Erskine Cadwell: Tobacco Road and God's Little Acre

Although Erskine Caldwell wrote more than sixty books, twenty-five novels among them,
Courtesy of Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Georgia Libraries
Erskine Caldwell, he is best known for two works of long fiction, Tobacco Road (1932) and God's Little Acre (1933). Tobacco Road was named one of the Modern Library's 100 best novels of the twentieth century, and God's Little Acre remains Caldwell's single most popular work, having sold more than 10 million copies. Along with the less well-known Journeyman (1935), these books make up a serio-comic trilogy of Georgia life in the first half of the twentieth century. They detail the ruination of the land, the growth of textile mills, and the abiding influence of fundamentalist religion in the South. These books thus present a radical contrast to the traditionally genteel and romantic views of the region, popularized most notably by Margaret Mitchell in Gone With the Wind (1936).

Tobacco Road

The Novel

Tobacco Road, published by Charles Scribner and Sons in 1932, was Caldwell's third novel. It was inspired by the terrible poverty he witnessed as a young man growing up in the small east Georgia town of Wrens. His father, Ira Sylvester Caldwell, who was pastor of the local Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church, was also an amateur sociologist and often took his son with him to observe some of the more destitute members of the rural community. Erskine Caldwell's sympathy for these people and his outrage at the conditions in which they lived were real, and his novel was meant to be a work of social protest. But he also refused to sentimentalize their poverty or to cast his characters as inherently noble in their sufferings, as so many other protest works did.

The novel's Lester family, headed by the shiftless patriarch Jeeter, both appall and intrigue readers with their gross sexuality, casual violence, selfishness, and overall lack of decency. Living as squatters on barren land that had once belonged to their more prosperous ancestors, the Lesters have come to represent in the American public's mind the degradation inherent in extreme poverty. That Caldwell also portrays them as often-comic figures further complicates the reader's response. Tobacco Road is a call to action, but it offers no easy answers and thus has generated intense debate both in and out of the South. Many southerners denounced the novel as exaggerated and needlessly cruel and even pornographic, an affront to the gentility of the region. Northern critics, however, tended to read the book as a serious indictment of a failed economic system in need of correction. Caldwell later explained that the book was not meant to represent the entire South, but for many this work confirmed demeaning southern stereotypes.

The Play and Film

The stage version of Tobacco Road was written by Jack Kirkland and opened on December 4, 1933, at the Masque Theatre in New York City. Caldwell had little to do with the play version and initially felt it would fail. First reviews were mixed, and after a month of sporadic attendance, the play moved to the 48th Street Theater, where it slowly became a word-of-mouth success. With Henry Hull as the first of five actors who would play Jeeter Lester, Tobacco Road ran for more than seven years, through 3,182 performances. When it closed on May 31, 1941, it had become the longest-running play in the history of the Broadway stage up to that time.

Road shows took the play to cities throughout the nation and later into foreign countries. In 1934 Chicago mayor Edward F. Kelly declared the play obscene and closed it down. The producers sued, and in a major court case, the play was allowed to continue. This was the first of numerous attempts to censor the show, which was often taken to court or banned during its many runs. Caldwell tirelessly defended the play and the book and, in the process, became a leading advocate for artistic freedom and First Amendment rights.

In 1940 Darryl F. Zanuck and Twentieth Century Fox, which had just produced John Ford's classic film version of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, bought the screen rights to Tobacco Road. Ford and screenwriter Nunnally Johnson (a Georgia native) attempted to preserve the caustic comedy and social protest of the book and play, but the studio overruled them on central issues, specifically the tragic ending. The result was a sentimental burlesque that Caldwell himself disavowed. Starring Charley Grapewin, repeating his stage role as Jeeter Lester, the film was released in 1941. It enjoyed initial success but is now considered one of Ford's lesser movies, a poor relative of his great work in The Grapes of Wrath.

God's Little Acre

The Novel

God's Little Acre was published by Viking Press in 1933, one year after the publication of Tobacco Road. In it, Caldwell shifts his sights to the industrialized South. Influenced in part by the textile mill strikes in Gastonia, North Carolina, he considered this work to be a "proletarian" novel dealing with the plight of workers deprived of union protection. It was intended to support these mill hands, or "lintheads," as they were sometimes called. Will Thompson, who leads the strike, represents both the inherent power and the frustration of the working class. When Thompson is killed by guards as he attempts to reopen the mill shut down by its ruthless owners, his death becomes a rallying cry; and his corpse is borne through the streets, but the mills remain closed.

The book also examines the misuse of the land and other natural resources. Ty Ty Walden, who (unlike Jeeter Lester) still owns his farm, spends his time digging for gold instead of farming the rich soil. His delusion and the tragedy it brings to his family again illustrate the waste Caldwell saw in southern attitudes toward the land.

