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CR: The New Centennial Review 2.2 (2002) 105-109



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Ciclón:
Post-avant-garde Cuba

Note on Pornography
"Nota sobre pornografía." Ciclón 2, no. 1 (January 1956)

Calvert Casey


THE YEAR THAT THE ENGLISH POLICE NOISILY CLOSED AN EXHIBITION IN London, confiscating its paintings, D. H. Lawrence wrote a pamphlet that was edited in England and was entitled "Pornography and Obscenity." Shortly before his death, Lawrence continued his twenty-year struggle against the "grays," those responsible for the seizure of complete editions of some of his works, and those who had been attacked by the "gray disease" which, according to him, takes the form of hatred of anything sexual. He also struggled against the stragglers from Victorian Puritanism of the nineteenth century, which he called the prudish and eunuch century, accusing it of having wanted to destroy humanity.

An enthusiastic admirer of Etruscan art, which he found more vital than any other in the Mediterranean basin for its freedom from all ideals and for its obedience to the most spontaneous impulses, Lawrence accused pornography of wanting to insult the sexual, of soiling it, of reducing the sexual act to the level of the trivial and disagreeable, of joining the sexual impulse (creation) with the excretory function (dissolution or "decreation"), which for Lawrence were separate in the healthy individual.

But Lawrence associated the pornography of the photograph, the postcard, the obscene verse, and the crude drawing on the wall with the pornography that he thought was implicit in Jane Eyre, in Tristan, or in Anna Karenina, works in which sexual excitation was provoked in order to later humiliate the impulse and degrade it, and so doing entering the realm of the pornographic. Since almost all literature of the nineteenth century is impregnated with this, the only remedy was to speak freely of the sexual impulse and sexual life, to encourage young people to read Boccaccio (whom pornographers hate because of the healthy naturalness of his tales), [End Page 105] and above all, to resist the hypocrisy of Puritanism, the great accomplice of pornography.

Lawrence sees the whole question of pornography in secrecy, the essential condition under which it can breathe. The "dirty secret of the grays, in love with the crowd," is the kernel of the whole question, and it is the secret which infects "pink" novels, romantic movies, popular adventures of neutral heroines of whitewashed purity, in which only the villain or the villainess betrays sexual urges. He accuses the majority of literature and popular pastimes of exciting people to masturbation, "the supreme secret and sterile act," to which Lawrence, author of a thousand enthusiastic hymns to the union of the two sexes, preferred homosexual relations, branding the whole of industrial civilization onanistic.

Lawrence accused "Du bist wie eine Blume" of the maximum complicity with the pornographic, execrable sentimentality which compares the loved woman to a flower, "as pornographic as a dirty story."

More than twenty-five years have passed since Lawrence wrote the pamphlet against "the grays." It concluded by warning against dangerous, excessively pathetic focus, of "disinfecting" the sexual with scientific words, of stripping it of all dynamism and mystery, and of the no less dangerous abysses of the "free" approach to sex. He put "free" in quotes, saying that this sort goes for the sexual like a person might assume an intellectual position or a socially rebellious stance, forgetting the "mystery," that which is beyond us, that which exceeds us, the impulse which Lawrence named and never defined. This is a relative of the blood which runs through us all and which makes us all one and the theme which is reiterated throughout yet never defined in any of his work.

After a depression, an intellectual round trip to and from the extreme left, a world war, and the spread of psychological doctrines—to which Lawrence contributed—the new naturalism is with us. To counteract its irresistible influence there is even a religious renaissance. "The grays" would no longer dare to gather up an audacious edition, after the blow dealt to them by the...

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