Redeeming Value: Obscenity and Anglo‐American Modernism

Redeeming Value: Obscenity and Anglo‐American ModernismAuthor(s): Loren GlassSource: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 32, No. 2 (Winter 2006), pp. 341-361Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/500706 .

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Critical Inquiry 32 (Winter 2006)

� 2006 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/06/3202-0005$10.00. All rights reserved.

341

1. Quoted in Edward de Grazia, Girls Lean Back Everywhere: The Law of Obscenity and the

Assault on Genius (New York, 1992), p. 369; hereafter abbreviated G.

Redeeming Value: Obscenity and Anglo-American Modernism

Loren Glass

Waging what he characterized as “‘a very cold, deliberate attack on cen-

sorship,’” Barney Rosset, owner of Grove Press and the Evergreen Review,

decided in 1959 that he would issue an unexpurgated, commercial edition

of D. H. Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover.1 Since its private publi-

cation in Italy in 1928, Lady Chatterley had been deemed legally obscene in

both England and America, but Rosset knew that the cultural and legal cli-

mate had changed, particularly with the Supreme Court’s 1957 decision in

Roth v. United States, the first case in which the highest court considered

whether obscenity constitutes an exception to First Amendment protection

for freedom of speech and the press. Roth would be the initial articulation

of what lawyer Edward de Grazia would later call the “‘Brennan doctrine,’”

a developing definition of obscenity formulated by Supreme Court Justice

William J. Brennan, Jr. that would exempt works of literary value from being

found legally obscene (G, p. xii). Furthermore, the Brennan doctrine would

affirm that “experts,” such as literary critics, authors, journalists and pub-

lishers, could testify as to the redeeming value of texts charged with ob-

scenity.

Citing Roth, the U.S. Court of Appeals in 1960 freed Lady Chatterley’s

Lover, and it became Grove’s first best seller. During a period of conglom-

eration and consolidation of the industry, Grove Press was the most suc-

cessful independent publisher of the sixties, going public in 1967 and

reaching $14 million in net sales by 1969. Over the course of the decade

Rosset would publish many of the key texts—including Henry Miller’s Tro-



342 Loren Glass / Redeeming Value

2. See Charles Rembar, The End of Obscenity: The Trials of “Lady Chatterley,” “Tropic of Cancer,”

and “Fanny Hill” (New York, 1968); hereafter abbreviated EO.

3. Quoted in S. E. Gontarski, “Introduction: The Life and Times of Grove Press,” in The Grove

Press Reader, 1951–2001, ed. Gontarski (New York, 2001), p. xxvi.

4. Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (New York, 1970), p. 233; hereafter abbreviated SP.

5. For a good cross-section of these debates, see Feminism and Pornography, ed. Drucilla

Cornell (New York, 2000).

pic of Cancer and William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch—that would precipi-

tate what his lawyer Charles Rembar called the “end of obscenity” for the

printed word.2 And Rosset would solicit a battery of “experts” to testify to

the value of the allegedly obscene texts he published. The success of their

testimony seemed to indicate that the end of obscenity was also a triumph

for modernist formulations of the literary, insofar as texts previouslyvalued

by an elite intelligentsia were finally being granted mainstream cachet. As

de Grazia, who also worked with Rosset, would affirm in his monumental

study, Girls Lean Back Everywhere: The Law of Obscenity and the Assault on

Genius, “the only significant breakthrough to freedom that was made over

the past century by authors and publishers . . . was made when the courts

were required by law . . . to admit and give weight to the testimony of

‘expert’ authors and critics concerning a challenged work’s values” (G, p.

686).

Then, on 13 April 1970, a group of women, movement feminist Robin

Morgan among them, occupied the Grove Press offices in New York, de-

manding union recognition and asserting that Rosset had “‘earned millions

off the basic theme of humiliating, degrading, and dehumanizing women

through sado-masochistic literature, pornographic films, and oppressive

and exploitative practices against its own female employees.’”3 In that same

year, Kate Millett would publish her groundbreaking feminist manifesto

Sexual Politics, in which Grove Press authors Miller and Lawrence (along

with Norman Mailer) would figure prominently as “counterrevolutionary

sexual politicians.”4 Grove plunged into debt and disrepute; Rosset had to

end publication of the Evergreen Review. By 1972, Standard and Poor’s index

refused to issue further reports on his company. Over the course of a single

decade, Grove had gone from representing literary freedom to representing

cultural oppression. Rosset would never recover.

The feminist engagement with pornography that followed upon the de-

mise of Grove Press has produced an entire library of popular and academic

polemics.5 But the abrupt apotheosis and collapse in the sixties of the dia-

Loren Glass is assistant professor of American literature and cultural studies

at the University of Iowa. He is the author of Authors Inc.: Literary Celebrity in

the Modern United States, 1880–1980 (2004).



Critical Inquiry / Winter 2006 343

6. See Frances Ferguson, Pornography, the Theory: What Utilitarianism Did to Action (Chicago,

2004); hereafter abbreviated P. Ferguson’s book is more about the sixties than it might initially

appear. Thus, even though she laments its “lame translation,” she is obliged to use the Grove Press

edition of Sade, published in the early sixties (P, p. 87). And she makes extensive use of its

chronology and critical materials, as well. As to Flaubert’s legal troubles, Ferguson uses French

trial transcripts, failing to mention that an English translation is available in the New American

Library edition of Madame Bovary, published in 1964, with an introduction by Mary McCarthy. As

literature, in other words, these texts can be analyzed in terms of the historical period and

geographic location of their composition; as publishing events, they are situated centrally in

postwar Anglo-American culture. It is worth further noting that Ferguson makes no reference to

two fine recent studies of literature and obscenity in England: Alison Pease, Modernism, Mass

Culture, and the Aesthetics of Obscenity (Cambridge, 2000), and Adam Parkes, Modernism and the

Theater of Censorship (New York, 1996).

Like Ferguson herself, Pease and Parkes somewhat unaccountably neglect the postwar era, even

though the issues they analyze came to a head during that period. There are only two significant

essays in the field of literary and cultural criticism focusing on the postwar obscenity debates:

Richard Ellis, “Disseminating Desire: Grove Press and The End[s] of Obscenity,” in Perspectives on

Pornography: Sexuality in Film and Literature, ed. Gary Day and Clive Bloom (New York, 1988), pp.

26–43, and Rachel Bowlby, “‘But She Could Have Been Reading Lady Chatterley’: The Obscene

Side of the Canon,” Shopping with Freud (New York, 1993), pp. 25–45. Ellis provides a trenchant

analysis of the U.S. publishing industry, but neglects the more specifically literary issue of

modernist aesthetics, as well as the role of literary critics as expert witnesses. Bowlby attends to the

role of critics, at least in England, but neglects the role of publishers. In a sense, then, my project

combines their concerns, arguing that the “end of obscenity” represents a crucial point of

convergence between the economics of publishing and the politics of literary criticism.

