vomiting up something intolerable in society, the art-act cannot help being offensive. Since the 19th century, the naturalists have meant to defy and shame when they stripped away the mask of hypocrisy. The primary aim of Dada is to shock. In his Theater of Violence, Antonin Artaud declares that theater is precisely not communicating ideas but acting on the the community, and he praises the Balinese

village dance that works on dancers and audience till they fall down in a trance. For that matter, the shrieking and wailing that was the specialty of Greek tragedy would among us cause a breach of the peace. The nearest we come are adolescent jazz sessions that create a public nuisance.) The "poetry readings" of the Beats try to give us their "existent situation," usually drunken, and the audience copes with it as best it can. I could continue a long list.

To these facts of modern art, the doctrine of Woolsey, Brennan, and van Pelt Bryan is not adequate. Such art cannot be defended as communicating ideas, and anything objectionable in it (there is much) must condemn it. Indeed, the arguments of the censoring customs officer or postmaster betoken a more genuine art-response, for they have been directly moved, although in an ignorant way, by the excitement and inner conflict of Joyce and Lawrence. Their experience is ignorant and low-grade because they are unwilling to let the sexual excitement belong to a larger world, and this is why they excerpt passages. But at least they have been. made to feel that the world is threateningly sexual. As the British Magistrate Mead said, on paintings by Lawrence, "Art is immaterial. . . . Obscene pictures should be put an end to like any wild animal which may be dangerous." And so Justice Manton, in his dissent on Ulysses, "Obscenity is not rendered less by the statement of truthful fact," for it is precisely the fact, the nature of things, that is obscene to the censor.

Woolsey's doctrine is insulting to the

artist. He says that the book did "not tend to excite lustful thoughts, but the net effect was a tragic and powerful commentary" (italics mine). Surely the author wants to say, "It is lustful among other things, and therefore its net effect is tragic."

IN OUR culture an artist is expected to move, the reader; he is supposed to move him to tears, to laughter, to indignation; to compassion, even to hatred; but he may not move him to have an erection or to mockery of public figures making a spectacle of themselves. Why not? By these restrictions we doom ourselves to a passionless and conformist community. Instead of bracketing off the "classics," as especially the British courts do--indeed, the legal definition of a classic seems to be a "non-actionable obscenity"-let us pay attention to the classical pornography and we shall see that it is not the case, as the court feels obliged to prove, that a work has a "net" social use despite its sexual effect, but rather that the pornography, in a great context and spoken by a great soul, is the social use. Aristophanic comedy was still close to a seasonal ritual to encourage rebelliousness and lead to procreation. Rabelais is disgraceful like a giant baby, and this is the Renaissance. Catullus teaches us the callous innocence of highborn youth, free of timidity and pettiness; and Tom Jones is a similar type, with a dash of English sentimentality. If we may believe their preludes, both the Arabian Nights and the Decameron are cries of life in the face of death; and in our times Jean Genet, one of our few fine writers, is pornographic and psychopathic because only so, he tells us, can he feel that he exists in our inhuman world. But apart from these lofty uses, there are also famous pornographic books made just for fun, since sex is a jolly subject.

To explore the nature of speech as action, consider the other forbidden topic, the mockery of sacred public figures. In our country we suffer from a gentleman's

agreement that is politically and artistically disastrous. For instance, our recent President could not frame an English sentence, and according to some observers his career as the head of a great university was dismally hilarious. "Dwight Eisenhower at Columbia" is a title to rouse an Aristophanes. In the 18th century Ike would have been richly mauled. But our satirists on stage and,TV avoid such subjects. Then there cannot be great comedy, for if you dare not mock the pink elephant looming in the foreground, you can't mock anything. Instead, our satire consists of isolated gags that do not add up to an éxplosion. But satire is an essential of democracy, for how can we expect our leaders to be anything but front-figures if they do not take any personal risk and cannot be stung?

The court is not philosophical. It does not see that lively speech is active speech. Sexual action is a proper action of art. The question is not whether pornography, but the quality of the pornography. To sting powerful figures into a personal engagement is a proper action of art, otherwise we sink in a faceless swamp. What the more intellectual court does do is to protect exceptional cases against vulgar prejudices and police busy-work. (But often, as in the astounding case of the revocation of Bertrand Russell's appointment at New York's City College, the matter never gets to a better court.) This is not enough to improve the cultural climate. In principle, the living writers are not exceptional and famous cases. Rather, it works out as follows: publishers will not publish what will get them into trouble; authors cease to write what will not be published, or what the editor censors the heart out of; soon the public has lost its authors at their best, and the authors have lost the common touch. The actual situation is that there is little that is published, and perhaps not much that is written, that does or would get into trouble with the censorship, except precisely the hard-core pornography. Why is there so little? If the

publishers and authors were doing their. duty, the courts would be battlegrounds. Instead, the void is soon filled with safe entertainers, gag-men, sensation-mongers, pap-journalists. Advertising is the chief public art. The community is starved of ideas.

III

HAS BECOME THE fashion to

I say that the aesthetic and liber-

tarian matters we have been discussing have no relation to the actual police problem of hard-core pornography; let the police be careful not to encroach on serious writers, and let the writers leave the police to their raids and entrapment. This schizophrenic theory is false. We are one community, and the kind of high culture we have and the kind of low culture we have are opposite faces of the same lead quarter. But let us look at the hard-core pornography in itself:*

I have been arguing in this essay that not only is there innocent and useful pornography that ought not to be censored, but the method of censorship helps create the very kind of harmful pornography that we should like to see checked. The case is similar and not causally unrelated-to the social creation of juvenile delinquency by social efforts to control it. When excellent human power is inhibited and condemned, it will reappear ugly and dangerous. The censorious attitude toward

* Most simply, we must bear in mind the remark of William Sloane of Rutgers, cited by James Kilpatrick: "I am unimpressed with the record of repressive legislation in this country. The laws against narcotics, for example, are supporting a large criminal class and leading to large-scale corruption of our youth. The laws against off-track betting are supporting a large criminal class and lead directly to police corruption. No set of laws will prevent the bootlegging of pornography." But they will make it profitable. When J. Edgar Hoover favors us with his periodic philippics about the frighteningly increasing rate of crime, flood of pornography, theft of autos, etc., and asks for more teeth in the laws and more money for enforcement, surely he proves too much. There is the possibility that his methods, since they do not work, might be the wrong methods.

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