Vom Elend der Literatur, by William S. Schlamm. Stuttgart: Seewald Verlag, DM $17.80
NINETEEN SIXTY-SIX will no doubt be remembered as the year in which Rome abandoned the index librorum prohibitorum and in the United States nine old men volunteered to spend their declining years reading dirty books, on the dubious assumption that age and black robes qualify one for special discernment in these matters. Not much new is ever learned in Rome but from time to time ancient errors are put aside. Our nine old men have staked out claims, however, on the high ground where fools rush in and angels fear to tread. And so the discussion of pornography will be with us for yet another season. Admittedly there is not much new to be said on the subject. Messrs. Steiner and Girodias in Encounter have been able to get a few thousands words out of a threadbare theme, but it is pretty obvious that unless the debate concerning pornography can be made to bear on other and more important issues the debaters will be stuck with the pornographers’ dilemma of saying the same old thing over and over again. Clergymen and judges have made a good thing of repetition but intellectuals generally require the challenge of novelty. The importance of William S. Schlamm’s new book, On the Wretchedness of Literature: Pornography and Commitment (Vom Elend der Literatur: Pornographie und Gesinnung), lies in the fact that it points beyond the tawdry subject of por_nography to contemporary social and literary concerns of the highest moment. These concerns are chiefly two: a discussion of the responsibility of the critic for the wretched condition of the arts in contemporary society, and a discussion of censorship and the limits of state power. Schlamm does not doubt that pornography is a danger in society but he does insist that the definition of pornography is a critical rather than a legal problem and that only those who resist the all-powerful state can logically be opposed to literary censorship. There is a deep inconsistency in those who believe in the intrusion of the state into every nook and cranny of human endeavor, who see the state as the mother of all the virtues and the patron of all the arts and sciences, and who would then refuse to permit it to act as literary arbiter. The Supreme Court was simply acting in consonance with its liberal penchant for muddled metaphysical meddling when it decided to make men good in spite of themselves not by punishing the deed but by censoring the thought. Even poor, dull, nervous little Mr. Ginzburg, the erstwhile publisher of Eros Magazine, was smart enough to see that the action of the United States Supreme Court resembled the trial of Daniel and Sinyavsky in the Soviet Union. Indeed, both cases spring from the same petulant fear on the part of the collectivist state that some aspect of the life and thought of the individual will, in its integrity, pass unpulverized between the hither and the nether millstones of the welfare state. Censorship must be opposed, Schlamm tells us, not because we think pornography is harmless but because we consider censorship immoral. There are limits to the power of the state and only those who recognize these limits can logically argue – against censorship. M ORE important than the question of censorship is the discussion of the decline of criticism which has fostered, in Schlamm’s view, the development of a pornographic consumer’s literature. “No literature is possible without a conception of Paradise; . . . without a confrontation between the given and the possible.” However, the contemporary intellectual situation is one in which both Paradise and Utopia are “dead.” Once transcendental blessedness and Utopian bliss are beyond the reach of man, only sensate satisfaction remains as a literary objective. The contemporary intellectual situation in which both Utopia and Paradise have been rejected is only one of a number of possible literary climates. It is the dominant mood because antihumanistic avant-garde literary criticism has made it dominant. These critics, Schlamm argues, are forced back upon a so-called “scientific objectivity,” a cult of expertise, and an emphasis upon the sensate and sensual, because they are unable to construct satisfactory ideological and epistemological systems. They are “arrested Communists,’ whose sympathies are on the Left but who cannot, because of the historical experience of Bolshevism and because of the rejection of Communism by contemporary society, become Communists and retain their audience. However, the critic remains a revolutionary, attacking every institutional and ideological structure in society without being able, as the great Marxian critics of the past were able, to offer an alternative. Literature is pornographic because, were it to raise ideological and transcendent questions, it would force the critic to disclose his Communist identification: a commitment which contemporary society finds unacceptable. The critic consequently stresses the “non-ideological,” formal, and technical aspects of literature. This is an interesting and sophisticated explanation of the contemporary literary situation, argued with great verve and dash in an explosive and idiomatic German without equal in modern German criticism. No doubt its strength both as exposition and explanation lies in the element of truth it contains. Still, one is left with a great many unanswered questions. The relationship between critic and artist and critic and audience is a _ reciprocal relationship. The critic serves as a link, as a middle-man between the artist and his audience, and unless the critic can find resonance in the wider reading public he can not make even pornography a literary success. The fact is that the contemporary mood, the climate of opinion, is not the creation of the artist, the critic or the reading public; it is a shared consensus. I suspect that overt sexuality plays such an important role in literature today because men _ are turning away from social issues and collective dreams to the intensely personal and the private; that the mood is indeed anti-ideological and that this mood is not simply the creation of “arrested Communists.” Among modern critics there are as many “arrested Christians” as there are “arrested Communists.” _ From the mid-eighteenth century, personalism and collectivism in Western society have been engaged in the most intense of debates, with now the – one and now the other gaining ascendancy. Since the collapse of the great ideological systems, personalism seems to have gained an absolute dominance in the artistic and psychological realms, while voluntarism (despite surface appearances) is beginning to replace ideological and physical coercion in the social and technical-collective realms. Schlamm is correct in pointing out the fact that the literary tradition in the West has been social and. political. Today that is no longer the case, but, before we decide that this state of affairs is wholly decadent, let us admit the importance of the personal and the private as the last stronghold of the integrity of the individual. “It is this solitary ego, this passional I, this imperfect self, which will finally throw down all the false gods of race, history and society and reassert the primacy of the person. Sexuality, even in its most degraded form, is a reassertion of personal integrity and an affirmation of personal choice in a world whose ideology and technique has become increasingly anti-human and mechanical. The fountains of the deep have been broken up, but is it not just possible that from them will issue “a river whose waters give life’?
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