“Physical love is unthinkable without violence,” Milan Kundera wrote in “The Unbearable Lightness of Being.” Some of the most essential recent fiction has surveyed the pain and pleasure of being on the receiving end of violent physical expression. There’s been a lot to absorb about submission.

In Sally Rooney’s impeccable novels, women yearn to be tied or beaten or choked or otherwise degraded; for intricate reasons, they feel they deserve no better. Marianne, in Rooney’s “Normal People,” desires to be “subjugated and in a way broken.”

The intensities of submission are a theme in Ocean Vuong’s novel, “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.” There’s a hair-pulling and hair-raising sex scene. The participants recognize something feral in each other. One thinks, “This is how we were going to do it from now on.” In Alan Hollinghurst’s recent novel “The Sparsholt Affair,” sex gives way to commentary about “the slight invalidish luxury of having been had.”

These are hardly new themes, in literature or anywhere else. In Toni Morrison’s “Sula,” to pick just one example, the protagonist “went to bed with men as frequently as she could” because “it was the only place where she could find what she was looking for: misery and the ability to feel deep sorrow.”