Art: Immoral or Immortal

Abstract

There is a difference, everybody is aware, between a work of art which we label indecent and one which shares the raw material with its illegitimate competitor, but is nevertheless above suspicion. What makes us think one is bad and the other good? What real progress, if any, have we made in our evaluation of immorality? Are we still trying to verbalize in the lawyer's parlance what is only our subjective individual prejudice? Are individual prosecutors, judges, experts and ladies and gentlemen of the bench guided by their particular preferences, repressions and regressions? Are there no more deep-rooted convictions to which we may resort? In trying to answer these questions, let us first see whether there is in fact an identity of raw material used by pornography and by realistic works of art with their merciless, pining, anti-Victorian daring. I once examined Virginal pornography,' i.e., that pornography of manuscripts and letters which, destined for private consumption only, is not written with an eye toward legal loopholes. One of its most striking traits is indefiniteness as to whether the author of such letters, or for that matter the addressee, is a male or a female. With due allowance for the anthropologist's revelation that the psychosexual traits of aggressiveness or submissiveness seem to be culturally rather than biologically determined, one will still have to state that in our civilization such asexual sexuality in adults is a sign of immaturity. Small wonder then, that in the pornographic and veiled pornographic works of literature and art, the emphasis is on what Freud has called the Erogenic Zones of the body. Freud has shown this to be an early phase in the development of psychosexuality. In the private pornographic manuscripts as well as books, a technique known to the radio announcers is used: stereotyped repetition as often as humanly possible of the name of the product and its qualities. Likewise, the following is characteristic of the pornographic style: A pornographic author never finds adjectives (qualities) enough to bandy about. There is a hurricane of attributes, but no substance; there are parts, but no whole. It is the same with the emotions as with the erogenic zones: There are the zones, but no body to which they belong; here are the emotions, but no personality to feel them; brush strokes but no painting and no painter.