complained Nathaniel Hawthorne in his American Notebooks, “up to this old age of the world, no such thing has ever been written.” He could have said the same of the erotic act.
The English language in particular makes things difficult by simply not having an erotic vocabulary. The sexual organs, the sexual acts borrow the words to define them from either the science of biology or the lexicon of vituperation. Clinical or coarse, the words to describe the marvels of physical beauty and the exultation of pleasure condemn, asepticize, or deride that which should be celebrated in wonder. Spanish, German, Italian, and Portuguese suffer from this same weakness. French is, perhaps, a little more fortunate. Baiser for copulate, which borrows its semantics from the word “kiss;” verge for penis, the same word for “birch,” which in its association with trees gives verger, “orchard;” petite mort, “little death,” for the moment of ecstasy after achieving orgasm, in which the diminutive endearment takes the eternity out of dying but retains the sense of blissfully leaving this world have little of the nudge-nudge wink-wink quality of fuck, prick, and come. The vagina (surprise, surprise) receives in French as little respect as it does in English, and con is hardly better than cunt. To write an erotic story in English, or to translate one into English, requires from the writer new and crafty ways of making use of the medium, so that the reader is led, against the grain of meaning or through an entirely separate imagination of language, into an experience that society has decreed will remain unspoken. “We have placed sex,” said the wise Montaigne, “in the precincts of silence.”
But why have we decided that Psyche must not look upon Eros?
In the Judeo-Christian world, the banning of Eros finds its canonical voice in Saint Augustine, a voice that echoes through the entire Middle Ages and still rings, distorted, in the censor boardrooms of our day. After a youth of womanizing and carousing (to make use of these fine preacherly words), looking back on his quest for a happy life, Augustine concludes that ultimate happiness, eudaemonia, cannot be achieved unless we subordinate the body to the spirit, and the spirit to God. Bodily love, eros, is infamous, and only amor, spiritual love, can lead to the enjoyment of God, to agape, the feast of love itself that transcends both human body and spirit. Two centuries after Augustine, Saint Maximus of Constantinople put it in these words: “Love is that good disposition of the soul in which it prefers nothing that exists to knowledge of God. But no man can come to such a state of love if he be attached to anything earthly. Love,” concludes Saint Maximus, “is born from lack of erotic passion.” This is a far cry from Plato’s contemporaries, who saw Eros as the binding force (in a real, physical sense) that keeps the universe together.
Condemnation of erotic passion, of the flesh itself, allows most patriarchal societies to brand woman as the temptress, as Mother Eve, guilty of Adam’s daily fall. Because she is to blame, man has a natural right to rule over her, and any deviance from this law—by woman or by man — is punishable as treacherous and sinful. An entire apparatus of censorship is constructed to protect male-defined heterosexual stereotypes and as a result, misogyny and homophobia are both justified and encouraged, assigning women and homosexuals restricted and depreciated roles. (And children: we excise the sexuality of children from social life, while allowing it to appear in seemingly innocuous guises on the screen and in the fashion pages — as Graham Greene noted when he reviewed the films of Shirley Temple.)
Pornography requires this double standard. In pornography, the erotic must not be an integral part of a world in which both men and women, homosexual and heterosexual, seek a deeper comprehension of themselves and of the other. To be pornographic, the erotic must be amputated from its context and adhere to strict clinical definitions of that which is condemned. Pornography must faithfully embrace official normality in order to contravene it for no other purpose than immediate arousal. Pornography—or “licentiousness,” as it used to be called — cannot exist without these official standards. Licentious, meaning “sexually immoral,” comes from license, permission granted (to depart from the rules). That is why our societies allow pornography, which embraces official notions of “normal” or “decent” behavior, to exist in specific contexts but zealously persecute artistic erotic expressions in which the authority of those in power is brought implicitly into question. “Girlie” magazines could be bought in neat brown paper bags while Ulysses was being tried on charges of obscenity; hard-core porno films were shown in theaters a few steps away from others at which The Last Temptation of Christ or How to Make Love to a Negro were being picketed.
Erotic literature is subversive; pornography is not. Pornography, in fact, is reactionary, opposed to change. “In pornographic novels,” says Vladimir Nabokov in his post-scriptum to Lolita, “action has to be limited to the copulation of clichés. Style, structure, imagery should never distract the reader from his tepid lust.” Pornography follows the conventions of all dogmatic literature—religious tracts, political bombast, commercial advertising. Erotic literature, if it is to be successful, must establish new conventions, lend the words of the society that condemns it new meaning, and inform its readers of a knowledge that in its very nature must remain intimate. This exploration of the world from a central and utterly private place gives erotic literature its formidable power.
