/On a Grammatology of Fucking
Article by Chelsea G. Summers
Peter Greenaway’s The Pillow Book may be one of the sexiest—and one of the most annoying—films ever made, but it is certainly the most illustrative of the tangled nature of words and fucking. The film revolves around the complicated needs of humans to put their sexual desires into language, a need most gorgeously expressed by the lead character Nagiku, played by Vivian Wu, who gives voice to her sexuality by painting text onto the flesh of her lover, Jerome. Jerome, played by Ewan MacGregor, reciprocates, and love—slowly, beautifully, complicatedly and tragically—is made.
I admit my interest in the intersection of fucking and language is a particularly personal, as well as a professional, one. As a writer of erotica, I’ve made some small renown in my ability to put into words the naughty, sweaty, drippy, suctiony, friction sensations that my body has experienced (or wants to experience, or can imagine experiencing). I have sat at my computer staring at that accusatory cursor wracking my fecund brain to come up with a phrase, a clause, a word that embodies that sweet rolling limbic front that swells and pink-presses just prior to orgasm. I’ve struggled to come up with words perfectly evocative of the thrilling thrall of a kinetic, velvet-steel cock. I’ve worked hard to sidestep words and phrases rubbed threadbare with gang-bangy overuse: wet, hard, juicy, slick, thick or some combination thereof. I have suffered an interior quailing at sex terms too twee (pussy, joystick, love nubbin, sweater puppy) and those too crass (cum comes to mind). I have groped for words that stand up to the sexytime experience. I have often failed, sometimes succeeded, but mostly what I’ve learned is that is there’s nothing so much like fucking as grammar.
Grammar is more than the rules of a language; it’s an infinite array of choices for you to express yourself. One person may look at a grammar handbook and see a dry collection of rules about commas and colons. I look at a grammar handbook, and I see the Kama Sutra of language: an endless number of ways to configure syntactical bodies. Grammar is to me extraordinarily exciting (though not exciting in and of itself; grammar is a fetish, if some of Dan Savage’s podcasts are to be believed—see Savage Lovecast for 1/8/08 and 1/22/08), but grammar is exciting because I like restraints. Without grammar language is chaos. Without a bit of role play sex is vanilla. Both chaos and vanilla bore me.
Grammar’s sexiness is apparent in names like “dangling participle,” “split infinitive” and “comma splice.” When talking about intrinsically sexy grammatical terms, the restrictive clause comes to mind. A restrictive clause is a clause that’s necessary to a sentence; without it, the sentence lacks sense. Conversely, a non-restrictive clause isn’t necessary to a sentence; it can be tossed to the side like spent condom, and nothing gets lost. Here’s the kicker: a restrictive clause doesn’t have any punctuation, but the non-restrictive clause gets commas on either side of it, like two little pieces of bondage tape, to show exactly how expendable it is.
Let me give you an example, a sentence that I’m going to use twice but in two different contexts. Here’s the sentence: The man who had an adamantine cock waved at me. In that sentence the crucial clause is “who had an adamantine cock,” for I’ll use it both as a restrictive clause and a non-restrictive clause.
Here are the two contexts:
In the first example the lack of commas shows that “who had an adamantine cock” is essential. It tells the reader which of the two men waved at me; presumably the man who didn’t wave didn’t have an adamantine cock. Maybe his was flaccid, ductile or prehensile. The clause in that first pair must be present; in the second pair, however, the clause isn’t necessary. Toss it to the side and the pair still makes sense. The lack of commas in the first pair tells us the clause was restrictive in that it restricts the meaning of the sentence. The commas in the second pair tell us that it doesn’t restrict anything. It’s free to wander.
Our sentence may be caught in the sweet grey matter of another’s head; our sweet pink matter may grasp a cock or a finger and hold it tight and squelchy as a toddler’s fist.
Grammar is more than the rules of a language; it’s an infinite array of choices for you to express yourself. One person may look at a grammar handbook and see a dry collection of rules about commas and colons. I look at a grammar handbook, and I see the Kama Sutra of language: an endless number of ways to configure syntactical bodies. Grammar is to me extraordinarily exciting (though not exciting in and of itself; grammar is a fetish, if some of Dan Savage’s podcasts are to be believed—see Savage Lovecast for 1/8/08 and 1/22/08), but grammar is exciting because I like restraints. Without grammar language is chaos. Without a bit of role play sex is vanilla. Both chaos and vanilla bore me.
