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X-raying Zora Neale Hurston

Words on Fire

The 2014 release of a hot trailer for the movie version of Fifty Shades of Grey stirred up renewed attention to the book trilogy that spawned it, the work of a lucky British woman named E. L. James. I like the arc of her personal story: from self-publishing the first book to sales of more than ninety million copies worldwide, with translations into more than fifty languages. So perhaps I should make this a short chapter with a single piece of advice to writers: sex sells.

But just as there is good food writing and bad food writing, good sportswriting and bad sportswriting, there is also good sex writing and bad sex writing. To illustrate this, I have chosen a scene—almost at random—from one of James’s books to X-ray. As you will see, it turns out to be much less graphic than the bondage scenes for which her work has become notorious, but the style of writing remains consistent:

Christian nods as he turns and leads me through the double doors into the grandiose foyer. I revel in the feel of his large hand and his long, skilled fingers curled around mine. I feel the familiar pull—I am drawn, Icarus to his sun. I have been burned already, and yet here I am again.

Reaching the elevators, he presses the call button. I peek up at him, and he’s wearing his enigmatic half smile. As the doors open, he releases my hand and ushers me in. The doors close and I risk a second peek. He glances down at me, gray eyes alive, and it’s there in the air between us, that electricity. It’s palpable. I can almost taste it, pulsing between us, drawing us together.

“Oh my,” I gasp as I bask briefly in the intensity of this visceral, primal attraction.

“I feel it, too,” he says, his eyes clouded and intense.

Desire pools dark and deadly in my groin. He clasps my hand and grazes my knuckles with his thumb, and all my muscles clench tightly, deliciously, deep inside me.

Holy cow. How can he still do this to me?

“Please don’t bite your lip, Anastasia,” he whispers.

I gaze up at him, releasing my lip. I want him. Here, now, in the elevator. How could I not?

“You know what it does to me,” he murmurs.

Oh, I still affect him. My inner goddess stirs from her five-day sulk.

Oy. What I usually call X-ray reading must briefly devolve into sex -ray reading.

There is nothing original or interesting or even mildly erotic about this passage. We’ve seen or heard it all before: Icarus flying too close to the sun. (When I saw that, I blurted out, “Oh, not Icarus again. See what you’ve done, Stephen Dedalus? Can’t we find another, less abused mythological figure?”) The encounter in the elevator is a staple in everything from porn movies to TV commercials. What follows are those suspiciously large hands and long fingers. There are those coy glances, and electricity in the air between them. Can you imagine that? Electricity in the air between them—in an elevator? (Does that mean a short circuit in the fuse box?) There must be pulsing—don’t forget the pulsing. Add some gasping and basking, and let’s not forget a bit of the visceral and primal. There is clasping and clenching and grazing. No mommy porn can be complete without the appearance of the word deep. The closest thing to original language is “Desire pools dark and deadly in my groin.” But all that alliteration cannot muffle the screams in my head that protest against the collision of pools and groin. Is this passion, I wonder, or a urinary tract infection?

EROTIC VERSUS PORNOGRAPHIC

To neutralize the poison of this passage, I offer a counterexample, also written by a woman, Florida’s own Zora Neale Hurston. Their Eyes Were Watching God was published in 1937 to mixed and controversial reviews but is now counted among the important novels of the twentieth century. A blurb by Alice Walker on the seventy-fifth-anniversary edition reads: “There is no book more important to me than this one.”

A photo of a pear tree appears on the cover, and beneath the title, an image of a bee. That artwork pays homage to the book’s most famous passage. The main character, Janie Crawford, thinks back to when she was sixteen years old. Her memories of a young lover, Johnny Taylor, turn into an erotic reverie.

It was a spring afternoon in West Florida. Janie had spent most of the day under a blossoming pear tree in the back-yard. She had been spending every minute that she could steal from her chores under that tree for the last three days. That was to say, ever since the first tiny bloom had opened. It had called her to come and gaze on a mystery. From barren brown stems to glistening leaf-buds; from the leaf-buds to snowy virginity of bloom. It stirred her tremendously.…

She was stretched on her back beneath the pear tree soaking in the alto chant of the visiting bees, the gold of the sun and the panting breath of the breeze when the inaudible voice of it all came to her. She saw a dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight. So this was a marriage! She had been summoned to behold a revelation. Then Janie felt a pain remorseless sweet that left her limp and languid.…

Through pollinated air she saw a glorious being coming up the road. In her former blindness she had known him as shiftless Johnny Taylor, tall and lean. That was before the golden dust of pollen had beglamored his rags and her eyes.

Are your X-ray glasses steaming up? You don’t need them to realize that this passage is a highly stylized description of a sexualized sensibility. Let’s hear it for sex. I’m all for sex—in life and literature. I’ve studied the ways human sexuality is portrayed in popular culture and in art. You would think that decades of such contemplation would lead to wisdom, but I admit to being as confused as ever about the power that sex holds over us. Only religion can compete. Sex, beyond its biological imperatives, is a cultural force that fascinates us, dominates our thinking, and drives us to act in ways that help us, hurt us, and complicate our lives.