For the mystic, the whole universe is one erotic object, and the whole body (mind and soul included) the subject of erotic pleasure. The same can be said of every human being who discovers that not only penis and clitoris are places of pleasure but also the hands, the anus, the mouth, the hair, the soles of the feet, every inch of our astounding bodies. That which physically and mentally excites the senses and opens for us what William Blake called “the Gates of Paradise” is always something mysterious, and, as we all eventually find out, its shape is dictated by laws of which we know nothing. We admit to loving a woman, a man, a child. Why not a gazelle, a stone, a shoe, the sky at night?
In D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love, Rupert Birkin’s object of desire is the vegetation itself: “To lie down and roll in the sticky, cool young hyacinths, to lie on one’s belly and cover one’s back with handfuls of fine wet grass, soft as a breath, soft and more delicate and more beautiful than the touch of any woman; and then to sting one’s thigh against the living dark bristles of the fir-boughs; and then to feel the light whip of the hazel on one’s shoulders, stinging, and then to clasp the silvery birch-trunk against one’s breast, its smoothness, its hardness, its vital knots and ridges—this was good, this was all very good, very satisfying.”
In John Collier’s His Monkey Wife, Eros is a chimp called Emily with whom an English schoolmaster, Mr. Fatigay, falls madly in love: “’Emily!’ he said. ’My Angel! My Own! My Love!’ At this last word, Emily raised her eyes, and extended to him her hand. Under her long and scanty hair he caught glimpses of a plum-blue skin. Into the depths of those all-dark lustrous eyes, his spirit slid with no sound of splash. She uttered a few low words, rapidly, in her native tongue. The candle, guttering beside the bed, was strangled in the grasp of prehensile foot, and the darkness received, like a ripple in velvet, the final happy sigh.”
In Cynthia Ozick’s “The Pagan Rabbi,” Eros is a tree: “I busied my fingers in the interstices of the bark’s cuneiform. Then with forehead flat on the tree, I embraced it with both arms to measure it. My hands united on the other side. It was a young narrow weed, I did not know of what family. I reached to the lowest branch and plucked a leaf and made my tongue marvel meditatively along its periphery to assess its shape: oak. The taste was sticky and exaltingly bitter. I then placed one hand (the other I kept around the tree’s waist, as it were) in the bifurcation (disgustingly termed crotch) of that lowest limb and the elegant and devoutly firm torso, and caressed that miraculous juncture with a certain languor, which gradually changed to vigor.”
This is Marian Engel describing an amorous encounter between a woman and a beast in Bear:
He licked. He probed. She might have been a flea he was searching for. He licked her nipples stiff and scoured her navel. With little nickerings she moved him south.
She swung her hips and made it easy for him.
“Bear, bear,” she whispered, playing with his ears. The tongue that was muscular but also capable of lengthening itself like an eel found all her secret places. And like no human being she had ever known it persevered in her pleasure. When she came, she whimpered, and the bear licked away her tears.
And the English writer J. R. Ackerley describes in these words his love for his dog, Tulip: “I go to bed early to end the dismal day, but she is instantly beside me, sitting upright against my pillow, her back turned, shifting, licking, panting, shifting, peering at my face: pulling at my arm. Sweet creature, what am I doing to you? I stretch out my hand in the gloom and stroke the small nipples…. Panting, she slackly sits while my hand caresses her, her ears flattened, her head dropped, gazing with vacant eyes into the night beyond the windows. Gradually, she relaxes, subsides. Gradually, my hand upon her, she sleeps.”
Even the lover’s severed head can become an erotic object, as when Stendhal has Mathilde, in The Red and the Black, seek out Julien’s remains: “He heard Mathilde move hurriedly around the room. She was lighting a number of candles. When Fouque gathered enough strength to look, he saw that she had placed in front of her, on a little marble table, Julien’s head, and was kissing its brow.”
Confronted with the task of making art out of a bewildering variety of objects and subjects, acts and variations, feelings and fears; limited by a vocabulary specifically designed for other purposes; walking the perilous edge between pornography and sentimentality, biology and purple prose, the coy and the overexplicit; threatened by societies intent on preserving the aristocracies of established power through the censoring forces of politics, education, and religion, it is a miracle that erotic literature has not only survived this long but become braver, brighter, more confident, pursuing a multicolored infinity of objects of desire.
A postscript: I believe that, like the erotic act, the act of reading should ultimately be anonymous. We should be able to enter the book or the bed like Alice entering the Looking-Glass Wood, no longer carrying with us the prejudices of our past and relinquishing for that instant of intercourse our social trappings. Reading or making love, we should be able to lose ourselves in the other, into whom—to borrow Saint John’s image—we are transformed: reader into writer into reader, lover into lover into lover. “Jouir de la lecture,” “to enjoy reading,” say the French, for whom reaching orgasm and deriving pleasure are both expressed in a single common word.