Grammar’s sexiness is apparent in names like “dangling participle,” “split infinitive” and “comma splice.” When talking about intrinsically sexy grammatical terms, the restrictive clause comes to mind. A restrictive clause is a clause that’s necessary to a sentence; without it, the sentence lacks sense. Conversely, a non-restrictive clause isn’t necessary to a sentence; it can be tossed to the side like spent condom, and nothing gets lost. Here’s the kicker: a restrictive clause doesn’t have any punctuation, but the non-restrictive clause gets commas on either side of it, like two little pieces of bondage tape, to show exactly how expendable it is.
Let me give you an example, a sentence that I’m going to use twice but in two different contexts. Here’s the sentence: The man who had an adamantine cock waved at me. In that sentence the crucial clause is “who had an adamantine cock,” for I’ll use it both as a restrictive clause and a non-restrictive clause.
Here are the two contexts:
1) Two men were at the orgy.
The man who had an adamantine cock waved at me.
2) A man was at the orgy.
The man, who had an adamantine cock, waved at me.
In the first example the lack of commas shows that “who had an adamantine cock” is essential. It tells the reader which of the two men waved at me; presumably the man who didn’t wave didn’t have an adamantine cock. Maybe his was flaccid, ductile or prehensile. The clause in that first pair must be present; in the second pair, however, the clause isn’t necessary. Toss it to the side and the pair still makes sense. The lack of commas in the first pair tells us the clause was restrictive in that it restricts the meaning of the sentence. The commas in the second pair tell us that it doesn’t restrict anything. It’s free to wander.
Film still from Peter Greenaway's 'The Pillow Book'
I find that distinction incredibly hot-making. It’s like playing bondage without ropes, that game where you kneel against your headboard and grip the white metal stands of your bed and don’t move, even though you could. It’s psychic bondage, a test of wills, a squelchy world of possibilities that you reject through sheer will and abject submission.
Grammar is a long and tortuous road of power struggles. Let the passive voice syntax be considered. The recipient of the action is privileged in the passive voice; the primacy of the actor is overturned. An example to be pondered:
Each of those sentences takes the form of passive voice. If it had been active, it would have read thusly: First he methodically stripped her body of all clothing but her thigh-highs and boots. He tied a blindfold around her eyes and led her to an upholstered ottoman. Gently he pushed her to her knees; firmly he guided her body so that she covered the ottoman… and so forth. In a word, yawn. In this particular example, his experience is less interesting than hers. The submissive woman’s takes precedence, and therefore the customary active syntax gets reversed. If there’s one syntax that tops from the bottom, passive voice is it.
I suppose I’m drawn to the rules of language for the same reasons that I’m drawn to sex that has ropes, blindfolds, the sting of floggers and the sweet smell of submission. I like rules because I like to break them. I like structure because I enjoy subverting it. I like structure, and structure is narrative, and just as I pretty much abhor free-form poetry, I pretty much abhor lyrical fucking, that rose-petal-strewn-bed, Sarah McLaughlin saccharine flavor lovemaking—that kind of sex that abides by conventional Hallmark syntax and doesn't allow for nips, bites, wicked attenuations, or short declarative sentences of pneumatic fucking.
I like some DeLillo fucking. Self-referential, meta-sex expressed in tidy syntax like a parade of carefully shorn terriers. I see the beauty of Woolf foreplay, a long and languid descriptive frottage where the infinitesimal movement of one saltshaker can be laded with meaning. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single woman in possession of a good libido should be in want of Austen necking. I like discursive sex, narrative sex, argumentative sex, and expositive sex. I like my fucking to be bigger than a greeting card and a lot more memorable.
But I suspect that more than finding a common love in the rules of grammar and the rules of sex the thing that most captures my mind is how ultimately fruitless both endeavors are. We communicate so that we will be heard and understood and so that we won’t feel so isolated in this world. We fuck so that we will be felt and validated and so that we won’t feel so isolated in this world. At the end of the day, at the end of spitting out reams of twisted beautiful sentences and at the end of fucking great swaths of lovers small and great, we are always, ever, alone. We are only rarely understood, rarely felt, and rarely in company.
