Filthy Material: Modernism & The Media of Obscenity by Chris Forster (review)

Filthy Material: Modernism & The Media of Obscenity by Chris Forster is composed of an introduction, six chapters, and a coda. In it, he argues that today no literature is considered obscene, no matter how sexually explicit or seemingly deviant, but a century ago, obscenity in literature was seen as a real and significant problem. During the modernist period, literature was commonly censored. Central to the zeitgeist of the era was the phenomenon of modernist literature creating scandals and yielding obscenity trials. But he points to authors that complicated these notions, such as Celia Marshik, who proposed that censorship wasn't repressive as is commonly assumed, but actually incited many of Modernist literature's most emblematic characteristics. Filthy Materials seeks to further complicate notions of modernist obscenity by analyzing it as more than a battle between authors and conservative censors.

Forster pushes readers to look at modernist literature's medial identity, in terms of the changes in obscenity throughout the twentieth century, and how this identity fits within the broader media ecology of the time period. Literature's physicality, specifically its technologies of reproduction and means of circulation and sale, was significant to understanding how obscenity was perceived. But we can't merely focus on literature as a medium, nor can we just situate literature within its larger cultural context. We have to look at how literature is shaped by other media and how that impacts the way it is understood. During the Modernist period, Forster notes, film and photography-pivotal technologies of cultural reproduction—were emerging and being adopted on a large scale. In order to understand modernist obscenity, we have to look at both literature's history and the history of media technology.

Filthy Material's first chapter provides a historical survey of obscenity law and looks at the shift in technologies of image reproduction that occurred during this period of Modernism. In chapter 2, 'The Pornometric Gospel,' Forster analyzes the modernist aesthetics of Walter Sickert's paintings and Wyndham Lewis's novel Tarr and the different responses they take to the nude in art. Lewis, he argues, rejects the notion that the nude should be depicted in modern art, and Sickert's nudes attempt to restore modern art. He sees both perspectives as influenced by the mass reproduction of nudes in multiple forms, which led to the failure of the usual justifications for the nude's role in art. The third chapter also looks at material reproductions, but of texts, specifically D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover and James Joyce's Ulysses.

In one of the most engaging chapters of Filthy Material, 'Very Serious Books,' Forster traces the censorship of the texts of two female authors, Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness and Norah James's Sleeveless Errand. He argues that Hall's book was censored because it was framed as a "serious" novel that could affect social change and depicted a same-sex relationship between women at a time when postwar anxieties about women's sexuality were very high. This censorship, he contends, established a precedent for the censoring of James's novel Sleeveless Errand.

Chapter 5 examines obscenity and orality in the work of T. S. Elliot, who defends obscenity's propensity to produce social cohesion by virtue of its own exclusion. The sixth and final chapter compares the cases of Joyce's Ulysses with Joseph Strick's film adaptation of Ulysses. Forster highlights how Ulysses, "[by] foregrounding its own materiality, […] mitigated its obscenity...", and yet the very same language became newly obscene when placed in another medium, as evidenced by the film's censorship thirty years after the novel's publication (Forster 8). In the coda Forster argues that the Obelisk and Olympia Presses are modernist institutions that arose as a result of the censorship explored by this book. He looks at how they contrastingly shaped the reception of Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer and Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita.

Filthy Materials successfully complicates...