Two studies, one forthcoming and the other in press at the time this article was completed,

promise to further develop many of the crucial issues I raise here: Florence Dore, The Novel and

the Obscene: Sexual Subjects in American Modernism (Stanford, Calif., 2005), and Elisabeth

Ladenson, Dirt for Art’s Sake: Literature, Sex, and Obscenity, 1857–1966 (Ithaca, N.Y., 2006).

Neither, it is worth mentioning, is centrally concerned with the crucial developments of the

sixties.

lectical entanglement between literary modernism and legal obscenity that

laid the groundwork for these polemics has received surprisingly little at-

tention, except from the lawyers who participated in it. A striking example

of this peculiar aporia in the field of literary studies can be found in Frances

Ferguson’s recent book, Pornography, the Theory. Taking her title from

Robin Morgan’s famous essay, and framing her argument as a response to

antipornography feminist Catharine MacKinnon, Ferguson returns to a se-

lection of the modern literature that originally provoked the cultural and

legal controversies that would culminate in the obscenity legislation of the

postwar era. However, with the exception of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Fer-

guson’s examples—Sade and Flaubert—are from eighteenth- and nine-

teenth-century France.6 And although Ferguson does devote an entire

chapter to Lady Chatterley’s Lover, she fails to note that the trials over this

text in both England and the United States were only the opening volley in

a highly public series of battles that would dominate the literary and legal

worlds over the course of the next decade—the decade in which, it is worth

noting, Ferguson would have received her own literary education.




7. United States v. One Book Entitled “Ulysses,” 72 F. 2d 705 (1934), in The United States of

America v. One Book Entitled “Ulysses” by James Joyce: Documents and Commentary, ed. Michael

Moscato and Leslie LeBlanc (Frederick, Md., 1984), p. 456.

8. My emphasis here will be on the history of obscenity in the modern United States, but, as the

studies of Pease and Parkes affirm, the legal issues and literary texts under consideration were

As I hope to show, these battles represented a mechanism, insufficiently

appreciated in Anglo-American literary and cultural history, whereby the

champions of high modernism in the academic, journalistic, andpublishing

community could establish and affirm the authority of their aesthetic stan-

dards. These standards had been difficult to legitimize because the mod-

ernist texts they were intended to evaluate had not stood the test of time.

They had not become “classics” by the only standard widely recognized by

the public at large: outliving their authors. Obscenity trials, in this context,

functioned as rituals of consecration whereby modernist texts could be af-

firmed as “classics.” They enabled an alliance between publishers and lit-

erary critics that was crucial to providing mainstream acceptance for

modernist texts by replacing the test of time with the patina of profession-

alism. Thus Circuit Court Judge Augustus Hand, affirming on appeal Dis-

trict Court Judge John Woolsey’s decision in United States v. One Book

Called “Ulysses,” asserted that literary value can be proven by “the estab-

lished reputation of the work in the estimation of approved critics, if the

book is modern, and the verdict of the past, if it is ancient.”7

However, insofar as these evaluative standards relied on the ethos of a

class fragment that was elitist and, at least residually, dissident, their very

incorporation into the mainstream tended to vitiate the underlying basis of

their authority. As a result, previously enshrined literary texts became sus-

ceptible to the ideological critique of a new generation of critics whose sen-

sibilities were informed by the experience of New Left identity-based

activism and whose critical strategies were more sensitive to the varieties of

readerly experience. Because this development occurred in the context of

debates over the status and value of representations of explicit sexuality au-

thored almost exclusively by men, it would be in terms of sex and sexuality

that this ideological critique would be pursued, predominantly by second-

wave feminists. This emphasis on the ideological functions of sexuality in

turn mandated that this next generation of cultural critics be more sensitive

to the conjunctions between their personal and professional lives. The re-

sidual anxieties over this relatively rapid transformation, I would offer, ac-

count, at least in part, for its neglect by the generation that experienced its

consequences.

The rapid transformations consequent upon the constitutionalizationof

obscenity law in the sixties had their roots in more gradual developments

stretching back over the preceding century.8 The Progressive Era crusaders




remarkably similar in England and America in the early twentieth century, and this brief overview

can be considered as applicable to the Anglo-American world more generally during the modern

era.

9. Quoted in Paul S. Boyer, Purity in Print: Book Censorship in America from the Gilded Age to

the Computer Age (Madison, Wis., 2002), p. 21; hereafter abbreviated PP.

10. U.S. v. One Book Called “Ulysses,” 5 F. Supp. 182 (1933), in The United States of America v.

One Book Entitled “Ulysses” by James Joyce, p. 309; hereafter abbreviated US.

11. For Cerf ’s version of the trial, see his At Random: The Reminiscences of Bennett Cerf (New

York, 1977), pp. 90–102.

against vice cast a very wide net, such that the battles over censorship and

obscenity that began in the late nineteenth century with the passage of the

Comstock Law tended to involve a somewhat uncomfortable proximity be-

tween high and low culture. Signal texts of Anglo-American modernism

such as Theodore Dreiser’s American Tragedy, James Joyce’s Ulysses, and

Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover—not to mention more established clas-

sics by Voltaire, Petronius, Boccaccio, and Rabelais—found themselves jos-

tling against anonymous pornographic pulp titles such as Screaming Flesh,

Raw Dames, So Firm and Fully Packed, The Lustful Turk, and Violated Wres-

tler. For the crusaders against vice, the distinction between high and low

was patently false, simply a ruse whereby dissolute intellectuals attempted

to satisfy their taste for smut. Thus Anthony Comstock, secretary and

founder of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice and Special

Agent to the Post Office Department of the U.S. Government, claimed that

“garbage smells none the less rank and offensive because deposited in a mar-

ble fount or a gold or silver urn.”9 Or, as one local customs inspectorclaimed

in 1930: “‘A classic is a dirty book somebody is trying to get by me’” (PP, p.

209).

For the publishers, literary critics, and authors who ushered in literary

modernism, however, the difference was crucial, and with each new case

they attempted to affirm that literary value is opposed to obscenity and

should exempt a text from censorship or suppression. However, their hands

were tied because judges were not required to recognize expert testimony

concerning literary value. These proponents of literary experimentation

achieved a signal triumph in 1933 when District Court Judge John Woolsey,

acknowledging “the reputation of Ulysses in the literary world,” overturned

the U.S. customs ban on Joyce’s masterpiece.10 Woolsey’s knowledge of this

reputation had been arranged for him by Bennett Cerf of Random House,

one of the highly influential “new breed” of publishers who were instru-

mental in popularizing modernist literature in the United States, and Mor-

ris Ernst, a New York lawyer who devoted much of his career to fighting

literary censorship. Concerned that they couldn’t use the testimony of ex-

perts to exonerate Ulysses, they pasted critical reviews into one of the Paris

editions and arranged to have it confiscated by customs.11




12. See, in particular, Paul Vanderham, James Joyce and Censorship: The Trials of Ulysses (New

York, 1998), and Marisa Anne Pagnattaro, “Carving a Literary Exception: The Obscenity Standard

and Ulysses,” Twentieth-Century Literature 47 (Summer 2001): 217–40. The critics whose opinions

were pasted into the original copy included Marcel Brion, Valery Larbaud, Louis Cazamian, and

Stuart Gilbert. In his brief to the court, Ernst references the opinions of Rebecca West, Paul

Rosenfeld, Gilbert Seldes, Edmund Wilson, and many others. Though Woolsey was not legally

required to consider these opinions, he was undoubtedly swayed by them.

13. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, in The Portable James Joyce, ed. Harry

Levin (New York, 1947), p. 471. For an excellent and extensive discussion of how, “since the

eighteenth century, what is aesthetic and what is pornographic have repeatedly been defined as

mutually exclusive,” see Pease, Modernism, Mass Culture, and the Aesthetics of Obscenity, p. 1. Pease

argues convincingly that this opposition begins to collapse with modernism, when authors

increasingly incorporated pornographic tropes into literary texts. However, since she almost

entirely neglects the legal debates over the status of these texts, she fails to note the degree to which

the opposition was sustained as a discourse of legitimation far into the twentieth century.

14. On the relationship between “legitimate taste” and Kantian aesthetics, see Pierre Bourdieu,

Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, Mass.,

1984), pp. 11–96.

The Ulysses case provided the precedent and template for almost all en-

suing obscenity trials in England and the United States. As critics and his-

torians have established, Woolsey’s decision was based on his adoption of

aesthetic theories promoted both by the prominent critics whose opinions

were attached to the volume entered as evidence and by Joyce himself in

the famous discussion of Aquinas in part five of Portrait of the Artist as a

Young Man.12 There Stephen Dedalus contrasts the “static” emotion elicited

by the proper arts with the “kinetic” emotion elicited by the improper arts,

including pornography. He concludes that, with “proper” art, “the mind is

arrested and raised above desire and loathing.”13 Woolsey’s conclusion

tracks Stephen’s theories of the redemptive powers of art quite closely:

“reading Ulysses in its entirety, as a book must be read on such a test as this,

did not tend to excite sexual impulses or lustful thoughts. . . . Its net effect

. . . was only that of a somewhat tragic and very powerful commentary on

the inner lives of men and women” (US, p. 312). Woolsey establishes that

the aesthetic object, insofar as it solicits a “disinterested” response, was op-

posed to obscenity, which elicited the “interested” and kinetic emotion of

lust. Furthermore, in contending that Ulysses must be read “in its entirety,”

Woolsey’s decision overturned earlier obscenity tests that required only that

portions of a text be deemed obscene while also affirming the doctrine of

aesthetic integrity so central to modernist literary and critical practice.

Given the specific copy of the text that Woolsey was using, this aesthetic

integrity included the criticism that had been pasted into the book. Thus

we can argue that the Woolsey decision helped legitimate the Kantian dis-

interest of what Pierre Bourdieu calls “legitimate” taste, by integrating the

aesthetic theory of the text into the text itself and acknowledging the au-

thority of the “experts” in expounding this theory.14 The Ulysses case, then,




15. Thomas Strychacz, Modernism, Mass Culture, and Professionalism (New York, 1993), p. 5.

16. People v. Fritch, 192 N.E. 2d 713 (1963), in Censorship Landmarks, ed. de Grazia (New York,

1969), p. 465.

17. On the story of Girodias and Olympia Press, in many ways an indispensable Parisian

prologue to the story of Grove Press in the United States, see John de St. Jorre, Venus Bound: The

Erotic Voyage of the Olympia Press and Its Writers (New York, 1994).

illustrates Thomas Strychacz’s assertion that “literary production in the

twentieth century was to be shaped and legitimated by professional asso-

ciations of writers, literary magazines, and by the rise of the university.

Modernist writing, in particular, responded to new discourse of profes-

sionalism.”15 The case, in other words, provided a legal imprimatur for a

larger shift in cultural authority in the U.S., from the fading moral hege-

mony of the genteel bourgeoisie to the expertise-based hegemony of the

professional managerial classes represented, in the cultural sphere, by pub-

lishers, academics, critics, and authors.

However, Woolsey’s decision also indirectly affirmed that the connection

between legitimate literature and pornographic pulp was not so easily sev-

ered. Thus Woolsey’s famous claim that he found no “dirt for dirt’s sake”

in Ulysses, echoing as it did the legitimation of so much contemporary aes-

thetic experimentation as “art for art’s sake,” indicated the affinities be-

tween art and dirt in its very attempt to distinguish them. It is worth briefly

unpacking the metaphorical resonances of Woolsey’s use of the term dirt

in this regard. Though the most obvious tenor is pornography, which is

ostensibly devoid of worth and therefore irredeemable, one can’t avoid the

Freudian inference that money is also implied and that dirt refers not simply

to the content of the text in question but to its status as a commodity fash-

ioned purely for profit. Such an inference is supported by Appeals Court

Judge John Scileppi’s avowal, in a later case involving Tropic of Cancer, that

Miller’s text was “dirt for dirt’s sake . . . and dirt for money’s sake.”16 The

association is further affirmed by Olympia Press publisher Maurice Giro-

dias, who coined the term dirty books to refer to the “‘meat-&-potatoes

part’” of his production that subsidized his unprofitable high cultural texts

(G, p. 259n).17 Art for art’s sake, on the other hand, is meant to affirm the

anticommodity status of aesthetic value, its irreducibility to economic

value. The U.S. government itself affirmed this opposition when, in section

305 of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, it allowed a customs exception

for “‘so-called classics or books of recognized and established literary . . .

merit . . . when imported for noncommercial purposes’” (PP, p. 227). Ernst

and his co-counsel Alexander Lindey relied heavily on the Smoot-Hawley

Tariff Act. Thus in a petition to the Treasury Department, Lindey averred,

“We have long ago repudiated the theory that a literary work must be hun-




18. Alexander Lindey, “Petition for Release and Admission of Book into the United States on

the Ground That It Is a Classic,” in The United States of America v. One Book Entitled “Ulysses” by

James Joyce, p. 189.

19. Greenbaum, Wolff, and Ernst, “Claimant’s Memorandum in Support of Motion to Dismiss

Libel” (1933), in The United States of America v. One Book Entitled “Ulysses” by James Joyce, p. 256.

20. Felice Flanery Lewis affirms that “the most significant aspect of the Ulysses opinions was the

classification of that novel as a modern classic” (Felice Flanery Lewis, Literature, Obscenity, and

Law [Carbondale, Ill., 1976], p. 133).

21. For an informative and entertaining account of Roth’s career, see Jay A. Gertzman,

Bookleggers and Smuthounds: The Trade in Erotica, 1920–1940 (Philadelphia, 1999), pp. 219–82.