Like Tobacco Road, God's Little Acre contains scenes of explicit sexuality. In April 1933 the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice took Caldwell and Viking Press to court for dissemination of pornography. More than sixty authors, editors, and literary critics rallied in support of the book, and Judge Benjamin Greenspan of the New York Magistrates Court ruled in its favor. The court case is still considered a major decision in the establishment of artists' First Amendment rights in freedom of expression. The book became a worldwide best-seller and remains today one of the most popular novels ever published.

The Film

In 1958 director Anthony Mann and screenwriter Phillip Yordan, in collaboration with Caldwell, made the film version of God's Little Acre, starring Robert Ryan as Ty Ty Walden and Aldo Ray as Will Thompson. The film, like the book, was considered scandalous and became one of the top-grossing movies for that year. Truer to its source than John Ford's Tobacco Road had been, God's Little Acre remains the best representation of Caldwell on film.

Suggested Reading

Edwin T. Arnold, ed., Conversations with Erskine Caldwell (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1988).

Sylvia Jenkins Cook, Erskine Caldwell and the Fiction of Poverty: The Flesh and the Spirit (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991).

Robert L. McDonald, ed., The Critical Response to Erskine Caldwell (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997).

Dan B. Miller, Erskine Caldwell: The Journey from Tobacco Road. A Biography (New York: Knopf, 1995).

Wayne Mixon, The People's Writer: Erskine Caldwell and the South (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995).

Edwin T. Arnold, Appalachian State University, Boone, North Carolina

Published 7/16/2002

Read More......

Revolutionaries without a Revolution: The Case of Julia Kristeva

I tell you this in truth: this is not only the end of this here but also and first of that there, the end of history, the end of the class struggle, the end of philosophy, the death of God, the end of religions, the end of Christianity and morals . . .the end of the subject, the end of man, the end of the West, the end of Oedipus, the end of the earth, Apocalypse now, I tell you . . . the end of literature, the end of painting, art as a thing of the past, the end of psychoanalysis, the end of the university, the end of phallocentrism and phallogocentrism, and I don't know what else? (Jacques Derrida,"Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy")

The Rhetoric of Ending and the Mourning to Come

Certainly Derrick's inventory is far from being complete, but it recreates with gripping poignancy the frenzy in which death certificates have been meted out to all repositories of thought, of hope, and of life writ large. By virtue of enumerating, enlisting, and discerning the far reaches of the rhetoric of ending and of the apocalyptic imagination underpinning it, Derrida's account itself can be said to participate in what it seeks to outflank in the first place. Yet, perhaps Derrida cannot be held accountable for the hairsplitting entrapments of this discursive graveyard-whistling; perhaps this is, after all, the crime (or logic) of philosophy itself-a discourse that cannot help folding back or receding into a reflection on its genesis and, by implication, on its ending. More than anything else, perhaps philosophy is, as Derrida himself intones, fond of quasimythical metadiscourses that can intransigently, irascibly, and in an "overlordly" way declare its dissolution or, to use Derrida's own word, its cadavérissement (literally, its reduction to a corpse).

Not infrequently, the philosophical rhetoric of ending has unwittingly overlooked its implication in an indissoluble contradiction that, while contending that the ending has been reached, not only participates in it but also lives through it, that is, in many respects survives it in order to announce it. "Who (or what) would announce the end were there nothing to be announced?" Of course, such a rhetorical question implies that, should there be an end or an apocalypse, no one would survive it in order to report it: the end would be the end of everything, period! "For that is also," as Derrida rightly conjectures, "the end of the metalanguage concerning eschatological language" (81). I am not here suggesting that there is no hors texte, no outside, from which the end could be announced by a meta-being, only that there is, practically, no ending whatsoever that humanity can pronounce or announce, let alone ascertain. On the other hand, "Who (or what) would announce the end were there nothing to be announced?" is a question that also implies not only that the end (associated, for so long, with the end of the millennium) proved not to be an end-only a mere illusion, which is exactly the position held by Jean Baudrillard-but also that nothing really will ever end without leaving remains, without corning back under the banner of "hauntology," a theme Derrick belabors in Specters of Marx. By and large, whether we have missed the end or fallen prey to the returning ghosts of our precursors, it is important to stress (1) that the rhetoric of ending is indissociable from the rhetoric of mourning, from the ethical impossibility of there being such a thing as a successful mourning à la freudienne any longer (Derrida 1994), and (2) that while philosophy cannot, much perhaps to the distress of Derrida and Kant before him, completely banish the apocalyptic tone from its discourse, it can nonetheless invent its own contrapuntal rhetoric that would, parodying Shakespeare's Edgar, remind us that, "The end is not/As long as we can say 'This is the end.'"

Yet, it would be unfair to restrict the obsession with the rhetoric of ending to the realm of philosophical discourse as such-a discourse that is addicted to drawing attention to itself even at the risk of compromising its very existence in the process. No one who has read and reflected upon the many heterogeneous tendencies of (literary and critical) theory since the 1950s would fail to notice at least two things: (1) the hectic proliferation of "new" theories, each of which purporting vociferously or reticently to effect a Khunian paradigm shift (thus, academics, who have an unyielding strain for order, are bewildered by the plethora of such shifts that they have grown wary of classifying and opted instead for portmanteau prefixes as "post-" or "neo-" to relieve themselves from the burden of differentiating such that we are now going through a period of immense disarray given that we are practically "past" all the "posts"), and (2) the celebratory and intransigent tone with which the death or ending of an age or a discursive practice and the beginning of another is announced.

As they parade in theoretical discourses today, announcements of endings are more often than not masks of "new beginnings," of the "good news," as it were, that awaits the puzzled and perturbed reader of Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man. The "end of history" is the proverbial formula that Fukuyama makes use of in order to hammer home the more contentious thesis of the triumph of liberal democracy. Likewise, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri dress the obsolete word "empire" with the new clothes of globalization, whose emergence as a new form of sovereignty is materializing on the pyre of the sovereignty of nation-states. According to Hardt and Negri, the end of imperialism, the decline of the nation-state, and the emergence of what in their own parlance is a decentered and deterritorializing apparatus of rule-a kind of global space of sovereignty that has no outside-provide the conditions of possibility of a new form of counterEmpire, a new form of political subjectivity (much of which nevertheless hinges on unlocatable and unmediated grains of resistance) that they call-in a strange admixture of bombast, Marxism, and messianism-the multitude. Unfortunately, the inimitable ability of the new Empire to manage dissent, if not to warrant and sanction it, leaves little room for the multitude to make significant, let alone revolutionary, changes.Whether it has to do with the end of history or with the end of imperialism and the nation state or any of the items inventoried by Derrida in the epigraph, the rhetoric of ending deployed by a variegated number of theorists today is in fact a function of the more encompassing rhetoric of seductive reasoning that these theorists make use of in order to persuade the reader of the necessity and validity of the alternative venue(s) of reflection which they propose. This applies not only to Fukuyama and Hardt and Negri, but also to, among many others, Arthur Donato's After the End of Art, Gianni Vattimo's The End of Modernity, Daniel Bell's The End of Ideology, and, not surprisingly, to Julia Kristeva's recent twin books, The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt and Intimate Revolt, in which she elaborates a theory of psychic revolt on the pyre of socialist and political revolution. Of course, after the welter of commentary and the plethora of books that followed the collapse of the Soviet Empire, it hardly needs to be restated here that the promise of a possible socialist revolution, while crucially attenuated by such an event, has continued to provoke disparate reactions. A recent special issue of Parallax titled Mourning Revolution attempts to capture this disparity by bringing together a variety of essays by Kristeva, Martin Jay, Alain Badiou, and Benjamin Arditi, among others.

While Kristeva and Jay contend, as will become clear in due course, that revolution is no longer a politically and socially useful concept, Benjamin Arditi argues quite persuasively that revolution can still play a vital role in our political life even in the face of its practical impossibility. Drawing extensively on Derrida's thinking of the ethics of the impossible, Arditi was able to conclude in his piece tiltled "Talkin' 'but a Revolution: The End of Mourning" that revolution is precisely what unfolds "in the spacing or play between the promise that entices us to demand the impossible and the continually deconstructible figures of possibility aiming to flesh out the promise" (Kurt, Stahl, and Willis 2003, 85). For Arditi, we lose nothing by thinking the impossible, but we open up more roads into the possible. Adopting a more versatile approach, Badiou declines to reflect on the possibility or impossibility of revolution today but presents instead a reflection on the whole question by means of an aporia: "If you think that the world can and must change absolutely, that there is neither a nature of things to be respected nor pre-formed subjects to be maintained, you thereby admit that the individual can be sacrificed" (73). In other words, the individual as such-as a natural being-has nothing intrinsic to his nature that merits preservation; all claims for preserving the individual must therefore be claims about his essence rather than his nature-his "unnaturalness" (73). The remainder of Badiou's contribution to Mourning Revolution consists of mapping variations on this "unnaturalness of the human subject." Implicitly, the demand for revolution is presented as an effect of this unnaturalness. Since the human subject as such, whether for Sartre or Lacan, is precisely that which lacks essence and being, it is only by "dissolving itself into a project which exceeds it" that it concretizes its essence (74). Ironically, striving for essence turns out to be, in Badiou's analysis, no more than a twentieth-century obsession with a formality: demonstration. To demonstrate is to evacuate the empty and vacant position of an existence without essence and to melt into the "we-subject" that emerges out of the collection of otherwise "isolated individuals" (78). It bears repeating here that after the collapse of the communist camp and the triumph of capitalism, demonstrations have become, at least for Hardt and Negri, new forms of militancy. While Badiou is reticent about the political import of this new form of militancy which came to stamp the twentieth century, Kristeva contends that the age of militancy is well behind us.