Descriptions and depictions of sex in media, advertising, literature, and drama, I would argue, are easy enough to create but difficult to do well.

Let’s consider the difference between creative work that is erotic versus work that is pornographic. My inclination is to identify pornography by what it says and erotica by what it does not say. Porn is, in practice if not by definition, prone to exaggeration and overstatement; eros works by suggestion, imagery, and understatement. Both porn and eros have the same desired effect: to excite the body, to prepare it for sex. Porn does this primarily through the eyes; eros through the imagination.

What interests me most about Hurston’s passage—beyond its erotic allure—is the way in which the most standard metaphors of language are transformed from common and euphemistic into astonishing and exciting.

To use the most old-fashioned language, a woman who loses her virginity is said to be “deflowered.” When young teens begin to learn about sexuality, it’s all about “the birds and the bees.” The parts of a flower, we might have learned in high school biology, have their male and female equivalents. We can find traces of all these comparisons in Hurston’s passage, yet the power and originality of the language unveils the sex act in ways we haven’t seen before.

Sometimes a pear tree, Dr. Freud, is more than a pear tree.

There is a name for Hurston’s technique, and as an anthropologist and author, she would have known it: anthropomorphism. Here’s the definition from The American Heritage Dictionary: “attribution of human motivation, characteristics, or behavior to inanimate objects, animals, or natural phenomena.” This process is easy enough to recognize when the subject is a mammal or primate but becomes harder as we move down the chain of being. When it’s a flower, Hurston gives its bloom a “snowy virginity.” The breeze has a “breath” and even “pants” like an energetic lover. There is a “love embrace” and even a “marriage” between the parts of the tree.

Then there is a cluster of words and images that in a different context or via expressions of connotation reminds us of sexuality. A tree blossoms and blooms; so, in a sense, does a young woman. Janie is “stretched on her back beneath the pear tree” as if it were her lover. A bee will “sink into the sanctum of a bloom,” bearing pollen and carrying countless associations with sexual union, fertility, and procreation. The “thousand sister-calyxes” are the sepals of a group of flowers, but “calyx” also describes the cuplike structure of the human anatomy, such as a pelvis. It arches, as a lover would arch her back, and the result is a kind of orgasm: “the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight.” (In porn, that’s called the money shot.) At the end of that passage, Janie is a spent lover, feeling “limp and languid,” alliterative words beginning with liquid consonants that offer their own kind of lubrication.

What a great change of perspective to look down a road through the glorious haze of “pollinated air” and see the human object of Janie’s desire. He is transformed now through the lens of her sex-ray vision: “the golden dust of pollen had beglamored his rags and her eyes.” There is magic at work here. The pollen is a form of fairy dust. To be “beglamored” means to be transformed as if in a spell or trance.

LANGUAGE OF LOVE

To understand how good this is—how artful and controlled—all that is needed is to contrast it to Fifty Shades of Grey.

The key to writing good sex (good anything) is original language. Consider how Vladimir Nabokov describes Humbert Humbert’s first sighting of Dolores Haze, who would become his beloved Lolita. That vision would remind him of a lost love from long ago:

With awe and delight… I saw again her lovely indrawn abdomen where my southbound mouth had briefly paused; and those puerile hips on which I had kissed the crenulated imprint left by the band of her shorts.… The twenty-five years I had lived since then tapered to a palpitating point, and vanished.

At one point early in the novel Humbert laments, “Oh, my Lolita, I only have words to play with!” Rather than a lament, Nabokov could adopt it as a boast, for I know no other novelist who is as relentlessly playful with the English language. Enjoy some of the phrases above, especially the dyads “indrawn abdomen” and “southbound mouth”; “crenulated imprint” and “palpitating point.” Appreciate the balance, alliteration, assonance, repetition, variation—the wild and witty texture of the prose.

Now hold it up against “Holy cow. How can he still do this to me?”

WRITING LESSONS

1. Indirection often has more power than direction. In an age of hard-core pornography, it may be difficult to remember that there was a time, not long ago, when a peek at a garter belt had sexual power (as acted out in the television series Mad Men, set in the 1960s). In an earlier century, it might have been the sight of a bare ankle. In an interview, the great Lauren Bacall suggested to me that the movies she made in her youth were sexier than more explicit contemporary films because of what they suggested and left out.

2. Almost anything can be described symbolically, including violence, illness, and sexuality. There is more than a partridge in Hurston’s pear tree. Human capacities and sensibilities can be used to describe animals, plants, even nonliving things. We name hurricanes, after all, and storms are said “to rage.”

3. As George Orwell reminds us, avoid language you are used to seeing in print. Try to take standard or tired language to a next level. Hurston’s brilliance derives from her ability to transform language and images that could be used as euphemisms for sexuality (bees and flowers) into something so vivid and original that it can almost be felt.

4. America manages to be a country that is both puritanical and pornographic in many of its cultural manifestations. In such a society, it’s especially important to write boldly about sex acts and the consequences of sexual activity. It’s also a good idea to find a test audience before publication to avoid the pitfalls of silliness or crude insensitivity. Try not to forget (gentlemen!) that sex can be experienced in the context of love. And, yes, it’s true: sex sells. Get cooking.