Coelho's Brida Given Bad-Sex Fiction Prize
Spiritual Subgenre of Erotic Fiction Seldom Excites Readers
Jan 12, 2009
What links well-known, but divergent authors, Paolo Coelho and John Updike together? They both write novels about human spirituality, including spirituality that is experienced or empowered through sexual congress, and they do it very badly. Their erotic writing is so atrocious, according to Literary Review, which included the offensive excerpts on its web-published announcement, the authors were presented with “Bad Sex in Fiction” awards in November, 2008, Updike with a Lifetime Achievement Award for having garnered the prize four previous times.
It isn’t just Coelho and Updike. While theologians might relish St. Teresa de Ávila’s rhapsodies about encounters with Christ in the garden, especially for linking mysticism and devotion with orgasmic rapture, readers of erotic fiction are less impressed. Essayist, Gwen (names withheld at request) ascribes less inspirational motives to the poor mystics who, “in order to make their orgasms acceptable, reinterpret them as religious experiences, but it really rings "sex bad" bells."
Sex Bad = Bad Sex Writing
Sexuality has long been linked to transcendence. If Walt Whitman or an antediluvian tradition of Hindu and Tibetan Buddhist Temple Sculptures, or Greco-Roman mystery school mosaics won't sufficiently convince, scores, if not hundreds, of books about it may be found with a quick internet search starting with the word "Tantra." The question isn't whether it is a valid form of spiritual experience, but why it is turned into such eyewatering fiction by writers who should know better.
Of Coelho, Nathan, another essayist, says, "I suspect that point might be that the author is desperately trying to impart to the reader how wonderful and pure the love of the two or more characters involved is, illustrating that it transcends such petty things as any simple, carnal pleasure to which the reader might themselves relate."
Gwen elaborates, "The biggest problem with this is that it isn't a sex scene. It's an avoidance-of-sex scene. My "ew ew ew!" reflex, at least, comes from the fact that it sounds, not like someone who wants to do this, but like someone who really, really doesn't! Not to put too fine a point on it, this (Coelho's) scene reads like a victim of violation dissociating. The direct statements say it's wonderful and all, but the sensory descriptions are of dire avoidance."
In placing the descriptors outside the realm of common experience, the author shows squeamishness, and dismisses earthiness, the ordinary day, the here and now, yet positions himself in the place of the Grand Initiator or Priest who introduces the reader into the mysteries of magical mind-blowing orgasms.
Nathan also speculates whether disappointing sex scenes come about "precisely because they’re expecting transcendence without actually putting in any effort."
It requires a writer's effort and awareness to strip away a characters' pretenses and psychic armour so that the sexual partners face a real person, not their personae. As with life, this won't happen if the writer uses a glamour of transcendence to shield characters against mortality, disintegration and decay, since transcendence encompasses all that. It's also disrespectful of those partners, one of whom has to have sex with someone who isn't there, or not wholly there. The problem with such writing isn't that the experience doesn't happen, but that it doesn't go deep enough. That lack of real vulnerability---even while the writer tries to present this intensely personal experience---is what makes readers cringe.
Except with Updike. Updike's sex-writing drawbacks are the reverse polarity of Coelho's. Updike's infamous scene is just viscerally and emotionally gross.
Literary Review claims that its Bad Sex in Writing prizes are not intended to shame authors, but to foster better erotic literature.
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