Dirt for Art's Sake

Books on Trial from "Madame Bovary" to "Lolita"

Elisabeth Ladenson

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780801441684
• eBook ISBN: 9780801466410
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Legal History
• Index: Literature

In Dirt for Art's Sake, Elisabeth Ladenson recounts the most visible of modern obscenity trials involving scandalous books and their authors. What, she asks, do these often-colorful legal histories have to tell us about the works themselves and about a changing cultural climate that first treated them as filth and later celebrated them as masterpieces? Ladenson's narrative starts with Madame Bovary (Flaubert was tried in France in 1857) and finishes with Fanny Hill (written in the eighteenth century, put on trial in the United States in 1966); she considers, along the way, Les Fleurs du Mal, Ulysses, The Well of Loneliness, Lady Chatterley's Lover, Tropic of Cancer, Lolita, and the works of the Marquis de Sade.

Over the course of roughly a century, Ladenson finds, two ideas that had been circulating in the form of avant-garde heresy gradually became accepted as truisms, and eventually as grounds for legal defense. The first is captured in the formula ?art for art's sake??the notion that a work of art exists in a realm independent of conventional morality. The second is realism, vilified by its critics as ?dirt for dirt's sake.? In Ladenson's view, the truth of the matter is closer to ?dirt for art's sake??the idea that the work of art may legitimately include the representation of all aspects of life, including the unpleasant and the sordid.

Ladenson also considers cinematic adaptations of these novels, among them Vincente Minnelli's Madame Bovary, Stanley Kubrick's Lolita and the 1997 remake directed by Adrian Lyne, and various attempts to translate de Sade's works and life into film, which faced similar censorship travails. Written with a keen awareness of ongoing debates about free speech, Dirt for Art's Sake traces the legal and social acceptance of controversial works with critical acumen and delightful wit.

CHAPTER ONE

Gustave Flaubert

Emma Bovary Goes to Hollywood

The book is concerned with adultery and contains situations and allusions that shocked the prudish philistine government of Napoleon III. Indeed, the novel was actually tried in a court of justice for obscenity. Just imagine that. As if the work of an artist could ever be obscene. I am glad to say that Flaubert won his case. That was exactly a hundred years ago. In our days, our times…But let me keep to my subject.

VLADIMIR NABOKOV, Lectures on Literature

Few books are as closely associated with their legal histories as is Madame Bovary. Most editions of Ulysses include in a preface Judge John M. Woolsey’s 1933 decision allowing Joyce’s novel into the United States, and the trial of Lady Chatterley’s Lover was not only published as a book in its own right but also famously commemorated by Philip Larkin in his poem “Annus mirabilis” as an epoch-making milestone:

Sexual intercourse began

In nineteen sixty-three

(Which was rather late for me)—

Between the end of the Chatterley ban

And the Beatles’ first LP.1

Neither sexual intercourse per se nor even adultery began in 1857, but it might be fair to say that modern literature did. And along with modern literature, efforts to stamp it out: as we have seen, 1857 was something of an annus horribilis, producing a bumper crop of literary trials in France, as well as unprecedented obscenity legislation in England. As Flaubert put it shortly after his trial, grandiosely but with a certain amount of justification, “my cause was that of contemporary literature itself [ma cause était celle de la littérature contemporaine tout entière].”2 The trial, in any case, remains part of Madame Bovary, even more than is true for Ulysses and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, for a number of reasons. For one thing, the novel carries a dedication to Jules Senard, Flaubert’s defense attorney, in which the author notes that it was through Senard’s efforts that the book was able to appear at all in book form. It had been prosecuted on the basis of publication in six installments in the Revue de Paris in October through December 1856, and if Senard had not won the case it would not have been able to see the light as a volume. Flaubert might just as well, though, have dedicated the novel to Ernest Pinard, the hated imperial prosecutor, since the prosecution launched his career as an author. Madame Bovary was his first published book, and while it had attracted a certain amount of attention on first publication, it was the trial that made Flaubert famous, as he himself recognized. “My Bovary continues to be a hit [La Bovary continue son succès],” he wrote to his brother just prior to the start of judicial proceedings. ‘’It has become spicy. Everyone has read it, is reading it, or wants to read it [Il devient corsé. Tout le monde l’a lue, la lit ou veut la lire].” The letter continues, in a spirit of coy cynicism: “My persecution has won me endless sympathy. If my book is bad, the trial will serve to make it seem better; if on the contrary it is to last, this will be its pedestal [Ma persécution m’a ouvert mille sympathies. Si mon livre est mauvais, elle servira à le faire paraître meilleur; s’il doit au contraire demeurer, c’est un piédestal pour lui].”3

Even so, the trial might have remained a salty detail in Flaubert’s career, since he went on to publish five more books and establish himself as an eminent author in general and not just the focus of a judicial scandal. But Madame Bovary is still his most famous work, and the trial remains literally part of the novel. Most editions of the novel available in French, from the prestigious Bibliotheque de la Pléiade volumes of Flaubert’s complete works to the cheapest paperbacks designed for casual readers and students, contain the transcript of the trial proceedings.4 The first edition of Madame Bovary to feature the trial dates from the author’s lifetime and was published with his consent.5 Not only was the trial included in the 1873 “definitive” edition of the novel with the author’s imprimatur, it was also at Flaubert’s behest that the judicial proceedings had been retained in full in the first place. When Flaubert came to trial in 1857, transcription of such cases was not automatic, and the author hired a stenographer to record the trial at his own expense. This gesture, coupled with that of agreeing to include the transcript in the definitive text of the novel in 1873, ensured that the trial proceedings would continue to figure as part of the text of Madame Bovary, which was already well on its way to becoming an established classic by the time of the author’s death in 1880.

