Easier done than said

SEX: GREG BAXTERreviews Granta: The Magazine of New Writing, Issue 110: Sex, Spring 2010, 288pp, £12.99

GRANTA, the world's most widely circulated literary journal, recently published an issue on sex. There are more than 20 contributions – fiction, nonfiction, poetry and art. Of these, there are four fine pieces of writing: a novel excerpt by the Nobel laureate Herta Müller, a short story by Natsuo Kirino, an essay on celibacy by Michael Symmons Roberts and an extraordinary personal history by Brian Chikwava about the origins and symbolism of the iskokotsha, a dance developed in Zimbabwe at the end of the 1970s.

The remaining contributions, in various ways, prove how difficult it is to write about sex, and how and why it so often goes wrong. The pieces fail to be provocative, illuminating, or, when treating the subject ironically, funny. Everything sincere makes you wince, and everything ironic makes you sigh.

Chikwava writes, referring to the iskokotsha: "We had . . . found a way of acting out our sexual urges but not a way of talking about the more difficult questions around sex." Müller, Roberts, Kirino and Chikwava all find original and complex questions to ask. The other contributors drift towards cliche, or disguise cliche with inventiveness.

Read this issue and discover for yourself. Straight men encounter whores with hearts of gold. Gay men dwell on early homosexual encounters. Women idealise male lovers, or stereotype themselves. Men and women humiliate the opposite sex, or hate their own. And that’s when the authors are trying to be serious. When they’re trying to be ironic they tell clever, one-dimensional jokes.

Fear of sex – something most authors would deny – tends to reveal itself in writing that gets lost in sentimental depictions of sex as an obstacle to experiencing life. Sex becomes an entity with which the human heart finds itself in conflict. The Grantacontributions – minus the exceptions above – often feel as if they were composed on a psychiatrist's couch: even the ironic stuff seems defensive.

Sex leads the authors (in nonfiction) and their characters (in fiction) to awakenings. Sex makes them feel silly or nostalgic. Sex makes them feel old or stupid. It makes them suffer. Et cetera. It’s always doing something. It’s never just there.

Nobody would argue that sexual urges exist outside the body. Why, then, do writers often treat sex by witheringly describing what they see through telescopes pointed at the night sky? William H Gass, in his book-length essay On Being Blue, tells us the erotic is linguistic rather than physical, and that a blow-by-blow account of intercourse is about as inherently interesting as a blow-by-blow account of eating chicken. The erotic life of sex is the "blue" life of sex. And the "blue" exists in the fantastic and metaphorical elements of language. (If only most writers could tell blue from purple.) What Gass suggests is an impossible exclusivity: that the erotic resides in the quality of language only, and has no value in the literal. But this doesn't pass the simplest of tests: ask someone if they would rather have sex or eat chicken.

Following the 1960 obscenity trial regarding Lady Chatterley's Lover, an English judge famously defined pornographic writing as "words that gave him an erection". This is a crude but telling definition of pornography: anything pornographic that does not give an English judge an erection is probably worthless. In this issue of Grantawe find a literal study of the pornographic capacity of words in a piece by Emmanuel Carrère. He writes an open letter of seduction, and asks the reader to masturbate on a train. But he miscalculates his own allure. He does not give us an erection (so to speak); he gives himself one.

Achieving the erotic in literature is something writers are so universally bad at that there are annual awards to punish the worst offenders. Even very accomplished writers struggle. John Banville and Philip Roth received them last year – for miscalculating plausibility while trying to make art.

Beyond the therapeutic and the creepy there is also the pointless: there's plenty of that in this Granta, too. Herta Müller's piece involves women in a camp who secretly sleep with "miserable and degraded" German POWs in some kind of derelict shelter near the camp, which they called the Zeppelin. The women feel these POWs are everything their men were not: they are warriors, and not too old or too young. The women cover for each other, and a white flag is used to warn them when they may be caught. "For our women [the POWs] were heroes . . . and offered more than evening love in a barrack bed behind a blanket . . . Love in the Zeppelin was free of every worry except for the hoisting and lowering of the little white flag."

I had hoped reading the Grantasex issue would be a little more like love in that Zeppelin.

Greg Baxter is the author of A Preparation for Death, to be published in July by Penguin Ireland