416
PARTISAN REVIEW
in
Crime and Punishment,
it exhibits enormous power and complexity .
Raskolnikov is a St. Petersburg Hamlet , and, come to think of it ,
Hamlet
is also a detective story. We can move down from
Crime and
Punishment
through good but much lesser writers such as Graham
Greene, Conan Doyle, Wilkie Collins, Dashiell Hammett , and so
forth. But there is an immense literature much lower still, and it
resembles Marcus's and Griffin's sense of the pornographic : full of
cliches, imitative, feeble characterization, fantasy, unlikely feats.
Wuthering Heights
and
Jane Eyre
are great Gothic romances, in–
vesting the "dark male" and the "passionate but unawakened
woman" with virtual mythic power. And, speaking of the things that
could not be said in the Victorian novel , Emily Bronte went much
further in print than the sexually hyperactive Charles Dickens. The
north-country novelist actually has Cathy and Heathcliffe spiritually
free on "Pennistone Crag." Here, in the Brontes, we are at the top of
the Gothic genre, and we can descend to Mary Shelley, Horace
Walpole, Bram Stoker, and others in whom there are good things ,
and we can descend still further to the junky Gothic romance you
can purchase at the airport, full of cliches, imitativeness , and im–
probabilities.
War and Peace
and
The Red Badge of Courage
are great
works of literature and deal .with the subject of warfare. But, of
course, much war fiction and many war movies are also garbage ,
full of cliches, and so on .
lt
is not at all surprising that Susan Griffin believes por–
nography to be hostile to eros. Bad art
does
make you feel bad. It is
the central point of Alexander Pope's
Dunciad
that bad art is hostile
to life itself, and in his great poem
MacFlecknoe
John Dryden equated
the bad poetry of Thomas Shadwell with excrement, constructing a
typographical pun by printing Shadwell's name as Shitwell. I am not
claiming for myself anything approaching the sensitivity of Mozart,
who became physically ill if someone played a note out of tune. But I
think most people have had the experience of being offended and
angered by, say, a really stupid and banal movie. Pornography is
merely bad erotic art.
Though the whole matter is charged with peculiarly intense
emotion , it seems to me that it would be an aid to intellectual clarity
if we put to one side for a moment the word "pornography ," and held
it, so to speak, in reserve.
I would argue that all areas of human experience should be–
and have been, as a matter of fact - available for artistic representa–
tion . There are indeed extreme forms of human experience such as
