Toni Morrison: On Sex and Violence (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 2)
Toni Morrison, Beloved
Toni Morrison's interview with The Paris Review couldn't be more packed with insights on her writing process and, by extension, with why her strategies and tactics succeed in impacting the reader. She discusses point of view (she always uses several in a book to keep the view from being "totalizing"), writing the ending scene as soon as she knows what it is (the ending isn't what excites her, it's the "how" the characters got there), and the importance of knowing the distinction between editing and fretting over your prose (fretting just works the prose "to death").
But today I want to grab the chance to talk about sex and violence.
With either, the line between being gratuitous and being earned is difficult to discern. Moreover, while sex and violence "sell," I regularly see evidence that publishers and agents can be prudish. It might be our Puritan roots. It might be the enormous weight put on "likable characters" by mainstream publishers. Or, it just might be that sex and violence are incredibly difficult to put into language well.
First, sex. Writing about sex is a challenge. Reading bad sex scenes is challenge, too. The number one killer of sex scenes is lack of tension. The people having sex are blissfully engaged with one another. Everything perfect, and the sex shows just how perfect they are for one another, physically, emotionally, spiritually, intellectually. One word: boring. Okay, two words: big yawn. If a book needs blissful sex to show me that two characters truly love each other, belong together, etc., etc., then something else in the book isn't working. The number two killer of sex scenes: language that throws me back into my nude drawing classes -- you know, the clinical language about breasts and limbs and skin color that makes the model an object, rather than a person. And the number three killer: the illusion that it's the sex act itself that's important. Because it isn't -- or, not usually.
I had an opportunity to discuss sex and writing a month back, then didn't take it. I'll do so now. One of the essays in The Writer's Notebook published by Tin House, Steve Almond's "Hard Up for a Hard-on," offers up the following sage advice for the writer writing sex. I think violence can be approached in a similar way, too. Almond encourages:
I want you to write the worst sex scene possible; the more wantonly, vaginally, pre-ejaculatory, oozingly awful, the better. Part of the reason I encourage you to do this is that it frees you up to write whatever you want to write. The central reason that people muff -- I said muff -- their attempts to write sex is because they are putting pressure on themselves for the scene to be sexy. And any time you feel pressure you start making all the mistakes associated with pressure: the unnecessary similes and metaphors, the needless obfuscation, the genital euphemisms, the fancy words that wind up feeling imposed by the author instead of experienced by the characters.
If you remove the pressure for the sex to be good, it frees you up to write about what really matters, which is the way sex reveals character. That's the central reason to write any scene, especially a sex scene: to lay your characters bare.
It's all about making your characters vulnerable and then seeing how they deal with it.
If Steve Almond comes at the difficult talk of writing about sex from the direction of the characters, Toni Morrison comes at it from two other directions: the reader and playing with voice.
Sex is difficult to write about because it's just not sexy enough. The only way to write about it is not to write much. Let the reader bring his own sexuality into the text. A writer I usually admire has written about sex in the most off-putting way. There is just too much information. If you start saying "the curve of ..." you soon sound like a gynecologist. Only Joyce could get away with that. H said all those forbidden words. He said cunt, and that was shocking. The forbidden words can be provocative. But after a while it becomes monotonous rather than arousing. Less is always better. Some writers think that if they use dirty words they've done it. It can work for a short period and for a very young imagination, but after a while it doesn't deliver. When Sethe and Paul D. first see each other, in about half a page they get the sex out of the way, which isn't any good anyway -- it's fast and they're embarrassed about it -- and then they're lying there trying to pretend they're not in that bed, that they haven't met, and then they begin to think different thoughts, which begin to merge so you can't tell who's thinking what. That merging to me is more tactically sensual than if I had tried to describe body parts.
Morrison reminds us that the intimate mingling of two characters doesn't have to happen just via description of bodies -- it can happen in many other ways as well. And sometimes, that's even sexier.
Next, violence. Morrison has been a fan of just letting the reader know right away what the plot of her story is. Don't hold back -- let the person buy another book if that plot doesn't interest them. This approach of just laying the plot out there -- even the ending -- also has an impact on how violence can be effectively handled by the book. Let me be clear: By "violence," I mean violence. Murder, kidnapping, torture, rape, and -- as in Morrison's Beloved -- infanticide. This level of violence can make marketing teams run scared, because it can make readers run scared. Morrison explains how carefully, therefore, she approached this death:
Interviewer: You also divulge the plot early on in Beloved.
Morrison: It seemed important to me that the action in Beloved -- the fact of infanticide -- be immediately known but deferred, unseen. I wanted to give the reader all the information and the consequences surrounding the act, while avoiding engorging myself or the reader with the violence itself. I remember writing the sentence where Seth cuts the throat of the child very, very late in the process of writing the book. I remember getting up from the table and walking outside for a long time -- walking around the yard and coming back and revising it a little bit and going back out and in and rewriting the sentence over and over again . . . Each time I fixed that sentence so that it was exactly right, or so I thought, but then I would be unable to sit there and would have to go away and come back. I thought that the act itself had to be not only buried but also understated, because if the language was going to compete with the violence itself it would be obscene and pornographic.
Morrison's solution: structure (the violence is deferred, buried) + crisp, simple prose (the violence is understated). If the language was going to compete with the violence itself it would be obscene and pornographic . . . The sharpest knife cuts so effortlessly we don't know our skin's opened.
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