The Use and Abuse of Literature
Page 11
So “what isn’t literature?” may depend upon who is asking, and who is answering, and for what ends: institutional, social, aesthetic, and so on. As Susan Stewart observed, “the literary tradition, in rescuing a ‘folk’ tradition, can just as surely kill it off.” For example, “in order to imagine folklore, the literary community of the eighteenth century had to invent a folk, singing and dancing ‘below the level’ of ‘conscious literary art.’ ” Stewart adds, equally perceptively, that this development has hardly ceased. “The advent of modern literary scholarship, with its task of genealogy—the establishment of paternity and lines of influence—and its role in the legislation of originality and authenticity, depended upon the articulation of a ‘folk’ literature that ‘literature’ was not.”15 Meantime, the saga of the ballad continues. While one branch of this field has reconverged with the public and with performance, through folk singers, blues ballads, and the ballad traditions of America, Australia, and other geographical areas, another branch has taken on a new energy within academic work, with the founding of the English Broadside Ballad Archive at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The archive aims to make these fragile objects, often printed on cheap, degradable paper, accessible to scholars worldwide, by transcribing the black-letter font into more easily readable Roman type, and providing online audio recordings, visual facsimiles, and essays that place the ballads in a historical context. Whether any of these uses are “literary” will depend, still, on whether the ballads are being interpreted as signs of the times or as works of art.
Redeeming Social Value
Books banned as indecent, obscene, or pornographic are often remanded, at least by those who ban them, to the category of something other than literature. This has been the case with some of the most critically admired works of the twentieth century, including Joyce’s Ulysses, D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. From the point of view of critics, these were never, arguably, “not literature,” but the customs and postal authorities of the United States, Britain, France, Australia, and other nations that have at one time or another outlawed them saw the matter differently. Here again, the question of use (and of abuse) enters the equation, since one of the criteria for a ruling of obscenity has been that a work has “no redeeming social value.” In this case, it is probably unnecessary to add that abuse (whether self-abuse, child abuse, or some other kind) is sometimes suggested as the intended use, or outcome, of the reading or even the simple possession of the banned book.
Ruling in the case of United States v. One Book Called Ulysses in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York in 1933, Judge John M. Woolsey memorably declared that the book nowhere exhibited “the leer of the sensualist.”16 Defending the frequency with which sex seemed to be on the minds of Joyce’s characters, he observed drily, “it must be remembered that his locale was Celtic and his season Spring.”17 And on the question of whether reading the book led to “sexually impure and lustful thoughts,” or provoked “sex impulses,” Woolsey gave it as his opinion that although the effect of Ulysses was “undoubtedly somewhat emetic, nowhere does it tend to be an aphrodisiac,” and that its “net effect” on some readers to whom he himself had given the book was “that of a somewhat tragic and very powerful commentary on the inner lives of men and women.”18
Even to quote these phrases indicates how far we have come in accepting the aphrodisiac (and the emetic) as a commonplace effect of reading modern literature—and also how far we have come since the time when such felicitous phrases, generated on behalf of a book the judge had read and admired, would give evidence of an admirable literary style. By contrast, when the U.S. Court of Appeals reviewed Judge Woolsey’s decision, they decided in advance, since they wanted to avoid publicity, that the opinion should, if possible, contain “not a single quotable line.”19 In a foreword to the Random House edition of Ulysses, Morris Ernst, the cofounder of the American Civil Liberties Union, noted that Judge Woolsey had “written an opinion which raises him to the level of former Supreme Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes as a master of juridical prose.” But we might also want to add that he had mastered the art of the literary review and of literary criticism.
In writing “Ulysses” [Judge Woolsey’s opinion declared], Joyce sought to make a serious experiment in a new, if not wholly novel, literary genre … Joyce has attempted, it seems to me, with astonishing success—to show how the screen of consciousness with its ever-shifting kaleidoscopic impressions carries, as it were on a plastic palimpsest, not only what is in the focus of each man’s observation of the actual things about him, but also in a penumbral zone residua of past impressions, some recent and some drawn up by association from the domain of the unconscious … What he seeks to get is not unlike the result of a double or, if that is possible, a multiple exposure on a cinema screen … Whether or not one enjoys such a technique as Joyce uses is a matter of taste on which disagreement or argument is futile, but to subject that technique to the standards of some other technique is absurd.20
Woolsey found Ulysses “an amazing tour de force,” describing it as “brilliant and dull, intelligible and obscure by turns.” Joyce, he thought, was “a real artist.”21 The question of law on which the judge was asked to rule was whether the book was written with pornographic “intent”—“that is, written for the purpose of exploiting obscenity.” This he emphatically denied. Ulysses was “a sincere and serious attempt to devise a new literary method for the observation and description of mankind.”22 It was not obscene under the law.
