neurosis. Freud's doctrine, let us remember, is that it is not repression (total amnesia) that causes neurosis, but the failure of repression, so that repressed contents return in distorted guise. The process is irreversible; our culture has experienced too much of it to ban it, or frighten it, out of mind. Therefore the only recourse is to try to get, as methodically and safely as possible, to the end of it, so that the drives can reappear as themselves and come to their own equilibrium. This involves undoing the repressive attitude itself. It is just in this that our high courts, ike the Lords in England, could be excellent social counselors. With expert advisors they could try to forecast, and guide toward, a sanc sexual policy. Instead, they cling to an outmoded concept of obscenity and they prevent outmoded statutes from becoming dead letters. At the same time, they are forced to cede to changing public taste and relax standards. Now this must lead to social chaos, as we are witnessing with the pornography, for so long as the attempted repressing continues, the repressed contents must continually emerge in more and more distorted form. And of course we also get legal chaos, as the court twists and turns to avoid the outmoded statutes.

For a writer like myself, there is a bitter irony in Bryan's statement that the previously shocking is now acceptable. Yes it is -because Flaubert, Ibsen, and Wedekind, and Dreiser, O'Neill, and Joyce paid their pound of flesh to the censor. They opened the ever new sensibility and were punished for it. Probably this is inevitable, and any advance worth having is worth suffering for; but it is a bitter proceeding. And now Lady Chatterley is accepted as a "community" art-work just when it has ceased to be a living art-work. Lawrence has explicitly told us that he wrote it "in defiance of convention"; that defiance, and its awk-. ward rusticity, were its life. Now we are left merely with a rather neurotic fantasy of a frigid woman and a class-resentful "dominating man. The court's lagging

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acceptance of bygone classics for the wrong reasons makes it difficult for a living classic to be accepted and exert an influence in the living community.

In the breakdown of repression, the artists do their part by first dreaming the forbidden, thoughts, assuming the forbidden stances, and struggling to make sense. They cannot do otherwise, for they bring. the social conflicts in their souls to public expression. But the court does not do its duty; and the critics (I will mention no. names) go along with the court's convenience and lie and lie.

What is the court's duty as I see it? To set aside the definition of pornography as obscenity-just as it set aside the doctrine of equal but separate facilities-and to clarify and further the best tendency of the sexual revolution. To call not obscene whatever tends to joy, love, and liveliness, including the stirring of lustful impulses and thoughts. I shall argue at the end of this paper that such a policy would tend to diminish pornography-make it not a big deal.

As it is, for well-known historical rea-. sons, we live in a stimulating, unsatisfying society midway in transition; and while the liberal court hedges in embarrassment and the critics lie, the police and the administrators lurk to get convictions on any grounds. The police make wholesale raids for girlie magazines, they entrap a harmless old man for his lustful habit, the postmaster bars Lawrence from the mails, and the Drug Administrator burns the books of Wilhelm Reich as "labels" for a contraband commodity. To restore order, there has to be a wiser policy.

ME PROCEED to a philosophi-

cal question raised by these decisions, which is, in my opinion, even more important for our society than the sexual matter: what is the nature of speech and art? To protect their "serious" books, the courts attempt to distinguish speech as communication of an idea or even as talk-

ing about a subject, from speech as an action doing something to its speaker, subject, and hearer. This is the tactic of Woolsey when he devotes most of his opinion to Joyce's "new method for the observation and description of mankind" and of Bryan when he says that the plot of Lady Chatterley's Lover "serves as a vehicle through which Lawrence develops his basic... philosophy. Most of the characters are prototypes." The judges reason that if something like this can be established, a book can be protected under the Bill of Rights guarantee of freedom to communicate opinion. Yet, although this is a useful distinction for some kinds of speech-e.g. scientific reporting and conscientious journalism-it simply does not apply to common speech, and it is necessarily irrelevant to art, for one essential function of art is to move the audience. If Joyce and Lawrence felt that all they had done was to convey ideas, they would have considered themselves failures.

(Naturally the decisions themselves, based on an unphilosophical distinction, have been notoriously inconsistent. For example, The Well of Loneliness was banned because "it seeks to justify the right of a pervert... it does not argue for repression of insidious impulses.. it seeks to justify and idealize perverted ideas." Yet these are merely the ideas of the author. But contrariwise, Justice Stewart defended the film of Lady Chatterley by saying, "The picture advocates an idea-that adultery under certain circumstances may be proper behavior. The First Amendment guarantee is freedom to advocate ideas." Jerome Frank has wryly commented that if an "idea" is eloquently argued, it is in danger; if it is dully argued, it is safe.)

Here is an example of the legal. doctrine at work. At the Marble Arch in London, crowds gather to listen to popular orators vent their grievances and longings on every topic under the sun, freedom for Nigeria, a subscription for the Irish Revolutionary Army, the ethics of deceiv-

ing one's wife, the nearest way to salvation. Like Bernard Shaw, the orators test their repartee against a powerfully insolent audience. All is strictly legal. But if à mon comes within twenty-four inches of the speaker, he is at once hauled off by a guardian bobby! A man can say anythi: g, but he mustn't do anything; he can : n. to anything, but he mustn't let himself ve aroused. Freedom of speech means freedom to talk about: Speech is not sayingas-an-action. The limitations are clear. If there would be incitement to riot, the freedom would cease. "Fighting words" are forbidden because they lead to fights. Pornography is forbidden because it is in the nature of detailed sexual reporting that it leads to physiological reactions and likely acts. Blasphemy and obscenity are forbidden because they are acts as such, they break a taboo in their very utterance, as well as presumably undamming what is held in repression by the taboo. Also, there are even particular topics, like the subject of Lolita, where merely to treat them at all in some public way is tantamount to sanctioning their existence in the universe. Here speech becomes magic, to name the Name creates the thing.

JEE

EFFERSON and other revolutionaries who insisted on the Bill of Rights probably had a more risky notion of, freedom of speech than our courts, as they did of political action in general. But if to them freedom of speech meant merely freedom to communicate opinions, they could not have intended the First Amendment to apply to belles-lettres at all, for the neoclassical aesthetic doctrine of their time held that the function of art was to move and instruct, to instruct by moving. In our modern aesthetics the legal embarrassment is even worse; we pay less attention to imitating reality and lay all the more emphasis on speech as action. To Freud, the art-act alleviates a repressed conflict by daring to express and publish it (this is Lawrence's "defying convention"). In advance-guard art, where the artist is reacting to and

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