Dirty Books

I've quite enjoying Elisabeth Ladenson's Dirt for Art's Sake: Books on Trial from Madame Bovary to Lolita. This is such an obvious topic for a work of criticism that I was surprised that this book was published in 2007 (there must have been others who took up this topic before Ladenson); and despite the release date, this book ends with Lolita, leaving me to wonder what Ladenson might have made of books have been censored since 1955. (Harry Potter, for instance would seem to fit Ladenson's themes, although it's certainly less literary than the books she covers here.)

But if I want Ladenson to go on, it's only because I'm so enjoying what she's doing here. The first thing to point out is that though Ladenson is an academic, and Dirt for Art's Sake is published by a university press, this book is very readable. So far I've found that the author strikes a good balance between getting into the guts of the matter but keeping the tone something that a layperson wouldn't be put-off by.

What else I'm enjoying here is that although Ladenson assigns a separate chapter to each work she covers, her analysis (so far) interlinks among the books. As an aside, something that bothers me in much of the critical works I've seen recently published by large presses is that the articles and essays collected in each book are barely linked at all. Most often they're a bunch of articles that originally ran in magazines that someone has grouped under a certain title in some weak attempt to persuade the reader that this is more than just a collection of previously published material. The thematic links seem only to exist insofar as certain critics are drawn to particular topics.

But, anyway, Dirt for Art's Sake isn't like this. Among Ladenson's many themes, the one I currently find most interesting is how she links the government's aversion to certain books (and so far it's been the government solely putting these books on trial) and the novel's descent into the everyday as Realism became the dominant style of writing.

For instance, Ladenson starts with Madame Bovary, whose author Ladenson says didn't even want to be considered one of the Realists. Yet Ladenson convincingly argues that Flaubert was, in part, prosecuted because he chose as his heroine a woman who was distinctly unheroic and had no moral lessons to teach.

The government's aversion to the inclusion of the everyday becomes more clear as Ladenson discusses Baudelaire's The Flowers of Evil and James Joyce's Ulysses. The poems of Baudelaire that the French government found so objectionable were ones that mingled elements of sex and death. (Strikingly, when the book was officially rehabilitated in 1949, it was noted that the prosecutors of 1857 had real the poems too realistically and failed to see the symbolism in the six censored poems. Clearly, even 100 years later couching sex in images of death was provocative.)

Similarly, with Ulysses Ladenson points out how is had been denied entry to the United States in large part because of a scene in which Leopold Bloom's defecation is depicted. Thirteen years later, the ban was overruled in part because of the fact that such a scene, although contrary to what people thought novels should include, was certainly nor prurient in nature or designed to arouse sexual emotions.

Ladenson lays out an interesting progression: in Madame Bovary, discussing what the characters ate was though too mundane (Ladenson notes that the newspaper that originally published Bovary censored that part because they thought it had no place in a work of literature), but by the time of Ulysses literature had opened up to embrace not only the food people ate, but what happened to it afterward. (Not everyone, Virginia Woolf in particular, was ready to read books of this srot, though.) Strikingly, Ladenson quotes critics who (with horror) prophesied this inevitable descent, one in particular who thought Zola would be the first to cross that barrier.

But simply following this line of thought greatly diminishes the range and nuance that can be found in Dirt for Art's Sake. Ladenson, for instance, interweaves the opening up of realism to the idea that books could corrupt, and thus censors performed an important societal function. Convincingly, she places books into a continuum of various forms of mass entertainment (film, hip-hop music) that have been censored once they developed a large following. (The Madame Bovary chapter features a fantastic dual reading of the book and the 1949 movie, using both to show just how far ideas about what art should be had changed, yet how fundamentally similar government concerns about the corrupting influence of art were in each period.)

Based on the half I've read this far, I highly recommend this book. Besides recounting some of the major literary trials, the books places them into a perspective (especially as regards the development of Modernist writing) that shows how knowing this material deepens your reading of books from the periods covered, as well as our own. Certainly, for instance, after reading about the trials surrounding Joyce's defecation scene I wouldn't look as Jonathan Franzen's talking turd (from The Corrections) or Kundera's use of the word shit in The Unbearable Lightness of Being in the same way.

Comments

[Richard]

Why would Harry Potter merit inclusion? Was there ever government action or a trial or indictment related to the Harry Potter books? Isn't this about legal actions taken against books?

[Scott]

I'm considering "trial" in the larger sense of the word. I think it could be included because the people who wanted to ban it argued for banning because it had attracted a mass audience and might corrupt that audience. Ladenson cultivates this same theme for her banned books.