SEX
553
As
things shape up, there seems to
be
some conflict between the
idea of freedom and the idea of civilization - which is nothing new
to those who know their Freud and have followed the diversions of
Norman O. Brown and his less theoretical cothinkers. Until recently,
however, anyone claiming to be advanced had to be for both freedom
and
civilization, though naturally the emphasis varied and there was
usually a good deal of vagueness when it came to defining just what
one meant and how it applied to
art.
Now things have changed:
freedom literally means going all the way, turning everything on; but
civilization today is actually regarded with a certain amount of irony
and skepticism, particularly by those who have an adventurous at–
titude to life and to art, and, of course, by those who think of
civilization as a synonym for a corrupt and dying system.
This, I think, is roughly the way the lines are drawn at present.
In literature sex is often the issue, though other moral questions are
involved. But when we try to examine more exactly what people
are for and where certain works stand the picture is not so clear.
In some contemporary writing commercial motives have gotten
mixed up with what might have been a normal extension of the
frontiers of sex and morality. Also different kinds of sex and different
uses of them for literary or ideological- or commercial- purposes
are not always distinct and they tend to be lumped together under
the heading of the new. On the other side of the fence, the guardians
of civilized art are hard to pin down, once we get beyond the gen–
eralities on which most of us are bound to agree. Often, you can't
tell whether they are objecting to violations of current morality, or
of current taste, whether there
is
too much sex, or it is too detailed
or too eccentric - in short, whether the objections are literary, or
moral, or ideological or just squeamish.
Usually the case against the new sexuality is not made too ex–
plicit. But two recent pieces by George P. Elliott
(Harpers,
March,
1965) and George Steiner
(Encounter,
October, 1965) do take fairly
clear stands. Both Elliott and Steiner claim to be talking mainly about
pornography; though they are really talking about sex and its moral
and aesthetic limits in literature, and about moral values ·in general.·.
At bottom, Elliott's position is that too much sex is bad not only
for~
literature but for society. At first he argues that to keep a·safe distance
from sex, as from other bodily functions, is simply a matter of good
