Recently edited to make it readable, as pointed out by my faithful reader, Emma (she of the hilarious Whimsiblog - read the latest post (vg)).
I've been looking for this piece for months, as it encapsulates exactly my struggle as a writer.
Finally have located it, I am copying it here for the record, so i don't lose it again.
I promise to write something of my own in here before the decade is out.
Thought for the Day, 13 October 2010The Rev. Dr Giles Fraser According to Martin Amis, writing well about sex is "impossible". So he told an audience at the Cheltenham Literature Festival last weekend. And Amis clearly has a point. Consider how many cringe-worthy descriptions of sex one finds in novels, even otherwise quality novels. Back in 1993, the Literary Review launched the Bad Sex Awards "in order to draw attention to, and hopefully discourage, poorly written, redundant or crude passages of a sexual nature in fiction." In this same spirit, perhaps someone ought to inaugurate a Bad God Award. For like good writing about sex, good writing about God is especially tricky - and for similar reasons. The connection here is how we represent the most intimate things in our lives. For our relationship with God is always deeply personal in so far as it draws in all our complex, messy and dysfunctional reality as human beings. The idea this can be simply a matter of breezy self-disclosure is often plain embarrassing. And indeed, those believers who constantly go on about their relationship with God often make me cringe in just the same way that people do who want to talk too much about their own sex lives. With writing about sex and with writing about God, less is always more. In his great work of analytic philosophy, the Tractatus, Ludwig Wittgenstein makes a celebrated distinction between what can be said and what can only be shown. Facts about the world can be said, stated as propositions. Everything else can only be shown. In Wittgenstein's terms: a great deal can be said about sex and our relationship with God - but only when these things are reduced to matters of mere technique, to the mechanics. However, the emotional and spiritual reality of both means that this reduction to technique is always a narrowing and an impoverishment. A fuller truth about sex and about God can only be shown, hinted at, revealed sideways, seen out of the corner of the eye. The erotic and the spiritual are at their most compelling when they are simply glimpsed. Perhaps this is why both God and sex make much more sense in poetry than in prose. Of course, Wittgenstein famously ended his Tractatus with the words: "Whereof one cannot speak, one must pass over in silence." And I can quite understand those who want to apply precisely this logic to writing about sex and about God. Martin Amis may be one of them. But this won't quite do. For desire - whether of God or of another - is such fundamental part of our lives that writers cannot avoid trying to explore it in their work, even if the attempt to do so looks impossible from the very start. In the words of that extraordinary monk Thomas Merton, writers are called to make "raids on the unspeakable." And if these raids fail or win awards for foolishness, so be it. There remains a nobility in the very attempt itself. |
| copyright 2010 BBC |
