What the Loud Don't Know

In 1928, in The Well of Loneliness, Radclyffe Hall named the consummation of a love affair between two women in six words. And that night they were not divided. The sentence sits at the end of a chapter, stripped of paragraph, mid-page; the line before it is an embrace and a kiss, the lines after it are an ardent fulfilment that the prose calls primitive and age-old as Nature herself, and in between is the sentence — and that night they were not divided — and a chapter break.

The novel was banned for obscenity that same year. The British prosecutor and the New York court did not pretend they had been hunting graphic content. There was no graphic content. They were responding to the sentence.

This is the first thing the corpus knows that the reputation of erotic writing does not.

If you read seriously across the literary erotic canon — across the centuries Vela's library is built from — what you encounter, much more often than you expect, is restraint. The sex scene that reaches for genitals or mechanics is the exception, not the rule. The novel that gets prosecuted for obscenity is, in many cases, the novel whose most charged passages name almost nothing. The body in the prose is named; touched, sometimes; placed in a room, in a season, in a posture; but the act itself is held just beyond the page, and the prose does its work on the approach and on the aftermath instead.

This is not a moral observation about restraint being purer. It is a structural one. It is what the writing actually does, when you read it.

D.H. Lawrence is the case the reputation gets most wrong.

Lady Chatterley's Lover sits in the cultural imagination as the explicit novel — the one prosecuted in 1960 over its language, the one whose Penguin paperback edition opened British publishing to graphic content. The trial and the verdict are real. The novel's reputation as the apex of explicit literary content is partially earned.

But it is not what most of the book is doing.

Most of the book is conversation. Most of the book is silence around the cottage in the wood, dewy mornings, the dog Flossie roaming the brake, dialogue between the husband and the gamekeeper and the wife of the husband, the long, slow accumulation of the social tissue around the affair. Even the scenes that are explicit are flanked, before and after, by passages whose erotic charge does not depend on description at all. The morning after, Connie lying in bed: She heard him downstairs opening the door. And still she lay musing, musing. Then the bare little room, the chest of drawers, the books on the shelf — books about bolshevist Russia, books of travel, a volume about the atom and the electron, another about the composition of the earth's core, and the causes of earthquakes: then a few novels: then three books on India. So! He was a reader after all. The sun on her naked limbs. The dog outside. A morning so domestic it could be any morning.

This is a sex scene. It is the morning after the body has changed and the mind is catching up to the change. Lawrence is not describing intercourse here. He is describing the way the room looks to a woman who, last night, became someone slightly different from who she was when she came in.

The most quoted line from the novel is not about mechanics. It is something Mellors says, after, in a different scene:

"We came off together that time," he said.

She did not answer.

"It's good when it's like that. Most folks lives their lives through and they never know it," he said, speaking rather dreamily.

The line is famous because it carries the novel's argument in nine ordinary words. It is also doing what the rest of the novel mostly does: leaving the body where it was, and reporting on what the body now knows. Most folks lives their lives through and they never know it. The sentence is about consciousness, not about the act. The act has already happened. The sentence is what the act left behind.

What this looks like in Hall — Radclyffe Hall, the English novelist whose 1928 The Well of Loneliness became the most-tried lesbian novel of the modern era, and whose long quiet career produced one book the cultural memory has not been able to drop — is different and more extreme. The Well of Loneliness is a novel about a body that the law and the medical literature of 1928 had already named invert, and that the church had named worse. The novel knows this. It also knows that any explicit description of a body of that kind would, in 1928, have been impossible — would have foreclosed the book's circulation absolutely, would have ended it before it began. So Hall does something else. She names the inside of the experience, page after page, and lets the body do its work in implication.

Then from out of that still and unearthly night, there crept upon Stephen an unearthly longing. A longing that was not any more of the body but rather of the weary and homesick spirit that endured the chains of that body. The longing is named. The body is named. What happens between the two is not.

When Hall finally permits the moment — the night Stephen and Mary become lovers — what she gives the reader is the dialogue before, and the consequence after, and between them the sentence I quoted at the opening. Stephen bent down and kissed Mary's hands very humbly, for now she could find no words any more . . . and that night they were not divided. The chapter ends. The next chapter opens with Mary in love and Stephen exhausted, and the prose calls what has happened a strange, though to them a very natural thing. There is no scene.

There did not need to be a scene. The line and that night they were not divided is biblical in its register — the phrase echoes the King James, where it describes warriors who fell together — and the prose has been preparing the reader to receive it for two hundred pages. The six words land because everything else has been doing the work the sentence does not have to do. The sentence is the moment the work stops.

This is, in 1928, what it looked like to write a love scene between two women that could survive its own publication. It is also, by any honest reading, more powerful than most of the explicit prose written about same-sex love in the half-century after.

Baldwin does the third version.

In Another Country (1962), the body is rarely on the page during the act, but the body before and after is everywhere. The novel is a study in what bodies do to themselves and to each other in the hours and days around the things that happen between them. People walk home alone. People sit at a phone, freezing and faint. People buy a drink they do not drink. People watch one another at a distance and know exactly what the watching means.

