What’s wrong with the “over-stiff part”? Martin Walser, 2018
Photo: dpa
When she feels his swelling masculinity through the thin wool material of her skirt, when fire is kindled in loins, when a soft moan or a strangled sound rises from throats, when a hot throb or a gentle tremor is felt between the legs, when one feels greedy or rosy buds stand up and wait for caresses, when either sea blue or deep dark eyes glow and hearts begin to race, when full rosy lips open and hot mouths are pressed together or greedily taken over, when hands are pushed under blouses, sliding between thighs or enclosing hard shafts, then we are without a doubt in the realm of the trivial novel.
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We know this kind of literature in which erotic encounters are only described in a fussy and standardized form and in which a gender image from the Stone Age lives happily on. Pompousness, platitudes and phrases are among the components that make up an average dime novel of the commercially available variety.
On the other hand, let us look at an excerpt from a prose work by a great poet, the Büchner and Peace Prize winner Martin Walser, who is still considered one of the most important German-language writers of the post-war period, if not of the 20th century. Walser, in contrast to the schmonzette smears quoted at the beginning, knew how to write in order to make the reader’s blood rush from his head to his abdomen, and yet he still produced great art with a linguistic reflex. In his novel “Angstblüte” (2006), for example, he cleverly put into words how the protagonist’s sexual arousal manifests itself not only as a difficult body temperature problem, but also as a previously unknown variant of ego dissociation, in which disturbing ways that are as mysterious as… Indescribable things happen to the sexual system: “He noticed how heat accumulated in the lower middle, how heat flowed together, how the genitals began to differ from its surroundings.”
This is of course great poetry. What is the inflationary “shaft” and the inevitable “pleasure grotto” in so-called pulp magazines and backstairs novels becomes, in Walser, the “lower middle”, both evangelical and subtle. The professional Walser leaves out the mysterious way in which the “genital part,” which the writer is careful not to specify in more detail, begins to “distinguish itself from its surroundings.” As always, it is the suggestion, the omission, the unspoken thing that triggers sexual excitement in the reader.
Malevolent voices claim that the passage quoted above sounds as if the protagonist had just shit his pants. But anyone who talks like that only shows that they have never dealt with high literary eroticism. However, the passage, as artfully composed as it is, seems somehow familiar when we read it. And we actually remember after a while! In his novel “The Moment of Love” (2004), Walser’s protagonist (who of course has a different name here) had to struggle with a similarly delicate problem: “He felt heat collecting in the lower middle. She literally flowed together. The muscles swelled. His genitals wanted to draw attention to himself. Apart from him, nothing should be noticeable anymore. The pleasant pain of the overly stiff part. Finally again. He felt like procreating.”
Already here, in the version published two years previously, the poet shows an astonishing mastery in describing the most delicate emotions in the complex cosmos of male sexuality. It is above all the hidden hints and subtle nuances that arouse the reader’s sense of pleasure and desire: “overly stiff part” – Ovid, Boccaccio and Nabokov can’t keep up with that!
Rarely in world literature have the most subtle sexual feelings of men been so – let’s say: expertly – translated into modern erotic literature that does not use any linguistic clichés: “His genitals wanted to draw attention to himself.” A true poet couldn’t say it better.
I’m not sure whether, for the sake of a better future, all erotic literature should be scrapped and replaced by the works of Martin Walser. Oh well. Hmmm. Maybe let’s think about it again. In any case, one thing is certain: an admittedly rather robust but crystal-clear Walser sentence like “He felt like procreating” makes us sharper than something like this: “His gnarled love scepter protruded boldly from between his thighs.”
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