ON PORNOGRAPHY
183
sexual life, these fantasies having been edited by the more
skilled, less innocent consciousness of the masturbatory adolescent, for
purchase by so-called adults. As a social phenomenon-for instance,
the boom in the production of pornography in the societies
of
Western Europe and America since the eighteenth century-the
approach is no less unequivocally clinical. Pornography becomes a
group pathology, the disease of a whole culture, about whose cause
everyone is pretty well agreed. The mounting output of dirty books
is
attributed to a festering legacy of Christianity-sponsored sexual
repression and to sheer physiological ignorance, these ancient dis–
abilities being now compounded by more proximate historical events,
the impact of drastic dislocations in traditional modes of family and
political order and unsettling change in the roles of the sexes. (The
problem of pornography is one of "the dilemmas of a society in
transition," Goodman said in an essay several years ago.) Thus, there
is a fairly complete consensus about the
diagnosis
of pornography it–
self. The disagreements arise only in the estimate of the psychological
and social
consequences
of its dissemination, and therefore in the
formulating of tactics and policy.
The more enlightened architects of moral policy are undoubtedly
prepared to admit that there is something like a "pornographic imag–
ination"; although only in the sense that pornographic works are
tokens of a radical failure or deformation of the imagination. And
they may grant, as Goodman, Wayland Young and others have sug–
gested, that there also exists a "pornographic society": that, indeed,
ours is a flourishing example of one, a society so hypocritically and
repressively constructed that it must inevitably produce an effusion
of pornography as both its logical expression and its subversive,
demotic antidote. But nowhere in the Anglo-American community
of letters have I seen it argued that some pornographic books are
interesting and important works of art. So long as pornography is
treated as only a social and psychological phenomenon and a locus
for moral concern, how could such an argument ever be made?
II
There's another reason, apart from this presumption about what
pornography is as a topic of analysis, why the question of whether
or not works of pornography can be literature has never been genuine–
ly debated. I mean the view of literature itself maintained by most
