Great Prose can make the Earth Move

First appeared in The Guardian

Writing about sex is never easy, but if authors pay attention to the darker side of desire they're in with a chance

Freud called the human tendency to inflict and receive pain during sex "the most common and important of all perversions". We all harbour conflicting urges, he argued, both passive and aggressive drives - Eros that is creative and life-producing; Thanatos that wills return to an inorganic or calm state of death.

Wild, frenzied intercourse can cause pain, but it can also transport us to a place of blissful peace, close to the ultimate pleasure that lies in stress-free, stimuli-free death. Eros seeks survival by avoiding "unpleasure" and threats to life. Thanatos cultivates extreme pleasure, aggression, and the violence which leads to death.

These forces, and theories about them, are all a bit jumbled up, but out of necessity. At the risk of disagreeing with Lee Rourke, in their paradoxical, convoluted way they express and reflect essential truths about life, complicated, conflicting truths which, I'd suggest, demand attention when writing about sex.

This mixed-up combination of motivations and desires underlies one of the major pitfalls that confronts an author who chooses to engage with the sexual act. Great sex often makes for bad writing. A writer who forgets this catechism may provide some amusement, but is unlikely to reach any literary height with it. In order to do so, the candle light of love and lust must include black-clad truths in its shadows.

The complications of sex and murder lie at the centre of Canadian author Sally Cooper's second novel, Tell Everything. They start when Pauline sees a photo in the newspaper of her old friend, Ramona, who is charged with killing her husband, James. The couple, recalling sex murderers Karla Homolka and Paul Bernardo, have together abused a series of young women. Pauline knows she will face questioning about her sexual involvement with the pair.

The novel moves along a blurred, complicated line of sexual consent, exploring just those topics that Freud spent a lifetime surgically packing and unpacking. Three-way sex, the fear of self-revelation, love and lust, self-protection, shame and acceptance, women as victims and predators, physical arousal betraying psychological repulsion... all coalesce and rub up against each other in this satisfying tale of crime and passion. Dancing in the dark regions of the soul, focusing on what fascinates and frightens is a good formula for fiction. Success lies in depicting our innate internal and external conflicts.

Shakespeare shows us the way with his tortured sonnet 129, a brutal examination of "savage, extreme, rude, cruel" lust, which proves beyond doubt that Freud, as Harold Bloom once pointed out, got all his good stuff from the Bard. Note the war taking place within the sonnet's narrator, and his shame. There's an impersonal tone here that's rare in Shakespeare's other poems, invoked when the speaker wants, defensively, to direct attention away from himself.

Or take Rebecca in Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, who requires a "supernatural effort not to die" when lifted up by a "startingly regulated cyclonic power", thanking God for "having been born before she lost herself in the inconceivable pleasure of that unbearable pain..." Now, it could be objected that anyone in the process of being "quartered" by the "claws" of pleasure would not be capable of cogent thought or, indeed, inclined to express gratitude, but many male and female readers I have spoken to about this passage agree that its powerful, sadomasochistic carnality is deeply impressive and affecting in a way that a straightforward roll in the hay could never match.

By adopting Humbert Humbert's perspective, Nabokov's Lolita blurs the lines still further: "I felt proud of myself. I had stolen the honey of a spasm without impairing the morals of a minor. Absolutely no harm done. The conjurer had poured milk, molasses, foaming champagne into a young lady's new white purse; and lo, the purse was intact."

There is no mention of the fact that Lolita is being victimised and abused. Child rape is rendered in ironic, beautiful, pastoral prose. A violation has occurred despite apparent consent. The narrator is lying, and the passage is all the greater for it.

Perhaps great writing about sex is even rarer than great sex itself. Authors who dare to tackle its complexity, by depicting not just the hot throbbing pokers, the moistened loins, but also the fears, shames, cruelties, hatreds, loves and madnesses which surround it, can fascinate in ways that no amount of slapping and tickling ever can.