On Pornography Author(s): James L. Jarrett Source: Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 4, No. 3 (Jul., 1970), pp.

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On Pornography
JAMES L. JARRETT When, as has been very common in our society in recent decades, the question is asked, "Is this story (poem, novel, film - or even painting) pornographic?" we may immediately distinguish between liberal or permissive answers and those that are conservative or restrictive. Bowdler has lent his name to the tendency to find pornography unhappily rampant in Anglo-American society, but there are some who feel that the very principle of freedom of speech rules out any legitimate objection to the sexual quality of verbal or visual art. Those who employ such a category as "pornographic"at all may initially be divided into two groups: those who employ "interior" and those who employ "exterior" criteria for the determination of pornography. An interior criterion may be said to be used where there is some mark whose presence or absence in the work itself is sufficient for its classification. Thus, and most typically, the employment of certain tabooed words will be enough for some to set the work down as pornographic. For instance, Allen Ginsburg's"Howl!" excited a storm of concern and a highly publicized trial because it contained a number of offensive words, which were taken to brand it as pornographicor obscene.' However, if a work includes descriptionsof sexual intimacy, it is subject to the same indictment, as in the case of the The Life and Loves of Frank Harris. Such internal criteria tend to make the censor's job relatively easy: he may be instructed to look for certain offensive words or for the account of overt sexual conduct and rule accordingly. School librarians
L. JARRETT is Associate Dean of the College of Education at the UniJAMES

versity of California, Berkeley. He has written The Quest for Beauty as well as numerous articles for philosophical and educational journals. He is currently a memberof the editoral board of this Journal. 1 For the present purposes no further reference to "obscenity"will be made. Perhaps, generally speaking, obscenity, more often than pornography,is alleged on the employmentof interiorcriteria.

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have often, either on their own or by instruction, made in such ways their decisions about the purchase or the circulation of books. Sometimes, too, publishers and even typesettershave refused to print certain words or certain descriptions, and cited laws forbidding such action. Exceedingly permissive editors of college publications have found themselves frustrated by the legalistic prudence of their printers and, shamefacedly have employed euphemisms or discreet dashes. Similarly, those in charge of the adoption of texts for the schools, have, as in a recent action by the California Board of Education, ordered that certain offensive words in short stories be expurgated or softened or that the offensive stories or whole books be stricken from the charmed lists.2 Although taboos change and lists lengthen and shorten, proscriptions having to do with offensive words tend to be rather more definite than those having to do with offensive descriptions. How intimate is intimate? Still, definiteness can be introduced here too, but at the risk of considerable arbitrariness. For instance, a Swedish film called "Hugs and Kisses"was recently expurgated in Great Britain because in one scene a woman's pubic hair was detectable to the alert viewer; the rule apparently was quite precise: nakedness is permitted only if pubic hair is not visible. More commonly there is present in the employment of this criterion,at least implicitly, some sense of extent or degree or proportion. For instance, it is sometimes said that sex organs and acts and thoughts may be described so long as they are not dwelt upon in detail: the temptation is to say, "loving detail." Or such description will not be ruled pornographic so long as it does not take up a disproportionate space in the work. Thus, The Story of 0, which has, if memory serves, no nonsexual scene, might be dealt with quite differently from Lolita, which has to do with many other matters too. (As it happens, neither of these books contains tabooed words, so the two sorts of internal criteriaare kept pure.) However, the internality of criteria is stretched somewhat by the principle employed by the Kronhausens in their Pornography and the Law, where an important distinction is found between "erotic realism" and "hardcore pornography." In the former, sexuality has a decently proportional place in the whole, and, more importantly, is tempered by the author's observance of the principle of verisimilitude; whereas those works are found offensive which are dominated by fantasy, by a fairyauthors and publishers have accommodated themselves to such 2 Generally demands. Doubtless, most of us would be willing to sacrifice verisimilitude and have an incensed child of the ghetto say, "Frig you!" if the reward were measured in thousands of dollars.