Among the many unforeseen consequences of these decisions on Flaubert’s part, perhaps the most spectacular is Vincente Minnelli’s 1949 Hollywood film version, which frames the plot of the novel itself with the 1857 trial. Minnelli’s film begins and ends with the trial, the intervening scenes from the novel itself—that is, most of the movie—subsumed in the story of the trial and presented as the author’s defense. This decision to frame the gist of the novel as evidence for the defense is to some extent quite in keeping with what happened during the actual trial. As in most such proceedings, the prosecution cited specific passages out of context as evidence of indecency (outrage à la morale publique et religieuse et aux bonnes moeurs), whereupon the defense expressed indignation that passages were being cited out of context, lamenting—as had the prosecution, for that matter—that for obvious reasons the novel could not be read aloud in its entirety during the trial. The defense attorney then proceeded to take up the passages cited by the prosecution and place them back into context, always, of course, in a way carefully chosen to highlight what he depicted as the extremely moral message of the work as a whole. Minnelli’s film begins in medias res, at the moment when the prosecution rests and Flaubert (or rather James Mason, since Flaubert did not in fact speak during his trial) is allowed to begin his rebuttal. The unfolding of the novel’s plot is therefore a perfectly logical device to follow and support his opening argument: you have mischaracterized my novel by selective quotation; I shall now demonstrate, by showing you the story as a whole, that your account is a distortion; here is what really occurs in my work.

The terms of the defense as represented in the 1949 version and the defense in Flaubert’s actual trial in 1857 differ greatly, though, and not just because Flaubert did not speak on his own behalf. The cinematic spectacle of Flaubert delivering his own defense speech is symptomatic of the most important overarching difference between the trial as it happened in 1857 and the trial as represented in Minnelli’s film. The speech delivered by James Mason as Flaubert presents the Romantic picture of the artist defending his art, and doing so according to two basic principles: the integrity and independence of art, and the idea that art is based on truth and has a special relation to it. The central element of his defense, which he repeats several times and which closes the film, is that his art represents the truth, and the truth will always triumph. Although all this is delivered in overblown, melodramatic Hollywood style, it says little that cannot be found in Flaubert’s letters. In this sense, Minnelli’s version of the speech for the defense is quite true to its subject. Where it diverges from the original is that, while Flaubert may have made similar statements in his correspondence, very little of this sort of rhetoric found its way into his attorney’s speech for the defense, which was conducted on quite different grounds.

The central points of the defense speech in the film—again, that art delivers truth and truth will always triumph—represent an amalgam of Romantic and realist aesthetic dogma. If they sound like clichés it is because the basic tenets of both romanticism and realism have, in the past 150 years or so, filtered into common discourse and become what Flaubert liked to call idées reçues: “received ideas.”6 The speech made by James Mason in the film contains many pronouncements that echo Flaubert’s correspondence not because the authors of the screenplay had researched the author’s letters, but because the concepts Flaubert deploys in his correspondence to defend his work, although iconoclastic at the time, have since entered common parlance. After all, the 1949 Madame Bovary was a Metro Goldwyn Mayer production, and therefore opens with the familiar roaring lion, surrounded by MGM’s motto: ars gratia artis, art for art’s sake: the once-revolutionary slogan popularized in France by Flaubert’s mentor Théophile Gautier.

Art for art’s sake—“l’art pour l’art”—a phrase borrowed from German romanticism, first used in French by the novelist Benjamin Constant in 1804, was made into a credo by Gautier in the polemical preface to his somewhat raunchy novel Mademoiselle de Maupin in 1834. (This work was itself to enter the annals of literary obscenity proceedings in the United States when an English translation of Gautier’s novel was unsuccessfully prosecuted by the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice in 1922; the preface is an argument against censorship in general and in the theater in particular.) In the mid nineteenth century in France, “l’art pour l’art” became the motto of the Parnassian movement, an offshoot of romanticism that reacted against some aspects of the French Romantic movement as represented for instance by Victor Hugo, himself a proponent of “l’art pour le progrès” (whereas writers such as Flaubert and Baudelaire were resolutely antiprogress). In any case, art for art’s sake, as slogan and ideology, took root in the avant-garde imagination starting in the 1830s, even as it remained anathema for a very long time in the context of official notions of the role art was meant to serve. By the time Minnelli, producer Pandro Berman, and screenwriter Robert Ardrey concocted the courtroom scenes for their Hollywood version, the ideas put forth in them must have seemed like the obvious self-justifications of any writer accused of obscenity. As Minnelli somewhat incoherently puts it in his autobiography, I Remember It Well, “We devised the historically accurate courtroom proceedings” (203). As mentioned earlier, they were not historically accurate, nor were they the arguments his attorney used. More to the point, these were not arguments that could conceivably have been advanced in the courtroom in 1857.

