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Olds's SEX WITHOUT LOVERafeeq O. McGiveron aa Lansing Community CollegePublished online: 30 Mar 2010.

To cite this article: Rafeeq O. McGiveron (1999) Olds's SEX WITHOUT LOVE, TheExplicator, 58:1, 60-62, DOI: 10.1080/00144949909597009

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WORKS CITED

Gardner, John. On Uorul Ficrion. New York: Basic Books, 1978. Honeywell, Arthur J. “Plot in the Modern Novel.” Essentials of the Theory of Ficrion. Ed. Michael

McCarthy, Cormac. The Crossing. New York: Knopf, 1994. Trilling, Lionel. “Manners, Morals, and the Novel.” Essenriuls of the Theory of Fiction. Ed.

J. Hoffman and Patrick D. Murphy. 2nd ed. Durham: Duke UP, 1996.

Michael 1. Hoffman and Patrick D. Murphy. 2nd ed. Durham: Duke UP, 1996.

Olds’s SEX WITHOUT LOVE

Peter C. Scheponik has found that the poetry of Sharon Olds reflects “an intense struggle for love and affirmation [. . .]” (60). We see this struggle in, among other works, Olds’s 1984 poem “Sex Without Love.” Brian Sutton is correct to note in the poem “a contrast between surface approval and deeper criticism of ‘the ones who make love /without love’; a contrast between emo- tional coldness and physical heat; and a contrast between the poem’s solemn, philosophical tone and its reliance on sexually graphic puns” (177). Another very important key to understanding the tone of Olds’s intriguing yet unfortu- nately undiscussed poem is her persistent use of images of superficiality. Though the poem’s speaker claims to know “the truth” (line 22), Olds’s images of superficiality seem to suggest that the valorizing of loveless sex stems not from some noble existential angst but simply from intellectual and moral shallowness.

Those who “make love / without love” (1-2), the speaker tells us, are “Beautiful as dancers, / gliding over each other like ice skaters / over the ice” (24 ) . Sutton, however, correctly finds “something narcissistic in the perfor- mance of fine dancers and ice skaters” (p. 178). In addition, perhaps just as damning to the speaker’s intellectual and moral stature as this rather difficult- to-pinpoint narcissism, is the fact that both skating and dancing here reflect a concern with mere surfaces rather than with more meaningful interactions. The dancers, after all, seem not a partnered couple remaining in close physi- cal and mental contact but ballet performers on intersecting yet basically iso- lated trajectories. The skating simile reminds us that “the loveless sexual part- ners lack human warmth” (Sutton 178), and it also reveals an emphasis on physical-and metaphorical-surfaces. Rather than being told that the skaters skate together or perform maneuvers requiring contact and cooperation, we are told only that they glide, very likely isolated, “over” the unyielding sur- face of the ice.

Moreover, the speaker refers to sex itself as the mere contact of surfaces rather than as the interaction of solid flesh. Only once in this poem about

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sex does Olds mention any physical penetration, or contact beneath the lit- eral-and perhaps metaphorical-surface, and it is the painful image of “fingers hooked / inside each other’s bodies” (4-5). Instead, just as they are compared to those gliding “over the ice” (4), the loveless pair glide ‘‘over each other” ( 3 , emphasis added). Later the poem mentions the couple’s ‘‘joined / skin” (12-13); certainly the speaker in this grim piece would not refer to, say, joined heart or mind or soul, but it seems just as significant that she does not even refer to joined flesh or bodies. That refusal to acknowl- edge others’ physical and metaphorical depth reveals a self-absorbed shal- lowness.

Even more distancing, toward its end the poem refers to “the partner / in the bed” (21-22). hesitating now to discuss even mere surfaces. In this passage the partner is not one who penetrates or is penetrated and is not even one who touches another, as had been the case when both were “gliding over each other” (4). Instead the partner is simply in the bed, not even next to-let alone under or above-another. In this most intimate of acts, the shallow speaker seems to forget even the physical connection, revealing an intellectual and moral outlook that never looks past the surface of a person or a situation.

Those who “do not / mistake the lover for their own pleasure” (16-17), the speaker claims,

are like the great runners. They know they are alone with the road surface, the cold, the wind, the fit of their shoes, their over-all cardio- vascular health-just factors, like the partner in the bed, and not the truth, which is the single body alone in the universe against its own best time, (18-24)

Almost all of those concerns either refer to literal surfaces, such as “the road surface,” or refer to fairly superficial matters, such as “the cold, the wind / the fit of their shoes” Only the “cardio- / vascular health” is an internal matter, or one beneath the surface, but it is one of self-absorption. The speaker is shal- low not necessarily for feeling “alone in the universe” but instead for seeing only the surfaces of people and situations.

Although the speaker of Olds’s well-crafted poem appears on the surface to be a noble existentialist making the best of a meaningless world, on closer examination she is revealed as merely shallow and self-absorbed; she sees dis- connected surfaces rather than the depth and the relationships beneath. Olds reminds us that if we fail to realize that others are not simply two-dimension- al props in our own personal universes, we will miss the fact that life is made of connection, not disconnection.

-RAFEEQ 0. McGIVERON, Lansing Community College

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WORKS CITED

Olds, Sharon. "Sex Without Love." The Dead and the Living: Poems. New York: Knopf, 1984.

Scheponik, Peter C. "Olds's 'My Father Speaks to Me from the Dead."' Explicutor 57 (1998):

Sutton, Brian. "Olds's 'Sex Without Love."' Explicuror 55 (1997): 177-80.

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