Abstract
‘Sexual intercourse began / In nineteen sixty-three / (which was rather late for me) – / Between the end of the ‘Chatterley’ ban / And the Beatles’ first LP.’ So begins Philip Larkin’s ‘Annus mirabilis’, which laconically dates the birth of sex in Britain to those halcyon days bookended by the verdict of R v. Penguin Books and the Fab Four’s debut. A side-swipe at the hypocrisies of the twentieth century’s most notorious literary obscenity trial, no doubt, but the genealogy of Larkin’s reference is a complex one. For if the Earth did indeed move in 1960s Britain, the tremors in the literary landscape had truly begun a century earlier, with their epicentre situated firmly across the Channel. Playing host to the trials of Flaubert and Baudelaire on charges of offending religious and public morality, 1857 was the undisputed ‘annus horribilis’ of the history of literary censorship.
The problematic interplay between the legal and the literary in 1857 and its aftermath provides the thematic crux of William Olmsted’s The Censorship Effect. Building on the work of scholars such as Dominick LaCapra, Nicholas Harrison and Elizabeth Ladenson, Olmsted’s comparative study makes a bold re-evaluation of the ways in which Flaubert and Baudelaire sought to negotiate a censorial Second Empire regime that criminalized objectionable writing. Following the obligatory opening observation that the renegades now inhabit the fortress, ‘having won canonization and a place not only within the patrimony of France, but within the worldwide modernist pantheon’ (p. 1), the author goes on to develop a highly readable account of the relations between formal innovation and cultural subversion that occupy the zone of contention proper to literary censorship. Working against the theoretical Manichaeism that would situate the repressive official and the literary freedom-fighter at opposite polarities, pitting, in the words of Robert Darnton’s recent study, ‘the children of light against the children of darkness’ (2014, p. 17), Olmsted sketches a nuanced picture that does justice to the grey zones of the author–censor relationship. The image of a censor who emerges, Janus-like, as both ‘impediment and impetus to stylistic innovation’ (p. 42) necessarily entails a re-evaluation of the metaphoricity via which this relationship is imagined, with Olmsted’s challenge to the incisory imagery of les ciseaux d’Anastasie articulated in his evocative ‘waltz’ of censorship and its multiple dance partners (‘official censors … friends, editors, critics, fellow writers, and publishers’, p. 3).
The innovative import of this study, however, lies in its argument that the principal features of the formal revolution that heralded the advent of literary modernism are, in fact, the product of anticipated censorship. Baudelaire’s fragmented poetic personae and Flaubert’s free indirect discourse accordingly emerge as ‘tactics of evasion or misdirection’ (p. 16), signs of ‘prudent self-censorship’ (p. 2) at once provocative and self-protective. If much ink has been spilled over the first of these two terms, the ‘ideological crime[s]’ that LaCapra (1982, p. 8) detects in transgressions of a stylistic order, Olmsted’s persuasive account seeks to redress the balance through attention to the second, where opposition to the censorial shades into complicity. This proceeds via a sustained critical engagement with the Bourdieusian thesis that modernity in cultural production begins with ‘the conquest of autonomy’ (1995, pp. 47–112), the starting-point of a narrative of the autonomous artist’s refusal to submit to the demands of ‘commercial and institutional control’ (p. 181). That Flaubert’s and Baudelaire’s concessions – crucially, self-imposed as well as externally enforced – to cultural and legal proprieties make this independence less than Bourdieu would have it is an important conclusion of Olmsted’s rich analysis, which will deservedly spark debate amongst literary critics and historians alike.
The author is swift to anticipate the most obvious criticism that might be levelled at his book, namely the imbalance in space and attention accorded to Baudelaire over Flaubert. This disparity nonetheless emerges as justified in light of the outcome of the two trials: where the hermit of Croisset was (miraculously) acquitted, the ‘pointillist practices’ (p. 101) and decontextualizing efforts of prosecutor Ernest Pinard and his acolytes resulted in Baudelaire’s condemnation and the suppression of six poems from the 1861 edition of Les Fleurs du mal. Flaubert duly forms the subject of Olmsted’s second chapter, which adopts a genetic approach in its examination of how the series of revisions to Madame Bovary, from initial scenarios and sketches to finished work, belie a concerted strategy of ‘immoral moralism’ (p. 23). This is enriched by a rich discussion of illustrators’ and film-makers’ responses to the challenges posed by ‘masterpieces of ambiguous insinuation’ (p. 41) such as the infamous scène du fiacre. The bulk of the analysis (chapters 3–5) is, however, reserved for consideration of the manner in which censorship ‘actively reshaped and fragmented’ (p. 180) Baudelaire’s texts, paratexts and poetic personae before, during and after the 1857 trial. Attentive to the importance of the ideology of l’art pour l’art and enhanced by a wealth of close readings, Olmsted’s book presents an intriguing new take on the homo duplex motif as it bears on Baudelaire’s posthumous reputation. Through the exploration of his simultaneous compliance with the 1857 judgement and clandestine publication of the condemned poems, Olmsted posits a historically sensitive underpinning, derived from the censorship effect, to Baudelaire’s dichotomous image as a Satan-loving ‘lesbian poet’ (Wittig, 1979, p. 117) and reactionary moralist. The result is an impressively researched and carefully argued study which feeds into the ongoing debate on free speech and which, while happily eschewing desperate assertions of this kind of contemporary relevance, merits an audience of hypocrites lecteurs beyond the intimate circles of the academy.