One of the most striking aspects of Flaubert’s trial, and of such trials in general, to the modern—or rather postmodern—reader is the extent to which the defense and the prosecution appear to be arguing from the same viewpoint. As cultural historian Dominick LaCapra puts it, “discussion and decision turn on a simple binary choice of a positive or a negative answer to a set of shared questions.”7 Historians and critics discussing literary obscenity trials often focus on this aspect, which now seems remarkable because of the extent to which such arguments have shifted ground in recent decades: specifically, since “the end of obscenity,” as attorney Charles Rembar, who defended Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Tropic of Cancer, and Fanny Hill in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s refers to the cessation of such proceedings. The British critic Rachel Bowlby makes the same point as LaCapra in terms of the 1960 trial of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in England:

The prosecution rests its case on the idea that this is a dirty book, likely to “deprave and corrupt” the minds of those who read it. The defense does not say that that is an inappropriate way of putting the matter, that it might be difficult or futile to determine the difference between a dirty book and a non-dirty book. Instead, it claims that Lady Chatterley’s Lover is an exceptionally clean or wholesome book…. In other words, the defense too adopts the categories of clean and dirty, wholesome and unwholesome, moral and immoral.8

“Dirt” per se (that is, the explicit representation of sex or use of obscene terms), which was to preoccupy twentieth-century censors and would-be censors, is not at issue in the Bovary trial, but the now-peculiar phenomenon of defense and prosecution arguing according to the same standards, and disagreeing only as to whether the work met those standards, held true for more than a century. In 1857 both Ernest Pinard, the imperial prosecutor, and Jules Senard, Flaubert’s attorney, ground their arguments in the assumption that the status quo (which, as Pinard emphasizes, is based on Christian morality) is to be upheld. Literature, they agree, should serve a morally uplifting purpose. The main point of divergence between the arguments for the prosecution and the defense during the actual trial is whether Madame Bovary serves such a purpose: this is the “simple binary choice” referred to by LaCapra. They disagree only as to whether the desired, and achieved, effect of the novel was to uphold or rather to subvert a moral framework that itself remains unquestioned by both sides.

Some weeks before his novel came to trial, Flaubert wrote the following in a letter: “The morality of Art consists in its beauty, and I value above all style, and, after that, Truth [La morale de l’Art consiste dans sa beauté même, et j’estime par-dessus tout d’abord le style, et ensuite le Vrai].”9 This sentence, which resembles many such pronouncements in Flaubert’s correspondence, would not be entirely out of place in James Mason’s speeches in Minnelli’s film (at least the part about Truth with a capital T, style having little part in “Flaubert”’s perorations in the film). However, nothing like it can be found in Senard’s speech in Flaubert’s defense during his actual trial. In 1857 this was a heretical position, one that would have been unthinkable in the courtroom. If, as LaCapra puts it, Senard’s “interpretation is in one sense more narrowly conservative than that of the prosecutor, for—despite his apparently ‘liberal’ conclusion—he construes the novel as a simple, clear, and distinct confirmation of existing morality and society” (34), this was out of necessity. Whether or not Senard’s personal convictions coincided with his speech for the defense, the shape that defense was to take was essentially preordained along the lines LaCapra describes. Even if Senard had, against all probability, wanted to make an argument similar to the one “devised” for the 1949 film, he could not have done so, since the arguments put forth in the film represent to a great extent the very bases on which Flaubert was being charged.

One of the key concepts involved in the 1857 trial, and which also explains in part the immense difference between that context and that of the 1949 film, is “realism.” In principle this means the idea that what is being represented in Flaubert’s novel is no more than the truth: that is to say, in the context of the novel’s defense, the real social conditions described in Madame Bovary. Flaubert himself, although he ended up being labeled as one of the founding fathers of realism, was no fan of the latter, as is clear from a letter written shortly before his trial: “People think I am infa...

Table of contents

• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue
• CHAPTER ONE Gustave Flaubert: Emma Bovary Goes to Hollywood
• CHAPTER TWO Charles Baudelaire: Florist of Evil
• CHAPTER THREE James Joyce: Leopold Bloom’s Trip to the Outhouse
• CHAPTER FOUR Radclyffe Hall: The Well of Prussic Acid
• CHAPTER FIVE D. H. Lawrence: Sexual Intercourse Begins
• CHAPTER SIX Henry Miller: A Gob of Spit in the Face of Art
• CHAPTER SEVEN Vladimir Nabokov: Lolitigation
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography