"If Thy Penis Offend Thee"

 Essays on Essays Part #1: “Big Red Sun” By David Foster Wallace (Consider the Lobster, Back Bay Books, New York: 2006, 3-50).  


“If Thy Penis Offend Thee”

Originally, I thought I’d end up criticizing the ethics in David Foster Wallace’s essay “Big Red Sun,” which covers the AVN (Adult Video News) awards. And to some degree I will. But I cannot criticize his ethic of the porn industry because it is not clear to me that he has one. It seems, instead, that I am stuck carping on Wallace for something of which he seems constantly guilty: a story telling method which stifles or hides the strength or even existence of any argument. To my eyes, Wallace has the rather curious habit—at least in his essays—of taking a long time to say almost nothing.  

The perfect example appears in the first page of “Big Red Sun,” where Wallace begs men—certain self-mutilators exhausted by their own lusts—not to go through with castration or penis guillotining. “Stay your hand,” he writes, “hold off with those kitchen utensils and/or wire cutters. Because we may have found an alternative.” It’s a provocative beginning; really, it’s a provocative essay: mention of penises—or one third thereof—often has that effect. You wouldn’t want your mother to know you’ve read it.[1] But in any case, 47 pages make up the total of this essay, and yet Wallace never actually offers these men his promised alternative. I have searched the pages many times to no avail.

Of course, I grant that arguments and alternatives may be implicit to stories. Wallace, genius that he is, probably employs anecdotes in a didactic fashion all the time. But there are two reasons I disagree with this method of essay writing. The first has to do with the weakness of an ethical vocabulary in language paradigms—which I’ll get to shortly. The second is that anecdotes bypass the traditional essayist’s imposition: namely the act of assertion. It was either Frege or Pierce (I forget now) who first pointed out that the act of assertion implies a certain degree of commitment on behalf of the speaker: a willingness to defend or supply reasons for the truth of said assertion. Hence the traditional essay’s tendency to have a certain chutzpah about it;  it’s a ballsy act on behalf of the essayist. That’s why I can’t figure out why Wallace neglects the assertive balls to talk, if I may, ethically about porn balls. The two seem to hang together, as it were. The way I see it, when he opts for maundering within the narrative he opts for weakened prose.

You won’t find me guilty of the same sin—or, I guess, peccadillo.  Nor could you sensibly accuse Jesus and Freud of it—that is maundering—which is why I’ll bring them in on this discussion. Both of them have a knack for taking things to the extreme.

I often wonder, for example, what Freud would say about the fact that the porn industry has been dubbed the ‘adult’ industry. Probably he would balk at the notion, arguing that sexuality haunts us from infancy. “There’s very little adult about it,” I hear in a thick German accent. In fact, he’d probably want to say sexual sensitivity at large, whether taking the form of active prohibitions (usually religious) or commendations (like the porn industry), are a direct result of the ubiquitous sexual tension between mother and son. He is, without question, wrong concerning the universal applicability of the specifics—not to mention a bit suspect and creepy. But he is right about the ubiquity.

That is, Freud’s real insight lies with the interpretive range of sexuality, its causal connection and applicability to day to day living, how so much of human psychology and pragmatics hinges on vaginas and penises. It’s all very alarming and fantastic, for sure, but that’s what makes it important—and a bit funny too.

Is it any wonder why pornography dominates the American landscape in media, religion, and social politics? And what, by the way, is pornography if not a sexual instantiation of the easy access (pun intended) American motto? It’s flapjacks from the easy bake oven, if you know what I mean; it’s a sort of microwavable surf and turf, if you catch my drift.