In her own autobiographical essay, "My Memory's Hyperbole," which first appeared in 1983 in Infini, the journal that replaced Tel Quel, Kristeva dates her disenchantment with the Communist Party back to the late 1960s, that is, to the early years of her affiliation with the Tel Quel group. Kristeva explains that the Tel Quel's belief in the "permanent subversiveness of the Communist Party" ceased as soon as the latter began its campaign to institutionalize and "appropriate, on behalf of the establishment, those currents of thought and aesthetic creation that would have remained marginal without it" (15). She comments on the later visits of members of the Tel Quel (herself included) to China after the 1974 Cultural Revolution as amounting to nothing more than an inauguration of the return to the only continent they had never ceased to believe in: internal experience. The present two volumes, with their insistence on the end of militancy and their call for a return to intimacy, can therefore aptly be seen as variations on a persistent theme.

Yet, if Kristeva could be seen to have withdrawn from any active engagement in politics-and from any belief in a socialist revolution, for that matter-during the early years of her involvement with Tel Quel, it is wrong to conclude that she ceased thenceforth to reflect on the concept of revolution. On the contrary, her whole oeuvre reveals her continually rediscovering the same entelechy, the same impasse of political revolution, always trying to inventory a new language of salvaging it, always trying to displace it into other realms of experience, be they poetic (as she suggests in her very first book of 1974, Revolution in Poetic Language) or psychic (as the present twin volumes under review here attest). This seems to me to be Kristeva's idiosyncratic way of working through the demise of socialist revolution, her way, in other words, of mourning-in the Freudian sense of the withdrawal of affective ties from a lost (ideal) object and of the establishment of new ties with a new object-revolution in its lost political sense: rediscovering and reinventing it anew in poetic and psychic locales. But first, how does Kristeva sort through the reasons that the task of situating revolt at the level of the psyche is of a pressing urgency today?

Who Would Revolt Were There Nothing to Revolt Against?

Kristeva does not ask this question, but I ask it here in order to better capture the fichue position (to borrow a Joycean expression from Ulysses) in which she places the subject, the very focus of her reflections on the relevance of the concept of revolt in today's world. "Who would revolt were there nothing to revolt against?" is formulated thus in order that it asks (1) after the one who would be willing to revolt even against that which exceeds one's capacity to revolt against, that powerful disembodied knitting machine called global capital whose handiwork is manifest everywhere but whose origins are ghostly and impossible to pin down, let alone subvert-this is perhaps the case with Hardt and Negri's multitude; (2) after the one who would be willing to revolt but would find literally nothing to revolt against, no visible constellation of power to overturn-this is perhaps the case with Fukuyama's liberal democrats who seem to have overcome the last frontier after the collapse of communism; (3) and, strangely enough, after the (no)one who would not be able to revolt and for whom there would be absolutely nothing to revolt against anyway. Out of the three possible interpretations of the question suggested above, only the last one is in piece with Kristeva's argument throughout her two volumes. In the eyes of Kristeva, not only is there no one capable of revolt today, but there is also nothing to revolt against. This is the qui and contre qui, the who and against whom, impasse in which Kristeva suspends the political subject prior to rethinking its prospects for another kind of revolt.

Kristeva expounds that revolt in its political sense is today mired not only because the political landscape is becoming more and more homogenized as dissimilarities between parties are waning, but especially because there is no tangible structure of power against which to revolt, only a power vacuum, and, gravely enough, no agent available to carry out the incumbent task of revolt. The harbinger of social change has become nothing more than a "patrimonial person" (personne patrimoniale), a mere "conglomerate of organs" (conglomérat d'organes) hardly capable of recognizing the power-technologies infused in him, let alone able to neutralize their virulent and hamstringing effects (2002, 4). The modern subject is, according to Kristeva, "a person belonging to the patrimony, financially, genetically, and physiologically, a person barely free enough to use a remote control to choose his channel" (4).

This picture of the modern subject Kristeva draws is even gloomier if we are to consider it against the backdrop of Fukuyama's most recent book whose title alone, Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution, chills the spine. For Fukuyama, George Orwell's prophetic vision of a world dominated by information technology and by hovering Big Brother(s) has come true, and so has come as well Aldous Huxley's prescience of a biotechnological world in which babies are no longer "hatched" in situ (i.e. in wombs) but in vitro. Without getting entangled in the entrails of Fukuyama's argument, I think that it draws a picture of the current world that is in many respects similar to the one Kristeva draws. In very general terms, there are, according to Kristeva and Fukuyama, two dystopias materializing before our eyes: (1) a virtual rather than real world in which the media, undergirded by a complex network of information technology, fosters and promotes what Kristeva calls, after Guy Debord, the society of the spectacle and the culture of entertainment rather than the culture of revolt, and (2) a biotechnological world, in which the wedge is being slowly but steadily opened for new technologies to take possession of the human body, thus managing it at will. According to Fukuyama, this is humanity's most frightening nightmare and literally the "post human" stage of man's existence, which would lead to what C. S. Lewis called the "abolition of man," that is, the negation of man in the process of technologically surpassing or mastering it.

