SEX
561
and
The Blacks
-
are among the outstanding works of our time. In
both plays the morbid sexuality
is
transformed by a bizarre and per–
verse system of associations into a sense of wild being, free of moral
attitudinizing or social pretense. The novels, however, are narrower:
here the perversity exists in its natural habitat and one cannot help
see it and judge it in relation to some other system that is not so
perverse. I do not mean to take down the novels: on the contrary,
I think they are in their own way marvelously conceived and executed;
but they are a special genre, probably a limited one, a kind of
autobiography of the imagination, though of course Genet appears
to be describing real events in his life.
One of the difficulties in relating to the new sexual style is the
assumption that the traditional handling of sex in literature is natural
and pure and that what we have today is a distortion. The fact is
that there is no basic sex - in the way there might
be
a basic Eng–
lish - except biologically or clinically. Sex
in
literature has always
been ideological: it has always been conceived of in terms of values
and attitudes toward other kinds of experience. In this respect, the
depiction of sex has been an enactment of an idea of sex. Thus sex
has been bawdy, comic, adventurous, immoral, fulfilling, frustrating,
mysterious, tragic, open, liberating. In its literary evolution sexuality
has reflected various pagan, courtly, pastoral, middle-class and ro–
mantic conventions. On the whole, though, the traditional idea of
sex has been associated with individual fate, that
is,
with human
realization or destruction, through love and passion. And it is with
this sexual tradition that both pornography and the new sexuality
might be said to have broken, substituting for it a deflated, poly–
morphous idea of sex divorced from love and from the institutional–
ized relations in which sex had in the past been located.
It
is an
idea of sex that is experimental, unfettered, anarchic; and if, like
more traditional views of sex, it is also represented as the expression
of true being, it is based on a conception of
be~ng
entirely fluid and
unpredictable, and limited only by one's imagination.
The question, then, of how much perversity can be assimilated
into literature has to do with the idea of sex rather than with its
reality.
If
we can talk at all about the "reality" of sex, it would seem
that a sense of its willfullness and its inventiveness, partly as an escape
from its terrors, is more suggestive of the actual experience than a
