Le Château de Cène
BY Bernard Noël
(Gallimard, 1993)

I had myself down as a tough-minded reader, after fifteen years of researching and teaching modern French literature, one who could contemplate any sort of catastrophic scenario without flinching. I’d read my way through Holocaust texts and trench warfare, through disease, hysteria and massacre, through unstable states of mind and heart-rending tragedy. And then I found myself one day sitting in my peaceful college rooms, reading the account of a young male protagonist, who sets out to explore a forbidden island ruled by a beautiful but savage princess, lands on the island, encounters a ferocious guard dog and… enters into an unnatural sexual act with it. I realised I was holding the book at arm’s length, regarding it with one eye closed and shouting “No! Make it stop!” So much for my readerly sangfroid. I could take bodies in most states of depredation, but show me a man engaged in oral sex with a dog and I suddenly found the limit of my endurance.

The novel was a cult classic, Le Château de Cène by Bernard Noël, and I was reading it for a book about pornography I was working on with a colleague from the university. The project had grown out of a graduate research seminar we’d given on feminism. Our discussion had turned to the notable number of texts and films coming out in contemporary French culture that borrowed pornographic tropes, and it occurred to us that there was this significant mass of provocative and disturbing material out there that no one was really talking about. I readily agreed to do the book, and it was only over the course of the following year that the full implications of what I’d let myself in for became apparent.

It is tricky to profess an interest — even an academic one — in sexual matters. The university environment can be deceptive, in that topics may be raised there that would not find favour in general conversation. At work I could casually toss the bombshell of my latest research topic into the mix without raising an eyebrow. Outside of work, I felt very differently. It took me months, for instance, to confess to my mother what I was working on. This struck me as odd, because graphic sex has become a familiar component of most literature and film, and yet the word pornography triggers an instant movement of recoil. What was a nice girl like me doing in a literary minefield like that? Pornography is not an innocent genre; it’s a form of sexual practice for lonely people without partners. Or it’s the province of the pervert, leering over lewd and disgusting acts that would offend all decent-thinking people. Or else it’s simply an endless procession of bump and grind about which nothing can be said.

It was the uncertain borderline between what was permissible and what was not, what writers could say and what readers would hear, and how we negotiated it that held me…

Revulsion, curiosity, disgust, boredom, titillation, the range of responses to obscene material is surprisingly broad. Yet literary pornography is often aiming somewhere quite different. Take the book I was so horrified by, Le Château de Cène. Bernard Noël wrote it with a purely political purpose in mind, after experiencing trauma whilst serving in the Algerian war, and attending a freedom rally that was broken up by riot police. Like many other French intellectuals, Noël believed that political action began at the level of language, with the evasion of the internal thought police. The outrage he felt could be better expressed by violent transgression into shocking areas of expression, than by lodging a complaint. Noel was taken to court on charges of obscenity, and wrote, in a justification of his book, that the only genuine response he could make at the trial would be to defecate before the judge. He wanted to bring the messy, visceral, animalistic reality of the body back into the public arena, because pushing it aside as impolite enabled collusion with all kinds of political repressions. A group of people can be less guiltily suppressed if we discount their flesh and blood humanity or if we think of them as disgusting and uncivilised. And thus, revolution may be served by the revolting.

So this was what I was interested in, what drew me to thinking about pornographic texts: I was interested in the way that certain representations refused to let people off the hook, forced them to reconsider knee-jerk responses that were purely orthodox or clichéd. Sexuality is an interesting arena in this respect, at once plundered to the point of exhaustion in stories, and yet still capable of sending shockwaves through the reader. It was the uncertain borderline between what was permissible and what was not, what writers could say and what readers would hear, and how we negotiated it that held me intrigued.

Passport photograph of D. H. Lawrence
Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library
(Yale University)

“Sexual intercourse began in 1963,” wrote Philip Larkin in his poem “Annus Mirabilis.” “Between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ first LP.” What Larkin meant was that for the first time, sex had become something visible in culture, something that could be acknowledged as existing in a public arena. There was a distinct lifting of censorship on sexual matters around this time in America, France and Britain due to a number of important test cases on novels with graphic content. Western culture was finally opening up, and becoming more broad-minded.

In the United Kingdom, 1960 saw the trial of Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence. Penguin Books courted the injunction by publishing an unexpurgated version at a relatively cheap price, in a move motivated by a recent change in the law. It was no longer permissible to prosecute novels on the basis of obscene passages taken in isolation. Now the book as a whole had to be considered, and equally significant, the content could be assessed and “justified as being for the public good on the ground that it is in the interests of science, literature, art or learning, or of other objects of general concern.” This was a sea change in attitude towards literature itself; it had been considered in the past that a well-written book stood to be even more dangerous than self-evident dross.

