The Passive Voice: An Erotic Novel
by G.C. Scott
Carroll & Graf 1996
Copyright 1995 G.C. Scott

There is a blurb on the front of the book favorably comparing this novel to Story of O. I'll get back to that later. The story takes place in England, and is about a woman in a bondage relationship, with a smidgen of S/m but with no explicit D/s. She gets tied up or chained up a lot, bound and gagged, and sometimes a little pain is applied, but she does not serve in a D/s sense. Her submission is only manifest through her willingness to be restrained, often for quite a long time, and to yield to her partner's will while under restraint. Her partner — they are not married and I hesitate to call him her Master or Dom — is named Howard, and apart from his sexual proclivities and inventiveness that's about all you get to know of him. The woman herself narrates the story, and we never learn her name (I searched for it) — but it'd be easier to write this review if she had a name so I'm going to call her ANNA.

There is very little conversation in this novel, and what little there is reveals nothing about the non-sexual psychology of the speakers. Anna does not show us how the people in her story talk to one another outside of any sexual context. We don't learn how they feel about one another or what they think of each other. This distances us from the characters, making them seem incomplete, unfinished even as fictional constructs. The story is filtered through Anna's sexual psychology: if something turns her on, or leads to or follows from something that turns her on, she tells us about it, otherwise she is silent. Her limitations as a character limit the novel. All Anna is concerned about (or concerned about telling us) is her sexual adventures. She admits as much on page 75, telling us: "This tale is about the extraordinary things we bondage freaks get up to; our everyday life is as boring as everyone else's."

That we learn so little of Howard is surprising. Apparently he matters to Anna only in what he can put her through, not for who he is aside from or in addition to that. It never seems to matter to Anna's phenomenological experience of bondage and sex that it is Howard who is involved in her physical experience rather than someone else. In this sense, Anna's sexual sensibility is narcissistic. Anna (the anonymous narrator) is a fictional person, so I find this narcissism interesting. There are three directions to go with this accusation: (1) argue against it, (2) view Anna's narcissism as a (consciously or unconsciously applied) literary device, and examine its significance and effects within the novel and upon the novel's reader, and (3) look at real bondage and sex in relation to narcissism and use any discoveries to critique the story in relation to the actual physical and psychological experience of bondage and sex. This third direction recognizes the reader's world as existing beyond the novel, compares fantasy and reality (both part of the reader's world), and raises the issue of realism in porn/erotica. I won't pursue all of these directions in this review, but there is a kernel of an idea here worth pursuing. If Anna is a narcissist, what are the implications? Is it realistic? How often does this occur in porn? Does it matter?

Pornography, being an exploration of sexual fantasy, can be unrealistic in various ways. (Is it, by its nature or purpose, always in some way unrealistic?) The three main categories in which pornography can fail to be realistic are the physical, the psychological, and the social. Physical unrealism can occur through bodies having physical traits or features bodies never or only rarely have, or exhibiting unreal abilities or properties bodies almost always never have, such as enduring what a body could not endure, performing in ways a body could not perform, or functioning in other ways a body could not or very likely would not be able to function. Psychological unrealism is more difficult to define. A character's mental life is exposed through speech, behavior, and narrative disclosure of the character's unspoken thoughts and dispositions. Psychological unrealism occurs when a character's apparent mental life as disclosed within the given context is incongruent with (what we know of) human psychology, including what we know of the complex psychological dynamics of human emotions and human sexual desire, arousal, fear, frustration, pleasure, and contentment. Social unrealism is a false portrayal of group dynamics, and is thus the extension of a failure in psychological realism. There's more to be said on that, but this will suffice.

The Passive Voice is unrealistic in all three of these ways. That needn't matter. Most fiction, probably more-than-most porn, and most literature, fails on some account to be realistic; and much fiction (literature included) is consciously designed to be unrealistic, for aesthetic and other reasons. Realism is not clearly better aesthetically than unrealism, and it is arguably far less than better. So porn and The Passive Voice are in good company. I'm not trying to make a moral point here, one way or the other. It's just that I find this division of fantasy and reality extremely fascinating. If fantasies never motivated behavior, the division would be less interesting; but they do, and since a fantasy can be either realistic or unrealistic, the distinction seems worth thinking about, if for no other reason than to guard against frustration and possibly worse through naively trying to bring an unrealistic fantasy to life.

The novel does not have a plot, and I'm almost inclined to say there are no characters. It's Anna's fault, I suppose. She's just not interested in the people she tells us about. She's only interested in their sexual adventures. And there's no plot because there is no problem anywhere to be solved. Everyone gets what they want — sex — the way they want it, when they want it. No one is reaching towards a goal beyond that. (On page 162, Anna says: "Sexual response for me is regulated mainly by energy. If I'm not too tired I respond. And I'm not too often tired. Nor do I have frequent headaches.") Anna takes us from one sexual episode to another. As I said earlier, if it's not about sex it's not in the book. Her third chapter tells the story of Hilary and Jean, a married couple (Jean is a man), and how they discovered the delights of bondage. This is an interlude to Anna's collection of tales about her own sexual escapades. The book could go on forever because there's nothing linking the experiences besides sexual associations, so there's nothing to signify the end of a story. The Passive Voice isn't, in fact, a story, because there is no plot.

