The Novel and the Police (Gazette)

Abstract

In his celebrated history of pornography, The Secret Museum, Walter Kendrick contends, It was when contemporary art joined in the battle that the modern concept of 'pornography' had its origin (31). He means to suggest that the controversy surrounding Modernism's challenge to respectable bourgeois canons of decency opened up a permeable space between the socially manufactured categories of art and obscenity, a space in which claims for the presence of one or the other could be registered and contested. A leading motif in this anti-censorship campaign, and one instrumental in the demarcation of a liminal pornographic zone, was the charge of tu quo que regularly levelled by the more provocative artists, such as Oscar Wilde, D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, and James Joyce himself, at those who condemned and/or banned their work on moral grounds. Assailed by self-styled guardians of the cultural health for the licentiousness, morbidity, even depravity of their creations, these artists drew upon the perspectivist turn in recent philosophy (Friedrich Nietzsche) and psychology (Sigmund Freud) to argue that such judgments only reflected the underlying salaciousness and corruption of the arbiters themselves, that obscenity was not just in but of the eye of the beholder, a defining property of the censorious gaze rather than its object. On the pages of the Scots Observer, Wilde defended his famous novel against a reviewer's moralistic strictures with the comment, Each man sees his own sin in Dorian Gray. What Dorian Gray's sins are no one knows. He who finds has brought them (266). In a series of brief poems, Lawrence, author of the outlawed Lady Chatterley's Lover, castigated the virginal pure policeman for defiling his paintings with scurrilous preconceptions. One of the series, acerbically entitled, Give Me a Sponge, exemplifies this reversal of charges: