30
STEVEN MARCUS
author may be detected, the genuineness of an edition determined,
or even in some instances the place and date of the publication fixed."
There is certainly a general kind of truth to this notion, and its utility
in other areas of bibliographical study has been proved. On the
other hand, we should not make the mistake of attributing to Ashbee
an anticipation of
The Psychopathology of Everyday Life:
moreover,
to my knowledge Ashbee never makes any use of the practice which
he so laboriously pursues. Once again we find ourselves in the pres–
ence of behavior whose conscious justification has been displaced a
considerable distance from its primary motive. For if anything about
this question is at all clear it is that Ashbee's chief source of gratifica–
tion lies in the mere fact of quotation, in the rigidly literal reproduc–
tion of what he has read. There is certainly something ritualistic and
therefore something of an obsessional nature about this convention.
And since, as I have implied, pornography itself is overwhelmingly
ritualistic and obsessive, we can regard both the structure and the
content of Ashbee's bibliographical performance as being at least in
part companion- or counter-obsessions. Contrasts and analogies sug–
gest themselves at once. Pornography is, for example, the most dis–
ordered kind of writing; not only are the contents of pornographic
writing "disorderly," but the entire field, from the volumes them–
selves through all the circumstances of publication and collection,
amounts to a veritable model of disorganization and absence of con–
trol-it is, to be sure, a "dirty" and chaotic state of affairs. Ashbee
himself is thoroughly implicated in this dark and dangerous business,
but onto it he has imposed what must have seemed to him the most
inflexible and powerful kind of order. Accuracy, precision, literal–
ness, reliability, absolute verification-all of these virtues can be
seen as bearing with dialectical but equally irrational force on Ash–
bee's other interest. Yet because these virtues were not adequately
beneath the guidance of reason, things did not work out exactly as
Ashbee intended. For although he was able to reduce pornography
to order and reintroduce it within the iron frame of scholarly and
bibliographical control, .the demands of that control were themselves
remorseless and excessive. And the signs or symptoms of those de–
mands, the fanatical quoting, the invariable literalness and precision,
the infinitude of references, operate in the end not to master the
subject but to reproduce on another level and in a symbolic way the