Unlike Fukuyama, a policy maker who goes on in his Our Posthuman Future to suggest pragmatic solutions to containing this otherwise runaway world in which the biotechnological revolution resulted, Kristeva is no policy maker but a thinker whose work traverses a wide array of philosophical, literary, linguistic, and psychoanalytical interests and who is primarily concerned with the ways in which the velocity of the biotechnological revolution might be slowed, as well as the ways in which the hold of the culture show might be dispelled. As such, she sets herself the task of pointing out the way for a culture of revolt, a culture that would move us "beyond the two impasses where we are caught today: the failure of rebellious ideologies, on the one hand, and the surge of consumer culture, on the other" (2000, 7). Kristeva thinks that it is incumbent upon us to resurrect a culture of revolt, not because we can no longer aspire for political revolt but because "happiness," as Freud demonstrated, "exists only at the price of revolt" (7).

Intimacy Now; or, the Psychic Tropography of Revolt

In order to restore us to/to us this culture of revolt, Kristeva undertakes to trace its writerly manifestation in the experiences of Sigmund Freud, Jean-Paul Sartre, Louis Aragon, and Roland Barthes. Although the two volumes deal with different texts by each of these above-mentioned writers, they overlap, almost exquisitely, insofar as the argument of both is concerned. I will not therefore alternate between each but will instead deal with both of them simultaneously.

Attentive to the linguistic difficulties of the task at hand, to the automatic association of the concept of "revolt" with the political and the ideological, Kristeva undertakes first "to wrest it, etymologically, from the overly narrow political sense it has taken in our time" in order to bring to light its "richness," "polyvalence," and "plasticity" and relate it thereof to the intimate sphere of the psyche (2000, 3). In this respect, she contends that the term "revolt"-whose Latin lineage (volvere) implies "movement" and "return", as well as "reversal,""detour," etc. (3)-did not come to lose its initially celestial origins in favor of more overtly political and historical purchases until the early beginning of the eighteenth century.

Kristeva complains that the word "revolt" has been repetitively used in relation to the suspension of old values such that the new nihilistic values are swallowed wholesale, rather than questioned in turn like the old ones. As such, the pseudo-rebellious nihilist, far from being a man in revolt, is in fact "a man reconciled with the stability of new values" (2002, 6). Kristeva goes on to propound that the technological development, the desacralization of Christianity, along with the abandonment of the Augustinian introspective and self-questioning quest (se quaerere) in favor of the immutability of being, have all combined among themselves in such a manner as to result in the paralysis of the will, on which totalitarianism preys:"I can never sufficiently emphasize the fact that totalitarianism is the result of a certain fixation of revolt in what is precisely its betrayal, namely, the suspension of retrospective return, which amounts to a suspension of thought" (6).

Kristeva begins both of her volumes by effectuating yet another return to Freud, perhaps in competition with Lacan but certainly not à la Lacanienne. Indeed, her championing of Freud's "models of language" in chapter three of her first volume-and her contention that the unconscious cannot be mapped onto Saussure's linguistics of signifier-signified-takes aim at Lacan, who famously claimed that the unconscious is structured like a language. Of course, we are here treading on familiar Kristevian grounds: ever since her early years of apprenticeship which culminated in the publication of Revolution in Poetic Language (1974), Kristeva has adhered with fascinating but predictable consistency to a cornerstone theoretical distinction between the symbolic and the semiotic, between what is purely linguistic or meaning proper (the symbolic) and what is not strictly so or linguistic per se (the semiotic) in that it encompasses the pre- or trans-linguistic organization and discharge of bodily drives through rhythms, tones, and alliterations anterior to signs and syntaxes. It is Kristeva's unfaltering argument, throughout her work, that signifiance or significance emerges in the dialectic between the symbolic narrow reference and the semiotic broad horizon.

Much of what Kristeva means by poetic or psychic revolt, then and now, hinges on the restitution of the semiotic functionality of language, that is, on "revalorizing the sensory experience, the antidote to technical hair-splitting" (2002, 5). In other words, much of Kristeva's "sense" and "non-sense" of revolt rests squarely on whether or not we are to accept the conditions on which her argument is predicated: Kristeva asserts that the semiotic is asymptotic and irreducible to language and intellect, only to contend in the final analysis that nowhere else can we come closer to psychic revolt than in the obstinate attempt to activate, articulate, and narrate the semiotic-the depository of the unconscious, of sexual fantasies, of oedipal aggression, of incest, of matricide, among other somatic instincts or drives. It is only at this stage that we have perhaps to decide whether we can afford to follow Kristeva's initially compelling argument-only, that is, when psychic revolt comes to mean slowly but overwhelmingly clinical analysis, at which time we realize that Kristeva's version of revolt is costly and therefore inaccessible to those who lack the economic means and the educational knowledge necessary to benefit from the luxury (of revolt) it promises to deliver.

