April 23 2012

[In my sketchy report about my trip to Viet Nam I mentioned that there were many pregnant women everywhere we went and promised an explanation. This is it: According to a local informant, the Year of the Dragon, this lunar year, is the most propitious one in which to be born, especially for boys, and so women try to achieve pregnancy at a time that will allow them to give birth in that year.]

Not long ago a friend who labors in the lawyering trade asked my opinion about adultery. Did I think, he asked, that there was as much adultery going around as one found in current fiction, or was adultery like quicksand? I wouldn’t blame you if your first thought was, “Who should know more than a lawyer?”  But then, maybe your first thought was, “Quicksand?” I went through those in that order and then asked myself, “Why is he asking me?” and “What does he mean by ‘current fiction’?”

This is what he was up to: He was asking me because he assumed that as a literature professor I spent a lot of time thinking, if not worrying, about the relationship between fiction and “truth” or “reality.” It seems he had been reading novels and New Yorker fiction for some time and had been struck by the number of these works in which adultery was situated at or near the center of everyone’s concern, if not everyone’s activity. This did not square with life as he experienced it or saw it, even as a lawyer, and the question to me was not whether it squared with my experience in life with adultery but whether it squared with my experience with literature. Or, he asked, was adultery like quicksand?

As the father of a young child, he had also spent some time not so many years ago watching television on Saturday mornings. He noticed that the cartoon adventure shows that made up so much of that programming was convention-driven, like much of popular culture. One convention, it turned out, was the ever-present threat of quicksand. Hardly a Saturday could go by without one episode in which a daring pre-teen hero or heroine would get herself stuck in deadly (always “deadly”) quicksand, followed by an episode on another channel of the exploits of yet another daring pre-teen adventurer freeing himself, or being freed, from deadly quicksand. No one ever explained what, exactly, quicksand was or why it was there, but it was omnipresent, for sure. Now suppose, he suggested, you were a member of an advanced alien race observing matters on Earth from another galaxy by monitoring what stray bits of television came your way on the extra-galactic equivalent of a Saturday morning. Among all that you might learn, one true thing should stand out: Earth was 10% water, 5% dry land, and 85% quicksand. Was not, he asked, adultery like quicksand? Was it not that medium in which New Yorker short story writers loved to enmesh their protagonists? Wouldn’t an alien of a certain age and disposition assume, every two weeks, that human relationships were 10% politics, 5% the search for weight-loss camps, and 85% adulterous?

Friend lawyer knew that the world is not awash (can one say that?) in quicksand. A few years ago a quicksand maven plotted a Google map with 100 known quicksand locations around the world; not so many considering that parking lots make up approximately 1/3 the metro footprint of American cities alone (there are 800 million parking spaces in America). While there is the occasional shooting, pepper-spraying, and/or irate-spouse-drive-over in a parking lot, these places don’t show up with anything like the frequency of quicksand as sites of mortal danger. (Actually, friend lawyer caught a “literary” convention in its waning hours when he watched Saturday morning tv. The heyday of tv and movie quicksand were the 1960s and 70s. Daniel Engber has documented quicksand’s rise and fall in this Slate piece from 2010: http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2010/08/terra_infirma.html)

But what about adultery? I’m going to posit that friend lawyer’s real concern was not for the misguided alien but for us. What are we to make of the seeming centrality of adultery in adult fiction? Do we care how many such stories there have been since the git-go? Is it the case that only Adam and Eve were successfully monogamous and every marriage after has been the steamy stuff of literature? Or are we concerned about the effect? Does, as Louise De Salvo suggests in Adultery (2010), the very act of reading about adultery make us more likely to commit it. (“To commit it.” Stop a minute and think about that phrase. We don’t say, “to perform it” or “to accomplish it,” or “to achieve it.” This is a nasty act for us. We commit it. I remember when my once-Protestant parents joined the Roman Catholic Church, my Methodist grandmother did not write to the family at large that Joe Bob and Mary Helen had “converted” to Catholicism but rather that they had “turned” Catholic.) There might be a matter for concern if we thought by assigning Madame Bovary to be read we literature professors were endangering the marriages of those in our classes so encumbered.

But I rather think the issue is with fiction’s relationship to truth. If people don’t commit adultery all that often, should the act show up in fiction all the time? You know the answer is, “Why not?” Fiction’s relationship to truth is not an aggregate/disaggregate issue. The real question, or one of the real questions, is of “why” adultery shows up so much. After all, there are plenty of things we all do all the time that aren’t situated at the center of a complex of plots and motivations for sale on Amazon in numbers too large to ignore. Next installment I am just going to explore one of several reasons we write about and read about adultery: property.