22. Greenbaum, Wolff, and Ernst, “Claimant’s Memorandum in Support of Motion to Dismiss

Libel,” p. 268. In this sense, we can see the Ulysses case as an instance of what Peter Stallybrass and

Allon White identify as a recurrent pattern in modern cultural hierarchies: “the ‘top’ attempts to

reject and eliminate the ‘bottom’ for reasons of prestige and status, only to discover, not only that

it is in some way frequently dependent on that low-Other . . . , but also that the top includes that

low symbolically, as a primary eroticized constituent of its own fantasy life” (Peter Stallybrass and

Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression [Ithaca, N.Y., 1986], p. 5). Interestingly,

Stallybrass and White have little to say about the problem of literary obscenity, as such.

dreds or thousands of years old in order to be a classic. We have come to

realize that there can be modern classics as well as ancient ones. If there is

any book in any language today genuinely entitled to be called a ‘modern

classic’ it is Ulysses.”18 Ernst would, in turn, exploit this exception in his

memorandum to the court with the claim that “the words ‘classic’ and ‘ob-

scenity’ represent polar extremes.”19 Over the next few decades, it would

become the job of literary critics to police this boundary and affirm the

category of the “modern classic.”20

It would be a difficult job because, as I’ve already indicated, a series of

affinities have linked modernism and pornography from Flaubert to Bur-

roughs. Both seemed to collapse ends and means so as to partake of a certain

autonomous circularity of value; they were their own justification. Fur-

thermore, both tended to figure as “crimes of writing,” focusing on sub-

versive representations of carnality and deviance—particularly female

sexuality and sexual autonomy—that challenged bourgeois moral proto-

cols. And, finally, as Girodias’s career affirms, the fields of cultural produc-

tion in which they circulated closely overlapped. Thus it is not surprising

that Samuel Roth, the defendant in the 1957 case in which the Brennan doc-

trine was originally formulated, was, according to one historian, “a poet

and something of an idealist who published both pornography and works

of recognized literary merit” (PP, p. 275). Indeed, in the twenties and thirties

he had been a well-known “booklegger” who pirated both Ulysses and Lady

Chatterley’s Lover.21 Ernst was well aware of Roth, who had already tangled

extensively with John Sumner, Comstock’s replacement as Secretary of the

New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, and in his brief he warned

that “if the government prevails in this motion, Ulysses will be relegated to

the class of smutty French postcards and outright pornography.”22




23. Rembar affirms that “censorship and copyright have closely connected origins” but doesn’t

pursue this connection (EO, p. 7n). Indeed, there is remarkably little legal or literary scholarship

on this crucial relation. One exception is David Saunders, “Copyright, Obscenity, and Literary

History,” English Literary History 57 (Summer 1990): 431–44, which makes no mention of Ulysses.

For a fascinating discussion of the history of the copyright in Ulysses, see Robert Spoo, “Copyright

and the Ends of Ownership: The Case for a Public-domain Ulysses in America,” Joyce Studies

Annual 10 (Summer 1999): 5–62.

24. See James Joyce, Ulysses (New York, 1934), p. vii. On paratexts, see Gerard Genette,

Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge, 1997).

25. Cerf, At Random, p. 94.

26. Susan Stewart, Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation (New York,

1991), p. 3.

The risks of this relegation were more than simply cultural, since the

federal government did not provide copyright protection for works deemed

obscene. The illegitimacy of obscenity as literature, in other words, was le-

gally affirmed by its exemption from the category of intellectual property.

Thus Joyce and Lawrence had no legal recourse against Roth’s piracy. Cerf ’s

decision, then, offered to doubly affirm Ulysses as both a modern classic

exempt from customs confiscation and as legitimate intellectual property

from which the author could profit.23 In order to affirm Ulysses’s classic

status and discourage further censorship and copyright challenges, Cerf in-

cluded Woolsey’s “monumental decision,” a foreword by Ernst, and a letter

from Joyce detailing his piracy woes in Random House’s version of the text,

establishing a paratextual convention that would incorporate the profes-

sional legitimation of modernist value into the aesthetic integrity of the text

itself.24

Cerf, in other words, used the censorship battle to leverage Ulysses into

Random House’s “first really important trade publication.”25 He made a lot

of “dirt” on Joyce’s “art,” precisely by exploiting the confusing distinction

between them. Thus Ulysses’s modernist credentials were affirmed by its

entry into the middlebrow marketplace, and this paradox was sustained by

the successful marketing of modernism in the publishing industry and the

canonization of the new criticism in the academy that mandated the moral

“disinterest” of literary value. What Susan Stewart identifies as a “‘properly’

transgressive space” was established by a close alliance between the expertise

of academic critics and the marketing savvy of modern publishers; the “ob-

scenity” of modernism, in other words, was contained by its aesthetic con-

secration.26 The Ulysses case provided legal sanction for this space of

containment. The law had acknowledged the expertise of literary critics in

adjudicating the distinction between art and dirt, and this acknowledge-

ment in turn transformed the subversive tendencies of modernism from a

liability to an asset in the cultural field.

The Ulysses case was undeniably a landmark, but it never rose to the level




27. Edmund Wilson, letter to Mario Praz, 1952, Letters on Literature and Politics: 1912–1972, ed.

Elena Wilson (New York, 1977), p. 432.

28. Edmund Wilson, Memoirs of Hecate County (1942; New York, 1959), p. 10; hereafter

abbreviated M.

of the Supreme Court and was never explicitly framed in terms of the con-

stitutional protections of the First Amendment. The first case that did reach

the highest court in the land is informative. It was Doubleday and Co. v. New

York (1948), and the book in question was Edmund Wilson’s Memoirs of

Hecate County, which had already been reviewed by Malcolm Cowley in

The New Republic, Lionel Trilling in The Nation, and Alfred Kazin in The

Partisan Review, and was becoming something of a succes-de-scandale for

the perennially impecunious critic, selling more briskly than anything he

had previously published. Wilson saw Memoirs, ostensibly his favorite

among his many publications, as “a suburban inferno,” chronicling the iro-

nies and hypocrisies of life in a fictional New York City suburb from the

perspective of an unnamed narrator clearly based on Wilson himself.27 Only

one story, “The Princess with the Golden Hair,” which included a single

passage of explicit sexual description, had generated the complaints from

the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, which broughtDoubleday

to court. Although Trilling was allowed to testify for the defense and al-

though Doubleday’s lawyers cited Hand’s statements in the Ulysses case as

to expert testimony in their brief to the court, Doubleday was found guilty,

and no written opinion was issued. When the case was appealed to the Su-

preme Court, Justice Felix Frankfurter, a good friend of Wilson’s, recused

himself, and the case deadlocked, again with no written opinions.

Not surprisingly, almost all the stories in Memoirs are meditations,either

allegorical or literal, on the problem of aesthetic value. Thus the opening

tale, “The Man Who Shot Snapping Turtles,” chronicles the problems of a

suburbanite whose pond is infested with snapping turtles. His neighbor

suggests that, instead of lamenting the destruction of his yard, he breed the

animals: “let the turtles create economic, instead of killing aesthetic,

value!”28 The next story, “Ellen Terhune,” loosely based on Wilson’s rela-

tionship with Edna St. Vincent Millay, documents the emotional troubles

of its title character who “was, in fact, probably the first woman composer

who had ever contributed to music anything of authentic value” (M, p. 22).