Our sentence may be caught in the sweet grey matter of another’s head; our sweet pink matter may grasp a cock or a finger and hold it tight and squelchy as a toddler’s fist. Still, we are alone.
But the beauty is that this futility doesn’t stop us. We may be restrained by our own humanity, and in the prisons of our own flesh, but we reach out, and we reach out, and we are reached, and we touch in language and in flesh and if we’re very, very lucky, in both, and occasionally we meet in bright hot white-pink seismic flashes and we feel blessed indeed.
You speak my language. You get me, and as I lie under you, around you, writhing like Joycean syntax below you, we get each other, briefly, painfully and sweetly.
Grammar is a long and tortuous road of power struggles. Let the passive voice syntax be considered. The recipient of the action is privileged in the passive voice; the primacy of the actor is overturned. An example to be pondered:
First, her body was methodically stripped of all clothing but her thigh-highs and boots. A blindfold was tied around her eyes, and she was led to an upholstered ottoman. Gently, she was pushed to her knees; firmly, her body was guided so that the ottoman was covered by it. Her knees were prised apart. Her breath was hushed; something—anything, something—was expected. A swoosh, a smack, a hot pink explosion on her ass: her expectation was fulfilled.
Each of those sentences takes the form of passive voice. If it had been active, it would have read thusly: First he methodically stripped her body of all clothing but her thigh-highs and boots. He tied a blindfold around her eyes and led her to an upholstered ottoman. Gently he pushed her to her knees; firmly he guided her body so that she covered the ottoman… and so forth. In a word, yawn. In this particular example, his experience is less interesting than hers. The submissive woman’s takes precedence, and therefore the customary active syntax gets reversed. If there’s one syntax that tops from the bottom, passive voice is it.
I suppose I’m drawn to the rules of language for the same reasons that I’m drawn to sex that has ropes, blindfolds, the sting of floggers and the sweet smell of submission. I like rules because I like to break them. I like structure because I enjoy subverting it. I like structure, and structure is narrative, and just as I pretty much abhor free-form poetry, I pretty much abhor lyrical fucking, that rose-petal-strewn-bed, Sarah McLaughlin saccharine flavor lovemaking—that kind of sex that abides by conventional Hallmark syntax and doesn't allow for nips, bites, wicked attenuations, or short declarative sentences of pneumatic fucking.
I like some DeLillo fucking. Self-referential, meta-sex expressed in tidy syntax like a parade of carefully shorn terriers. I see the beauty of Woolf foreplay, a long and languid descriptive frottage where the infinitesimal movement of one saltshaker can be laded with meaning. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single woman in possession of a good libido should be in want of Austen necking. I like discursive sex, narrative sex, argumentative sex, and expositive sex. I like my fucking to be bigger than a greeting card and a lot more memorable.
But I suspect that more than finding a common love in the rules of grammar and the rules of sex the thing that most captures my mind is how ultimately fruitless both endeavors are. We communicate so that we will be heard and understood and so that we won’t feel so isolated in this world. We fuck so that we will be felt and validated and so that we won’t feel so isolated in this world. At the end of the day, at the end of spitting out reams of twisted beautiful sentences and at the end of fucking great swaths of lovers small and great, we are always, ever, alone. We are only rarely understood, rarely felt, and rarely in company.
Our sentence may be caught in the sweet grey matter of another’s head; our sweet pink matter may grasp a cock or a finger and hold it tight and squelchy as a toddler’s fist. Still, we are alone.
But the beauty is that this futility doesn’t stop us. We may be restrained by our own humanity, and in the prisons of our own flesh, but we reach out, and we reach out, and we are reached, and we touch in language and in flesh and if we’re very, very lucky, in both, and occasionally we meet in bright hot white-pink seismic flashes and we feel blessed indeed.
You speak my language. You get me, and as I lie under you, around you, writhing like Joycean syntax below you, we get each other, briefly, painfully and sweetly.
- 12/01/2009
