Adults only, read on:
If I called this post Review: Triptych, by Krissy Kneen, nobody would read it. So I decided to put the content in the title. I was reading, with interest, an online review of Kneen’s erotic memoir, Affection (in the US, Seal Press, 2010), when a fellow book blogger, Kat of Book Thingo, mentioned Triptych (Kat’s review here), Kneen’s first published book length work of fiction, and offered to send me her signed copy, I could hardly say no (and it’s on its way back to you Kat!)
Kneen is from Brisbane. Here is her bio on Amazon:
Her short fiction has been published in various literary journals including The Griffith Review, The Lifted Brow, Wet Ink, Torpedo and the short story collections The Death Mook and Herding Kites The Best of Torpedo. Her non-fiction has appeared in magazines and books including The Reader and Writing Queensland and online at nerve.com. Her mini collection of erotic stories Swallow the Sound was published though Eatbooks in 2007. Her memoir Affection was first published in Australia through Text Publishing in 2009 and in the USA through Seal Press in 2010.
And from Goodreads:
Krissy Kneen has been shortlisted three times for the Queensland Premier’s Literary awards. She is founding member of Eatbooks Inc and is the marketing and promotions officer at Avid Reader bookshop. Find out more about Krissy Kneen at www.eatbooks.com and www.avidreader.com.au
Triptych is aptly titled: it’s three short stories, the characters loosely connected by internet porn. Although… how loose is the connection between people who use webcams to perform sex acts together? Are they less connected than the partners, sleeping a room away, unaware not just of the cybersex, but of the empty spaces and needs that drive it?
As the title suggests, each story takes its cue from a painting. In the first story, it’s Susanna and the Elders (1610) the first painting by 17 year old Artemesia Gentileschi. This painting has been on lonely single woman Susanna’s bedroom wall since childhood. The painting depicts a story from the Book of Daniel: Susanna was watched bathing by a couple of voyeurs who then threatened to blackmail her for sex. She refused, and Daniel exposed the men as liars by cross-examining them. This is apparently one of the few paintings of Susanna that depicts her horror.
The Susanna of Triptych has a hard time connecting to people. Raised by deaf parents, she has always had a talent for languages, but a mistrust of noise and words. Living alone in an apartment, she turns to internet chat rooms to fill her sexual needs, at first with reluctant curiosity and later with seasoned abandon. One partner, Aaron shares Susanna’s love of literature (Lolita, of course) and words. One handed, they manage to transcend the usual “cum for me” chat vocabulary, and develop not just a satisfying sexual connection, but also a literary and emotional one. Through a fluke, she figures out that Aaron lives in her apartment building and proceeds to spy on likely candidates, often masturbating herself to orgasm while these neighbors are having sex, much in the way the men in Biblical Susanna’s story do.
“Susanna” was my favorite of the three stories, in large part because it was the most conventional, and did the least to push my own boundaries. All three stories end with both sexual and emotional fulfillment for their female protagonists, but I found the character of Susanna the most developed. I appreciated the connections between Susanna’s relationship to language and her sexual desire, and her meditations on the intersections of 2D and 3D life:
‘So, you’re single’ asked one of the actors, the latest attempt to woo her away from her little bubble of silence and out into the noisy world of human interaction.
‘No,’ she said, and was surprised to find that she really did not see herself as single at all. Aaron Fitzgerald was an odd kind of companion but he was under her skin now, in her blood. Sometimes she found herself using one of his turns of phrase. Once when introducing herself to a new director she said her name was Susie-su and was startled at her own use of the word, his name for her and no one else’s. His Susie-su of the handcuffs and the deserted buildings was striding out with quiet Susanna into the world.
Kneen’s writing is lovely, but the sexual fantasies that compose most of this book invariably turned me off. In fact, I think if I came up with a list of the things that are least likely to turn me on, this book would contain most of them. All the literary and artistic allusions, all the lyrical writing, and all the deft touches, can’t overcome the fact that for erotic fiction to succeed, it must reach the reader on a sexual level.
But it’s not just the content. It’s the writing. Having read some erotic romance, I may have told myself it was in some way “realistic” because those authors use words like “cock” instead of the euphemisms and figurative language more common in other kinds of romance. In Kneen, even sex that I might, written in other ways, find appealing, is described as so profoundly unsexy to me that she may as well have been writing about root canals or cleaning out a sink.
As an example, Susanna is crouched in a cupboard watching a man in her building, who may or may not be Aaron, have sex with a prostitute. She recollects an exchange with Aaron in which he typed:
It would break my only rule, but the thought of you stretched wide, the abandon of your warm stream — I would devour the image as one knocks back vodka, with all the rough energy of a Russian peasant: the thought of your waters splashing against my thighs. Surely we know each other well enough by now. If only I could enter you with your bladder full and throbbing around my cock. If only I could remain inside you to enjoy the hot stream, your pleasure and relief trickling down over my balls.
