Michèle Roberts is a one of the countries most underrated and under read writers. Her books are absorbing explorations of the human condition. Her stature and ability as a writer is comparable to that of Graham Greene and valid for several reasons. Her ‘entertainments’ as Greene dismissively referred to his books, are extremely well written. She has experimented both in form and content over the years and has been original in both. She has been a passionate writer and a crusader of social and political causes, controversial and confrontational. And like Greene, her Catholic education and upbringing informs a lot of her work. She is a writer who seems to have been side-lined in an age of ‘chick lit’ and trendy gender posturing.
Some years ago she conducted a literary experiment in one of her books which was a direct attack on the reader’s senses. The unforeseen and unexpected sexual assault of a young woman is the catalyst for this experiment. She wanted the reader to experience a ‘rupture’ in the narrative and in the act of reading itself. She also wanted the reader to be shocked into a new and more meaningful relationship with her theme – here, intimacy.
For thousands of years philosophers and poets have endeavored to express the nature of intimacy. The problem is that intimacy sits astride the psyche and soma and is fully found in both. Aristotle explored intimacy as a pleasurable, useful, virtuous relationship. While accepting this, Sartre would go further and write that it was much more a romantic, passionate and sexual attachment. His philosophy gives precedence to the pleasure of the real and existential sexual act, leaving little or nothing of emotional value post coitus. Joyce, a lapsed Catholic, explored intimacy in stream of consciousness and in his characters intimate personal actions, defecating or masturbating. Unlike Sartre, Joyce frequently returns to themes of transcendence, he acknowledges and explores the abstract metaphysical world. Joyce is willing to consider the notion of intimacy beyond the grave, beyond the real. There are many examples of this in Ulysses and in particular Hamlet’s overriding obsession to revenge his father.
In her literary experiment Michèle Roberts uses the existential definition of intimacy, she uses the sexual act. The sexual act can be the moment of greatest pleasure but it is also the moment when the individual is most exposed and vulnerable to ridicule, rejection, or pain, it is the convergence of the psyche and soma, and it is where intimacy is so often thought to be at its profoundest. When her character is violated by a sexual act the reader is shocked - there is an epistemological crisis for both. The reader is shocked into a reappraisal of intimacy, but only some aspects of it, the existential.
Central to a Catholic way of life is the intimacy of prayer. Greene, a convert to Catholicism, conveys something of this intimacy in The End of the Affaire – when a promise is made in prayer to God for the safe deliverance of a lover. Prayer is also a moment of profound intimacy, intimacy with a deity. This relationship of course requires a level of faith and an understanding of the given deity. There are many problems here as it is possible for an individual to project emotions of an ‘intimate’ type on to another individual, pet, or inanimate object, in effect, one way or illusory ‘intimacy’. Those Christians that believe that God is not a concept, but a real and living God feel that through prayer they are having an intimate relationship. The theology required here depends on the claims made for the deity. An omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent God, is all powerful, all knowing and everywhere. So is there free will if God is all knowing? Why is there evil if God is all powerful? The problems here are numerous and complex.
It is perhaps unfair to expect an author to explore both existential and metaphysical aspects of a theme like intimacy from one dramatic event. Michèle Roberts’ literary experiment was indeed arresting and thought provoking; metaphorically it was a dramatic shout rather than a stage whisper. But for all that, her work was worth reading, a valuable, cliché free exploration of the rich nature of intimacy. It is lamentable that a diet of sensationalist TV soaps and ‘chick lit’ have debased an understanding of intimacy. Instant gratification in the immediate, existential sexual act seems now to equate to intimacy.
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