"All ready." He picked up her bag and gave it to her. They kissed briefly again, and walked down the stairs into the streets. He put his arm around her waist. They walked in silence, and the street they walked was empty. But there were people in the bars, gesticulating and seeming to howl in the yellow light, behind the smoky glass; and people in the side streets, loitering and skulking; dogs on leashes, sniffing with their masters. They passed the movie theater, and were on the Avenue, facing the hospital. And in the shadow of the great, darkened marquee, they smiled into each other's faces.

This is the end of an afternoon's affair. The two of them on the street. The cab is hailed; she gets in; he stands in the dark Avenue and watches her go. The novel does not describe what happened in the apartment they have just left. It does not have to. The walk down the stairs and the silence in the empty street and the smile under the dark marquee are the description. The act is in the after.

Baldwin is doing what Flaubert did with the cab in Madame Bovary — what What Literature Knows opened on, in this column's first essay — but he is doing it for a kind of love and a kind of body that Flaubert could not have named. The technique is the same. The world goes on around what happened. The world's continuing is the content of what happened. They smiled into each other's faces. That is the whole novel, in one sentence.

Edmund White, twenty-six years later, in The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988), does something that looks at first like the opposite move and is, on reading, the same one.

I hurried down the cold street, my mouth sour from Tex's cigarettes, my cock and ass glowing, my heart sinking, sunk. I swore to myself I'd never, never sleep with another man.

The body is named — cock and ass glowing is not Hall and not Baldwin — but the act is not described, and the sentence's center of gravity is not in the body. It is in the heart. My heart sinking, sunk. The clause is the whole reason the paragraph exists. Everything before it is the precondition for the reader to feel the second clause. The body is reported on so that the heart can be reported on. The body is the way into the disclosure that the heart is the subject.

The reader who arrives at White looking for the explicit register of post-Stonewall gay writing finds, instead, this: a young man on a cold street, the day after, glowing and sinking, swearing he will not do it again. The writing is sometimes called shameful. It is not shameful. It is what shame's voice actually sounds like, which is quieter than the writing about shame usually allows.

It is worth saying what the loud writers, by contrast, have been doing.

The corpus the analyzer has been working through is full, also, of writing that does describe the body and does describe the act, in graphic mechanical detail — vintage erotica from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Laura Middleton line, anonymous Victorian-era pornography, Frank Harris's My Life and Loves. These works are real. They have a register. They are also, almost without exception, the works that the literary tradition has not retained as essential. They are not held up alongside Lawrence and Hall and Baldwin and White as the writing one must read to understand what English-language fiction has done with desire. They are read, when they are read, as historical curiosities — as evidence about a period, a market, a publishing economy — but they are not read as the canon.

This is not a moral judgment. It is a description of what the canon has, in fact, retained.

What the loud writers are doing, mostly, is reporting on access. The body is described because the body is being described. The interest in the writing is the interest in the description. The structure is one of accumulation: more positions, more partners, more mechanical detail, more orgasms catalogued in roughly the same prose. The prose is not investigating consciousness. It is documenting that consciousness was, briefly, at a particular kind of party. The writer's pen functions like a camera, pointed at the body, recording. The reader is given the bodies. The reader is not given anyone's interior.

This is what Audre Lorde was naming when she made, in 1978, the distinction between the erotic and the pornographic. Lorde — the Black lesbian poet, essayist, and theorist who taught at Hunter College from the 1980s until her death from cancer in 1992, and whose essay collection Sister Outsider (1984) is the load-bearing twentieth-century text on the politics of difference inside feminism — published "Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power" first as a 1978 conference paper at the Fourth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women. She put it this way:

The erotic has often been misnamed by men and used against women. It has been made into the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized sensation. For this reason, we have often turned away from the exploration and consideration of the erotic as a source of power and information, confusing it with its opposite, the pornographic. But pornography is a direct denial of the power of the erotic, for it represents the suppression of true feeling. Pornography emphasizes sensation without feeling.

Sensation without feeling is the formula. It is also, as a critical principle, exactly the line the loud writers cross and the quiet writers do not. Lawrence's morning room, Hall's six-word sentence, Baldwin's empty street, White's cold walk: each gives the reader sensation suffused with feeling, sensation that does not separate from interiority because the writing has not separated them. Harris and the Laura Middleton line and the bulk of vintage commercial erotica do the opposite work, on principle. They isolate sensation from feeling because that is the genre's contract with its reader. The reader is buying access, not understanding.

The literary canon has retained the writers who refused that contract.

There is a cost, of course, to writing this way. The cost is that you cannot do, on the page, certain things the loud writers can do — the long sustained mechanical description, the build-and-release of an extended physical scene, the kind of erotic prose whose pleasure for the reader is in the prolonging of the depicted act. The literary canon has paid this cost willingly, mostly. The trade is that you get something else: you get the body's continuing life around the act, before and after, in the conversation that follows and the morning that arrives and the empty street and the cold walk and the line that does not have to describe what it does not have to describe.

