Modernism, Mass Culture, and the Aesthetics of Obscenity (review)

Adam Parkes

Modernism/modernity, Volume 8, Number 3, September 2001, pp. 527-529 (Article) Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: 10.1353/mod.2001.0071

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regard. Leys announces a desire to show how multiple personality functions as a switch-point between two competing models, the first mimetic and the second antimimetic, of personal identity and [, she argues,] gender-formation (48). She does note that multiple personality cases have tended to be female, and that the norms of gender affect both the scene of trauma and the scene of analysisthe one occasionally indistinguishable from the otherin the case of Miss Beauchamp. But her willingness to refract the genealogy she traces with a steady feminist lens is limited: the nexus linking trauma, identity, and gender drops quickly out of view, reappearing only intermittently, as in one compellingand too briefrereading of the Medusa myth through Sandor Ferenczis account of imitation magic. Modernist historians might also wish for more. Leyss impressive close-reading of the authors under consideration also constrains her from engaging, or even noting, myriad intellectual and disciplinary offshoots of the terms under discussion. It is especially unusual that a book so deeply imbedded in the psychology of mimesis does not mention in passing the work of Roger Callois, whose study of the mimicry characteristic of certain species of insects loudly proclaimed that mimesis has to do with the distinctions and confusions produced between an organism and its environment. The elision is perturbing, especially given Calloiss belief that mimicry is inexplicable in terms of species-survival. This belief led him to abandon neurological and naturalistic explanations and seek answers in psychology; most notably in the studies of Pierre Janeta structuring figure in Leyss bookfrom whom Callois borrowed the concept of legendary psychasthenia in order to describe insects ability for morphological imitation as a loss of at once representational and relational orientation.2 Such blindspots are certainly not news to Leys. To say she deviates from a political or historical commitment is also to note a self-concious strategy designed to counterbalance ongoing tendenciesin both popular and academic debatesthat place trauma in the service of a particular ontological or epistemological model. Significantly, what Leyss Trauma ultimately offers is an unflinching look at the fraught oscillations that characterize psychoanalytic models of trauma, presented with a productive skepticism about the possibilityindeed the desirabilityof resolving their impasse.

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Notes
1. Jean LaPlanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 129. 2. Roger Callois, Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia, trans. John Sheply, October 31 (1984): 1232.

Modernism, Mass Culture, and the Aesthetics of Obscenity. Allison Pease. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. xvi + 244. $54.95. Reviewed by Adam Parkes, University of Georgia
Allison Pease attempts to trace the emergence of modern notions of obscenity and pornography in Britain from the eighteenth century to the twentieth in Modernism, Mass Culture, and the Aesthetics of Obscenity. Pornography, as she argues persuasively, developed dialectically with eighteenth-century ideas of the aesthetic, especially as these categories had been formulated by the third Earl of Shaftesbury and Immanuel Kant. The difference between these two terms was that the aesthetic appealed to the rational and reflective faculties (an appeal that

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528 furnished the notion of disinterest), whereas pornography attempted to provoke a purely sensual (or interested) response. In the modern era, she contends, this distinction between the aesthetic and the obscene began to collapse as artists such as Charles Algernon Swinburne, Aubrey Beardsley, James Joyce, and D. H. Lawrence appropriated pornographic discourses to create an aesthetic of the obscene, which transformed what had once been regarded as low cultural elements into a new kind of high art (34). Indeed it was in part obscenitys very lowness that made the modern aesthetic of the obscene look high. The triumph of this new aesthetic was then secured, Pease suggests, by modernist critics such as I. A. Richards, F. R. Leavis, and T. S. Eliot, whose notions of embodied response transform Kantian aesthetic philosophy by granting a central role to the once despised concept of sensation (xv). As this study makes clear, pornography and obscenity have never been purely aesthetic (or anti-aesthetic) terms; such categories, from their inception, carried considerable ideological weight. Enlightenment notions of taste and disinterest, as elaborated by the Shaftesbury tradition, helped to enforce a middle-class social and political ideology that became increasingly dominant from the eighteenth century onward (11). Pornography seemed to threaten this ideology because, in demanding sensuous responses, it disallowed the concept of aesthetic disinterest, and insisted that selfish interest and material gain were at the heart of any individual act (5). Following the lead of Lynn Hunt and others, Pease suggests that the ideological menace posed by pornography was exacerbated by the ways in which pornography hinted at intimate connections between the body erotic and the body politic. Pornography, in other words, was laden with political implications that the bourgeoisie wished to repressin particular, the simultaneous (though by no means identical) possibilities of cross-class desire and a leveling of the classesand that became ever more threatening with the nineteenth-century growth of mass literacy (57). Modern artists sought to turn this threat to their advantage, and to make pornography safe for the middle classes, by idealizing its materialist urges through a formalist structure (xv). This was an inherently reactionary maneuver as it meant neutralizing the potentially subversive body, especially the working-class body, to which earlier pornographers had granted generous representational space. In their swerve toward formalism, Swinburne, Beardsley, and Joyce were all more or less guilty of this tendency, in Peases view, and the critical tradition spawned by Eliots famous essay on Ulysses perpetuated it. While Lawrence satirized such practices in Lady Chatterleys Lover, and championed not merely the body, but the body politic, the body of the masses, he too is finally charged with reify[ing] the very class divisions that one would have expected to be erased by the collapse of certain elements of the pornographic into the aesthetic (138, xiv). Indeed, Lawrences appropriations of the pornographic tropes and discourses of mass culture were reappropriated, in turn, by mass culture: Lawrences wholistic method of sexual representation has been embraced by the entirety of twentiethcentury mass culture, from romance novels to Hollywood films (ibid.). In what is presumably a chilling irony (although Pease does not spell it out fully), the effect of such reappropriation is the neutralizing of Lawrences own potentially subversive political energies. In emphasizing the role of class-ideology, which has been underestimated in previous accounts of the place of obscenity in British modernism, Pease contributes significantly to the study of this compelling topic. But her approach is not without its drawbacks. Even if it were unequivocally true that Joyce and company incorporated elements of pornography into their work to establish an ideologically conservative measure of aesthetic controla claim from which many Joyce scholars would withhold their assentit is by no means self-evident that in doing so they were, as she asserts, making art safe for the middle classes (184, 83). What does that phrase mean, really? The operative assumption here is that while middle-class ideology serves to oppress revolutionary or subversive forms of political consciousness, it cannot itself be a site of meaningful contestation. In this spirit, Pease declares that Ulysses posits a series of sites of contestation between [the aesthetic and the pornographic], a confrontation so aggres-

