PISANUS FRAXI
27
quently be grateful to the bibliographer who shall have taken the
trouble to wade through this literary garbage, shall have estimated it
at its real value, and shall give a terse but reliable account of it."
Ashbee himself confesses that he has not been entirely able to achieve
this object, although he has come closer to it than anyone previous
to
him.
But the "real desideratum," he concludes, is for a "single
work which, confining itself to the worthless and deceitful, points out
what should be avoided." The reader can understand that in a vague,
general way this sentence makes sense. But that it should be cast in
the form of a tautology, that the categories it establishes are mean–
ingless, and that the language itself dissolves beneath the slightest pres–
sure of inspection suggests again that we are in the presence of a
series of displacements. Such sentences are really about something
else and have their referents elsewhere.
These processes may be observed in another context, as invading
and conditioning Ashbee's scholarly virtues (it is not possible to make
a strict calculation of the degree of causal influence exerted by such
processes; they seem rather to act in the manner described in the
social sciences as "independent variables"). One of these virtues is
Ashbee's practice of giving "frequent and copious extracts" from the
works noticed along with "the opinions of previous critics and bibliog–
raphers." This modesty and generousness, however, serve a double
purpose, as we see a few pages further on when Ashbee declares: "I
have not attempted to generalize or draw to a head the various and
diverse material which I have manipulated; this is the province of
the historian rather than of the bibliographer, and requires a more
comprehensive grasp and an abler hand than mine." Here we can
observe how Ashbee's virtues and predilections go together and how
the former work as both mask and sanction for the latter. For Ashbee
shares in common his dislike of or repulsion from generalization with
pornography itself. Although as I have said pornography is para–
doxically a highly abstract form of expression, it does not achieve
its abstractness by means of its generalizing power. Generalization is
in fact anathema to pornography, for what generalization does is to
sum up or bring to conclusion a train of concrete instances; most of
all it dispenses with the need for a further production of such in–
stances, for a repetition of them. But it is precisely in repetition, in
repetition sustained to infinity and beyond, that pornography and