You also get, sometimes, the act and the interior, simultaneously — Lawrence at his most Lawrence-like, when the explicit scene is not held offstage but is brought on and is, all the way through, also a description of consciousness:

Connie went slowly home, realising the depth of the other thing in her. Another self was alive in her, burning molten and soft in her womb and bowels, and with this self she adored him. She adored him till her knees were weak as she walked. In her womb and bowels she was flowing and alive now and vulnerable, and helpless in adoration of him as the most naive woman.

The body is named. The body is described. The body is also a consciousness, and the description is of the consciousness through the body, and the prose holds both at once. This is what the literary erotic canon, at its best, has tried to do. The quiet passages and the loud passages are not opposites. They are gradations of the same effort, which is to write so that what is happening on the body and what is happening in the mind are not separable in the writing because they are not separable in the experience.

The pattern, once you have seen it, is durable across centuries.

Where the literary tradition has produced erotic writing that survives, the writing has worked at low explicitness almost without exception. Boccaccio in 1353. Hall in 1928. Lawrence the same year. Baldwin in 1962. Edmund White in 1988. Maggie Nelson, Garth Greenwell, Mary Gaitskill, Toni Morrison, Carmen Maria Machado, in the years since: each has built a body of work in which the body is named without being mapped, in which the act is approached and is honored by the not-describing as much as by the describing, in which the prose moves through the moment with a kind of attention that does not stop at the surface. This is not a coincidence. It is what serious literature, given the choice, tends to do.

The corpus is showing it directly. Across thousands of passages from these works, the dominant register is low-explicitness, emotional or atmospheric in body-focus, restrained in mechanical description. The loud register exists in the corpus too — in My Life and Loves, in the anonymous Victorian-era books, in scattered scenes from a few of the canonical works — but it is the minority report. The majority of the writing about desire that the literary tradition has held onto is quiet, in this specific structural sense.

Why?

The argument the writing itself makes — implicitly, by what it does — is that the body has more to say than the body's mechanics. That what a person is doing inside a moment of physical experience is mostly happening in their interior, even when what is happening is also entirely physical. That the writing's job, when it engages this material, is to track the interior through the body, not to substitute the body for the interior. The loud writers, in this view, have not been writing about wanting. They have been writing about access. The two are not the same project, and the two do not produce the same kind of writing.

It is also, of course, a writing-craft observation. Restraint is harder than indulgence. The discipline of writing what is not on the page is more demanding than the discipline of writing what is. The literary canon has, at the level of craft alone, selected for the more difficult thing.

There is a further point, which the corpus makes hard to avoid.

The works that survived the obscenity trials of the twentieth century — Hall's, Lawrence's, Ulysses, Tropic of Capricorn, the rest — were, with very few exceptions, the works where the explicit material was carrying interior content that the prosecution could not prosecute and the jury could not, finally, declare meaningless. The works that did not survive, that fell out of print and out of conversation and out of memory, were the works that had nothing else to do with the explicit content they had put on the page. The pattern was already legible in 1960. It is now overwhelming.

The literary canon has been doing, for at least a century, an editorial filtering whose principle is roughly the one Lorde named in 1978. Sensation without feeling does not last. Sensation with feeling does. The canon has been keeping the latter and dropping the former, regardless of how explicit either was at the time of writing.

This is not the same as saying the canon is right about everything. Hall got kept; many lesbian writers of the same period and the next did not. Baldwin got kept; the African American gay literary tradition of the 1950s and 1960s is recovered slowly and incompletely. The canon's keeping is uneven and historically interested in ways that are not always literary. But the principle, where it is operating, has been operating in the direction the corpus shows. The quiet has won. Mostly. Where merit is what is being judged.

When you finish reading a writer like Hall or Baldwin or White, the experience the prose has given you is not, strictly, an erotic one. The writing is about erotic experience. The writing has rendered it with care. But the experience the writing has produced in the reader is closer to recognition than to arousal — closer to I have been there than to I want to be there. This is also, by the canon's own standard, a feature, not a defect. The writing has done what serious writing about the body always does, which is to bring the reader back to their own body, in their own life, with the prose left behind.

The body the reader has come back to is, in most cases, quieter than the body the loud writers describe. It is the body in the morning, in the empty street, in the conversation after, on the train going home. The body that has been somewhere and is now back, and is changed, and is doing ordinary things again. This is the body the canon has, almost without exception, been writing toward.

The loud writers wanted to put the body on the page. The quiet writers wanted to describe what the body knows.

The two projects look similar from a distance and are different in nearly every line of the prose. The corpus shows that the canon, century after century, has been quietly clear about which of the two projects literature is for.

→ Read No. 1: What Flaubert Hid in the Cab

→ Read: D.H. Lawrence and the Class the Body Crosses

→ Read: The Erotic as Lorde Named It — the column's first essay on the women writers who took back the word.

→ Read the emotion guides — slower companions in adjacent territory: On Desire, On Tenderness, On Shame.

→ Browse: the library.