01.30.08 5:00 AM CST
• Books
• Amy Grace Loyd
We tip our hat to intern Seth Feigerman, who wrote this entire entry with using the phrase ``cunning linguist.’’ George Steiner has long been considered one of the towering intellectuals of our time. As a scholar and literary critic, he has tackled everything from crucial cultural issues to analyses of poetry and philosophy. But in his new essay collection, My Unwritten Books, Steiner explores seven subjects he never had the courage to write about during his long intellectual tenure. These seven essays cover a vast amount of academic terrain, from the plight of Jewish identity, to the theology of emptiness.
Tucked amid these dense subjects is a colorful essay on the relationship between language and sex based largely on Steiner’s own experiences as a multilingual love machine. Apparently, this busy professor has managed to have sex in four different languages. It must happen when he’s not writing his books.
Steiner begins his essay with a complaint about how pornography and popular culture are destroying the creativity of sex-talk: “What should be the most spontaneously anarchic, individually exploratory and inventive of human encounters, is to a very large degree scripted.” It is his belief that modern society now “programs” its sexual encounters in such a way that we lose all freedom in how we express ourselves before and during sex. Just think the Pick-Up Artist.
Steiner’s central thesis in this essay is that the “mechanics” of sex are the same for everyone. But culture and society ultimately impinge upon the fundamental experience of sex, reshaping it. Language may be the clearest instance of this. “We speak love as we make it, both inwardly and outwardly,” he writes. With this in mind, he describes how the sexual experience changes in each language. Having sex in French, for example, is formal because partners refer to each other with the respectful pronoun “vous.” Having sex in German, on the other hand, is “taxing.”
To support these claims, he uses his personal empirical evidence which is sometimes questionable but always entertaining. For example, he describes sleeping with a German woman who manufactured her own innuendos based on Viennese place-names. “Thus ‘taking the street car to Grinzing’ signified gentle, somewhat respectful anal access.” I suppose this is enough of a reason to conclude that sex in German is taxing.
Amid all his talk of sex in different languages, Steiner’s own sexploits are usually described in the stiffest terms: he “enters” women, “copulates” with them and after some time where he mulls over the meaning of their foreign moans, he approaches “climax.” At times one can’t help but wish Henry Miller were alive to write this essay for Steiner. Or Sartre. Still, it’s a fascinating read and may help us all to explore new ways of expressing ourselves in bed.
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