Strangers in the Night: Sexual Encounters in Religious and Secular Texts

ZVI JAGENDORF Strangers in the Night: Sexual Encounters in Religious and Secular Texts Eros is too much with us. Sex and all its temptations display themselves in print and in image, in all the media of communication. It is an endless subject of discussion in every kind of journalism, a phenomenon to be analysed and measured in a number of real and pseudo sciences, while in contemporary works of the imagination lovemaking is a conventional topos which writers must struggle with rather in the manner of would-be epic poets describing a storm or a suit of armour. We know that the contemporary imaginative writer's total freedom to treat of sex and to train the full light of his imagination on lovers in the act yields very little in the way of discovery. The detailed description of sex in serious writing, let alone the mass of junk, popular fiction, and pornography , is often embarrassingly stereotypical, tied as it is to the all too familiar geography of the erogenous zones and the ultimate physical sameness of most human beings. In a similar way, the contemporary writer's freedom to enter into the minds of lovers making love has not produced undiscovered worlds of consciousness but has reminded us that the era of democratic, guiltless sex is also one of banal mental activity in the bedroom. Ifa result ofourfreedom has been to attenuate and render banal the vocabulary of lovemaking, the reticence of earlier texts can be doubly appreciated for the creation of resonance and a space for interpretation around an act which, like the violent deed in a Greek tragedy, may never be shown though its consequences may be contemplated through the contrasted awarenesses of observers and participators . Between the opposing poles of the carnal deed itself and the activity of mind and spirit which envelops it there is an essential incompatibility which, when seized upon by the imagination, yields a wealth of insight into the different sexual roles of men and women, differences which disturb sexual union while making it possible. This difference is perhaps most apparent in Genesis where its original discovery complicates things in Eden and offers an ironic frame for the reversals of role in ensuing scenes of sexual deception. This reversal of the original Hebraic insight 'man knows woman' is taken in this study as an archetypal situation which sets out the contrasts and ironies of the encounter and against which later, fuller versions of the sexual tangle may be measured. UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 53. NUMBER 2, WINTER 198Y 4 I A certain kind ofsexual encounter recurs in literature from biblical times to the eighteenth century, when its inherent improbability to a better lit and more rationalistic world led to its fall from fashion as a convention of sexual and romantic adventure. The confusion of partners in the act of love, mistakes or errors involving sex, trickery and duping in bed, fill the pages of countless fabliaux, tales, ballads, and plays, from Jacob's wedding night to the conventional bed-trickery of Elizabethan and Jacobean comedy and tragicomedy. Although it might at first glance seem an inherently far-fetched and untypical situation which modern audiences of Measure for Measure, All's Well, and The Changeling often greet with weary familiarity, a closerlook at its implications will show that it strikesat the heart of our imagination of sexuality. The hoary old trick embodies a charge of fear and desire that is COmmon to all men and may be taken as an epitome of one of the many faces of our sexual life. In modern times, though the error in the dark no longer seems possible realistically, its psychological connotations are part of our sexual consciousness . We may not accept the likelihood of a man being blindenough not to know his partner in bed, but we do know it to be possible that while making love the lover is imagining his partner to be someone else. Indeed, various therapists of sexual malaise encourage us to create such fantasysubstitutes out of our workaday mates in order that the sluggish body should catch fire from the lust of the mind. It is the interplay of mental image...