Some Ideas About The Use of Sex in Fiction

Probably one of the first things writers learn, or get told, is sex sells. But if one incorporates it in a story simply for that reason, problems often arise.

How can one depict it, or impart it with significance, in a manner that is not derivative?  All too often, the answer seems to be: make it even more transgressive than has previously been the case.  Contemporary fiction is riddled with that sort of thing -- and one has to grudgingly admire the imagination or enterprise of some authors.

But I ran across another option when reading a review of Julian Barnes latest book, "The Man in Red Coat."  Therein, the reviewer, Parul Sehgal, says that in Barnes case, "Desire -- sexual jealously -- lies at the core of much of his work, not just as dramatic engine, but as a spur to moral thinking." He then goes on to quote Barnes as having said: "Sex is the area where moral decisions, moral questions, most clearly express themselves. It's only in sexual relationships that you come up against immediate questions of what's right and wrong."

Well, that may be overstating the case, but you get the point. And in Barnes' case, his own experience may be one place in which he ran up against the issues in question.  According to Seghgal, the author's life has been characterized in part by "his attachment to a charismatic and congenitally unfaithful woman."

The Appeal of a Twist in Opera and Fiction

One well-known genre is the coming-of-age novel, represented perhaps most famously by J.D. Salinger's classic, Catcher in the Rye. The opposite might be called the fading-away novel, here represented by Julian Barnes' The Sense of an Ending.

First published in 2011, it won the coveted Man Booker Prize, but I just got around to reading it, and wasn't planning to write anything about it until I took a course from the Seattle Opera in how to write a libretto.

Eliot & Barnes: Why The Past Belongs In What's New

In his 1919 essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” T.S. Eliot famously argued that great poets are distinguished not by the degree to which their work differs from the past, but rather by the manner in which they incorporate and acknowledge prior achievements.

It is a prejudice of critics that they search for those aspects of a poet’s work that least resembles the work of other writers, and pretend to find therein the essence of the poet and that which readers can most enjoy, Eliot said. “Whereas if we approach a poet without this prejudice we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously,” he continued.