The trial was over quickly. The jury at the Old Bailey heard testimony for the defence from thirty-five different literary experts, including Rebecca West and E. M. Forster, and were told there were another thirty-five waiting in the wings. The prosecution, due in part to complacency and in part to an unsuccessful search for anyone who would condemn the novel, produced only one witness: the police office who had collected copies of the book from the publishers. The jury reached a verdict in less than three hours.

“I feel as if a window has been opened and fresh air has blown right through England,” said Barbara Barr, Lawrence’s stepdaughter. It was a symbolic victory for the force of liberal humanitarianism in Britain, and a severe blow to the authoritative “old guard,” described in George Orwell’s words as “the striped-trousered ones who rule.” The establishment was duly horrified by the outcome, and raised questions in the press for weeks afterwards as to why the prosecution had been unable to match the defence “bishop for bishop, don for don.”

Reading the notes of the trial today, the dead hand of the prosecution can be felt in both the patronising assumptions made, and the atrocious act of literary criticism committed. Senior Treasury counsel, Mervyn Griffith-Jones declared to the jury, “Ask yourselves the question: would you approve of your young sons, young daughters — because girls can read as well as boys — reading this book? Is it a book that you would have lying around the house? Is it a book you would wish your wife or servants to read?” His approach was to put Lady Chatterley figuratively in the dock and to try her, not for obscenity, but for adultery.

At the end of the fifties, it was still difficult for conventional wisdom to accept that women were also sexual beings, and that the desires of the body were natural. This was precisely what D. H. Lawrence wanted to eradicate: the idea that the body was animalistic and should be loathed and feared. He wanted to show a couple, a man and a woman together, both of them disappointed in their lives, but healing and growing together through an intimate relation that put them back in their bodies in a healthy, meaningful way. His idea was unacceptably radical in 1928 when the book was first published and had not changed so very much by 1960. Charles Rembar who successfully defended the book in America wrote in his account of the trial that “freedom of expression is experienced as a need mainly by two classes of people — writers and lawyers.” If the case had been put to a popular vote, he maintained it would have lost. In other words, obscenity trials at this time were working against public opinion.

The strategy of Mr. Griffith-Jones for the prosecution was precisely to appeal to that popular sense of respectability. He dismissed the opinions of the expert witnesses, asking “are they really of such value as the views which you… hold and can see from the ordinary life?” And that ordinary life he suggested was constantly under threat: “you only have to read your papers to see, day by day, the results of unbridled sex.” His case rested on a reading of sex in literature as unavoidably dirty, impure, corrupting and contagious. The reader would only have to come across an erotic passage to be overwhelmed by feelings so fierce and disruptive, he would be blinded to its context and meaning. Moral depravation would only be a step away.

What was being proposed here was a whole new response to sexual material, one that operated through curiosity, not prurience, and that sought information, not titillation.

The defence took up the battle for the mind of the “common reader,” and argued instead that a more measured and contained reading of sexual matter was within the reach of all — including, radically for the era, women and the lower classes. Gerald Gardiner for the defence suggested that “there are students of literature in all walks of life,” and that Penguin Books were fighting an old attitude of elitism, “the attitude that it is all right to publish a special edition at five or ten guineas so that people who are less well off cannot read what other people read.” Wasn’t it perfectly natural for everyone to be interested “in the problems of human relationships, including sexual relationships?”

What was being proposed here was a whole new response to sexual material, one that operated through curiosity, not prurience, and that sought information, not titillation. One that might also be freed from the taint of misogyny contaminating all disturbing erotic feelings, ever since the word “pornography” evolved from the Greek for “harlot” or “female whore.” It took the combined might of clever legal minds and the most intellectual element of the ruling class to win the day on the basis of a belief that readers from every walk of life were capable of seeing more in sexual encounters than just a compulsion to sex.

The question of what we actually see when looking at sexual images was uppermost in my mind when I was writing the book on pornography. Colleagues often sent me links or contacts that they thought would be interesting, and in this way I found myself studying online the photographic art of a Frenchman, Henri Macaroni. Macaroni had put together an exhibition of three thousand images, all of which, from the publicity material, seemed to have a generic similarity. I couldn’t quite figure out what I was looking at, and thought perhaps they were underwater photos of sea urchins, or strange magnified images of spiders at work. I had a movement of instinctual recoil when I finally realised that they were all images of a woman’s vagina. Once that moment had passed, the images still looked like nothing particularly interesting. The thought of three thousand of them represented tedium on a scale I could barely imagine.

If the erotic is at all dangerous to presence of mind, it must, then, be tied to a quality of elusiveness or secrecy, not placed on open display.

This seemed to be par for the course with a lot of sexualised art over the turn of the millennium, which sought not to make its audience think, but to give it a powerful experience, and rarely a pleasant one. A harbinger of this trend was the French performance artist, Orlan, who, for one installation, set herself up as her own exhibit. She would lie naked on a table, her pubic hair painted blue, and a magnifying glass aimed over her vulva. Visitors would view her through a gap in curtains, and a television screen nearby replayed their own expressions when they realised she was menstruating.

