I'M pessimistic about sex.
You're pessimistic about sex. So, I believe, are he and she. Looks like
we're on to something here, perhaps the beginnings of a new declension.
If so, Lawrence Osborne has every right to be considered as one of our
grammarians. He's up there at the head of the class striding back and
forth, and giving every little member a thwack with his Quelching cane,
should any of us threaten to get overexcited.
In
this schematic yet discursive essay, Osborne takes us from the Desert
Fathers to the Orgone Box and back again on a round trip of sensual
mordancy. He kicks off by pinpointing the moment at which Western
culture somewhat mysteriously decided: 'Hey] Two for the price of one:
sex and death]' From there on, whether it be the dissection of the
vagina or the putative endowment of Old Nick, everything is grist to
his eschatological mill.
This is all very well, and Osborne is
never less than entertaining. He has wisely eschewed the missionary
position commonly adopted by writers on this subject (in which they lay
their intellect down on top and then hammer away) for a more
insinuating, snaky, Foucaultesque approach. Following this kinky French
manual, he has hit upon a coital quadrille for eight archetypal
partners. Each section of the book takes its title from one of these,
ranging from the virgin and the witch, on through the Jew and the leper
to the noble savage, the Don Juan, the Oriental and the androgyne.
The
trouble with this is that it is difficult, with such a protean
complement, to make out who's having who. There's so much
transmogrification going on, what with virgins coming out of serpents
and syphilitic Jews being flayed away to reveal stripling
hermaphrodites, that the impression is of the collective sexual psyche
as a mimetic realm capable of shaping itself to the most extravagant
imaginings.
This isn't at all what Osborne wants. He wishes us
(like others before him) to see the Christian era as merely another
polyp-Gestalt thrown off by the efflorescing body of Eros / Thanatos as
it advances, virus-like, through human history. In this he is assisted
by a traditional (and one-sided) view of the relationship between
Gnosticism and Christianity. On Osborne's reading, Gnosticism is the
veritable black rod of sexual history, brutally deflowering whatever
chance Western culture ever had of having fun in having sex, leaving us
spent and gnawed at by a world-historic case of tristesse.
But
Osborne is too honest (and too anecdotal) to let this stand unopposed.
Instead, just as the penis can be read as an exteriorisation of the
vagina, so, according to him, Christianity itself is the 'outsie' for
Gnosticism's lurking 'insie'. What goes around comes around and even
the heady sexual optimism of Wilhelm Reich, who viewed the orgasm as a
global panacea, a cure for cancer and a solution to war, is unveiled by
Osborne as a deracination
of our fundamental corporeal being.
If
it sounds as though this book is a victim of its own intellectual
fancy- pantsery, that's because at a certain level it is. However,
reading it as an assortment of oddments, a wry collection of
perspectives on the voracious beast that lies between our legs, The
Poisoned Embrace is enthralling and impelling. Particularly fine are
Osborne's discussion of sexual demonology and his overview of the
corrupt Western ejaculation into the Occident and the New World.
The
curious omission of any discussion of the impact of Freud, or of the
character of the late-20th-century sexual revolution (and the
subsequent reaction to it), can be explained less by Osborne wishing to
press everything into conformity with his thesis than by the millennial
perspective he has taken. 'Come now,' he always seems to be reminding
us, 'sex is miserable enough already, without having to bring the
modern age into it.'
