Obscenity, Psychoanalysis and Literature

Lawrence and Joyce on Trial

William Simms

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000435221
• Topic: Psicología
• Subtopic: Salud mental en psicología

Obscenity, Psychoanalysis and Literature offers a fascinating psychoanalytic reading of four landmark obscenity trials involving the texts of D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce. By tracing the legal histories of Lawrence and Joyce, from censorship to their eventual redemption and transformation into champions of sexual freedom, the book draws a narrative of changing legal, literary and cultural investments.

The book examines the four trials of these authors in detail to show how the literary text can function as a symbol of both life and death and the political uses of figuring them as such. Taking a psychoanalytic perspective, we can see how this narrative of sexual repression to sexual liberation may itself be an emergent form of the superego imperative to enjoy and consume. Through close readings of trial transcripts and archival documents, this book helps elucidate the fantasies operating throughout the trials: the unquestioned assumptions of the nature of sexuality, gender, drugs and truth. It demonstrates with clarity how, through its attempt to suppress the sexual, the law confronts its own nature as language and in doing so troubles the distinctions between law, literature and desire that it usually wishes to protect.

Offering a uniquely psychoanalytic account of the obscenity trials of these authors, this text will be of great interest to scholars from across the fields of psychoanalysis, law and literature.

PART 1

The Woman

All the women are one woman

DOI: 10.4324/9781003202509-1

In the first two trials examined in this thesis, the criterion used for ascertaining a text’s obscenity was the Hicklin Test. The test derives from the English case of R v Hicklin (1868), wherein the text in question was an anti-Catholic pamphlet authored by Henry Scott and entitled The Confessional Unmasked: shewing the depravity of the Romish priesthood, the iniquity of the Confessional, and the questions put to females in confession.¹ Copies of the pamphlet were originally ordered to be destroyed, but Scott appealed the decision to the court of Quarter Sessions. Recorder Benjamin Hicklin rescinded the order of destruction on the grounds that it was not Scott’s intention to ‘corrupt and deprave’ the public, but rather to expose barbaric practices within the Catholic Church. A second appeal, this time by the prosecution and conducted at the Queen’s Bench, revoked Hicklin’s decision arguing that the intention of the author was irrelevant when deciding whether a publication was obscene. In his ruling, Chief Justice Alexander Cockburn set down what would become known as the Hicklin Test which would be used to justify the great majority of the subsequent prosecutions under the 1857 Obscene Publications Act in Britain and Under the Comstock Act in the United States.² Cockburn held that, in order for the prosecution to prove a text obscene, it must demonstrate a ‘tendency… to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences, and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall’.³ Cockburn’s decision to shift the determinate of guilt from the author onto the reader engendered a shift in the hermeneutic practices of all subsequent trials.

The Hicklin test is the first instance in this text of a persistent legal fantasy of a prelapsarian form of purity that is under threat from an obscene form of jouissance. Commenting on Scott’s text, Cockburn emphasizes the degree to which this imagined pure subject is threatened by a destructive and seditious exterior agent:

This work, I am told, is sold at the corners of streets, and in all directions, and of course it falls into the hands of persons of all classes, young and old, and the minds of those hitherto pure are exposed to the danger of contamination and pollution from the danger it contains.⁴

It is the law’s duty to intervene in order to maintain the purity of this imagined vulnerable subject. The signifier itself comes under suspicion in this legal definition, its dissemination and interpretation cannot be contained, neither can the form of enjoyment it elicits be pre-determined.

It is also important to notice that the movement of emphasis from an author to a reader is also a movement from a known legal subject to an abstract and undefined reader. Within legal discourse, the author no longer operated as the locus onto which the meaning of a text can be fixed. Instead, the meaning and, consequently, the danger of a text could be determined by its effects on its reader. This reader, however, is not an ideal or average reader but a susceptible one who needs to be protected from the possibility of corruption.

