Notes on Some Scandal

The recent controversy surrounding Orhan Pamuk, the Nobel laureate in literature charged with insulting Turkishness, is a pertinent reminder that, as Jonathan Dollimore has argued in Literature and Censorship (2001), 'civilization is inseparable from censorship of all kinds', and, more provocatively, that 'most people, civilized or otherwise, are in favour of censoring something' (p. xii).

Scandalous Fictions, a collection of ten original essays by scholars from the UK and USA, explores the ways in which literary scandal is produced in a diverse range of twentieth-century novels from the UK, South Africa, Nigeria, Australia, and the United States. The volume, as Jago Morrison and Susan Watkins outline in their introduction, 'is an attempt to explore the twentieth-century novel as a public form, bringing a fresh critical gaze to some of its landmark texts' (p. 1). The novels discussed in Scandalous Fictions range from causes célèbres (The Satanic Verses, Lady Chatterley's Lover) to less familiar works of fiction (Chinua Achebe's A Man of the People and Helen Demidenko's The Hand that Signed the Paper). As Morrison and Watkins state, all the novels examined (which also include Beloved, On the Road, Disgrace, Ulysses, The Well of Loneliness, and Native Son) 'were accused, variously, of being obscene, blasphemous, libellous, seditious, even racist' (p. 1).

One of the strengths of this collection is the way in which the essays resist reducing or fixing the notion of scandal to a narrow definition, contributing to a discussion of how scandal is produced, maintained, and performed in literary production. Although each of the ten essays focuses on a 'scandalous fiction', the controversies explored are not always expected or obvious and the emphasis is on original interpretations of each novel's entrance into the public sphere. As Morrison and Watkins point out, 'the popular consumption of the novel, especially outside of the education system, has been subject to almost unrelenting suspicion' (p. 17). Although the novel has been integral to the development of literacy from the eighteenth century onwards, it has been accused of being 'a disseminator of inappropriate and morally dubious material to vulnerable minds' (p. 17), as illustrated by the 1921 Newbolt Report, which warned against the inclusion of novels in the school curriculum lest the content mislead innocent minds. Scandalous Fictions also provides a useful overview of the history of the novel in the twentieth century, in particular of how fiction probes the boundaries between the public and the private, its ability to corrupt or redeem the reader, and the relationship between authorial intention and censorship.

The collection begins with 'The "Nameless Shamelessness" of Ulysses: Libel and the Law in Literature', in which Sean Latham elegantly outlines the publication and reception of Joyce's masterpiece. Tracing the famous court case which saw Judge Woolsey lift the American ban on Ulysses in 1932, Latham locates the scandal of Joyce's novel, not in the obscenity charges laid against it, but in how the novel knowingly and provocatively flirts with libellous descriptions of people, places, and businesses in Dublin. Latham's chapter convincingly reads Ulysses as a work which is 'neither fact nor fiction' (p. 43), arguing that the novel's radical transgression lies in the way that it 'muddles the boundary between history and the novel, threatening the legal definition of fiction itself ' (p. 30).

In '"The Aristocracy of Intellect": Inversion and the Inheritance in Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness', Susan Watkins argues that the novel's scandal lies not only in the same-sex love between two women but also in the 'plea that "sexual inversion" should be considered as congenital and therefore morally blameless' (p. 48), an important factor in the magistrate's ruling that the novel was obscene. Watkins's chapter compellingly argues that Hall aligns ideas of hereditary sexual deviance with the upper classes, showing how the relationship between the two scandalised a fragile British public in the wake of the First World War. Using...