| You've coined a word, "sexistential",
with this new book. What does it mean? |
| First of all, this is primarily
an existential book. Cordell, the protagonist, is looking
for meaning in his life. Who am I? What am I? Why live?
These are very basic questions. And the path that Cordell
takes to find that meaning is a path of sexuality. Camus's
The Stranger is probably my favorite novel. As far as
I'm concerned it's a very similar book, about a guy who
is set free by events and goes looking for himself through
the act of sex. |
| What was the greatest challenge
for you in writing erotica for the first time? |
| It actually wasn't the first time;
there's erotica and sexual scenes in all my novels, and
beyond that, there's an understanding of how human sexuality
presses forward dramatic action in the world. |
| But this is the first time
you've written a novel with graphic sexuality. |
| Some people have described the book
as pornographic, but I didn't set out to write a book
primarily to arouse the reader. My intent was to portray
a very literal world of sexuality and to write about sex
in a very straightforward way: it's actually an anti-erotic
and therefore anti-pornographic view of sex. Many of the
things Cordell does and experiences he doesn't enjoy,
and wouldn't necessarily be enjoyable to someone reading
it. My point is to talk about the obsession and compulsion
of sexuality in our contemporary alienated society. If
people get excited about reading it, I would consider
that a side-effect. |
| The sex is written about
in the first person, from a man's perspective--something
few male writers do. Was this deliberate? |
|
Absolutely, and more specifically it's written from
a heterosexual man's perspective, a heterosexual man
in a pansexual world. I wanted to convey not how dominant
he is sexually but how he feels on the inside: all of
his fears, his loss of control, and his desire to understand
his pain.
Maybe there are other writers writing from the same
perspective, but they're certainly not well-known. Henry
Miller did it, but he was using sex to shock people
into seeing a world they lived in but denied, which
is partially what I'm doing but not completely. There's
a certain amount of sensuality missing from Tropic of
Cancer (though that's not a criticism of the book).
|
| It's also written from the
perspective of a black man. |
| I think it's one of the few books
that delves deeply into the issue of black male sexuality,
one of the most threatening issues in America, and hence
rarely talked or written about. The idea that Cordell
is having all this sex is disturbing especially because
he's not particularly handsome, so there's no excuse for
it. But I'm also trying to write make black men normal:
we have midlife crises, we have boring sex most of the
time, and the white guy often gets our girlfriend. |
| How do you think a man's
self-exploration through sex differs from a woman's? |
| In today's culture, a man finding
himself through his sexuality is almost an untapped resource,
so it's hard to say. Women so often are finding themselves
through sex-in literature, in film-that we have a much
clearer idea of what it means to them. Men are much shyer
about their sensual excitations than are women, and keep
a tighter rein on it. |
| This is also a book about
a mid-life crisis. |
| That's really the plot: it's about
a man having a mid-life crisis. One of things that's really
important is the connection between existential angst
and midlife crisis. There's a moment in life when everything
is possible and there's no end in sight, when you don't
ask yourself, has my life had meaning, is there meaning
to life. And then there's a moment when you become aware
of your mortality. This is the mid-life crisis and thought
it's not necessarily an existential dilemma there's a
resonance between the two and they might unite. There
are parts of the novel that aren't about sex, they're
about existentialism. |
| Do you think that you can
write graphically about sex and it's still literature? |
| Absolutely. Writing about any kind
of extreme physical experience or physiological violence
is part of our legacy as human beings and not only can
it be but lit it has to be literature. Two favorite books
come to mind: one, All Quiet on the Western Front which
has extraordinarily graphic violence, especially for the
time in which it was written, about what war is like;
second, Night by Elie Wiesel which goes very explicitly
into the horrors and terrors of the concentration camp.
When you write graphically about the experiences of the
human body, it's so disturbing to people because they
know the possibility or have experienced it but they'd
rather deny it or marginalize it. People try and keep
art that's graphic out of a literary vein, because acknowledging
it as literature means accepting that this is how our
world works, and that's problematic for many people. |