It is an ordinary human response to peer and to scrutinise, when faced with something we do not initially understand, but it is equally human to watch with covert fascination when something we are not supposed to see is finally put on view. Both artworks play with this duality, turning spectators into the peeping Toms they never intended to be caught out as being. But they also raise the question of what it is that we are really looking for when we desire to see images of a sexual nature. My own experience, and that of the audience at Orlan’s performance, was that it was all too easy to see far too much. The erotic must reside in a promise of revelation, in the hint or suggestion of sexual activity, in a cheeky surprise rather than a nasty shock. It is all too easy to move past that point and be greeted with embarrassing, groaning fornication or the equivalent of someone’s medical records. If the erotic is at all dangerous to presence of mind, it must, then, be tied to a quality of elusiveness or secrecy, not placed on open display.

When we trace the obscenity rulings in literature back in time to Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, we find both the practice of law and the practice of representing sex in literature to be operating under very different constraints. If Flaubert was acquitted it was due as much to his name and to the whisper of his “connections” as to the triumphant line of his defence counsel that Madame Bovary was “an incitement to virtue through the horror of vice.” Much like Lady Chatterly, Emma Bovary had dared to seek her own satisfactions outside of marriage and in the sort of compulsive promiscuity that a jury in the 1960s would have been willing to condemn. It was unthinkable in 1857 that her career should end in anything but disaster, and even so, her behaviour was decidedly risqué.

Gustave Flaubert
PHOTO: Wikimedia Commons

The real trouble came about because Flaubert had taken a contract with the Revue de Paris permitting them to serialise his novel. Serialisation was still relatively new, but it gave writers a chance to reach a wider audience; its newness as a publishing practice also gave the authorities much cause for concern at the political opinions a revue was capable of disseminating. Aware they were under scrutiny, the Revue de Paris editors cautiously found sixty-nine passages that they asked to be suppressed or altered, utterly infuriating Flaubert, who hadn’t spent weeks slaving over each sentence for nothing. For one particularly cherished scene, he demanded a note in the text, pointing to its suppression in a way that actually drew the attention of the censor and made things worse.

The scene in question was the one in which Emma and Léon supposedly make love in a closed carriage travelling around the streets of Rouen. It was deemed “impossible” by the editor, Maxime du Camp, although all that the reader “sees” is Emma’s hand at the window, throwing away torn scraps of paper before the curtains are closed. However, it was a nineteenth-century convention to extrapolate from the text, as the activity of the reader’s imagination was understood to be part and parcel of the story. The fact that the scene was not described in detail made it no less potent to the reader’s mind. A similar scandal was caused by John Singer Sargeant’s portrait, Madame X, featuring a celebrity socialite of the day, Amélie Gautreau. When the portrait was exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1884, the spectators were horrified to see the strap of her dress dangling off her shoulder, implying either the prelude to or the aftermath of sex. Gautreau was forced to retreat from society, her reputation in tatters. Coded hints were considered the equivalent of graphic sex.

But some of the passages that the Revue was unhappy with really seem quite extraordinary. For instance, they objected to the phrase “un morceau de veau cuit au four,” or “a piece of veal cooked in the oven,” which came from the longer passage: “To spare him expense, each week his mother sent him by carrier a piece of veal cooked in the oven; and on this he lunched when he returned from the hospital in the morning.” How on earth such a phrase could be considered offensive? The only clue is that such details were considered by the editors to be “inutile” or useless.

This isn’t merely a concern about word count. We have to think about the fact that “realism” was a very new genre and as such viewed with suspicion and mistrust. Before its arrival, stories were built around the maxim. These little philosophical truisms littered the pre-novel text, and made reading an essentially educational experience. Letting Flaubert off the hook, the prosecutor reminded him that “the mission of literature ought to be to enrich and refresh the mind by elevating the understanding and refining morals.” Realism was a very strange creature in comparison; what good was it to describe what people did? Particularly when it wasn’t very enthralling or uplifting? When no principle of conduct or insight could be drawn from it? Readers were quite bewildered by extraneous information and clung to prescriptive demands for stories to subordinate their elements to a serious, sensible moral meaning.

Although Flaubert’s trial took place one hundred and fifty years ago, and whilst that means we’ve had a century and a half to get used to realism, the same concerns and the same conflicts rage over what literature should do, what it should offer the reader. There is still a tendency for readers to believe that stories should correspond to their own beliefs, and to criticise them sharply if they don’t, even if nowadays setting the law on the author hardly ever happens because the law is often on the author’s side. This only encourages authors to do what they have always done, to stir things up, to rattle bars, to break taboos and challenge society’s cherished convictions. The question isn’t really whether they should do this, but how to judge the intentions behind the provocation. And this is probably hardest to do where sexuality is concerned.

Although Flaubert’s trial took place one hundred and fifty years ago, and whilst that means we’ve had a century and a half to get used to realism, the same concerns and the same conflicts rage over what literature should do, what it should offer…

Once Lady Chatterley’s Lover had survived the obscenity trial, the book did nothing special, except sell in the millions, until 1969 when the feminist, Kate Millett found new reasons for offence in her book, Sexual Politics. This time the novel is “a quasi-religious tract” founded on worship of the male penis. “Although the male is displayed and admired so often, there is, apart from the word cunt, no reference to or description of the female genitals: they are hidden, shameful and subject.” Only equal amounts of narrative space, divided up fairly and assigned to male and female genitalia would have represented decent sexual politics for Millett, who goes on to unmask Lawrence himself as a cunning Machiavelli, unfolding a masterplan. She argued that the sexual revolution for women had alarmed Lawrence who needed a way to fight back: “it could grant women an autonomy and independence he feared and hated, or it could be manipulated to create a new order of dependence and subordination.” Persuading women to be in thrall to the penis was clearly the way forward.

Generally I like Kate Millett’s book for its caustic wit and analysis, its bold attack on men talking male nonsense about sex. But the chapter on D. H. Lawrence seems to me excessive and overly paranoid. To believe her, we have to see the gamekeeper, Oliver Mellors, as a sort of sex guru, bending Connie to his will, rather than a man with nothing to his name, no self-esteem and no more idea of how to run a proper relationship than Connie does. As their sexual encounters progress, Mellors gradually begins to believe that tenderness between a man and a woman is possible, and he starts to give up the gender rancour he’s been harbouring after his disappointments in love. When he parades himself naked in front of Connie, the point is that she doesn’t laugh or turn away in disgust, but accepts him, as wholeheartedly as she can. There’s something quite sweet about these scenes, and something utterly ridiculous, too. And there is never any reason to take what two people do to one another in the pages of a novel and assume it as a blueprint for the whole of humankind.

Nor does it seem to me plausible to think of D. H. Lawrence as a ringleader for phallic domination. He and his wife, Frieda, had a tempestuous relationship that contained a lot of physical fighting. But to see Lawrence as the alpha male and the bully wouldn’t be entirely accurate or just. He often sought to verbally humiliate his wife and he was unable to control his temper, but then Frieda was often unfaithful to him, whilst he remained completely loyal to her; he was the domestic one, while she preferred to be looked after, and Katherine Mansfield, an unwilling witness to one of their major disagreements recorded how, once the operatic argument had passed “he was running about taking up her breakfast to her bed and trimming her a hat.”

They were, in other words, a perfectly ordinary couple, having a relationship that, like most relationships, could not possibly be explained or justified to the outside observer. We could also plead for a little historical understanding here, and see Lawrence as the man of his times he could not help but be. He was no clairvoyant, able to write books with attitudes that would anticipate the political climate fifty years or a hundred years later. He could only be a flawed human being, wishing men and women could sort themselves out in the maelstrom that is sex and make each other a bit happier.

But this is the nature of literature; it says things it shouldn’t, in order to rattle the bars and alarm the sacred cows. We should be wary of the stories that only say what we want to hear.

When we look back at books like Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Madame Bovary, they seem completely tame compared to modern standards. The books I was reading for my research project blew them out of the water. Graphic sex was only the beginning of it; there were sadomasochistic scenes, novels about paedophiles and of course, men and dogs. But none of them were suggesting to me, personally, that I should rush out and commit such acts. And much as I had a few university degrees under my belt, I didn’t think they exempted me from reacting like an average human being. I was horrified by that scene in Bernard Noël’s book, because he intended me to be. He wanted me to finish reading it so nauseated and reeling and angry that I was ready to question all relations of dominance and submission. He succeeded. And dreadful as the book was, the great thing about a book is that no actual dogs were harmed in the making of it. It was asking me to examine my fantasies and my prejudices, and I felt compelled to do so.

The books I read spoke about the alienation between men and women that sex used to bridge, but now could not, given how shame and mistrust and confusion over political correctness had entered into sex itself. They spoke about the way that our consumer culture markets sex as one of its prize commodities, and sells an experience to people that dominates their sense of what ought to happen them, and they spoke about the way that children are sexualised too in order to power a youthful consumer culture. They spoke all kinds of things that I did not like hearing, about the way that uncomfortable fantasies still invade the space between lovers, because sex is the place where we are least in control of ourselves, and often unable to react or behave as we would wish. They said much that was ugly and disquieting and offensive.

But this is the nature of literature; it says things it shouldn’t, in order to rattle the bars and alarm the sacred cows. We should be wary of the stories that only say what we want to hear.