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WILLIAM PHILLIPS
stake when fiction loses its earlier reserve in handling sex and goes
in for erotic detail.
There is simply no evidence to indicate that sex is robbed of
its power and mystery and the range of feeling or thinking is narrowed
when sex is treated as freely as any other kind of experience. On
the contrary writers like D. H. Lawrence, Nabokov or Mailer cannot
be said to have narrowed our views of sex or interfered with our
freedom. It seems to me that Steiner does not like certain kinds of
writing, which is his critical right, but what he is really doing is
elevating his taste into an intellectual principle.
As
for Elliott, I need scarcely point out that his social views
are as conservative as his idea of literature.
If
there is a lesson to be
drawn, it is that the two often go together; though recently some
political radicals have turned out to be quite conservative in their
literary tastes. It is impossible ever to prove such things, but I suspect
that one cannot rule out
some
new things without invoking a prin–
ciple that would rule out
any
new things.
If
certain kinds of writing
or thinking are to be excluded, either because they are immoral or bad
for art, it can be done only in the name of some existing norms
or values, which are assumed to be fixed, and, therefore, outside of
time and history. How else can one justify, for example, saying that
Miller's or Genet's or Mailer's treatment of sex is out of bounds,
except by appealing to notions of sex and morality of the most
conventional kind.
Are we then to conclude that we cannot legitimately set any
limits for sexuality - or for anything else - in literature?
If
by
limits we mean arbitrary,
a priori
principles, rules of restraint, it
would seem that we cannot impose any such limits without getting
into some kind of intellectual if not legal censorship. Even if the
taboos are advanced in the name of literature itself, they are in
effect an attempt to outlaw a less restricted sensibility.
It
might be objected that if no limits can be put on literature,
then the role of criticism becomes limited.
If
anything goes, then
there is no basis for literary or intellectual values. However, I am
not proposing the abdication of criticism; what I have been sug–
gesting is simply that restraint is an indirect form of criticism, and a
very conservative one. Some critics might dismiss such an approach
as extraliterary, but in the sense that every judgment, like every new
