Web Letters: When the Whip Comes Down

This review came at the right time for me, though I've never read any of Mary Gaitskill's work. (I've ordered some of her books now.) However, I just finishing exploring J.G. Ballard's carnegraphic conflation of sex with trauma and violence and was searching for ways to think about it. This whole area of thought, whatever you call it, has come over my horizon (retired, living in a village on the Montana prairie next to the Blackfeet Reservation, writing and reading) partly because I stumbled into the path of Tim Barrus. Since I'm a bit of an expert on Native American lit, I read one of his Nasdijj's trilogies, found it valid, was shocked by the criticism of him, and entered correspondence with him. I'm not upset that he pretended to be Navajo. We all pretend.

He runs Cinematheque, a group of at-risk boys with HIV, often because of pasts as hustlers. He keeps them fed, sheltered, medicated and out of the street life by getting them obsessed with art and video. Ideas. Some examples are better than others, but this one is relevant and probably worth serious criticism and thought. It arose out of one of the boys calling his mother "a cunt"--alcoholic, abusive, unloving. The video is called "Le Cunt," which is considered too rude to be a title even in video culture. Tim is the speaker because they can't afford an actor and because the boys must be disguised.

I don't know what to call this category of thought. My original education (Northwestern University, class of 1961) was mostly theater from a Method point of view: that is, inhabiting the person and understanding their "spine" or motivation, or worldview. We didn't shrink away from erotics or "love" or "sex" or "gay," and many of us were dealing with those issues in real life. (Not me. I went for repression and sublimation. Which is not to say I didn't read a set of books I kept with their spines on the inside of the bookshelves. They were about sex, but they were serious books.)

From 1978-1982 I retrained in graduate school, University of Chicago Divinity School and Meadville/Lombard Theological School, in preparation for a ministerial career in the Unitarian Universalist denomination. Here I learned about embodiment, incarnation and many other ideas shared between religion and sex, especially Christians who so love their ambivalence about birth and death. Would such an education help Mary Gaitskill avoid sentimentality and clear her head to recover her early skills? Maybe. The older, tougher professors might have (don't even think about taking them to bed, except that Mircea Eliade wouldn't have objected--if he could bring his pipe). The younger, newer ones seem to have been defeated by the hard confrontation between sex and, well, higher needs--I'm thinking dignity, compassion, sheltering, nurturing and so on. Their systematics have a Hallmarkian ring: angels descend. But they really don't know about "sex of the soul" or intense intercourse of ideas.

Which is why I'm so interested in Tim Barrus and his wild boys. Most of them have no theology--though some attend church and two are Jesuit-educated--and Tim, an early fan of Gaitskill though he once gave her a critical review, has a demonic anti-God based on a version of Abraham and Isaac in which Abraham beats Isaac nearly to death and no god intervenes. The angel is a helpless lover. Barrus sometimes takes the American nature-worship trail, which can make me itch since it is so trendy and commodified, but he's fairly dry about it.

The Cinematheque boys are not afraid to talk about "pole in the hole" sex. In your words: "Penetration, physical or psychological"; "Sexualized cosmology. Its central image is that of a hole or shaft, dark and deep as the pit of the earth. At the bottom of it ran boiling rivers of Male and Female." This is not so far off from the theological schematics of Eliade (center point vs. edge, i.e., axis mundi vs. abyss) or Tillich (notorious as a lover) with the horizontal incarnation pierced by a vertical (both up and down) access to the sacred world. (This is often concretely included in authochthonous ceremonies. A real pole in a real hole.)

What other books or writers combine high theory with fleshly phenomena?

This review came to me as an automated review e-mail from Powell's bookstore. I didn't go looking for you or for Gaitskill, anymore than I went looking for Barrus, but somehow these ideas seem to be adding up to something. Too early to tell what. But I would hope it would get us away from both "cheap grace" and "cold sex," even if we must redraw disciplinary subject lines or even use new media like video.

Mary Scriver

Valier, MT

Early in his review, William Deresiewicz references Gaitskill's past as a "stripper and prostitute" and reveals that she "spent time in a mental institution." When he later attacks Gaitskill for the "religious" quality of her exploration of sexuality in her new stories, their "woolly mysticism" and "gesture toward the miraculous," I had to wonder on what basis he was making his judgments. Since he openly criticizes Gaitskill's "inability to imagine minds unlike her own," is he implicitly saying that he can so successfully imagine what it is like to be a woman prostitute that Gaitskill's own perspective on her experience is not worth serious consideration?

Why not instead view Gaitskill's increasingly spiritual take on sexual degradation as legitimate--not as a need for "comfort" and "consolation" but as the hard-fought insight of someone who has spent her adult life trying to understand the violence and despair she experienced in her youth? One can disagree with the world view Gaitskill has developed, but to dismiss it as condescendingly as Deresiewicz does indicates what, for me, her later work so bravely reveals: the urge to reject the soul's essential beauty and innocence, rationalized as unsentimental maturity.

Christopher Shinn

New York, NY