When Less Is More: On Writing Sex and Violence

In sex, on the page as elsewhere, tastes vary widely. But one thing is certain—sex scenes are tricky to write and often excruciating to read, especially when they’re meant to be serious. The characters in my novel The Betrayed fall in love with each other, desire each other, and therefore have all kinds of sex—first-time-with-a-new-lover sex, married sex, save-the-marriage sex, sex with someone who is thinking of someone else, etc. I needed to think about how to portray these, with the Guardian Bad Sex Awards (for “poorly written, redundant, or downright cringeworthy passages of sexual description in modern fiction”) in my mind as warnings.

How write about sex, then? How keep it exciting, how keep it sensual? One can go the explicit route, and other writers may do this well, but in my case it seemed fraught with cringeworthy potential. It also felt untrue to my characters—their erotic encounters involved far more than sexual acts.

I found inspiration in Italo Calvino’s essay “Lightness” in Six Memos for the Next Millennium. He describes the problems he faced as a young writer, when he aimed to write about the “ruthless energies” of the world. He wanted a light touch in his writing, yet dealing with heavy topics made his writing heavy as well: “The weight, the inertia, the opacity of the world [are] qualities that stick to writing from the start, unless one finds some way of evading them.” How to maintain lightness—how subtract weight—while writing about such topics?

Calvino offers a technique that can be applied to sex scenes (though he wasn’t talking about sex): approach the scene by turning away, as Perseus did when he killed Medusa. Perseus knew that if he looked directly at Medusa, he would turn to stone. To slay her, he had to turn away from her and take aim by looking at her reflection on his bronze shield. A similar strategy works well in sex scenes. We can look sideways, to what happens immediately before and after the sexual act, to what is going on in the characters’ minds or in the world beyond their bed when they make love, to the other dramas in their lives—everything but a direct look. We can leave spaces. The reader will fill in the gaps.

Marguerite Duras is an expert at looking away, stepping back, in order to come in for the kill. In my memory, her novels The Lover and The North China Lover (which cover the same love affair) were among the most erotic I had read, but when I returned to them years later, I was surprised to find how few sex scenes they contained—and these were suggestive rather than explicit.

What’s really erotic about these books is how they depict desire. And Duras takes her time: the first sex scene in The Lover appears about a third into the novel. The scene lingers over the girl’s discovery of the man’s skin, its softness, the thinness that must have made him, she thinks, vulnerable to bullies in school. Like Perseus, the girl can’t look at him. She closes her eyes. The sex act is summed up in one sentence, near the end of the scene: “And, weeping, he makes love.”

How to remove weight from the sex scene? We can follow Duras and pay attention to desire, rather than sex. It’s usually desire that makes sex interesting, anyway, in life and on the page, and desire is about not having, not knowing, not telling everything. I tried this approach in a chapter where two characters make love for the first time. I spent time on the escalating tension—between and around them—during the day, the fraught political situation that heightened their willingness to take risks and to seek even fleeting refuge in each other, the moments of disarray before and after sex. The act of penetration was brief, on the page at least.

Sex doesn’t have to carry the weight of a sex scene. Nor do lovers have to talk or interact extensively or profoundly. They can be as awkward or evasive as lovers outside novels. We can draw the reader’s attention to the other longings in their lives—for example, by bringing random thoughts into the scene. We are often elsewhere when we’re with our lovers, thinking about other concerns and other people—our families, our friends, our fatigue or the temperature, work, money, our bodies, the things we need to do.

Thoughts unrelated to sex are part of every sexual encounter, and we can write them into the sex scene. We can also, as Duras does, break up a scene of sex or desire with passages that focus elsewhere: a description of an object, a memory, a flashback that raises the stakes of the sexual encounter, for the characters and for readers.

Many dramas are embedded in the erotic. People’s longings are never just sexual; thoughts and fears about other aspects of their lives are woven into their sexual and emotional encounters. In my book, the political conflict in the Philippines, an assassination by the dictator and its consequences on the murdered dissident’s daughters drive the plot and shape the daughters’ desires.

