book is the one that makes people want to write. I don’t know why I feel more alive when I write, but I do. Maybe I imagine that if I scratch hard enough into the paper, I will last. Maybe the world isn’t enough, or maybe the distinction between the world and fiction is not so clear. Fiction is made from the stuff of the world, after all, which includes dreams and wishes and fantasies and memory. And it is never really made alone, but from the material between and among us: language. When Mikhail Bakhtin argues that the novel is dialogical—multivoiced, conflicted, in constant dialogue within itself—he is identifying all those jabbering voices every fiction writer hears in his or her head. Writing novels is a solitary act that is also plural, and its many voices are forever placing us somewhere—here or there or yonder. At the same time, writing collapses these spatial categories. Like a heartbeat or a breath, it marks the time of a living consciousness on the page, a consciousness that is present and here, but also absent. The page can resurrect what’s lost and what’s dead, what’s not there anymore and what was never there. Fiction is like the ghost twin of memory that moves through the myriad cities, landscapes, houses, and rooms of the mind.
1995
A Plea for Eros
A FEW YEARS AGO A FRIEND OF MINE GAVE A LECTURE AT Berkeley on the
fentme falaie,
a subject he has been thinking about for years. When I met him, he was a graduate student at Columbia University, but now he is a full-fledged philosopher, and when it is finished, his book will be published by Galfimard in France and Harvard University Press in America. He is Belgian but lives in Paris, a detail significant to the story, because he comes from another rhetorical tradition—a French one. When he finished speaking, he took questions, including a hostile one from a woman who demanded to know what he thought of the Antioch Ruling—a law enacted at An-tioch College, which essentially made every stage of a sexual encounter on campus Legal only by verbal consent. My friend paused, smiled, and replied, “It’s wonderful. I love it. Just think of the erotic possibilities: ‘May I touch your right breast? May I touch your left breast?’“ The woman had nothing to say.
This little exchange has lingered in my mind. What interests me is that he and she were addressing exactly the same problem, the idea of permission, and yet their perspectives were so far apart that it was as if they were speaking different languages. The woman expected opposition, and when she didn’t get it, she was speechless. Aggressive questions are usually pedagogic—that is, the answer has already been written in the mind of the questioner, who then waits with a reply. It’s pretend listening. But by moving the story—in this case, the narrative of potential lovers—onto new ground, the young philosopher tripped up his opponent.
It is safe to assume that the Antioch Ruling wasn’t devised to increase sexual pleasure on campus, and yet the new barriers it made, ones that dissect both sexual gestures and the female body (the ruling came about to protect women, not men), have been the stuff of erotic fantasy for ages. When the troubadour pined for his lady, he hoped against hope that he would be granted a special favor—a kiss perhaps. The sonnet itself is a form that takes the body of the beloved apart—her hair, her eyes, her lips, her breasts. The body in pieces is reborn in this legal drama of spoken permission. Eroticism thrives both on borders and on distance. It is a commonplace that sexual pleasure demands thresholds. My philosopher made quick work of demonstrating the excitement of crossing into forbidden territory—the place you need special permission to trespass into. But there is distance here, too, a distance the earnest crusaders who invented the ruling couldn’t possibly have foreseen. The articulation of the other’s body in words turns it into a map of
1995
A Plea for Eros
A FEW YEARS AGO A FRIEND OF MINE GAVE A LECTURE AT Berkeley on the
fentme falaie,
a subject he has been thinking about for years. When I met him, he was a graduate student at Columbia University, but now he is a full-fledged philosopher, and when it is finished, his book will be published by Galfimard in France and Harvard University Press in America. He is Belgian but lives in Paris, a detail significant to the story, because he comes from another rhetorical tradition—a French one. When he finished speaking, he took questions, including a hostile one from a woman who demanded to know what he thought of the Antioch Ruling—a law enacted at An-tioch College, which essentially made every stage of a sexual encounter on campus Legal only by verbal consent. My friend paused, smiled, and replied, “It’s wonderful. I love it. Just think of the erotic possibilities: ‘May I touch your right breast? May I touch your left breast?’“ The woman had nothing to say.
This little exchange has lingered in my mind. What interests me is that he and she were addressing exactly the same problem, the idea of permission, and yet their perspectives were so far apart that it was as if they were speaking different languages. The woman expected opposition, and when she didn’t get it, she was speechless. Aggressive questions are usually pedagogic—that is, the answer has already been written in the mind of the questioner, who then waits with a reply. It’s pretend listening. But by moving the story—in this case, the narrative of potential lovers—onto new ground, the young philosopher tripped up his opponent.
It is safe to assume that the Antioch Ruling wasn’t devised to increase sexual pleasure on campus, and yet the new barriers it made, ones that dissect both sexual gestures and the female body (the ruling came about to protect women, not men), have been the stuff of erotic fantasy for ages. When the troubadour pined for his lady, he hoped against hope that he would be granted a special favor—a kiss perhaps. The sonnet itself is a form that takes the body of the beloved apart—her hair, her eyes, her lips, her breasts. The body in pieces is reborn in this legal drama of spoken permission. Eroticism thrives both on borders and on distance. It is a commonplace that sexual pleasure demands thresholds. My philosopher made quick work of demonstrating the excitement of crossing into forbidden territory—the place you need special permission to trespass into. But there is distance here, too, a distance the earnest crusaders who invented the ruling couldn’t possibly have foreseen. The articulation of the other’s body in words turns it into a map of
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