PISANUS FRAXI
21
large number of topics related to the central interest of his work;
and the ideas and attitudes he therein reveals lead us a step forward
in our consideration of that subject and of him.
In
the first place
there is the inevitable problem of justification: how does one secure
intellectual authorization for the study of matter so outlawed vile
, ,
worthless, depraved, etc. A convenient argument
is
close to hand–
pornography is valuable because it reflects or expresses social history.
"I hold that for the historian or the psychologist these books, whether
in accordance with, or contrary to the prejudices and tendencies of
the age, must be taken into account as well as, if not in preference
to those in many other and better cultivated fields of literature . . .
where shall we find a more truthful and striking picture of the rotten–
ness and depravity of the old French
noblesse,
which undoubtedly
hastened, if they did not produce the first revolution, than in the
memoirs of the time, or in the novels of Mirabeau, de Sade, Andrea
de Nerciat, Choderlos de Lados, and others; or what history will
make us so well comprehend the vices, follies, and venalities which
disgraced the courts of our Georges, as the lampoons, scandalous
biographies, and scurrilous periodicals with which that period
abounded? Such writers undoubtedly reflected the times in which
they lived,
if
they were not, as some historians maintain, the actual
necessities and complements of their respective epochs." And he goes
on to enlist both Buckle and Macaulay in his support, quoting at
length from them passages in which they contend that the vices of an
historical period are as important for its understanding as its virtues.
There is to be sure a certain degree of truth in this argument, but it
is a degree of truth decidedly easy to overestimate (nowadays this
overestimation is tending to become part of advanced received doc–
trine). Pornography, like every other creation of the mind, is by
definition historical; it is the product of a particular time and place.
And it inevitably contains a certain amount of observation, some of
it registered consciously, some unconsciously. Unlike the situation
which exists in the novel, however, observation is incidental rather
than organic to pornography- its governing tendency in fact is to–
ward the elimination of external or social reality. And although on
first inspection pornography seems to be the most concrete kind of
Writing-concerned as it is with organs, positions, events-it
is
in
reality very abstract.
It
regularly moves toward independence of time,
space, history, and even language itself. Furthermore, since it is by
