The Warren Adler E-Sheet 59

In this issue:

• Greetings From Publishing Central
• Explicit Details in Literature: How Far Should an Author Go?

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Explicit Details in Literature: How Far Should an Author Go?

Among the numerous decisions concerning the storyteller's art, the most crucial one involves sex; how much explicitness is required to move the story, sustain interest and keep the reader's involvement in the story at maximum pitch.

How much description of sexual congress and all its emotional and physical manifestations is required to satisfy the what-happens-next aspect of the story? How much is integral to the core nature of the story's characters? How much must be described to drive the plot?  

I'm not talking about pornography, softcore or hardcore, which in various narrative platforms, has a singular entertainment purpose: sexual arousal. People who get their jollies from reading such material know exactly what I'm talking about, whether the material is embedded within the so-called erotic novel, gay or straight, or the somewhat more respectable romance category.

Sexual mystery and modesty have virtually disappeared.

I'm referring to, for lack of a better definition, mainstream novels and short stories, those books generally considered traditional and respectable, that fall within an inexact continuum spanning serious literary fiction to the great commercial middlebrow mass market fiction.

Anyone who has lived through the last fifty years needs no historical reminders about how words once considered wash-your-mouth-with-soap-nasty are now part of every day speech. The "f" word, once scrupulously avoided or disguised in books such as Mailer's The Naked and the Dead published six decades ago, is now considered by many as part and parcel of accepted speech. Nor does anyone need be reminded that the internet is powered by pornography, arguably the most watched form of electronic entertainment.

The days of "Banned in Boston" are over. Attempts at censorship of explicit sex are either met with legal barriers or derision and ridicule, despite large fines imposed by government agencies for infractions as exemplified by the FCC fine for the Janet Jackson episode where she bared one breast during a Super Bowl half-time show. I wonder if the fine would have doubled if she had bared two.  

In today's novels, euphemisms are no longer employed to describe sex, and the body parts are normally referred to in what were once verboten terms. In fact, it is no longer even considered racy to describe most sexual tastes in action.  Meanwhile, well-meaning activists determined to keep children away from such words and images have pushed distribution outlets to put up barriers based on age, most of which can easily be avoided by kids far more tech savvy than their parents.

Church-based groups valiantly try to invoke older standards of morality, and only partially succeed.  The mainstream culture moves at its own pace and in its own way. It is unstoppable. Sexual mystery and modesty have virtually disappeared. What was once considered aberrational is now normal, or almost. Whether all this knowledge and general acceptance improves people's lives is debatable and not my province.

I think I'm posing a perfectly reasonable question to fiction writers and their brothers and sisters in the visual arts. Where is the line between the story's needs and the titillation factor? Or is there a line?  

Looking backwards, the closer I get to the sixties, the so-called decade of the sexual revolution, the more explicit were my sexual depictions in my storylines. I can remember a typist who I had hired to type a final manuscript walk off the job when she encountered the word "hard-on" in my novel. Oddly, this slang description of erection is still avoided as somewhat off-color, despite the much heralded and advertised happy result attained by taking pills to induce this physical manifestation of the male genital mechanism.

This does not mean that there is little sexual explicitness in my contemporary work. Hell, my most enduring theme is the mysteries of attraction, the baffling obsession of love. The sexual component is integral to the characters in such relationships and should be described…up to a point. In other words, how much is enough.

In today’s media, sex is so overexposed that it tends to be repetitive and, heaven forbid, boring.

I raise the question because in today's media sex is so overexposed that it tends to be repetitive and, heaven forbid, boring. Sometimes watching thrashing naked bodies on screen becomes intrusive and distracting, a pause in the story while the business is portrayed. This distraction is also true in storytelling through words.

Certainly though, the human sex drive is as powerful or as compulsive as ever. It is central to our living experience as human beings, irrepressible and necessary as the principal tool of propagation. Indeed, we all know the mechanics of the process,  what it does to us, how it works and what special feelings, emotions, confusions and pleasures it  arouses. We know its happy side and its dark side. Through modern media, we have learned about most of the variables, obsessions and aberrations it induces. 

Perhaps my question is unanswerable and depends on the individual storyteller's internal choices. I can only wonder what readers think. The great Victorian novels, in that age of so-called repression, dripped with sexual innuendo and unexpected pregnancy induced the most prevalent form of female angst and dramatic turns. Interestingly, such story points required no graphic descriptions of the sexual act and no language that would have been unacceptable to standards at the time.

From the Bible through Greek and Roman plays, Shakespeare, the Elizabethans, the Victorians, and the great American writers of the last century, sex was always a dominating theme of such literature, albeit delivered without the explicitness so common today. One wonders if it was more powerful left to be imagined than graphically described? Even the famous Molly Bloom soliloquy in James Joyce's Ulysses, which raised many eyebrows years ago, can be considered tame by today's standards.

Not an earthshaking topic to be sure, but for those of us who write stories of the imagination and the happy few who revel in reading such works, it is worth thinking about.

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Warren Adler

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