Illness and Culture in the Postmodern Age by David B. Morris

Author:David B. Morris [Неизвестный]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2010-01-22T10:55:00+00:00

POSTMODERNISM AND THE OBSCENE

Henry Miller is a useful guide to a biocultural version of the obscene as created at the crossroads of culture and human neurobiology. In 1961 Grove Press reprinted his long-suppressed book Tropic of Cancer, first published in 1934, thus creating an occasion for the reappearance of a classic modernist text in a postmodern context. The ensuing legal battles showed that even in the early 196os obscene narratives still held an important place in the bourgeois politics and poetics of transgression.34 Certainly the federal, state, and local bureaucrats who sought to ban Tropic of Cancer indicated something quite specific about American relations to the obscene circa 1960. They described the obscene as a kind of hellish opponent of everything lofty and ideal. It had to be banned or expunged in order that the ideal could survive.

Chief Justice Charles Desmond offers a typical American response to the obscene in writing about Tropic of Cancer for the New York Court of Appeals: "From first page to last it is a filthy, cynical, disgusting narrative of sordid amours. Not only is there in it no word or suggestion of the romantic, sentimental, poetic or spiritual aspects of the sex relation, but it is not even bawdy sex or comic sex or sex described with vulgar good humor. No glory, no beauty, no stars-just mud." 35 Mud, of course, is an apt metaphor for the obscene as dirt, filth, pollution, and defilement (topics to which we will return). Mud suggests the existence of a lowdown, viscous, indeterminate substrate of human life that threatens to swallow up and defile everything decent and noble and civilized. In 1961 a narrative of sex that failed to acknowledge reigning cultural pieties about beauty and romance was simply too dangerous for official sanction. It had to be roped off and banned as obscene.

American law still defines obscenity as material that deals with sex in a manner appealing to "prurient interest." Various lower courts and public servants agreed with justice Desmond that Tropic of Cancer appealed to prurient interest, and their decisions entangled Miller and Grove Press in a cross-country marathon of legal action stretching from Brooklyn to Los Angeles. The Supreme Court nonetheless finally upheld publication on a split vote, in a judgment remarkable for containing no arguments and no opinions. Nobody, it appears, wanted to go on record. Yet two significant results drifted out of this judicial silence. First, the obscene had begun to slip through legal barricades that had previously suppressed or forced it underground. Obscenity would thenceforth be a visible player in the public culture. Second, the litigation, censorship, and public disapproval surrounding Henry Miller were not without benefit because they drove him to air several particularly shrewd discussions of the obscene. Turning from courtrooms to the shadowy world within the self, he depicts the obscene as a mirror that exposes some unpleasant but liberating truths we prefer to keep hidden.

Miller's mirror theory finds clearest expression in a long essay titled Obscenity and the

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