This might not be the kind of that Hardt and Negri's multitude asks for, but it is certainly not the kind of revolt that such a multitude can afford. While bearing this in mind, let us try to assess the extent to which Kristeva reconciles between her version of revolt as an aspect of the clinical and analytical experience of transference (developed at length in the second volume) and revolt as Freud presents it in Totem and Taboo: a facet of primitive culture at the origin of religion (developed mainly in the first volume). In Intimate Revolt, Kristeva revels in analyzing the virtues of the analytical experience of transference and counter-transference whose alleged terminus is freedom. It is not freedom in Sartre's sense of condemnation to choice and responsibility but freedom from the guilt of being as such (Heidegger) and from the vicissitudes of consciousness whose penchant for interiorizing the collective realism of sin in individual responsibility is unquenchable (Freud). Here Kristeva's interpretive elaboration of the concept of forgiveness as rebirth, as suspension of judgment, as retrieval of the significance (i.e. semiotic dimension) of the drive, and generally as "the unconscious coming to consciousness in transference" (2002, 19) might prove rewarding for those (Hegelians and Freudians alike) interested in the traps of consciousness in the road to happiness.

It is, however, in "The Scandal of the Timeless," chapter three of Intimate Revolt, that Kristeva delivers a sustained and compelling philosophical argument on the concept of the timeless (l'hors-temps/Zeitlos), on its role and importance vis-à-vis the transferential experience of analysis. Kristeva argues persuasively that "while human existence is intrinsically linked to time, the analytical experience reconciles us with this timelessness, which is that of the drive, and more particularly the death drive" (2002, 12)-that which feeds on what, according to Kristeva, Freud calls "the symptom of 'being conscious'" (27).While one cannot here but admire Kristeva's diligent construction of the different figures of the timeless-which range from "the memory trace" and "working through" to "interminable analysis"-one nonetheless wonders what has become of psychic revolt in the process. Is psychic revolt here indissociable from the jouissance of psychic aggression at work in the death drive that the Homo analyticus (the analyst) brings to the fore? This question is of grave consequences as to the theoretical valences of Kristeva's concept of psychic revolt, all the more so if we are to consider it in relation to two Freudian texts: "Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through" and Totem and Taboo, both of which Kristeva quotes.

In "Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through," Freud insists that the significance of the transferential experience of analysis lies in its ability to bring forth a playground of psychic transferal and struggle (between the analyst and the analysand) whose success or failure depends on the analyst's capacity to dispel the hold of repetition compulsion into the more laborious work of remembering. Specifically, what might amount to psychic revolt on the part of the analysand and to analytical triumph on the part of the analyst is nothing less than the moment of mastering the repetition compulsion and the Zeitlos underpinning it-of "keep[ing] in the psychical sphere all the impulses which the patient would like to direct into the motor sphere" (Freud 1968, 153). The clinical and analytical experience in Freud has the merit of releasing the subject from the unconscious compulsions (of aggression, of the death drive) that he would readily net out in the outer-world, rather than spell out and contain in the interior world of the psyche. Kristeva is not perhaps unaware of this facet of psychic revolt (as a break out of the mould of repetition compulsion), but she tends to stress a less finite aspect of revolt which she associates with the experience of transference itself. The bulk of Kristeva's understanding of psychic revolt in Intimate Revolt is dedicated to insisting that, once analysis is over, the analysand will be opened up to innumerable opportunities of identification, to "the re-creation of the transferential dynamic with other others" (2002, 40). Like Freud, Kristeva does not think that analysis is terminable; unlike Freud, however, she reverses the interminability of analysis into a virtue: no longer inexorable but open, this interminability will continue to inspire the analysand in his subsequent quest to bond with others.

The question that is left hanging is this: How can we reconcile this amicable version of psychic revolt with the other more political (and violent) version that Kristeva analyzes, somewhat elegiacally, in Totem and Taboo? How can we reconcile Kristeva's reprisal of Freud's construction of the birth of Homo religiosis on the pyre of the father of our ancestral history-and in the wake of guilt and repentance-with the analytical version of revolt as containment of aggression (Freud) or as a license to love, as Kristeva herself contends in Intimate Revolt? My guess is that Kristeva has not been able to banish the political completely from the psychic typography (the troping of revolt in the geography of the psyche) in which she attempts to locate it. My guess soon turns into certitude when Kristeva moves to illustrate what she means by her version of psychic revolt in the works of the surrealist Aragon, the existentialist Sartre, and the structuralist Barthes.

Getting the "Political" out of Revolt

Is the psychic revolt that Kristeva discerns and redeems in the literary and philosophical texts of Aragon, Barthes, and Sartre separable from its political import? Moreover, does writerly revolt, for these writers, hold the same status as political engagement? While Kristeva is aware of the undecidability of the heterogeneous group of surrealists on this issue, all the more so in the case of Aragon whose suspicion of the political dimension of the literary experience pressed him to join the Communist Party, she attempts to convince us nonetheless that Aragon was unequivocally "an alchemist of the Word" whose "non-sense" pursuit of ideological revolt (through "the spectacle of adherence" to the Communist Party) must not blind us to the irremovable "sense" of psychic revolt that ripples through his entire oeuvre. Kristeva's tone here is intransigent and irascible toward a culture that buries writers and their works in the shadow of their political or institutional membership. On the other hand, her tone seems apologetic since much of what she says about Aragon amounts perhaps, as the following confession implies, to nothing less than a projection of her own "non-sense" of political revolt at the time of Tel Quel: "There may have been a crisis of love, values, meaning, men, women, history, but I am not going to Abyssinia, I do not belong to the Communist Party, and if I venture to China or into structuralism, I come back" (2000, 113).