Soon enough, she is climaxing, and urinating, all over this man’s shoes. No stranger to flights of language, Kneen describes Susanna’s convulsing vaginal walls as “masticating jaws of ecstasy.” The man flings the closet door open. His penis is a “fat finger” that she immediately takes into her mouth. When he speaks, it is to say, “Hello, my cupboard angel … My name is James Bacon.” The story ends.
So…he’s not Aaron. But it’s a new beginning. So, what do we make of the connection to Aaron? Cyber sex is a prelude to something real? That’s it?
“The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife” is the story of Leda and the sex she has with her dog Paul. She meets, in school, Rachel, who also likes to have sex with dogs. They also have sex with a pony (oral. It’s safer.). And Leda has sex with an octopus. The connections to the famous erotic woodcut for which the story is named are obvious.
The animals are overtly anthropomorphized. All kinds of feelings — even a sexual preference for Rachel over Leda — are imputed to Paul the dog. At one point, Rachel ponders consent for about five seconds, saying “As long as two creatures, people, animals, whatever, as long as the sex is done with consent then you have nothing to worry about at all.” I come from two traditions that make that sentence nonsensical. The women’s studies tradition emphasizes the importance of overt, verbal, enthusiastic consent to sex. And the clinical ethics tradition makes consent depend on a set of cognitive skills we can measure. There is no way, from my point of view, that a nonhuman animal, nor, indeed, many humans of impaired or reduced cognition, can give consent to sexual activity.
I didn’t find the animal sex titillating (detailed descriptions of dog penises don’t do it for me.), and I didn’t think the handwaving to consent helped do anything but draw attention to the lack of it. I hasten to add that I think it’s perfectly ok to write and read about, and even get pleasure of various kinds, from things that we consider immoral in life (although I do think there are some limits even to fantasy). But again, this is an erotic story, and, in my world, erotic fiction fails if it doesn’t arouse.
Perhaps the worst thing about this story is that Paul the dog gets hit by a car and killed when Leda returns home unexpectedly from college. This story was a perfect storm of “oh no she didn’t” for me.
In the third story, a brother and sister have sex, beginning on their bedroom floor during adolescence, and then as a “married” couple. The sister gets bored and has alley sex with a much younger colleague at the library where she works. Incest. Adultery. And that way of describing sex that Kneen has: loads and loads of slippery juices, labia ripe as melons, penises as meat. Not for me.
Kneen is focused on female pleasure. All the female protagonists are more beautiful than they realize. They are all shy, or closed, or have a difficulty communicating, which sex can help. Sex, even illicit sex, leads to better real life human relationships in each story. So, it’s a very sex positive, woman positive volume. Kneen has an ear for the ways femininity is boxed up, closed off, and stunted by our modern world. I would, in a heartbeat, read a nonerotic work of fiction by Kneen. But for erotic fiction, I’ll look elsewhere.
Wow. What an interesting review. The part of your review that most called to me was the fact that no matter how lovely the book is written, if the actions of that novel cross your personal comfort boundaries you still can’t enjoy it fully. I suspect this probably makes erotic romances very similar to inspirational romances (ha!) – because they are both writing for audiences that can have very specific “turn ons” and “turn offs” (either sexual or religious) which can be a bit of a tightrope walk – you’ll have readers who meld to the writing perfectly and love it, and others who put it down, offended or otherwise distanced from the book.
That’s pretty much the reaction I had to Judith Ivory’s Untie My Heart. Beautiful writing, absolutely gorgeous description – but the BDSM subtext of the story (where the hero essentially helps the heroine break her sexual boundaries and develop more flexible ones by terrifying her and dominating her) made me too uncomfortable to totally enjoy the book. And it’s weird because I know that book is probably a thousand times more vanilla than actual BDSM erotic romances (this novel was a regency romance), but just how the domination/submission power dynamic fit into the actual romance dynamic between the characters (he controls, she realizes she likes being controlled) put me off. Which probably explains why I love Beta heroes.
So there’s a lot going on here, but the thing that really stuck out at me was the idea that erotic fiction fails if it does not arouse. My gut reaction to that was no, that’s not true, but then I think, maybe it is. Of course eroticism is so incredibly subjective, maybe even more so than romance because it has a stronger physical component. Those are not your fantasies (or mine) but if they are someone’s then they might very well arouse, when a standard erotic romance would do nothing for them.
But putting aside preferences, there is this: what if you want to write about sex but your goal is not to arouse. Various goals are allowed in other topics. For example, if you want to write about death, your goal as a writer may be to inspire sadness or fear or hope. Maybe a mix of both, but it would be silly to say that so-and-so’s handling of death did not inspire X-feeling and therefore, is a failure. And yet we DO put that restriction on erotic fiction, or fiction about sex. You might say that writing about sex when not meant to arouse would be called something other than erotic fiction, like literary or general fiction, etc, but not really, no. It certainly couldn’t sell to those people, not the publishers or the customers as those genres if it contains a lot of explicit sexual content. That would automatically be classified as erotica, and therefore subject to the “must be arousing” rule.
On the issue of erotic fiction, Kneen has said that she prefers to call her work pornography. Would this change the critieria (or degree) for determining whether not the novel was a success for the reader?
Any chance you’ll read her memoir?
@AnimeJune: I love Ivory, but have never read that one. I loved your review, which you were very modest not to link. I’ve read books that offended my moral sensibilities so much I threw them across the room. I didn’t feel that way at all about this one — except maybe at some of the animal scenes. But, as you say, the squick factor of the fantasies took the edge off my enjoyment.
@Amber:
I’m not sure I agree. But let me first clarify, that these fantasies did not read as titillating to me, but they might well have excellent uptake with other readers, and this would work really well for them. So, to say it failed as erotica for me is not to say that it fails, period.
I think of erotic fiction like other genre of fiction. So, horror fiction fails if it doesn’t scare or unsettle. Mystery fiction (of a certain stripe) fails if it doesn’t generate a real question about who is the killer. I think most book blogger reviews bear this out, actually. So, a romance reader will usually give a low grade to a book if she doesn’t care about the starring couple. Getting the reader engaged and excited about whether the couple will end up together is one of the main aims of this type of fiction. But that a book fails for a given reader doesn’t make it a failure.
This is a great point. I actually agree with you that this is an expectation, but I think that situation is a terrible one. In feminist philosophy class this week we spent some time on pornography, and one of the books we discussed was Linda Marchiano’s anti-pornography book, Ordeal. She went by the name Linda Lovelace when she made the famous porn film Deep Throat. Because there was explicit sex Ordeal, it was shelved with erotica. Yet the book itself was a condemnation of the pornography industry.
@Kat:
I guess, in my mind, I think of erotica as good pornography, but which I mean porn that has some aesthetic or other social value, and that does not degrade women. But I know that’s problematic. For one thing, I don’t think there is anything necessarily wrong about material that is sexually explicit and has no other value besides sexual arousal. I think the obscenity definition of porn that says porn is sexually explicit material that appeals to the prurient interest with no aesthetic or social or political value, is derogatory in a way I don’t necessarily mean to be. Then there’s one well known feminist definition, the McKinnon/Dworkin line, that says porn is woman-degrading, fetishizes male power, etc. Neither of them really works completely for me, but I haven’t done a lot of thinking about it.
As for the memoir… maybe. I know you loved it and that’s a strong selling point.
Given the heroine’s name, I suspect another subtext was the myth of Leda and the Swan.
The point you and Amber raise about what constitutes “erotica” is an interesting one. I think there is literary fiction that is this explicit: Nicholson Baker, for instance, or maybe Portnoy’s Complaint. There isn’t a ton, and I think that that’s a failure of literary fiction to be willing to explore sexuality. Which is dumb, since it’s a pretty big area of life and identity. (I think in some other cultures there is less squeamishness. French fiction, perhaps?).
Some of this fiction is partly meant to arouse. I’m not sure how Baker describes himself. He’s taken seriously as a literary writer, but I noticed his work is being discussed in both literary and erotica forums on Amazon. So what’s the distinction between literary fiction exploring the erotic and erotica? Is it the author’s purpose? But how can we know what that is? The quality of the writing? That’s a can of worms! These lines are quite hard to draw and I think a lot of us fall back on “I know it when I see it” kinds of definitions that may partly depend on our own responses to what we read.
Allan Moore’s comments on why he describes Lost Girls as pornography are interesting in this context.
@Laura Vivanco: Thank you Laura. Yes, absolutely.
@Liz Mc2: @Liz Mc2:
Yes, this is what I do. I like to think I can tell whether it’s supposed to arouse, based on the writing, the paratextual elements, like the cover, cover copy (ex: Triptych is called “irresistibly erotic” by the publisher; the author calls it “pornography”), and other reviews etc., and, in a most tautological and thus fallacious way, my own response. I know that I don’t have a really good definition of porn or erotica, or any definition at all, but to be honest, I’ve never been that interested in either, so I haven’t forced myself to get clear on it.