|
A very indecent revelation...
Etcetera delves into the literary world’s raunchiest cause célèbre
Posted 17th April 2008 | Author: Kayleigh Wiggins
From Issue 2 of Etcetera (Views: 814)
Keep it under wraps, but there’s an intimate link between Melvyn Bragg and Alan Titchmarsh. Salman Rushdie, Ben Elton and Sebastian Faulks share the same connection: Bad Sex.
In literary terms, that is. All have been the slightly-less-than-grateful nominees for the dubious honour of the Literary Review’s Bad Sex in Fiction trophy. Bragg, Faulks and Titchmarsh even won it.
The award’s literary critic founders Rhoda Koenig and Auberon Waugh resolved to ‘draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it.’ And so they set upon the task, a teenage boy’s dream, of shuffling through modern masterpieces, looking for the dirty bits.
The awards have caused something of a stir within the literary world. Described by 2006 winner Iain Hollingshead as ‘one of the ironic highlights of the literary year’, previous hosts of the notoriously wild annual award ceremony include Jerry Hall, Sting, Mick Jagger and Courtney Love. It’s the award everybody is intrigued by, but nobody wants to win.
And there’s a very good reason why. Granted, all publicity is good publicity: even Bad Sex sells. But actors read out the nominated passages in front of all gathered at the glitzy ceremony. Can you imagine experiencing a (verbal) dramatisation, in public, of your imaginative scene in which ‘Anne Hathaway’s cow-milking fingers, cradling my balls in her almond palm, now took pity on the poor anguished erection, and in the infinite agony of her desire, guided it to the quick of the wound’? Especially when it continues, ‘at the same time I searched wildly with the fingers of my left hand, groping blind as Cyclops, found the pulpy furred wetness, parted the old lips of time and slipped my middle finger into the sancta sanctorum’.
That was from Will, Christopher Rush’s novel on the life of Shakespeare. It’s actually one of the more conventional entries, which range from the hilarious to the simply bizarre. Take this excerpt from 2002 winner Wendy Perriam’s Tread Softly: ‘Weirdly, he was clad in pin-stripes at the same time as being naked. Pin-stripes were erotic, the uniform of fathers, two-dimensional fathers’. Apparently the judges ‘had never before heard of pin-striped genitalia’. It’s odd, but perhaps not quite as odd as the genitalia encountered in Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods:
Why am I embarrassed about taking off my clothes in front of a robot?…‘Spike, you’re a robot, but why are you such a drop-dead gorgeous robot? I mean, is it necessary to be the most sophisticated machine ever built and to look like a movie star?’
She answers simply: ‘They thought I would be good for the boys on the mission.’
…
‘So you had sex with spacemen for three years?’
‘Yes. I used up three silicon-lined vaginas.’
Winterson’s not the only one to sound like she’s, ahem, taking us for a ride. Ben Elton must have been joking when he wrote in 2005 nominee The First Casualty, ‘“Ooh-la-la!’ she breathed as he smelt the clean aroma of her short bobbed hair and the rain-sodden grass around it. ‘Ooh-la-jolly-well-la!’” The naughty bits can be the funny bits in modern novels, apparently. They don’t have to fall into the eulogising trap that caught Sebastian Faulks in 1998 Bad Sex winner Charlotte Gray (‘This is so wonderful I feel I might disintegrate, I might break into a million fragments’). 2001 winner Christopher Hart proved this with Rescue Me:
Her hand is moving away from my knee and heading north. Heading unnervingly and with a steely will towards the pole…And, like Sir Ranulph Fiennes, Pamela will not easily be discouraged. I try twitching, and then shaking my leg, but to no avail…And when she reaches the north pole, I think in wonder and terror – she will surely want to pitch her tent.
The Bad Sex prize goes to the blushing author of the most ‘redundant or embarrassing description of the sexual act’ in a novel otherwise deemed to be of excellent literary merit. But why? Where lies the intrigue and fascination in scouting out these literary crimes and hauling the offenders before an arbitrary and humiliating justice?
It’s quintessentially British, of course, to celebrate failure. But this kind of failure? It smacks of schoolkids smirking over a dirty joke, especially when the naughty nominees are read out on the night: perhaps this is just a lot of grown adults indulging their inner child.
Or perhaps it’s a real attempt to expose bad writing and so prevent it from happening again (this Waugh proclaimed more than once.) It’s certainly exposed the dilemmas of writing those intimate moments, by pointing out the most dangerous pitfalls: writers have told how a fear of Bad Sex looms large when the need to write a raunchy scene arises.
So yes, maybe the award does have a genuine literary purpose. Maybe it’s even doing some good in the world of literature. But truthfully, is this its real appeal? I think not. We’re fascinated by sex and intrigued to read what other people are feeling and, well, doing. But we’re just not grown-up enough read and write about it properly, as the awards seem to prove.
And this is OK. Better still, it’s a cause for celebration. ‘Most sex is bad sex’, proclaimed Waugh, ‘It’s the great discovery of our time’. So come on Titchmarsh, don’t be embarrassed: you and your ‘human boa constrictor’ are forgiven.
user comments
|
etcetera.online