Her insistence on the "non-sense" of political revolt threatens to dilute, when it comes to Sartre, the considerable risks he took in his political action, especially in France's colonial war against Algeria. Moreover, while whoever reads Sartre's existentialist manifesto, Existentialism and Humanism-whose emphasis on the moral responsibility involved in the condemnation to freedom cannot be overstated-will not fail to note its consistency with his choice not to accept the Nobel Prize, Kristeva reads it as an emblem of "the sense and non-sense of revolt" (2000, 150). For Kristeva, Sartre wanted to set, on the one hand, an example for writers who might want to dissociate their continual revolt from honorific institutions. On the other hand, she claims that "his concern to detach himself from Western conformism had blinded him, and he adhered completely, without the spirit of revolt demanded elsewhere, to a certain leftist propaganda of the time" (152). Of course, Kristeva misses here the portion of doom and condemnation involved in revolt, which Sartre carefully elaborates in his writings and for which the Nobel Prize affair is, in my view, a dazzling example. By and large, I think the power of Kristeva's analysis of Sartre, especially in Intimate Revolt, lies in the central conceit of its polemic, which is to read Sartre not only against himself but also against the backdrop of the present, in which the virtual is alienating us with the foundational négatités (by which Sartre means the copresence of nothings and identity) at the heart of being.The thrust of Kristeva's argument points to the pertinence of Sartre's work on the imagination to the necessity of building psychic dams firm enough to counter the flood of images of the society of the spectacle-Kristeva's bête-noire throughout her two volumes.

Kristeva presses forward in her remapping of different types of texts through the lenses of the theory of psychic or intimate revolt by turning her probing gaze, in an admixture of mourning and melancholia, to her deceased teacher: Barthes. Kristeva takes good care to steer Barthes clear of the terrorist charges foisted on him by his detractors who are in point of fact alarmed by the subversiveness and negativity of his writing, a "negativity that works against the transparency of language and the symbolic function in general" (2000, 210-11). Kristeva shows the extent to which negativity is central to Barthes's "desubstantifying" project of writing-a project that undoes the plenary and hackneyed communicative thrust of language in the service of the "transformative," the unfamiliar, that is, the "antilanguage (Joyce) that is sacrificial (Bataille) that also bears witness to the social structure in upheaval" (211). Barthes demystifies the latent ideological structure of myth, which is otherwise veiled under the linguistic sign; in so doing, he exercises an interpretive revolution in that his exercise is not neutral but clear and lucid. For Kristeva, Barthes is a demystifier of social proprieties, norms, trifles, and sweet nothings, as well as a decoder of intimacy: his writings seductively move the reader from the sensorial realm of taste and fashion into the more overtly political realm of ideology; his discursive wanderings do not halt without making a "political incision" (2002, 83), without "crystaliz[ing] an island of meaning in a sea of negativity" (2000, 213). The reader will not fail to notice the heart of a failed poet beating here and there in Kristeva's prose, but her reading of Barthes is lucid and rewarding.

In the fleshing out of her own concept of psychic revolt to the writings of Aragon, Sartre, and Barthes, Kristeva finds herself overtly involved in the specific historical and cultural circumstances that inform these texts. Kristeva's project would have been better served had she attempted to reconcile her pronouncement of the death of revolutionist ideologies-and of the alleged necessity of pursuing "a low form of revolt" (une forme basse de la révolte), a form of "tiny revolutions (re-volte infinitésimale), in order to preserve the life of the mind and of the species" (2002, 5)-with the ways in which she then proceeds to investigate a number of texts whose historical context is traversed by the promise of socialist revolution, even if there is also in them a fringe of open texture that warrants what Kristeva means by intimate revolt. A good deal of what passes for psychic revolt in Kristeva's reading of Aragon, Sartre, and Barthes certainly does fall under the heading of the political, but the very idea that intimate revolt could somehow compensate for or replace political revolt is in the final analysis self-defeating and impertinent to these texts themselves: the sense of intimate revolt in Aragon, Sartre, and Barthes is indissociable from the political and revolutionary horizon that informs it; it is, moreover, within a hair's breadth of morphing into political action. To the extent that her readings of these authors might bring them (especially Aragon who is, according to Kristeva, hardly read today) back to the attention of the candid reader, she performs a laudable task; to the extent that she reads these authors to hammer home her vision of psychic revolt, she has not perhaps convincingly delivered us from the political.This, however, must remain a methodological problem that threatens to attenuate the premises of the thesis of psychic revolt writ large; by no means does it undermine the many moments of insight that fill her separate readings of each author.