After that, “Glimpses of Wilbur Flick” details the narrator’s relations with

the title character, heir to a baking-powder fortune and aspiring amateur

magician. At one point, the narrator comments to his friend on the parallels

between magic and art: “All art . . . is a fake. Every work of art is a trick by

which the artist manipulates appearances so as to put over the illusion that

experience has some sort of harmony and order” (M, p. 105). This persistent




29. On the “paperback revolution,” see Freeman Lewis, Paper-Bound Books in America (New

York, 1952), and Kenneth C. Davis, Two-Bit Culture: The Paperbacking of America (Boston, 1984).

ironic skepticism about the legitimacy of aesthetic value accounts for Wil-

son’s determination to include what might otherwise seem like gratuitous

explicit description in the next story, the one that caused all the trouble.

Describing the nude body of his lover, “The Princess with the Golden Hair,”

the narrator effuses, “not only were her thighs perfect columns but . . . all

that lay between them was impressively beautiful, too, with an ideal aes-

thetic value” (M, p. 181).

This striking comment, in turn, illuminates the concerns of the following

story, “The Milhollands and Their Damned Soul,” which chronicles the

transformations in the publishing industry attendant upon the “paperback

revolution.” Something of a roman-a-clef about Wilson’s experiences in the

New York City literary establishment, and in particular his relations with

the brothers Carl and Mark Van Doren, the story opens with Warren Mil-

holland arriving in New York “as the prophet of a new literary era,” pop-

ularizing modern American literature through book clubs (M, p. 317). He

starts an “‘agony column’” in his magazine Booklover, which gradually

morphs into personal ads that, in turn, gain the attention of “The American

Purity League.” As Warren’s star fades, his brother, Spike Milholland, rises

to prominence with “a conspicuous firm who had achieved an immense

success by scrapping completely the old-fashioned inhibitions which made

publishers still want to appear gentlemanly” (H, pp. 359, 374–75). Spike’s

emergence, in other words, indicates that “the market for cheap paper-

bound reprints susceptible of being sold by the million was exerting a new

kind of pressure on even the long-established publishers in their ordering

and selecting of books” (M, pp. 380–81).29

The relationship between Doubleday v. New York and the paperback rev-

olution in turn became the crux of William B. Lockhart and Robert C. Mc-

Clure’s call, in their 1954 Minnesota Law Review article “Literature, the Law

of Obscenity, and the Constitution,” for a constitutional standard, based on

the First Amendment, protecting literature from obscenity prosecution.

The authors of this article, which almost certainly helped provoke the Su-

preme Court to review the Roth decision three years later, open with the

claim that “the Doubleday case demonstrates that constitutional protection

for literature attacked as obscene is an open and live issue today.” They then

provide an overview of contemporary censorship, which had spiked con-

siderably with the formation of the House Select Committee on Current

Pornographic Materials. Lockhart and McClure argue that mass-market




30. William Lockhart and Robert McClure, “Literature, the Law of Obscenity, and the

Constitution.” Minnesota Law Review 38 (Mar. 1954): 301, 302, 317, 370.

31. Gontarski, “Introduction,” p. xiv.

paperbacks are frequently targeted because of “the volume of their sales, the

manner of their distribution, their modest price and ready accessibility to

the public, the provocative nature of some of their jackets and blurbs, and

the existence of a national organization that had already sharpened its teeth

on comic books and magazines.” And they affirm that this National Or-

ganization for Decent Literature, like the vice societies that preceded it, casts

a wide and indiscriminate net, ranging from “something called Hot Dames

on Cold Slabs to William Faulkner’s Pylon, Sanctuary, and Soldier’s Pay.” The

paperback revolution, by expanding the audience and availability of fiction

in all its forms, had revealed that the difference between obscenity and lit-

erature had not been fully established by the Ulysses case. Some sort of con-

stitutional standard was required. And, in order to assist in establishing this

standard, Lockhart and McClure resort to the same aesthetic theories that

operated in the Ulysses case, arguing that, in literature, “experience is in-

tensified by arresting the reader’s sensations, focusing his attention upon

his own emotions so that he can know them for what they are.”30

It would be into this cultural and legal environment that Barney Rosset

would enter as both a champion of modern literature and an enemy of cen-

sorship. Grove’s early history has thus far been almost the exclusiveproperty

of former editor S. E. Gontarski; various versions of his narrative appear as

the introduction to The Grove Press Reader, 1951–2001 (2001), in his pub-

lished lecture Modernism, Censorship, and the Politics of Publishing (2000),

and on the Grove/Atlantic website. All versions characterize Rosset as a he-

roic individualist, “the rogue who personalized publishing, made it an ex-

tension of his will, psyche, and libido.”31 This brief description provides an

informative contrast with Edmund Wilson’s more lengthy critique of Spike

Milholland:

In exploiting his personality, Spike Milholland had become quite deper-

sonalized: he was a mere point of intersection by the great corporate

lines of interest of the new television company, the several radio compa-

nies it had swallowed, a company that made powder for jelly deserts and

that was sponsoring this first big program, the great merger of publish-

ing companies that was speculating on the Frederick Pratt novel, and

the national propaganda bureau that had continued, since the end of

the war, to work on public opinion at home as well as abroad. [M, pp.

387–88]




32. Roth v. United States 354 U.S. 476 (1957), in Censorship Landmarks, p. 292. Over the course

of the sixties, the term importance would increasingly be replaced by value.

33. See D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (New York, 1959), p. 5.

Rosset, in other words, figures as the last heroic hope for modernism in this

increasingly depersonalized and conglomerated media world, of which

publishing is really only a minor wing.

The ritual of consecration provided by the obscenity case became par-

ticularly attractive in this regard, as it could afford both literary legitimacy

and media publicity simultaneously. Starting with Lady Chatterley’s Lover

and then quickly following up with Tropic of Cancer and Naked Lunch, Ros-

set would exploit Brennan’s foundational redefinition of obscenity in Roth

as that which is “utterly without redeeming social importance.”32 In order

to prove the social importance of these texts, lawyers Rembar and de Grazia,

working closely with Rosset, solicited the “expert” testimony of a battery of

critics who could affirm the literary value and, thus, social importance of

these banned books. By this time, Rembar could confidently proclaim in a

brief to the Supreme Court “‘there are among us individuals who, by train-

ing and experience, are better qualified than most to appraise the literary

or artistic . . . merit of a book’” (EO, p. 440). Indeed, Rembar would go so

far as to affirm that the judges need not even read the books if they “have

highly qualified witnesses who come to court and stake their professional

reputations on their analysis of the book and its values” (EO, pp. 454–55).

The names of these witnesses—Malcolm Cowley, Alfred Kazin, Mark

Schorer, Jacques Barzun, Louis Untermeyer, Leo Lowenthal, Richard Ell-

mann, and many others—read like a veritable duty roster of U.S. cold war

cultural capital and, relying heavily on Ulysses both as an aesthetic standard

and legal precedent, they succeeded in convincing the courts of the “re-

deeming social value” of these now classic literary texts. Rosset would, in

turn, package his books, many of which had ambiguous copyright status,

using paratextual conventions quite similar to Cerf ’s strategy with Ulysses.

