The Respite Of Reticence Amid A Cyclone Of Candor

A FAVORITE book among toddlers of my acquaintance is "Everyone Poops."

It presents an undeniable fact without embarrassment, apology or explanation. Illustrated with funny pictures of people, horses, elephants, it is intended to help babies grasp the universality of a basic life activity, with the thin hope of leading them to potty-training success.

The book's frankness is its charm, and it works for an audience in diapers. But it seems entertainments and literature for continent audiences have lost all ability to control the urge toward a similar blatancy.

We know everybody poops, yet belles-lettres treatments of the physical exertion and detailed sketches of the resulting product have become so commonplace they're edging up on cliche, though celebrity writers from William Kennedy to Paul Auster have shown dazzling talents for the subject.

And with adults it's never confined just to poop, this penchant for putting undeniable facts in the glare of klieg lights.

A note in the latest "women's issue" of The New Yorker explains that consultant Roseanne, angry feminist mogul, encouraged the magazine to publish more articles by women "in which they owned up to the scary parts of themselves."

Hence, there is an essay by writer and editor Daphne Merkin in which she confides in inescapable detail about her need to be spanked (in a very specific way) as sexual foreplay. I could have averted my eyes, but this act of revelation is too morbid to resist.

Will her editors now look upon her differently knowing she has a special place in her heart for hairbrushes? Will her neighbors, doormen, grocers think it more polite to feel her pain (perhaps assuring her "I've been there myself") or to ignore what she has revealed to a million readers?

The voyeurism is heightened by The New Yorker style itself; efforts to turn the magazine into a hipper institution have produced some unfortunate effects. Sex articles now are written in the same lofty, empathetic tone once employed on the natural history of sorghum.

The result is warmed-over prurience, with neither the force of the profane nor the cold weight of analysis. A piece such as Susan Faludi's recent 20,000-word article on the plight of male porn stars who do all the hard work without much pay has a raw, spent quality. The attempt at reportorial gravity merely causes the half-awake reader to ask: Are there no other industries in America where men are treated shabbily while women earn the big bucks?

The New Yorker is only going where others have been.

Michael Ryan received wide acclaim and respectful interviews for a memoir on his own sexual addiction. Philip Roth won the 1995 National Book Award for "Sabbath's Theater," a book about the interior life of an aging masturbator. And Martin Amis's literary blockbuster "The Information," has the casual, arty coarseness that has become the mark of serious, cultivated books.

Poor Bill Bennett. He condemns daytime talk-shows with their sweaty trailer-park confessions (e.g., "He Slept with the Babysitter"), while higher-brow writers are finding catharsis writing about similar deviancies, with predictable references, of course, to Rousseau's spanking fetish as literary model.

This ubiquity of candor may be reason why millions of unprudish adults have taken refuge in Jane Austen, a writer who rarely mentions eating, much less its natural consequences.

"Sense and Sensibility" reaps awards and millions at the box office. The lavish six-hour BBC production of "Pride and Prejudice" made Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy the toast of television. And copies of "Persuasion," Austen's chilly romance with a faded heroine, have been flying out of bookstores, aided in marketing by a fine movie.

Even those who abhor efforts to censor contemporary art are finding respite in Austen's cool bath of unacted-upon feelings and silent desires.

This is repression in full bloom, where misunderstandings are allowed to remain uncorrected and grievances go unexpressed. Nobody, thankfully, feels compelled to work it out with anybody else. Life isn't pushed, and intimacy if it comes at all is allowed to run its own course.

The virtuous characters are blessedly, faithfully impassive. Elizabeth Bennet is most loved perhaps because she is more candid than the rest and more like us. But even she appreciates the value of letting the obvious go unsaid.

OK, maybe none of this is psychologically healthy.

Maybe Fanny Price, Anne Elliot, and Elinor Dashwood should have had it out with their dotty parents, stared their sexual appetites in the eye and gone for it. Yet, the mass audiences reveling in Janemania seem to find in self-knowing reticence a sign of sanity.

Bill Bennett touches a nerve when he flogs modern art and mores, though his attempts to impose controls are clumsy. Still, it doesn't take a cultural pundit to point out that looking into someone else's toilet does not reveal infinite human variety. Unless, of course, you're a baby.

Terry Tang's column appears Friday on editorial pages of The Times.