SEX
555
Again and again he represents the sexual antics of his characters
as evidence of desperation, lurking behind the total despair of
meaninglessness. He is what he says he is: an enemy not just of the
badness of our society, not just of our specific society, but of society
as such. To do what he can to get his readers also to become enemies
of society, he assaults with persuasive force taboos, especially sexual
taboos, which are intrinsic to the social order.... As an act against
society, to write, publish, and distribute a book like
Tropic of
Cancer
is more serious than to write, publish, and distribute a
pamphlet which intellectually advocated the forcible overthrow of
the government, but less serious than to take arms against the
government - about on a par with inciting to rebellion. . . . In
other words, the only plausible argument for suppressing
Tropic of
Cancer
would be that its publication is a dangerous political act and
not that the book is pornographic, even though its pornography is
the main instrument of the book's nihilistic force.
Steiner's argument is more sophisticated. He, too, is disturbed
by the lack of inhibition in pornography or in any other kind of
writing. But his objection to too much sexual exposure is essentially
that it makes public something that should remain private and
restricts the imagination because sex has a limited repertoire. "Sexual
relations are, or should be," says Steiner, "one of the citadels of
privacy, the nightplace where we must be allowed to gather the
splintered, harried elements of our consciousness to some kind of
inviolate order and repose." This sexual homily has little to do with
writing for it is really an argument against acts of exhibitionism or
voyeurism, though its view of sex as reassuringly serene and relaxing
- almost as good as a warm bath - and free of mystery or terror
has literary implications. Steiner's seemingly more effective point is
that there are only a limited number of sexual variations; hence, for
Steiner, the vague and less erotic descriptions of sexual activity, of
the kind one finds in writers like Stendhal, George Eliot, Tolstoy or
Henry James, are more suggestive, hence more imaginative, than
exact or charged descriptions of sexual relations could be. This, it
seems to me, is not true, and, anyway, the comparison is unhistorical;
but it is at least an arguable position. Like Elliott, however, Steiner
introduces moral and political considerations when he claims that
"the novels being produced under the new code of total state–
ment ... leave man less free, less himself, than they found him...."
In other words, it is nothing short of human freedom that is at
