What Wiley wants evolves from simple sexual pleasure to self-discovery: “It was the feeling she aroused in me, a feeling that was, to be honest, made up of tenderness and concern and a kind of mere affection, a brotherliness as if she were my brother, not different from me at all.”Īs Wiley identifies with Orra, she becomes his counterpart, his sibling, his co-innocent. Brodkey uses it to establish rhythm that builds towards sexual climax, and then shortens his syntax to designate withdrawal. The semicolon is the acrobat of the line – it gushes, and then withdraws, leaving us to feel the world changed by its effusion.

This cloying extravagance is amenable to risking kitsch. His semicolons implicate us in the lustrous tangling and indulgent all-at-once-ness of sex.Īs a low-status punctuation mark, more ornamental than necessary, the semicolon asserts itself aesthetically, like a gold earring or a faux mink coat.

Proust would not exist without his semicolon suave- that distinct baroque swerve of accretive syntax-nor would sex in Brodkey. Like flour and oil, semicolons thicken the mix and build stickiness when stacked they intensify the list with their rich, gooey stitch. ‘Innocence’ deploys the semicolon as texturizing agent in the paragraph. The frantic lens narrows and widens, enacting the disorienting effect of earnest sexual encounter. Like Wiley, we are mired in the tension of sexual pleasure Brodkey accomplishes this simultaneity by sexing-up the syntax, using paragraph-length sentences punctuated by nothing except semicolons drawing slow trains of commas ruptured by interjections across the page employing diction that shifts from the sensitive to the obscene and then back.

The meticulous inventory of sexual sighs, moans, and tremblings seduces the reader into the scene: we look back and forth between their faces, trying to interpret their expressions. The seamless swerve from interior monologue to omniscient description is Brodkey’s high-wire act. Pleasure and pleasing reveal their kinship, since Wiley’s desire to pleasure Orra is inseparable from his hunger to please her. “Any attempted act confers vulnerability since only she could judge it,” Wiley explains. The first-person speaker deifies Orra: she is the monument, the mystery, the god, and the court. Both the narrator and his object of desire emerge in parts, in pieces, in pleasures sought. Harold Brodkey’s barococo ‘Innocence’ portrays a college girlfriend, Orra, as seen by her lover, Wiley.

Innocence harold brodkey pdf