64
DIANA TRILLING
normal sexual life could not be more ambiguous than it is today
in our society. Much of this ambiguity stems from its having been
permitted to become a subject of open-but never fully open-dis–
cussion in recent years, and is contributed to by the fact that
it
is from
that most respectable quarter of contemporary culture, science, that
it made its way into literature, at which point science fled the dis–
cussion. In speaking of science, I refer of course to Freud's investiga–
tions of the polymorphous perversity of normal human infancy, and
the consequent recognition by psychiatry of the large reservoir of
perverse sexual impulse in the normal adult. From a moral-social
view, the best, or most, that psychiatry has done with its knowledge
of our natural endowment of perversity is to assign its control to
that force in man which desires his survival in civilization, while giv–
ing
permission to such perverse remnant in us as can be presumed to
offer no threat to our picture of ourselves as civilized people. The
common formulation of psychiatry, that is, is that anything is sexually
permissible to a man and woman who love each other and who each
wants what is being done. Because the premise of present-day psy–
chiatry, as it deals with sex, is heterosexual love as both the source
and support of the social institution of marriage, it is heterosexual
love that sanctions natural impulse, it is marriage that licenses an
unspecified degree of mutually agreed-upon perverse indulgence.
It was at this stage of our scientific progress in the understanding
of our sexual natures that literature took over from psychiatry, with–
out a credit line even at the start and, later, with a considerable
acerbity. Certainly marriage has not disappeared from modern fiction,
not even from our most consciously radical fiction. On the contrary,
it is a constant presence, though staggering under the excessive burden
which literature imposes on it in the search through the incoherence
of society for man's possibilities of self-fulfillment. But marriage is
far from being either the only arena or the only goal of sexual activity,
as it is described in modern literature. Nor is it to love that literature
assigns the task of validating sexuality or determining what is or is
not a proper form of sexual conduct. Where, in the first years after
the war, it was the concern of the enlightened wing of our culture
to enlist sex in the wholesome on-going social effort, the chief value
that attaches to sex in our advanced literary view today lies in its
opposition to society, in the individual freedom it celebrates and of