To give the series of disjointed episodes a sense of forward motion, chapter six introduces preparations for a feigned marriage between Anna and Howard which takes place later in the same chapter (there are nine chapters total). Nothing in previous pages has lead us to expect this event. It shows up unannounced. In fact, until then Anna has spent more time telling us about her experiences away from Howard than with him (and it's pretty much "out of sight, out of mind" as far as Anna's thoughts on Howard go). This revised relation between Anna and Howard has no consequences. The author could have structured a plot around this "marriage" and given the book some semblance of a story, but as it stands, it's just another detachable episode in a series of episodes.

Incidentally, either chapter two or four is redundant. The same electrified bodysuit is the focus of both chapters, and only the setting and the person wearing the suit differ. Anna is at the controls in chapter two, controlling her friend Janet's experience. The second time around, Anna is inside the suit herself, with Janet and Harriet (who I mention again below) sharing control. In both events, Anna is behaving just as she wants, so the second demonstration of the suit is not a meaningful consequence — such as reward, compensation, penalty, correction, punishment or revenge — of anything that preceded it. Anna simply wants to try out the suit after seeing its effect on Janet. Realistically, it seems, the author needed another chapter and chose to recycle a scene.

A dominatrix/switch Harriet, and Anna's friend Janet, among others, are recurring characters (Anna, Janet and Harriet are the "victims" of a gang rape in chapter five) but they have no personality outside their sexual performances. No one does. This is why I say there are no characters. The psychological unrealism is so severe that character simply does not exist in the book. This compares The Passive Voice unfavorably with Story of O (I assert this without explanation). Perhaps the reviewer who made a favorable comparison with Pauline Réage's novel was thinking more of literary style. The book is well written in terms of style (however, the "complexion" and "shape" of that style are nothing like Story of O); and Anna, being the narrator, does have quite a lot of personality. She can't help it. She's written well. But she's no O, and Howard is no René, much less a Sir Stephen.

{Footnote: If Anna has "quite a lot of personality" isn't there at least one character in the book? Anna the narcissist? Let's examine this idea of her narcissism further. (I'm going to take the long way 'round here, so be forewarned.) Anna, as narrator, must narrate, i.e. she must describe situations and events. The manner in which she does this, the way in which she describes, interprets and comments upon each episode, exhibits her personality. Her exposition, then, is a disclosure. If Anna were a real person we would not hesitate to say that her narrative, and hence her disclosure, is incomplete, because more took place than she reported, and she herself is more than she exhibits in her narrative. But her rendition, we would say, is significant because it is a manifestation of psychological events occurring within her psyche during the course of her narrative's composition. Some of these psychological events are memory events, the center and apparent source of her narrative. Other psychological events occurring at the time of composition overlay and perhaps misapprehend memory, and still other psychological events underlay and influence commentary. These influences occur at the moment of composition — or recomposition, as would be the case in composing, reevaluating and editing a written narrative — and are not rigidly determined by the past physical and psychological events which are the ostensible subject of her narrative. Thus psychoanalysis. But because Anna is not a real person, her disclosure is complete. There isn't any more there. Yet, although Anna is not real, merely a construction of her self-referential narrative language, should we understand her narrative nevertheless as if she were real and so read her narrative as an incomplete disclosure? What other material could we use to further our understanding of Anna? We know nothing of her broader cultural, social or biographical circumstances, as we might learn in delving into the limitations and latent meaning of a narrative that a real person might compose about real events, because all there is to know of the fictional Anna is what we read in her narrative. Anna's report is not part of some greater autobiography implicit within a corporeal life (unless we wish to say it is a partial expression of the creative author's life). We cannot ask for further details or commentary. If Anna's sexual psychology is narcissistic, as I contend, then because her narrative is concerned only with her sexual experiences, her narcissism severely limits the expression of her "personality". And because it is not clear how to understand her disclosure as other than complete, we are trapped within her narcissism, unable to delve into the complex psychological configurations which in a real person would lie beneath it. Hence, no character.}

A nice touch in the book is the recognition that sexual thrills are not the same for everyone. There is an (otherwise unrealistic) episode about a woman who gets herself placed into bondage style rape scenes with strangers. During the telling of this woman's kink, Anna remarks how for this woman the bondage is simply part of the rape fantasy. Once the rape or series of rapes is finished her thrill is over and she has no desire to remain bound or to know the rapist (getting to know him would make him no longer a stranger, and thus not sexually interesting to her), whereas for Anna, bondage is in itself arousing, especially when it's extended, regardless of what else happens. Anna compares herself to another woman who enjoys the adventure of sexual play involving aspects of bondage outdoors, and remarks how something that turns this woman on immensely (riding a bicycle with a dildo rising from the seat while she's bound to the bike) has little effect on herself because the bondage aspect is so minimal. In fact, Anna's orgasms are always coupled to bondage.