The use of the specific terms ‘deprave’ and ‘corrupt’ in the discourse of the trials has important connotations for this study, also. To deprave, from the Latin prāvus, crooked implies a norm from which to gauge the perversion that a text could cause. It then becomes the task of the legal trial to agree upon a norm from which deviation can take place. To corrupt, meaning to spoil or destroy also implies the presence of a foreign agent who performs the corruption. The rhetoric of corruption, with its biological connotations, indicates the degree to which the law is not only interested in the policing of texts but also of living bodies, specifically women’s: in this coinciding of the norm and the body, the biopolitical aspects of Hicklin become clear.

By figuring itself as the protector of this purity, the law can thus operate as pure itself and absolve itself of any of the enjoyment it perceives at play in the text. The positing of a vulnerable subject and the necessity to protect her thus allows the law to disavow its own status as writing, as a product of the very same structure of language that it treats with suspicion.

In both of the following trials, this imagined reader will be specifically figured as feminine and under threat from the literary texts on trial. In order to better understand this legal investment in the purity of female readers, I will briefly delineate the Lacanian understanding of The Woman as one of the instances of the Name-of-the-Father. By understanding how the law does not protect but actually produces this figure in order to justify its operation, I hope to show how this fantasy underpins both the trial of The Rainbow and The Little Review.

Lacan begins Seminar XX with a discussion of ontology. The history of ontology, both in philosophic and mythical forms, has routinely posited the sexual relationship as the ground for describing the essence of the cosmos. Lacan does not urge a return to these systems of thought but, rather, he asks why they always return to the sexual relationship in order to justify themselves. The ubiquity of these myths does not point to a universal truth. Instead, it attests to the universal ‘failure of the sexual relationship’ that this excess seeks to compensate for.⁵ Love, and its attendant signifiers, functions as the means of eliding the sexual relationship rather than confirming it: ‘they revolve’, Lacan argues, ‘around the fact that there’s no such thing as the sexual relationship’.⁶ The multitude of myths that use the sexual relationship attests to the degree to which the real of sexual difference, that traumatic kernel that resists symbolization, pervades the entirety of language, the failure at an individual level is deferred on to the family, on to the community, until the entire cosmos must stand as the justification for the sexual relationship. And it is not just in the obviously sexualized ontologies that this failure can be recognized: discussing Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics, Lacan argues that, here too, we find the same deadlock. In his attempt to construct an ethics by which the world can be understood, Aristotle must assert certain universals (The Good, Truth, Beauty) that act as guarantors for the system of meaning. Lacan’s point is that the need for these universals is necessitated by a certain constitutive lack in the system itself; that these universals need to be enunciated is evidence of the lack of their own self-evidence. The jouissance offered by the system fails, it requires an ‘other satisfaction […] that can be seen to emerge from […] the universals: the Good, Truth, and Beauty’.⁷ In the overtly sexuated cosmology of myth or in any secular ethics, ‘something skids off track in what is manifestly aimed at, and then it immediately starts up with the good and happiness’.⁸

There would seem to be no escape from this deadlock. ‘Reality’, Lacan claims, ‘is approached with apparatuses of jouissance’ and ‘there’s no other apparatus than language. That is how jouissance is fitted out in speaking beings’.⁹ Language thus operates as the medium by which the subject accesses jouissance, and it is jouissance that mediates reality. However, Lacan insists that this fact does not indicate ‘that jouissance is prior to reality’; jouissance is only possible once a signifying system is in place to designate its movement.¹⁰ Any signifying system that attempts to totalize the world under the auspices of the signifier must, like Aristotle’s ethics, miss the mark, come short in some way. This failure is a productive one in that it introduces a circuit that can be infinitely repeated by the drive. This jouissance that fails and is doomed to repeat is phallic jouissance, and Lacan will designate it structurally as male. There is also (an)Other jouissance that Lacan designates as female. This jouissance is predicated on the existence of the exception to the signifying system, ‘on the basis of the not whole’.¹¹ The feminine position of ‘not all’ points to the radical contingency of the law, the degree to which the signifier bears no natural relationship to the signified or the world it hopes to represent. The existence of the feminine position of not all potentially indicates the possibility that these symbolic fictions can be rewritten that the co-ordinates of the subject’s desire can be reformulated.