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sive that their dialectical relationship is both exposed and threatened (87). Yet she effectively disallows this reading by implying that the issue was predetermined by the authors own ideological investments (his middle-class affiliations and high-cultural aspirations) as if they were not subjected to any sort of pressure in the text itself (90). So powerful is the modern artists will to formwhich, according to a familiar argument, results in the assertion of difficulty as a jointly aesthetic and ideological imperativethat the sensuous content of Ulyssess narrative is rendered impotent (ibid.). So resolute is Peases commitment to this view, however, that she goes so far as to claim that [i]t is indeed the difficulty of Ulysses that rescues it from censorship (91). It almost sounds as if she has forgotten that Ulysses actually was censored. Surely she has not done that, but the ambiguity of her syntax is telling: it illustrates her tendency to discount the obscenity trials of the 1920s and 1930s as matters of relatively small importancestorms in inconsolably middle-class teacupscompared with the larger stakes of class-ideology, on which she wants to insist. This is itself a thoroughly middle-class view, though one that probably would not have come so easily during the modernist period, especially not to writers who were themselves censored. Pease, with her rather flat understanding of class-consciousness and her inclination to dismiss the modernist aesthetic of the obscene as a bourgeois exercise in political bad faith, appears not to appreciate this. This books narrow focus on class-ideology leads to some notable casualties. There is no sustained discussion of morality or religion. These omissions are disconcerting for several reasons, including the fact that in nineteenth-century Britain censorship often occurred under the auspices of the blasphemy laws, rather than the obscenity lawswhich is probably why previous studies have found it impossible to disentangle obscenity from religious morality. An even more surprising casualty of Peases approach is sexual politics, a field of inquiry that frequently occupies the foreground in contemporary discussions of pornographypopular and academic. Her account of pornography is relatively untouched by recent debates about the objectification of the body, especially the female body, in the work of male artists (not that one wants necessarily to hear another rehearsal of arguments such as Andrea Dworkins). This omission is all the more vexing because much recent critical work on modernism, and on Joyce and Lawrence specifically, has also addressed such problems. This body of work includes, of course, Kate Milletts famous attack on Lawrence in Sexual Politics (1970), and other works of feminist criticism, such as Cheryl Herrs Joyces Anatomy of Culture (1986), Carol Siegels Lawrence Among the Women (1991), and my own Modernism and the Theater of Censorship (1996). Pease ignores most of the issues raised by these books; indeed, Millett doesnt even appear in her bibliography, which similarly omits several recent titles that have relevance for this and other closely-related subjects, including Richard Dellamoras Masculine Desire (1990), Dominick LaCapras Madame Bovary on Trial (1982), Jeffrey Segalls Joyce in America (1993), Paul Vanderhams James Joyce and Censorship (1998), and Ed Cohens stimulating exploration of the Wilde trials, Talk on the Wilde Side (1993). Indeed, Wilde himself is forgotten in this bookanother questionable oversight, as the Wilde trials haunted all subsequent literary trials in Britain during the modernist era (including the similarly neglected Radclyffe Hall trial of 1928) and force us to recognize how differences in sexual orientation, as well as gender, have complicated the history of literary obscenity. Deeper engagement with the critical work that considers such issues, or with the equally slighted bodies of scholarship that treat Lawrence and Joyce individually, would have made it harder for Pease to assert that such writers made pornography safe for the middle classes, partly because she would have been forced to develop a more finely nuanced understanding of the concept of class. To be sure, a present-day study of obscenity should tell us much about the ways in which ideologies of class, gender, and sexuality inform and modify each other. For the time being, at least, Pease has missed a good opportunity to do so.

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