But to return to the point, the classes of people with whom Freud is concerned—and who I wish to include in this essay—do not consist merely of porn industry employees, nor merely the men and men and women who purchase and partake of porn industry product. We also want to include those who repress and prohibit access to pornography because of a belief that it is immoral. In America this class usually consists of Evangelical social enterprises like ‘accountability partners,’ XXX.Church.com, purity ring seminars, and the like. I myself remember more sexual prohibitions during youth camp sermons than I remember gospel presentations. The American church (worldwide and historical) is as sexual an enterprise as any other, perhaps even moreso than most.[2]

And I think that the church’s staunch attitude toward sexuality comes from , among other things, [3]Jesus’ ethical radicalism. What, for instance, would Jesus have written had he been given the same assignment as Wallace? (For some reason an image of white Jesus wearing rimless glasses and writing on a journalist's notepad enters my mind and gives me a chuckle). If Jesus’ essay came in the form of a narrative, surely it would be a parable with a punch line, and not the empty prose or passivity of “Big Red Sun.” Surely not the spoken and articulate aloofness of, “stay your hand” without an alternative. I imagine, rather, that Jesus’ essay would consists in something near the exact opposite of what Wallace writes, something at once poignant and vulgar and shocking. Really, I see a fresh and amended Matthew 5:29-30: “If thy penis offend thee, grab thy kitchen utensils and wire cutters and saw it off”!  If we’re willing to pluck out eyes and cut off hands to join the kingdom of heaven , I see no reason why cutting of penises shouldn’t be included.

And you may dance however you like around the hermeneutics of Matthew 5:29-30. Odds are the majority of my readers (all 3 of you) haven’t done their homework, and it would be exactly that, a dance. So whether we are to take the passage literally, metaphorically, both, allegorically, as hyperbolic or quite seriously, or whatever is beside the point. Because the principle point Jesus is trying to make is true in all of these cases: immorality destroys human identity. Morality is a serious matter: the most serious of matters.  

You have to look at the vocabulary paradigm used by American (and historical) Christianity compared to class vocabularies that hide or stifle moral thought to see what I mean. [4] David Foster Wallace, as I’ve been arguing, avoids explicit moral vernacular in his essays. His language paraphernalia fostera a type of vocabulary that isn’t as much concerned with immorality as amorality, agnostic ethics, or moral ambiguity. His is not even like a Buddhist’s grammar, which generally wards off desire and then calls that warding off morality. I’m not saying that he cultivates an attitude of wretchedness; I’m saying he cultivates a type of that thinking that doesn’t think very much is wretched. It’s all tragically and obviously symptomatic of the times. Skepticism now covers the moral sphere where it belongs in the epistemic sphere,[5] truncating or atrophying the will toward action.[6] Or when an action does occur, especially sexual action, it happens to happen—it’s a matter of course, or an accidental property of high sexual tension.

So you have the dichotomy: a false one, I grant, but a useful one. Some of us are nonchalant about the porn industry and some of us are its greatest antagonists. I realize that many of us will oscillate between the two positions on a given day. But it seems to me—for reasons I have no space to express— that the good life consists in the moral life, and the moral life consists, at least in part, with a well thought out ethic concerning pornography. In other words, I am with Jesus on this one.

And tangentially, the moral life cannot consist merely in words but in deeds. “Because people to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just a matter of words too” (Faulkner). I myself do not bank on the historical fact of Jesus dying and rising again ipso facto because phenomenologists have demonstrated quite irrefutably that there is no such thing as any fact eo ipso­. It’s why ultimately I think trying to analyze the semantic dialectic between faith and works in James’ epistle ends up a futile exercise. When you exclude the epistemological claims of modern Christianity from the program, you end up with faith concomitant with action. The proposition that Jesus died and rose again, on this model, no longer causes moral action, moral action is the faith. Moral action does not demonstrate that I have belief in Christ, I am (present tense) believing in Christ while doing the good. Faith in this sphere is not assenting to a proposition in any sense of the term, but concomitant with action, every moral act one of banking on the hope that Jesus did, in fact, die and rise again—even, if not especially, where that hope is a fool’s hope.

