Human sexuality makes farcical our most serious intentions

The expression “Human sexuality makes farcical our most serious intentions” is T. S. Garp’s compact account of the comic disruption that sexuality brings to serious purposes. It emerges from his defense of a novel about marriage whose reviewers struggled to decide what its treatment of sex meant.

Context and Formulation

Garp’s novel, Second Wind of the Cuckold, prompted reviewers to debate its supposed thesis. One reviewer found a contradiction in the impression that sexual relationships profoundly reveal people to themselves even as, within those relationships, people seem to lose whatever profundity they possessed. The phrase gives that tension a comic formulation: sexuality does not simply disclose character; it can also derail people’s serious intentions.

Garp’s Account of the Novel

Garp rejected the idea that he had set out to prove a thesis. In a grumpy response to an interviewer, he described the book as “a serious comedy about marriage, but a sexual farce.” He later wrote that “human sexuality makes farcical our most serious intentions.” The later formulation shifts from a label for the novel’s genre to a broader observation about sexuality’s capacity to unsettle solemn purposes, while retaining the collision between seriousness and farce.

Reception and Irony

The expression belongs to a dispute in which reviewers variously called the book brilliant or dumb and debated whether its sexual material disclosed truth or undermined it. Their interpretations did not translate into commercial success: Second Wind of the Cuckold sold a few thousand copies fewer than Garp’s Procrastination. Although his editor, John Wolf, reassured him that second novels often sold less, Garp felt for the first time that he had failed. The phrase therefore sits beside an irony the novel’s reception made tangible: an account of the comic failure of serious intentions came from a book whose serious ambitions did not secure success.