Free The Art of Intimacy by Stacey D'Erasmo

have led Gornick to dismiss the whole topic for art, for everyone, forever. Her idea that “many of us” have realized “the larger truth” that love is nostalgia is so sour and narcissistic as to be absurd. Gornick’s stance saddens me, because it sacks love as a Great Theme on account of its inability, apparently, to deliver freedom and a bigger self; to, in other words, produce the ideals of the Enlightenment in individuals. Gornick has never, apparently, considered the possibility that this Western construct of the past few centuries might be as contingent and partial as any other construct. Instead, she blames love for being unable to measure up.
    Gornick’s argument does, however, inadvertently point to a different dilemma, which is the ubiquitousness, the cheapness even, of intimacy as a modern ideal. If intimacy were a person, he or she might be tired, dragged in as s/he is to glue together every sagging plot, every movie at the movieplex, every self-help book ever written, every conversation (overheard on the subway: “I know he wants to call, so I’m giving him that space”), every commercial, and many works of literary fiction. A particularly modern, faux-sincere, kitsch intimacy sells everything from afternoon talk shows to pictures on Instagram to Facebook’s endlessly mined personal information, so glittering to retailers. We are continually willing to buy access to some inner zone or other, to the truth, the inside story, the “unretouched photo.” But as Charles Baxter has put it, “Intimacy suggests a possibly sexualized, private, almost sacred location or space, a closeness that not everyone can share. ” To which the average marketer might reply, “So you mean a limited edition kind of thing?” In this climate, intimacy could not be faulted for wanting to take a damn rest. And it’s a bit suspicious, this reliance on intimacy as the sine qua non of human existence, it’s a bit, well, thin. That’s what we’re down to, here in the third millennium? Spiritual enlightenment, transcendence, courage, ethics, what language is, the collective good, and, for that matter, the existence of evil: when did they become chopped liver?
    I suppose we could blame modernism for making those categories so problematic that all we have left to talk about with any seriousness is human connection and its vicissitudes. And yet what we talk about when we talk about intimacy in literature is, very often, how it isn’t working out, a condition we tend to agree is sad. This is the problematic truism of writing fiction today, if nothing else: the reader does not have to be convinced that intimacy matters, that intimacy always suffices for what we call the “stakes” of a story. It’s not that we all necessarily believe without exception in love as salvation or enlightenment, but we do believe without too much doubt that characters believe in it; as motivation, it works. (The only thing it might be compared to in this regard is money, but that’s an essay for another day.) We do not question the assumption that people want to get closer to one another, that they will move heaven and earth in an attempt to achieve closeness, and that they will grieve mightily for the loss of that closeness. One cannot, as a writer, place patriotism at the center of a novel without shoring it up and explaining it quite a bit; ditto spiritual belief. But intimacy—whether it’s romantic love, bonds with one’s children or one’s parents, intimacy among friends, even intimacy with objects; intimacy found or lost—is a sure thing, a state of affairs that can quickly undo a writer wishing to create art and not schlock.
    I would counter Gornick’s argument with the supposition that the dilemma the writer faces isn’t that no one believes in love since 1968, but the opposite: the idea that intimacy is a self-evident good is so omnipresent that we don’t even notice it. (I am indebted, here, to Elizabeth Povinelli’s argument to