For Lacan, male and female constitute two structural positions within language. The two positions do not necessarily coincide with a given subject’s biological sex or a culturally designated gender but rather with the subject’s relation to language and the concomitant modes of jouissance available to her. Slavoj Žižek succinctly glosses the distinction when he states that:

sexual difference does not designate any biological opposition grounded in “real” properties but a purely symbolic opposition to which nothing corresponds in the designated objects—nothing but the Real of some undefined x that cannot ever be captured by the image of the signified.¹²

In Seminar XX, Lacan details this logic of sexuation. The male relationship to language and the form of jouissance available to him is centred around the phallus, not understood as the biological penis, although, in some sense, the penis can function as its proxy, but rather as the structuring principle of the male’s relationship to the symbolic and imaginary, in a word, fantasy. The phallus in Lacanian psychoanalysis is a structuring principle through which the male subject learns to desire and finds his position in relation to the Other, as its lover. Following this logic, then, for the male, there is only one form of jouissance, all jouissance is phallic jouissance.

But there exists a fundamental gap between the male subject’s desires and their articulation into signifiers, so much so that these desires are never fully satiated. The phallus, in all its symbolic weight, functions not only as a fantasy of the male subject’s potency and identity but also as the means overcoming this symbolic castration by the signifier. This dynamic produces the object petit a, as a supplement to phallic jouissance that allows for a fantasmatic relation to the other, that allows him to be the other’s lover. The object a is, according to Lacan,

from at least one pole of sexual identification, the male pole - the object that puts itself in the place of what cannot be glimpsed of the Other. It is inasmuch as object a plays the role somewhere - from a point of departure, a single one, the male one - of that which takes the place of the missing partner, that what we are also used to seeing emerge in the place of the real, namely, fantasy, is constituted.¹³

The barred subject can only approach the feminine in the form of object a, the partial object and object cause of desire. According to Lacan, man may indeed ‘believe he approaches woman’, and in doing so attempts to achieve a harmonious sexual relationship, ‘but what he approaches is the cause of his desire that I have designated as object a. That is the act of love’.¹⁴ This act of love is destined to fail as it aims towards the partial object and not the female subject herself: ‘He is unable to attain his sexual partner, who is the Other, except inasmuch as his partner is the cause of his desire’.¹⁵ We have here a Lacanian reproduction of the myth of the sirens, wherein the male investment in a form of knowledge beyond the signifier is manifested in the fantasy of seduction by The Woman. However, this act of love not only threatens death but it also helps to maintain the symbolic life of the male subject; it maintains his desire. The male subject is caught in the perpetual work of maintaining the proper proximity to the object of desire. Lacan suggests the repetitive drive at work within the process of maintaining this fantasy when he states ‘Man believes he creates – he believes believes believes, he creates creates creates. He creates creates creates woman. In reality, he puts her to work - to the work of the One’. Male desire is figured as narcistic, it creates The Woman to assist in the erasure of the lack within the phallus, the creation of the One. It is also figured as exploitative; The Woman is here being put to work for his enjoyment. But also, through the repetition of the acts of belief and creation also hints at the futility of these actions and the presence of the drive, maintaining itself through perpetual failure and return.

We have previously witnessed such an incarnation of full enjoyment in the figure of the primal father whose murder allows for the origin of the law. Salecl discusses this similarity between the fantasy figure of The Woman and the Primal father of Freud’s myth when she notes that ‘[i]n the case of Woman—the mythical “She”- […] we are dealing with an agency of power that is presymbolic, unbridled by the law of castration’.¹⁶ In referring to The Woman as uncastrated, we can see a clear link between this fantasy figure and the full enjoyment of the primal father. But as a figure with whom the male subject can hope to conquer or possess, The Woman’s function differs slightly from the primal father in that she remains very much alive as a fantasy and as such presents the possibility of access to a form of enjoyment beyond the castrating signifier.

The fantasized enjoyment of The Woman does not correspond to the enjoyment of a feminine subject in Seminar XX. After his discussion of the deadlock of phallic jouissance, the paradox of feminine jouissance is introduced. Lacan argues...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Series preface
• Introduction
• Part 1 The Woman: all the women are one woman
• Part 2 The Truth: father can’t you see, I’m writing!
• Conclusion
• Index