The love story and their sexual choices cannot be separated from the political context. In Duras’s two novels, the emotional and physical violence in the girl’s family life creates a melancholy in her that she carries into her lovemaking. The scenes with her lover would lose much of their power and poignancy if we didn’t understand how unusual it is for her to be open in this way, how radical it is for her to want and love. Money, sex, the girl’s love and longing for her mother—all are intertwined in the sex scenes. Through small asides or longer passages inserted into these scenes, Duras brings the larger context, the other dramas of the girl’s life, into her desire.

Desire, of course, is a great narrative engine, and sex scenes can be turning points in a plot. I used them to reveal shifts in my characters’ marriage: the passionate lovemaking in the beginning, the woman’s realization—during sex and because of it—that her husband wants someone else, her attempts to win him back through sex, her own desires and simulation of desire, the refusal to fake pleasure, their sexual explorations with other people. Treating sex scenes as turning points is another way of opening them up and allowing them and the reader to breathe.

How else can we write about sex by looking elsewhere? One technique is to bring the outside world into the bedroom. We can make the lovers—and therefore the reader—aware of what’s happening outside the room: a car on the street, rain, voices outside the window, the changes in light filtered through a curtain. The larger world—the context of their love affair—remains present in this way; the bedroom doesn’t become claustrophobic. How the lovers perceive these sounds or light before and after making love—or while doing so—can say a great deal about their sexual encounter.

Another way of using Perseus’s shield in sex scenes is to turn away from the body’s customarily sexualized parts and focus on other aspects—its weight, smells, textures—during sex. A character may feel that her partner is too heavy or too hot against her or, on the contrary, may relish that heat and pressure; she may stroke a mole on her lover’s arm or feel its contours. We can also sexualize another part of the body during an erotic scene. In Duras’s novel, the man’s hand is charged with sexual tension throughout the narrative.

Soon after the girl meets him, while they are riding in the back seat of his limousine, she takes his hand and responds to it as though she were making love, as though it had a life of its own. She is stirred by its novelty, its strangeness, its sensual promise. Embedded in that hand, too, is the memory of her mother’s hand and her longing for a mother who cannot love her. The man’s hand in the limousine isn’t just erotic (few things are ever just erotic).

The girl’s passion for her lover is so powerful that, like Perseus, she cannot look at him directly. Instead, she eroticizes other things or people—her lover’s hand, the body of her schoolmate, Hélène. We know almost nothing about the man’s body, but the girl vividly imagines Hélène’s breasts, desires her, and describes in detail what she looks like and what she would do to her. Hélène’s body is another example of Perseus’s shield, a looking away from her lover that allows the girl—and the author—to express the force of her desire for him.

These techniques for sex scenes can be applied to scenes of extreme violence as well. They allowed me to write such scenes in my novel without graphic details. I wrote the scene of a beheading, for example, by describing not the beheading itself, but the characters’ reactions to it, their turning away, the details they focused on so as not to see what was happening in front of them. I think that horror (like desire) can be portrayed more effectively in this way than by focusing on graphic descriptions that risk turning the writing—and the reading—into stone.

Shading sex with tenderness—and, yes, love—is another way of subtracting weight from the sex scene. Delicacy, Calvino says, is essential for a monster-slayer like Perseus, who after slaying Medusa, makes a bed of leaves and water plants for her head on the ground: “I think that the lightness, of which Perseus is the hero, could not be better represented than by this gesture of refreshing courtesy toward a being so monstrous and terrifying yet at the same time somewhat fragile and perishable,” Calvino writes.

Even the rawest sex scenes can contain moments of grace and lightness—in the language, the sensibility, the writer’s ability to depict sentiment as well as sensation, fragility as well as power. Even the most ruthless energies can be humanized, rendered vulnerable, much like Medusa’s snake-haired head, set tenderly by Perseus on its soft nest.

_____________________________________

The Betrayed by Reine Arcache Melvin is available from Europa Editions.