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ON PORNOGRAPHY 63

tale quality such that "everythingturns out according to one's fondest fancy and every erotic wish can be lived out without punishment or any unpleasant effects whatsoever."3 Although "decently proportional" is of course vague, one can still imagine making this sort of decision in a way similar to that by which the presence of offensive words or offensive descriptionsis the mark of pornography; however, verisimilitude cannot be decided in such a mechanistic way, requiring instead that a reader appeal to experience in determining whether the eroticism is lifelike or simply invented for an effect. In any case, one wonders whether this representssimply an attempt to distinguishbetween works of literary importance on the one hand, and, on the other, the lucubrationsof a hack, writing for a sex-starved audience. That the distinction does not work is pretty well proved merely by the mention of such names at Petronius, Boccaccio, and Henry Miller - all authors whose eroticism is far over on the side of fantasy--and indeed by no means always "decently proportional." To get fully into what is meant by "external"criteria of pornography, we may notice something said by A. S. Neill, who has wrestled manfully with the question of the complex problems of youthful sexuality in a repressivesociety: I have just read the banned book, Last Exit to Brooklyn. It has many four-letterwords, many instancesof pervertedsex, many instancesof sheer it is not, if by pornography we mean a way of brutality,but pornographic excitingpeoplesexually.4 Certainly some such meaning is common. However, nearly everyone who has considered the criterion (or the principal criterion) of pornography to be conduciveness to libidinous thoughts or impulses, comes to the hard question of "excites whom?" Perhaps a vigorous young couple in love, like Paolo and Francesca? On a day for dalliancewe read the rhyme of Lancelot,how love had mastered him. We werealonewith innocence and dim time. Pauseafterpausethat high old storydrew oureyestogether whilewe blushedand paled; but it was one soft passageoverthrew Ourcautionand ourhearts. For whenwe read how her fondsmilewaskissedby sucha lover, he who is one with me alive and dead
s Eberhard and Phyllis Kronhausen, Pornography and the Law (New York: Ballantine Books, Inc., 1959), p. 265.
4 A. S. Neill, "All of us are part of this sick censorship," The TimesEducationalSupplement, March29, 1968,p. 1049.

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Breathed on my lips the tremorof his kiss. That book,and he who wroteit, was a pander. That day we readno further.... For such a couple we might suppose that if the seductive book had not been at hand, a daisy or the distant tune of a shepherd'spipe might have done as well. Still, essential or accidental, the book is allegedand who can doubt Francesca'swinsome testimony?- to have aroused these readerssexually. A device for delimiting the vulnerable audience, one employed in current English law, is to raise the question about who is likely to read the work in question. Thus Ulysses, The Golden Ass, and Nabokov's Ada might be allowed to circulate because they were unlikely to evoke lustful thoughts in young readersfor the excellent reason that few young readers can be expected to read these difficult or exotic works. In his famous decision allowing Joyce's Ulysses to enter the United States, Judge Woolsey grappled with the difficulty suggested by Dante's verses and came up with the fiction of "l'homme moyen sensuel." Granted that anything may arouse someone, Judge Woolsey himself read and had certain friends of his, presumably sensually average men, read the book to see whether it tended "to stir the sex impulses or to lead to sexually impure or lustful thoughts." These readers found that the book did not so stimulate them and could not therefore properly be called pornographic. The tendency of a work to "stir the sex impulses" is only one kind of "external"criterion, and one that certain critics have found wholly unacceptable, first, because such stirring, even in normal, mature persons, is so very common that the class of the pornographic would become much bulkier than any but the most gray-visaged puritan could desire -what was wrong with the Judge and his friends that none of the scenes in Joyce's novel really got to them? But even more important is the question: What's so wrong about sexual imagining? Now, those who ask that rhetorical question are by no means necessarilyreflecting an attitude of amorality toward the whole sexual area. For instance, not a few who would allow, without prejudice, an unlimited amount of sexual titillation in the imagination, would be very severe about incitement to certain kinds of action. Thus, any writing (or other artifact) that could be reasonablymade out as a strong contributing influence to criminal assaultmight well be called pornographic.6
5 Dante, The Inferno, trans. John Ciardi (New York: New American Library, Canto V. 1954), 6The best known instance of this position in recent years is that of Pamela HansfordJohnson in the Moors murders.