Thus his version of Lady Chatterley includes an opening endorsement by

Archibald MacLeish (affirming that “there is no dirt for dirt’s sake in Lady

Chatterley’s Lover”), a critical introduction by Mark Schorer, and a copy of

the legal decision by District Court Judge Frederick van Pelt Bryan.33 The

legal and literary opinions, in other words, are integrated into the aesthetic

autonomy and authenticity of the text.

However, many critics who appeared as expert witnesses also found

themselves in the position of having to contend with another prong of the

Brennan doctrine—that “contemporary community standards” be applied

to the text in question—which potentially undermined the literary distinc-

tion in which social importance was based. After all, defenders ofcensorship




34. Gerald Gardiner, “Closing Speech for the Defence,” in The Trial of Lady Chatterley: “Regina

v. Penguin Books Limited,” ed. C. H. Rolph (London, 1961), p. 204.

had always held that obscenity was less a question of the opinions of critics

regarding the autonomous qualities of a text than it was a question of that

text’s effects upon “average” readers. Many critics attempted to affirm that

this equally vague question could also fall within the purview of their pro-

fessional expertise. Thus, in his testimony for the Lady Chatterley case,Cow-

ley identified himself as “‘a literary critic and historian . . . I have made

somewhat of a specialty of the folkways of readers and writers; that is, my

last book . . . was more or less a book of literary sociology rather than criti-

cism’” (EO, p. 78). Kazin, testifying in the same case, also identified his spe-

cialty as “‘the trends of literary taste, what the public has responded to, what

it has bought’” (EO, p. 97). Both Cowley and Kazin affirmed that the public

was becoming increasingly tolerant of sexual explicitness in literature and

that Lawrence’s text was no longer as offensive to public taste as it was when

originally published. In affirming this increasing public tolerance, however,

Cowley and Kazin were undermining the very distinction in which mod-

ernism was based. Modernist texts (including, in this sense, Howl and Na-

ked Lunch) defined themselves explicitly in opposition to mainstream

culture; in a sense, the lingering ban on Lawrence and Miller operated as a

residual reminder of this crucial distinction. By revealing that modernism

was losing this distinction, these critics were compromising the value that

their testimony was supposed to establish.

The British trial of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which followed upon the

American case by only a year and closely paralleled it in legal reasoning,

clarifies this contradiction. As in the United States, it was the first case in

which expert testimony was required to be admissible as evidence of aes-

thetic value, thanks to the passage of the Obscene Publications Act of 1959,

which provided statutory as opposed to common law protocols for ob-

scenity trials. The experts in the British trial—Raymond Williams, Richard

Hoggart, E. M. Forster, Stanley Unwin, Walter Allen, Rebecca West—were

equally illustrious. But the delimitations of their expertise were more clearly

marked. As the defence conceded in his closing remarks, the testimony of

experts could only establish the literary value of the text; he was “notallowed

to call expert evidence as to what the tendency of this book might be for

the ordinary reader.”34 The British trial, in other words, more cleanly dis-

tinguished between the value of a text as determined by an educated elite

and its potential effects on the “ordinary reader.”

Of course, neither literary value nor community standards was particu-

larly clear as a guideline for determining obscenity, and by the time the




35. Mishkin v. New York 383 U.S. 502 (1968), in Censorship Landmarks, p. 634.

36. Ibid., p. 635.

37. United States v. Ginzburg 86 S. Ct. 942 (1966), in Censorship Landmarks, p. 485.

Fanny Hill case rolled around in 1965, along with the controversial com-

panion cases of Mishkin v. State of New York and Ginzburg v. U.S., a group

of critics, publishers, and authors, including Paul Goodman, Walter Min-

ton, Norman Podhoretz, Richard Poirier, Barney Rosset, and William Sty-

ron, filed an amici brief arguing that “the Court should once and for all

outlaw all governmental policing of the images and ideas disseminated

among adults in book and any other printed or graphic form.”35 Claiming

that the Brennan doctrine did not lay down “any standard by which the

average writer, critic, publisher or distributor can safely distinguishbetween

material pointing to perdition and that having sanctity,” the brief acknowl-

edged that it was impossible to establish a consensus on redeeming social

importance or literary value and therefore that censorship, in all its forms,

should be ended.36 The ultimate incoherence of the Brennan doctrine, then,

forced many critics and intellectuals to admit the correlative incoherence

of the literary value they had been solicited to uphold.

On 21 March 1966, Cleland’s famous book was freed, but Ginzburg and

Mishkin’s guilty verdicts were affirmed. The reasons for this split are infor-

mative. While Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, not unlike Ulysses and Lady

Chatterley’s Lover, was being rescued from underground circulation by a

reputable publisher (Putnam’s), Ginzburg and Mishkin were essentiallypa-

riah capitalists in the tradition of Samuel Roth. Ginzburg, in particular, had

considerable high cultural pretensions and had already published excerpts

of Fanny Hill, as well as Mark Twain’s 1601 and an article on Lady Chatterley’s

Lover, in his glossy hardcover magazine Eros, one of the texts for which he

had been indicted. However, in affirming the guilty verdicts of Ginzburg

and Mishkin, the high court determined that they “may include consider-

ation of the setting in which the publications were presented as an aid to

determining the question of obscenity.”37 The Court decided, in other

words, that a text’s location in the cultural marketplace was relevant to de-

termining whether or not it could be deemed obscene; if the publisher mar-

keted it as obscene, the court would be more likely to agree. Although this

“pandering” logic was much maligned at the time, it was really in essence

an acknowledgement that the literary underground in which pirated mas-

terpieces had circulated alongside pornographic pulp was coming to an end.

Grove Press had successfully legitimated even the most explicit and graphic

modernist texts; men like Roth and Ginzberg were no longer necessary. It

is for this reason, I believe, that Rembar concludes his book triumphantly




38. In Miller v. California, the Burger Court did make an attempt to roll back some of the more

liberal conclusions of the Warren court rulings on obscenity, changing the “utterly without

redeeming social importance” clause to “lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value”

(Miller v. California 413 U.S. 15 [1973]). However, as Amy Adler affirms, “the wording of Miller

clearly reflects the Modernist era in which it was drafted” (Amy M. Adler, “Post-Modern Art and

the Death of Obscenity Law,” Yale Law Journal 99 [Apr. 1990]: 1364) and therefore fails to

acknowledge that “serious value is no longer a coherent standard in the face of recent

developments in art” (ibid., p. 1362). In any case, insofar as Rembar’s assertion is correct regarding

the end of obscenity for printed word, the Miller case is moot in terms of literary value.