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[1] Take for example this passage, “It is difficult to describe how it feels to gaze at living human beings whom you’ve seen perform in hard-core porn. To shake the hand of a man whose precise erectile size, angle, and vasculature are known to you. That strange I-think-we’ve-met before sensation one feels upon seeing any celebrity in the flesh is here both intensified and twisted. It feels intensely twisted to see reigning industry queen Jenna Jameson chilling out at the Vivid booth in Jordaches and a latex bustier and to know already that she has a tattoo of a right sundered valentine with the tagline HEART BREAKER on her right buttock and a tiny hairless mole just left of her anus.”

[2] Take a look, for example, at the range of sexual thought and activity within Christian history: Paul, on my reading, got stuck in the quagmire that is sexual pragmatics. Au fond  he says, “Look, if you’re a ravenous mammal, too bad for you. Hop on the sex train and get married if you must. But if not, singleness is a most excellent, nay, much better alternative.”[2] Augustine wasn’t much different, though he had the trouble of being much hornier. In Confessions  we find a chronicle of his sexual misadventure supplemented by a philosophical discussion with the Stoics tradition concerning humanity’s appetitive nature. St. Abelard, that great medieval theologian and philosopher, suffered famously for the sexual prowess of his youth, having been castrated by the father of his beloved Heloise. During the tryst he and Heloise spoke of little besides their love; later Abelard confessed his relief that sexuality no longer burdened him. John Milton, among others, believed pre-fall Adam and Eve could control their sexual impulses, literally kick-start them on command, as it were. Certain sects of Puritanism—or so I’ve been told—taught their followers how to circumvent sexual pleasure altogether, opting solely for sex’s procreative uses—a most religious and unfortunate bit of dogma, if you ask me. Ascetics, monks, priest, nuns, and many more have been and are putatively known for rejecting any sexual activity. I could go on to the point of boredom, and probably, Christianity would do well to be given a history of its sexuality.

[3] Among these things is the rabbinic tradition. The three Semitic religions, in fact,—and their respective offspring—likely account for the highest concentration on ethical awareness in the world. Something about the Adamic myth, the creation of being and its corruption through moral failure has reverberated through history.

[4]  To what degree Nietzsche is responsible for this shift in vocabulary I won’t venture a guess. Probably, I think, his project turned out just as much descriptive as prescriptive. But few would agree with me on that.

[5] I agree with the skeptics within the liberal arts tradition. The data, whatever it is, may be interpreted in any way, religious or no. We have no particular reason to be Christians or Buddhists or Atheists in any evidentialist’s sense. Our penchants and parents guide us, and neither are sufficient grounds for epistemic belief. That’s why I say quite seriously, that ‘no’ I do not know whether Jesus died and rose again. How could I? Even if I were there, on that blessed day, I could not know it wasn’t an illusion. After 7 years studying philosophy, its not clear to me that we can ever know anything in a useful sense of the term, not even differing versions of JTB theory which seemed so promising for so long work out the problem. So epistemologically, I am about as agnostic as they come. But it’s not quite so simple and easy to say that humans have the luxury of moral agnosticism. Heidegger is right to think that our throwness here—our here and nowness rather than there and theness—obliges us to be morally authentic. We are beings stuck in time, and our limitations require a type of being in the world: morality isn’t an option, it’s a state of affairs. We are either successful or unsuccessful. Where Heidegger went wrong was in thinking that empathy follows from authenticity and throwness, and that humanity can build an ethic off of it: though, certainly, much of Western society has tried. Without delving into an argument, the very language of empathy requires a tradition within which to arise and have meaning. And empathy, so far as it has meaning, has Christian meaning.

[6] I have to go with Aristotle view of akratic action on this one. People always do what they take to be the good, whether they are conscious of it or not, whether that good is explicit or temporal believed to be good, or not. What type of akratic action can agnostic morality support? Anything consistent? Authentic/? Anything at all where it does not have an operant Good besides we do not know what the Good is?