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ON PORNOGRAPHY 65

Still another way of defining pornographyputs the emphasis not upon the particular acts incited but upon its effect on character, or on fostering the tendency to act immorally, as when the British law speaks of works that tend to "deprave or corrupt." Obviously the problem in the latter two cases is in knowing when, if ever, the writing is more than a negligible factor in what is bound to be complex causation. These, then, may suffice as illustrations of two classes of criteria which are sometimescited or which seem to be implicit in charges of pornography; the one says, in effect, that you do not have to go beyond the work itself to determine its culpability while the other looks to the work's effects on the reading public. But so far the assumption has been that "pornography" must be taken pejoratively. And indeed this seems the commonest connotation, as witness the tendency of many personsto say about a book: (1) "But it's not pornographic; indeed, it's a very good book." (2) "Well, it may be in part pornographic,but it has many redeeming qualities." (3) "It's silly to call any book 'pornographic.'" The first remark identifies pornography with trash, the sort of thing that would appeal only to the literary lowbrow. The second statement admits that pornographyper se is bad, but argues that works may be good in spite of regrettablefeatures - a position often recognized in the law, so that aesthetic or social qualities may offset pornographic blemishes. The third remark is typically spoken by the moral relativist; recognizing that "pornography" is a damning label to pin on a book, he reminds us that one man's poison is another man's meat, and askswho, after all, is the final arbiter? Yet it is possible to take the term "pornography"as descriptive (not just an empty word of abuse) and to rescue it from opprobrium. For instance, respectablemarried couples may admit that they like to read a little pornography now and again as a kind of fillip to their connubial commerce. And it is even commoner for a sophisticate to display with some pride "the pornographic wing" of his private library, as if to say, "You and I realize that pornography, far from being odious, is one of life's little pleasures." In other words, it may be admitted that some writings are pornographic, say in the sense of stirring sexual desires and imaginings, but defended as valuable not in spite of but because of this power. Still again, "pornography"is now occasionally legitimized by being made into a value-neutral literary genre. John Hollander, for one, has distinguished between pornographic and realistic novels, the former composed of "encounters that are heroic, hyperbolic, hieratic, and

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thoroughly unlikely."7 Such an account agrees with that of the Kronhausens, except that, for Hollander, this is a perfectly legitimate form of writing. He praises Fanny Hill as a veritable prototype of pornography. It is, he says, a successfulwork of art, not merely in the minimal sense of being "good pornography"- satisfactory, considering the sort of thing it is - but according to literary criteria. That is, it is well written, expert in character development, and- who can deny it?- very interesting. All in all, this latter procedure has much to recommend it, although headway is certain to be slow against the inertia of the pejorative meaning. Such a change would permit the recognition of John Cleland, the Marquis de Sade, Pauline Reage, and Henry Miller (in certain of his works) as pornographers and as good writers, craftsmen, admirable models to which more workers in this vineyard ought to look instead of contenting themselves with unimaginative, formulistic, and careless writing. If "pornography"could be taken as the name of a genre, one might still choose to speak of pornographic moments, elements, or scenes in stories and novels not themselvesinstances of the genre - say, The Red and the Black, Tom Jones, and Ulysses. Or one might prefer another adjective, such as "erotic,"for such purposes. In any case, it is important that one's language easily permit both aesthetic and moral distinctions to be made without prejudice. It is too bad when some works get - and perhaps even fairly so, according to classified as "pornography" well-consideredcriteria and are ipso facto dismissedas literarilycontemptible. Even worse is the by no means fanciful case in which it is inferred that because a work is pornographic (say, strongly sexual in content or stimulation) it must be immoral. For instance, many of us would plead that it makes a difference why the sexuality is present. For all of the much advertised pitfalls of the "Intentional Fallacy," readers are not entirely helpless in assessingthe seeming intent of an author in introducting sex into his story. If it seems quite gratuitous, we may find this an aesthetic blemish. If it is to illustrate and celebrate the depravity of woman, we may blame him on moral grounds. Then too, as moral judges we may be interested in possible, probable, or even actual effects upon reader behavior, and in this respect empirical evidence is not entirely wanting, though the issue is still hotly controverted even among impressive authorities. In short, the adoption of "pornography"as a neutral classificationmakes it at least logically possible for an instance Vol. 21, No. 4. (October "TheOld LastAct,"Encounter, 'John Hollander, 1963), 69.

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ON PORNOGRAPHY 67

of the genre to be found ill-written or well-written, interesting or boring (e.g., highly repetitious), perceptive or hackneyed, morally harmless or even beneficent. Nor does this usage preclude, as some believe or want to believe, moral denunciation of certain pornographic works. For instance, they may be found to invite a cynical reduction of love to sexual attraction, to tend to blunt sensitivitiesessential to the moral life, to promote the idea that all limitations on sexual conduct are merely stuffy conventions, or to convey the impression that there is something intrinsicallyugly, morbid, and cruel about sexuality generally, and thus ironically to do the work of the grim-lipped haters of sex. D. H. Lawrence, who had more trouble with the censors than any other major author of our time, even more than Joyce, was nevertheless almost violently critical of a certain kind of pornography, that which he characterized as "the attempt to insult sex, to do dirt on it."8 Indeed, Lawrence so hated this type of writing that he believed it should be strictlycensored. But censorship is another, even more complicated, matter.
8 "Pornographyand Obscenity," Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence (New York: The Viking Press, 1936), p. 175.

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