39. Andrea Friedman, Prurient Interests: Gender, Democracy, and Obscenity in New York City,

1909–1945 (New York, 2000), p. 125.

with the Memoirs case, arguing that “so far as writers are concerned, there

is no longer a law of obscenity” (EO, p. 490).38

Furthermore, it is significant that Rembar ends with Cleland, insofar as

Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure was more difficult to defend in modernist

terms. The text had long been considered pornographic, so much so that

Ernst referenced it in his Ulysses brief as an example of obscenity. Its ex-

oneration, then, risked undermining the opposition between modernism

and pornography that that case had upheld. Rembar himself called it “a

classic of pornography,” directly collapsing the opposition between classics

and obscenity established as a precedent by the Ulysses case (EO, p. 224).

Although Rembar did specify in his brief that it “‘is a work of literature that

has considerable value,’” this value could not obscure the fact that, like por-

nography, it was clearly intended to arouse lustful thoughts and prurient

interests (EO, p. 436).

But for whom? Memoirs, like Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and indeed like

many of the books and films that had been the object of obscenity trials

since Madame Bovary, is written by a man but focuses primarily on female

sexual pleasure. The possible “prurience” that such representations may ef-

fect in readers was, in these cases, also being principally adjudicatedbymen,

with an implicit assumption of a male reader. Woolsey had defined this

reader as “l’homme moyen sensuel” (US, p. 312); somewhat ironically it had

been the crusaders against vice who had worried about the effects on female

readers. Thus we can see how the literary structure of Hecate County, which

attempts to combat the vertiginous ambiguity of aesthetic value in a com-

mercialized culture by anchoring it in the male gaze on the female body,

quite effectively incorporates the demographic and sociological contexts of

its reception.

Indeed, it is worth noting, as Andrea Friedman affirms, that the literary

consecration of modernism in midcentury coincided with a “masculini-

zation” of the obscenity debates; women were notably absent, except as

characters in the novels under consideration.39 However, once these texts




40. Ellis affirms that “censorship artificially preserves aura,” but strangely neglects to consider

the modernist extensions of this crucial relation (Ellis, “Disseminating Desire,” p. 40).

had been released more broadly into the public sphere in the context of the

increasing incursion of women into the professions and a greatly expanded

university system in the process of being transformed by student activism,

the differential possibilities of readerly experience began to displace the new

critical focus on textual autonomy. In gradually abandoning the “disinter-

est” of literary value, in other words, the critics who helped enable the end

of obscenity were also ushering in a new era in which the sexual interests

of readers and the gender identity of writers would supplement, if not en-

tirely replace, the autonomous formal qualities of the text.

I would like to conclude by mapping out the complex overlap between

these two shifts: on the one hand, the collapse of the modernistconsecration

of literary value based on the aesthetic integrity of the text and, on the other,

the emergence of a politics of sexuality that shifted the emphasis of literary

criticism from the autonomous qualities of texts to the phenomenological

experience of readers. My argument here will be that the former partly en-

abled the latter, insofar as the loss of a modernist aura around such texts as

Lady Chatterley and Tropic of Cancer expanded the contexts in which their

sexual themes could be understood at the same time as the obscenity de-

bates were foregrounding the relativity of readerly experience.40 As the ideo-

logical contexts of these themes came to be examined—most prominently

by second-wave feminists—intellectuals in the humanities and the social

sciences were forced to realize relays and relations between their personal

and professional lives in ways both liberating and unsettling. The obscenity

debates, in other words, forced figures of cultural authority to examine the

ways in which the authority of their readings was informed by their private

identities as sexed subjects.

The terms of this transformation are illustrated by a particularly symp-

tomatic moment in Malcolm Cowley’s testimony in the Lady Chatterley

case:

There are a certain number of short Anglo-Saxon words for bodily

functions that were regarded until World War I as being wholly part of a

secret language of men. . . . These words were used in the smoking

room, in the bar room, in the barbershop, and no woman was supposed

to know them unless she was an utterly degraded woman. After World

War I, women increasingly demanded admission to what had been the

sacred places of men. The smoking room, the bar room, the barbershop

even, and demanded knowledge of the secret language of men. So that

there came one word after another in one novel after another.




Cowley concludes: “‘There is no more secret language of males. That has

been abolished’” (EO, p. 84). By lining up transformations in novelistic dis-

course with the incursion of women into male “‘sacred places,’” Cowley

affirms that the consecration of modernism was related to the disintegrating

sexual exclusivity of this linguistic domain (he also affirms why so many

male authors considered censorship to be a form of emasculation). His em-

phasis on this demand on the part of women for “‘admission’” and“‘knowl-

edge’” should be conceived both metonymically, as an indication of the

more general incursion of women into previously homosocial realms of

work and leisure, and symptomatically, as an indication of Cowley’s private

anxieties about this incursion. Indeed, later on he concedes: “‘I don’t like

this new fashion of using those four-letter words all over the place. I would

rather keep them for the secret language of men’” (EO, p. 93).

Cowley’s anxious admission here indicates that he probably saw some-

one like Millett on the horizon. For one of the sacred places to whichwomen

demanded admission would be English departments. In the context of the

obscenity debates this demand meant far more than a demographic shift;

it meant a transformation of the academic habitus in which the nexus be-

tween personal and professional identity would be restructured. This re-

structuring, which mandated that critics and scholars account for the ways

in which their private and intimate experiences were implicated in their

professional methods and manners, was, in my opinion, central to the

transformation of literary studies in the postwar era. A key moment in this

shift occurred with the publication of Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics, which

began as a Ph.D. dissertation in English at Columbia University. It opens

with what could arguably be a methodological and political credo for the

next generation of literary critics:

It has been my conviction that the adventure of literary criticism is not

restricted to a dutiful round of adulation, but is capable of seizing upon

the larger insights which literature affords into the life it describes, or

interprets, or even distorts. This essay, composed of equal parts of liter-

ary and cultural criticism, is something of an anomaly, a hybrid, possi-

bly a new mutation altogether. I have operated on the premise that there

is room for a criticism which takes into account the larger cultural con-

text in which literature is conceived and produced. Criticism which

originates from literary history is too limited in scope to do this; criti-

cism which originates in aesthetic considerations, ‘New Criticism,’

never wished to do so. [SP, p. xii]

Millett may be overstating her claims a bit here, but her preface nevertheless

illustrates a shift in the status of the “literary” that was enabled, at least




41. Jane Tompkins, “An Introduction to Reader-Response Criticism,” in Reader-Response

Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism, ed. Tompkins (Baltimore, 1980), pp. xvi, xxv.

42. Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860 (New

York, 1985), p. xi.

partly, by the end of obscenity. In moving from aesthetic adulation to ideo-

logical critique, she acknowledges that literary value inheres not in the text

but “in the larger cultural context in which literature is conceived and pro-

duced,” a fact that “expert” testimony was forced to concede in arguing for

the “contemporary community standards” prong of the Brennan doctrine.

The connection between Millett’s critical agenda and the end of obscen-

ity is clearly evident in the texts she chooses as illustrations of her argument.