By comparison, we might note that one of the judges in an earlier 1920 New York court case about the publication of the “Nausicaa” episode of Ulysses refused to allow passages to be read aloud in the courtroom because there were women present—including, as it happened, some of the editors of the book.23
The standard in the Ulysses case in the U.S. in 1933 was whether or not the work was written for the purpose of exploiting obscenity. In the U.K. in 1960, the decision about Lady Chatterley’s Lover rested, according to the Obscene Publications Act of 1959, on whether the work in question had literary merit. A group of recognized literary experts—Helen Gardner, E. M. Forster, Richard Hoggart, and Raymond Williams—were called to testify. The chief prosecutor, Mervyn Griffith-Jones, asked the members of the jury whether it was the kind of book “you would even wish your wife or servants to read.”
Would you approve of your young sons, young daughters—because girls can read as well as boys—reading this book? Is it a book that you would have lying around in your own house? Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or servants to read?24
This class breakdown doubtless contributed to the ridicule of the prosecution as out of touch with the times, although the mention of “your wife or servants” seems particularly and ironically germane to the plot of the novel. In any case, what was chiefly deplored was the danger such a novel posed to the moral character of readers. The defense, in general, preferred to move the debate away from the dangers of reading and toward either a standard of literary merit that presumably stood apart from and above the social, or a broad and impassioned articulation of the importance of freedom of expression. The jurors in the case returned a verdict of not guilty—and the 1961 Penguin edition of the novel was dedicated to them.
In both Ulysses and Lady Chatterley the index of the literary was determinative. Judge and jurors attempted to decide whether the works had literary quality and were written with literary intent. Probably the most cited piece of literature to come out of the trials was Philip Larkin’s poem “Annus Mirabilis,” with its well-known opening stanza:
Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(which was rather late for me)—
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles’ first LP.
Similar issues had been raised in connection with Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, which was banned in the United Kingdom
and in France before its eventual publication. In an interview with the London Times, the novelist Graham Greene had called Lolita one of the best novels of 1955. The editor of the Sunday Express immediately denounced it as “sheer unrestrained pornography” and “the filthiest book I have ever read.” Were these books literature, or were they “filth”? This was the question bandied in the court of public opinion and argued in the courts of law. From a present-day perspective, it would be possible to regard the contretemps as quaint, signs of a very different time. (Morris Ernst indeed compared the lifting of the ban on Ulysses to the end of Prohibition.)25
For these novels, literary was a qualitative honorific, borne out by subsequent critical judgment, and the binary alternative set up by the law as the opposite of obscene. Judge Woolsey’s decision, as we saw, was itself an extended and effective piece of literary criticism. All three books are now regularly taught, and highly praised, in college courses. But what about works with a less certain or less acclaimed literary status?
Radclyffe Hall’s lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness (1928) inspired support from writers and scholars despite doubts about its lasting merit as a work of literature. When The Well was condemned by the editor of the Sunday Express as “A Book That Should Be Suppressed” (“I would rather give a healthy boy or a healthy girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel”26), Leonard Woolf and E. M. Forster drafted a letter of protest and lined up other signatories, including T. S. Eliot, G. B. Shaw, Arnold Bennett, Vera Brittain, and Ethel Smyth. But as Virginia Woolf reported, Radclyffe Hall insisted that the letter should praise the book’s “artistic merit—even genius,”27 and the letter was never sent. Woolf herself, who privately regarded The Well as a “meritorious dull book,”28 signed a briefer letter with Forster and appeared as a witness in court, where she was relieved, she wrote, that “we could not be called as experts in obscenity, only in art.” The chief magistrate, Sir Charles Biron, ruled that the question of obscenity was one that he alone would determine, and he refused to permit testimony about literary merit. His decision—that the book was obscene and prejudicial to the morals of the community—was upheld on appeal, and the book was not legally available in the U.K. until twenty years later.29
In the United States, Morris Ernst headed the defense when The Well was accused of obscenity. A number of prominent authors, including Ernest Hemingway, Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Ellen Glasgow, John Dos Passos, and Edna St. Vincent Millay, submitted statements in support of the book, and although a magistrate refused to consider the question of literary merit, the New York Court of Special Sessions decided that the book addressed a “delicate social problem” and was not written in a way that could be described as obscene.30
But if The Well of Loneliness was not obscene, did that make it literature? It has been much reprinted and has sold well; it is often taught in courses on sexuality, lesbian and gay theory, and feminism. Few critics have spoken up in admiration of its style, which is often regarded as overwrought and sentimental. The use of obscene works had been roundly decried: such works, it was said, provoked lustful thoughts, and lustful actions, and were “intended” by the authors to produce such thoughts and actions. What should we say about the use a work like The Well, which inspired identification, solidarity, strong and varied emotional responses, and political and social debate? The publicity that the trials brought to the book increased its visibility and its sales, to the pleasure of some and the dismay of others. Its celebrity, and its subsequent place in a historical canon of lesbian and gay writing, came about as a result of a kind of publicity we might want to call extra-literary, or nonliterary. But the publicity was inextricably tied to a debate about whether it was a literary treatment or some other kind of writing.
