The Work Room Interview: Garth Greenwell on Writing Sex, Philip Roth’s Sabbath’s Theater, and the Choices We Make on the Page
Interview by Cassie Archdeacon
CA: In your course description for "What Sex Can Do" you ask: If sex scenes are so hard to write, why do writers keep bothering with them? On the flip side, why do some writers keep avoiding them? I’m thinking of the line from Sigrid Nunez’s The Friend: “Nothing in their heads and nothing between their legs is how one teacher I know describes the characters in workshop stories."
GG: Well, I don't think any writer has an obligation to write anything, and this may come down to a question of temperament. It may also have something to do with our particular cultural moment, when sex and desire have become seen as almost inherently "problematic," and when we have so emphasized sex as a site of trauma that we may be at risk of losing sight of it as a source of joy, or banality, or simply sociality. In workshop, I think there can be a reticence to share material that can cause discomfort, and also that is so often assumed to be autobiographical--maybe especially when presented by women writers and queer writers. Certainly it's the case that workshop conversations about sexually explicit material can be crushingly boring; in my own experience, the same theoretical questions about writing sex--how much is too much, and can it be written at all--took up most of workshop time.
My hope for the sequence of classes I'm offering this summer--"What Sex Can Do" in June, followed by a workshop on writing sex in July and August--is to get around that. In "What Sex Can Do" we'll tackle some of the theoretical questions around writing sex--tackle them in a very practical way, by looking at examples of great sex writing and asking how they work. With that shared theoretical basis, my hope is that in the workshop we'll be able to cut through the usual cant about sex scenes, and focus on what really matters: the work in front of us, which succeeds or fails not because of some ideology about sex but because of the concrete choices we make on the page.
CA: During last summer’s "What Is Style?” seminar you spoke about the destructive nature of the MFA workshop. What’s the best advice you’ve heard or given on how to recover from that destruction?
GG: Oh, I don't mean to make any general pronouncements about MFA workshops; like everything else, they come in better and worse versions. But I do think there are some dangers in the way workshops are typically structured in the US. There's something suspect in throwing fifteen people in a room, often with no explicit sense of the particularity and situatedness of their own aesthetic values, and then discussing work in a way that suggests the success of art can be measured by the number of people who "like" it. I also think it's a problem that authority in such settings is often generated by articulating the ways in which a text fails; I don't think that's true of our encounters with books as readers. When I teach workshops, I emphasize description and analysis over evaluation. I think the best way we can be helpful is to help a writer see their text as clearly as possible.
CA: You’ll be teaching a workshop on "Writing Sex” this summer, and in your description mention the “logistics of putting bodies on the page.” How do you approach, or even choreograph, these logistics in your own writing practice?
GG: It is so easy to seek refuge in metaphor or abstraction when writing sex, and to lose sight of the physical bodies interacting with each other. I constantly remind myself, when writing sex scenes, to attend to bodies in space, to how actual flesh fits together. In all my workshops I emphasize that, whatever you're writing about, logistics are sexy--working out the details of physical reality is a way of expressing your commitment to the world you're writing. I think of Zola's description of lowering a horse into a mine, or Iris Murdoch's account of dragging a medieval church bell from a lake: those are moments of immense vividness and life, precisely because they are so invested in mundane, technical descriptions of how things work. The same thing is true of sex. This doesn't mean rejecting the metaphorical and abstract--what we need is a complicated, difficult counterpoint that allows sex to be illuminattive of both external and interior reality, of concrete particulars and the large questions sex inevitably raises.
CA: In your Harper’s essay “Making Meaning” you write: “'irrelevant' has joined 'problematic' as a term of absolute dismissal, applied not so much to books one reads and hotly debates as to books one needn’t read at all.” How does this pressure to stay relevant impact a writer trying to find their personal style?
GG: I feel so strongly that artists should resist the lure of the "relevant." Trying to gear a book to what feels currently relevant is a losing game, I think, if only because books often take years to write, and there's no telling how the cultural conversation will have shifted in that time. What a writer needs to pay attention to is not what feels relevant to the larger culture at a particular moment, but what feels urgent to the writer herself. In that essay, my main argument is that our genuine relationships to art are more complicated and mysterious than our current dependence on the idea of "relevance" can recognize.
CA: Lastly, I’d like to raise a question once asked by a student: “All of us are continuously affected by so many different media & lexicons. How to find/protect/nurture/develop your authentic style while most of us are permeable to what’s out there? For example, I’m fascinated by your ability to use social media language seamlessly while not letting that influence your language on the page."
GG: I'm suspicious of any idea of the "authentic," as well as of all our attempts to be impermeable; these always smack, to me, of a desire for purity that can only end up being destructive. My ideal of style is the sense great writers give of an entire life--an entire world--condensed to a voice. I don't think one achieves that by trying to build a wall around one's personal style. The issue is not to close oneself off, but to be open, I think: not to try to purify language but to see all kinds of language as a potential resource. The question of style is then to manage those resources, to deploy them on the page in a way that conveys a sense of full, rich, interesting personhood.
That's a potentially glib answer to what's really a very difficult question, and I understand the force of Eliot's claim that the poet's duty is "to purify the language of the tribe." We can recognize how problematic Eliot's use of "purify," "language," and (especially) "tribe" are and still feel the ethical force of the injunction, I think. When I consider how language is used by politicians and marketers, I think there is a moral imperative to resist that. But resistance doesn't mean erasure or purification; it means active engagement and wrestling.
That's all very easy to say in the abstract. What matters, and what often feels infinitely hard, is trying to make it meaningful when one sits down to write.
CA: It’s no secret that Philip Roth is a controversial subject. Why do you think it’s important to study his work (or more broadly, “controversial" art), particularly in the age of cancel culture?
GG: Art is what I turn to when situations or dilemmas are so complex they defeat my usual tools for thinking, including--maybe especially--my ready-made tools for moral evaluation. One reason I find it so troubling that "problematic" has become a term of dismissal in cultural commentary is that I more or less take it for granted that any serious work of art is going to be problematic--that it is going to challenge my certainties, that it will force me into uncomfortable positions, that it will avoid easy judgments, that it will make me recognize painful things in myself. One of the most valuable things art can do is show us how far any of us stands from righteousness.
One measure--maybe for me the most important measure--of the greatness of art is the extent to which it is open to the full range of humanity, including the monstrous, the abyss we all stand on the brink of. In Sabbath's Theater Philip Roth faces up to that abyss. He forces us to spend time with--to come to know--a man who is in many ways repugnant. Also brilliant, hilarious, aggrieved, wounded, entirely human. He reminds us that moral condemnation is seldom a profound mode of knowledge of the other; he reminds us of everything else we can know about a person if we suspend our condemnation. It's one of the greatest books I know.