Her first chapter opens with a quote from Miller’s Sexus, published byGrove

Press in 1965, that, a decade earlier, would have resulted in Millet’s own text

being censored. After the lengthy quote, Millett affirms that “what the

reader is vicariously experiencing at this juncture is a nearly supernatural

sense of power—should the reader be male” (SP, p. 6). And later on she

acknowledges, echoing Cowley, that “Miller’s sexual humor is the humor

of the men’s house, more specifically, the men’s room” (SP, p. 303). She

leverages her argument, then, through both specifying Miller’s predomi-

nantly male audience and entering their “sacred space.” She inverts the re-

demptive agency of Miller’s earlier male critics by appropriating his

“offensive” language, thereby rendering the subject of masculine literary

subversion as an object of feminist ideological critique. Thus she opens by

overturning Lawrence Durrell and Karl Shapiro’s paratextual celebrationof

Miller as sexually liberatory: “Miller is a compendium of American sexual

neuroses, and his value lies not in freeing us from such afflictions, but in

having had the honesty to express and dramatize them” (SP, p. 295). In re-

orienting Miller’s “social value,” Millett is also exposing the personal and

sexual investments of his earlier readers.

What Millett confirmed, then, is that literary critics are just another in-

terpretive community whose values are as susceptible to ideologicalcritique

(and transformation) as any other institutionally established elite. Indeed,

it is no coincidence that Stanley Fish’s highly influential essay, “Literature

in the Reader: Affective Stylistics,” came out in the same year as Sexual Poli-

tics. As Jane Tompkins would later proclaim of her husband’s essay, “the

reader’s activity is declared to be identical with the text and therefore be-

comes itself the source of all literary value.” She concludes, “the net result

of this epistemological revolution is to repoliticize literature and literary

criticism.”41 And Tompkins opens her most well-known study, Sensational

Designs, with the gambit that she will be dealing with texts that are “suspect

from a modernist point of view.”42 The passage from Millett to Tompkins,




then, affirms that the culture of our expertise has gradually shifted from an

evaluative focus on the literary text based on the modernist masterpiece to

a political focus on the contexts of reception, partly as a result, I would

argue, of the obscenity debates of the fifties and sixties.

The postmodern cultural field has mirrored this shift, as explicitsexuality

became firmly integrated into mainstream literary forms and corporate

marketing strategies. Thus the real beneficiaries of the end of obscenitywere

less the literary avant-garde, which quickly dissipated as an important force,

than middlebrow novelists such as John Updike and Philip Roth. Both Cou-

ples (1968) and Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) were undeniably enabled by the

end of obscenity, and both were critical and commercial successes, in many

ways heirs to Wilson’s Memoirs of Hecate County. Once the taint of ob-

scenity that kept modernism on the cultural fringe had been erased, main-

stream novelists were free to exploit sexuality as both an aesthetic strategy

and a marketing ploy. The fate of Grove Press is informative in this regard.

Rosset limped along for another decade, finally selling out to George Wei-

denfeld in 1985. In 1993, Grove merged with Atlantic Monthly Press, and

Grove/Atlantic Inc. is now run by publishing entrepreneur Morgan En-

trekin, who quite self-consciously models himself on the independentmav-

erick style of Rosset. Nevertheless, the new company could not fully operate

independently within the new environment of multimediaconglomeration.

In 2002, Penguin Putnam announced an agreement to publish selected

Grove titles in paperback. The first title was Four Blondes, by Candace Bush-

nell, better known for her postfeminist blockbuster Sex in the City. Few

publishing events could more economically indicate the complex conse-

quences of the “end of obscenity” than this collaboration between an ersatz

avant-garde independent publisher and an international media conglom-

erate to produce a mass-market paperback of a middlebrow narrative doc-

umenting the sex lives of professional women.

The socioeconomic underside of this multimedia middlebrow conglom-

eration is no longer a disorganized group of pariah capitalists hawking a

peculiar potpourri of Victorian erotica, pulp-for-hire, and pirated mod-

ernist masterpieces, but an entirely legitimate billion-dollar pornography

industry that no longer requires any aesthetic excuse for its blatant appeal

to sexual arousal. This is why Ferguson’s title, Pornography, the Theory, is so

misleading. Unlike obscenity, the term pornography has no official legal

status, but it was frequently used over the course of the century precisely in

response to the muddle that arose when literary texts were deemed obscene;

it was assumed that so-called hard-core pornography could not make the

same claims for redeeming value. The simultaneous success and collapse of

the redeeming-value defense in the sixties in turn enabled the rhetorical




43. Catharine MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law (Cambridge,

Mass., 1987), p. 147.

44. Ellis makes a similar argument when he concludes that “decensorship transfers the erotic/

pornographic from the realm of ritual to the realm of politics” (Ellis, “Disseminating Desire,” p. 40).

45. Stewart’s statement concludes his concurring opinion in State of Ohio v. Jacobellis, the case

that affirmed that the obscenity of a text cannot be determined by “a ‘weighing’ of its social

importance against its prurient appeal, for a work cannot be proscribed unless it is ‘utterly’

without social importance” (State of Ohio v. Jacobellis 84 S. Ct. 1676 [1964], in Censorship

Landmarks, p. 425). Although the Memoirs case followed it by two years, Jacobellis was nevertheless

widely acknowledged as signaling the end of literary censorship in the United States.

shift in terminological emphasis from obscenity to pornography in the sev-

enties. This shift is elegantly illustrated by MacKinnon’s trenchant claim:

“obscenity is a moral idea; pornography is a political practice. Obscenity is

abstract; pornography is concrete.”43 The conceptual clarity of this turn to

the political is only possible, I would argue, once the determination of aes-

thetic value is no longer central to the debate.44

Indeed, it is worth noting how strangely blind Ferguson is to the his-

torical exigencies of the discourse of aesthetic value in its relation to por-

nography. She establishes from the beginning, and reiterates throughout,

that pornography is “one of the principal examples of essentially utilitarian

social structures that aim to manifest the differential value of actions to indi-

viduals,” but she nowhere considers the ways in which these values might

be articulated to the cultural marketplace in which the texts that represent

them circulate (P, p. 14). She does affirm that

the obscenity trial and the review are simply different aspects of the ar-

gument that art is art not simply by virtue of its author’s conviction but

by virtue of its having a recognizable value to its readers. It is, thus, not

really surprising that obscenity trials have regularly included testimony

from critics and from other writers and that they have treated such tes-

timony as expert. [P, p. 101]

However, as I hope I have illustrated, obscenity trials have not regularly rec-

ognized the legitimacy of such testimony; indeed, it was precisely this rec-

ognition as expert witnesses that critics had to struggle for over the course

of the early twentieth century, and it was precisely the collapse of their au-

thority as experts on literary value that enabled feminism’s political en-

gagement with pornography in the later twentieth century. Thus the

certainty of “Justice Potter Stewart’s remark that he doesn’t know what

pornography is but knows it when he sees it”—which Ferguson argues in

favor of—emerges from his confidence that he won’t be reading any literary

modernism (P, p. 7).45 Such texts did indeed provoke disputes that are re-

lated to contemporary debates over pornography, but any study that refuses

to distinguish them is blind to its own conditions of possibility.