Harriet the dominatrix (she's a squat dumpy woman, wholly against type) shows up again in the last chapter. Anna and Howard are visiting another couple. The woman, Victoria, is a masochist and for some reason Harriet is there with the husband, "training" Victoria. Anna and Howard stay to watch. Harriet is clearly the one in charge. She binds Victoria and suddenly binds Anna's hands too, without consultation with Howard, then pushes Anna over and binds her ankles. This is done with absolutely no recognition by Harriet that Howard, who I'd think would have some say in the matter, is present. The dynamics have never been established between Harriet and any of the men in this book — men who, we are given to believe, have principal control over their women, not Harriet. Nothing explains Harriet's apparent right to do as she pleases without prior consultation with Howard. It would have been easy to establish the dynamics between Harriet and the men earlier. That it wasn't done is careless and sloppy. There seems to have been no planning whatsoever in constructing this so-called novel. In the final analysis, Howard means nothing. He's just one of the several puppets who surround Anna and create the circumstances of her narcissistic pleasure.

Harriet seems wholly out of place in this book. Why would these men bring a dominatrix into their lives to "train" or otherwise dominate their women? Can't they do it themselves? Harriet is a more celebrated character in the book than the men. Where is the craft in this composition? It's all on the surface, in the language (but see my comments a few paragraphs below on the suspicious oddities of the language). To punctuate my point, when Harriet is done having fun with Victoria she tells the two men (who played no part at all in the short scene between Harriet and the women) to take her (Harriet) home and, like obedient little puppy dogs, jumping when Harriet says jump, they both silently leave with her, leaving their women Anna and Victoria bound alone in the house to finish out the chapter and the book. This makes no sense whatsoever. What was the point of including the men in this episode? They played no part. They were superfluous. Harriet and the women could have had their playtime without them. The chapter actually finishes with another tacked on episode — an account (Anna is telling us something Victoria told her) of an impalement device that Victoria's husband designed.

This is occuring in the final chapter of the book. The book does not end with Anna and Howard together or even thinking of one another. The novel began with Anna giving Howard a birthday present (her labia pierced and held closed with a padlock — the key given to Howard as a gift) which inaugurated their entire bondage lifestyle. So the book should end with some sort of recognition of that initial moment to create at least something to tie all of these disjointed episodes together — it'd be impossible to have a resolution or denouement, since you need an actual plot for that. But what we get is Anna with a woman who we didn't even know existed until 19 pages from the end of the 242 page book. The actual method of closure for the book is Anna musing on how she likes her kink, that she has no idea why she's got it, but how that's just the way it is, so she's not going to lose any sleep over it. The book ends with a self-justification against those who might disapprove of the kind of sex depicted in the book.

That raises another point. Why the felt need to justify the sex in the narrative? Anna does this in other places too, and this ties in with how throughout the book she constantly cutesy-pies around with her sexual discourse, using bouncy, humorous language rather than emotional, ardent, intense, or even vulgar speech. (She's funny and light-hearted, some readers would say.) What is she actually feeling? I keep saying this narrator is narcissistic, but does anyone actually experience sex in the kind of descriptive sense created by the language the narrator so often uses? Why speak like this? What is being hidden by this language? I contend that it is embarrassment or guilt. Why else project onto the reader a judgement against the narrator and her lifestyle that needs to be averted by a self-justification in the closing paragraph of the book? (Remember, this is what we're given for an ending rather than — what is infinitely more logical — a scene with Anna and Howard together celebrating the adventurous life they've had since Anna's gift to Howard created the very possibility of that life.) The narrator is not only narcissistic (her relation to Howard is clear evidence of this, but the entire narrative proves it), she is disassociated, within her language use, from the complexity of her experiences. This doesn't mean she wouldn't have experienced sex in a deep way, but that when it comes to talking about it (which is the function of her narrative), she gets coy and jaunty and hides behind breezy language. So Anna is interesting but she's shallow as hell. (That's an implicit contradiction if you read it one way, and it isn't if you read it the way I mean it.) There is no evidence that this book was carefully planned to create a deeply meaningful literary text. So all of this narcissism and linguistic disassociation within the (anonymous — I think that's significant) narrator arose during the composition of the book without the conscious intent of the author, which means it arose from the author's own hidden (creative) psyche. (I am not saying the author is narcissistic. Think this through with me.) I find that very interesting. The narrative reads as if it were written by a slumming academician, but certainly not an English professor — the total lack of plot argues against that. The author is clearly educated (the language is very polished), yet it seems evident within the text that the author was on some level ambivalent during the writing of this book about what was in it and about how it would be perceived by others.

If this author would learn how to plot and how to create characters, characters that make sense together in the same story, and incorporate that into porn we'd get something pretty damn good. Stylistically, on the very surface, the book is well written. But as it stands, it's nothing but an interesting failure.

G.C. Scott has written other books of porn/erotica with bondage themes. Look at online booksellers for titles. I have no idea whether this author is male or female.