Moreover, the view that The Well addressed a “delicate social problem” comes close to the notion of “redeeming social value,” which was laid down in the 1957 case of Roth v. United States (354 U.S., 476) as the limit standard for obscenity: “[a] book cannot be proscribed unless it is found to be utterly without redeeming social value.” The conditions attached were two: the book had to be considered in its entirety rather than by particular parts; and it had to be judged according to contemporary community standards, the anticipated response of the average person. In a later case, Jacobellis v. Ohio (378 U.S. 184, 191, 194), Justice Brennan altered the phrase to “utterly without redeeming social importance.” Whether there is a significant difference between “value” and “importance,” legally speaking, is not unambiguously clear.31 But what is clear is that when jurists and literary scholars go head to head in a courtroom—even, or especially, a Supreme Court room—a great deal depends upon the literary standards of the judge.
Supreme Court Justice Tom Clark, dissenting in the decision on John Cleland’s eighteenth-century Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (usually known as Fanny Hill), found literary scholars’ testimony about “the book’s alleged social value” unconvincing, to say the least. He offered, with “regret,” a summary of the book’s plot, beginning, “Memoirs is nothing more than a series of minutely and vividly described sexual episodes.” To the first expert witness’s testimony that the book “is a work of art” and “asks for and receives a literary response,” he countered with a flat statement of denial: “If a book of art is one that asks for and receives a literary response, Memoirs is no work of art. The sole response evoked by the book is sensual.” Whether reviews spoke in favor of the novelist’s writing style (“literary grace”), the history of the novel as a form, or the heroine’s “enthusiasm for an activity that is, after all, only human,” Clark dismissed their arguments as worthless: “The short answer to such ‘expertise’ is that none of these so-called attributes have any value to society. On the contrary, they accentuate the prurient appeal.”32 Despite the facts that Clark’s opinion was a dissent and that Fanny Hill went on to have a successful commercial career (including films and a spinoff novel by Erica Jong), his views underscore the problem of calibrating “value to society” in terms of “literary merit”—especially when “literary experts” are rejected as lacking any substantive grounds for their expertise.
This was precisely the issue addressed by Justices Harlan and Douglas in their opinions in Memoirs v. Massachusetts, the case that addressed the status of Cleland’s novel. Justice Harlan wrote, “To establish social value in the present case, a number of acknowledged experts in the field of literature testified that Fanny Hill held a respectable place in serious writing, and unless such largely uncontradicted testimony is accepted as decisive it is very hard to see that the ‘utterly without redeeming social value’ test has any meaning at all.” Justice Douglas wrote, “If there is to be censorship, the wisdom of experts on such matters as literary merit and historical significance must be evaluated.”33
The idea that a work of literature should have an identifiable “social value” to “redeem” it from the charge of obscenity ran counter to much thought about what art was and was not. Such an idea spoke, and speaks, to the continually problematic question of use. If use in this case was synonymous with “having social value,” what kept the claim from being merely tautologous, or a matter of taste, whether lay or expert? The defense against the charge of obscenity was, to a certain extent, a defense against the idea that the author’s intent had been to create a bad object, something that could be used (or misused, or abused) to generate lustful thoughts and even lustful actions. What was the proper, nonabusive, nonmisusing use of a novel? Was reading a sufficient use? Was it a social value? None of these novels has been at the forefront of social change or social improvement, except if we include—as maybe we should—a change in cultural taste or cultural norms. But this idea, that risky (and risqué) writing should push the envelope of community standards, was not the social value that the Justices had in mind. The notion of redemption, with its religious ring, further complicates the matter: is the sinner in this picture the work, or the author, or the reader?