There are, of course, other more general problems that arise in relation to the broad strokes of Kristeva's argument: first, if the subject is no longer anything but a marketable collection of organs, how would it be reconciled to the sensory? To the extent that such revalorization of the sensory, the introspective, and the self-reflexive is possible, would it not present itself under the guise of the culture show? With no fringe of free will, no penumbra of critical distance, and with no allowance that the subject can somewhat exceed the power structures of which s/he is a product, there can hardly be any possibility for revolt whatsoever, even the kind of revolt in miniature that Kristeva elaborates in her two treatises. By emptying the subject of any political action, Kristeva can be said to deny the sensory prior to positing it as a space where tiny coups could be mounted. Second, what would intimate revolt amount to if not to sharpening the faculty of critique, of discerning the contours of ideological apparatuses locally and globally, and of undertaking political action? Should not intimate revolt prepare us for the political rather than deliver us from it?

In her recent contribution to Mourning Revolution, a special issue of Parallax, Kristeva reiterates her position that political revolt is over. I cannot help but remain slightly puzzled by Kristeva's appropriation of the rhetoric of ending-namely, the ending of the subject-in the service of a theory that would not obtain without the subject. Is her elaboration of intimate revolt an attempt to trope the subject back into existence? In "Mourning a Metaphor: The Revolution is Over," also a contribution to Mourning Revolution, Jay points out that the word "revolution"-whose astronomical origins invoke celestial movement and circular or elliptical return to a former place-is nothing more than a mere metaphorical displacement. The word was used, according to Jay, in the face of events whose violence and unpredictability seemed impossible to comprehend, but it was not until the late eighteenth century that it was used in the peculiar and, ever since, more widespread sense of a Utopian tomorrow. By 1989, however, the latter more promissory meaning of "revolution" was crashed and we are, according to Jay, "no longer beholden to maximalist fantasies of redemption and epochal transformation, fantasies whose defeat leaves us feeling impotent and lost" (Kurt, Stahl, and Willis 2003,19-20). Jay argues, in other words, that there was a time when we might have needed metaphors such as revolution to fashion the world according to our own dreams, but that time is over, and we now need to understand that metaphors are nothing more than metaphors. The good news is that "it may therefore be better to wander forever in the desert of metaphorical displacement than set up our camp in an oasis that proves only to be a mirage" (20).

Perhaps no one has so far understood this lesson more than Kristeva since her concept of "intimate revolt" can be seen as nothing more than a metaphorical displacement, all the more so since she purports to effect a return to the original meaning of "revolt" which is nothing other than "return" itself. The original meaning itself is a metaphor: Kristeva's return is thus nothing but a remetaphorization.

Works Cited

Baudrillard, Jean. 1994. The Illusion of the End. Trans. Chris Turner. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Bell, Daniel. 1988. The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Derrida, Jacques. 1982. "Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy." Trans. John P. Leavey, Jr. Semeia 23: 63-97.

_______. 1994. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International.Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge.

Donato, Arthur. 1997. After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Freud, Sigmund. 1968. "Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through." In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. 5. 12, trans. James Strachey. 1914. Reprint. London:The Hogarth Press.

Fukuyama, Francis. 1992. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Avon Books.

_______. 2002. Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution. New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux.

Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2000. Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Kristeva, Julia. 2002. "My Memory's Hyperbole." In The Portable Kristeva, ed. Kelly Oliver. New York: Columbia University Press.

Shakespeare, William. 2000. King Lear, ed. Stanley Wells. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Vattimo, Gianni. 1988. The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in a Post-modern Culture. Oxford: Polity Press.

Nouri Gana teaches at the University of Monteal. His work has appeared in American Imago, Études Irlandaises, Law and Literature, Theory and Event, and Mosaic.

Copyright West Chester University Fall 2004
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved

[this article is taken from http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3709/is_200410/ai_n9470213/pg_12]

Read More......

Salman Rushdie: The Satanic Verses and the Fatwa

The publication of The Satanic Verses in September 1988 caused immediate controversy in the Islamic world because of what was perceived as an irreverent depiction of the prophet Muhammad. The title refers to a Muslim tradition that is related in the book. According to it, Muhammad (Mahound in the book) added verses (sura) to the Qur'an accepting three goddesses that used to be worshipped in Mecca as divine beings. According to the legend, Muhammad later revoked the verses, saying the devil tempted him to utter these lines to appease the Meccans (hence the Satanic verses). However, the narrator reveals to the reader that these disputed verses were actually from the mouth of the Archangel Gibreel. The book was banned in many countries with large Muslim communities.

On 14 February 1989, a fatwa requiring Rushdie's execution was proclaimed on Radio Tehran by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the spiritual leader of Iran at the time, calling the book "blasphemous against Islam." A bounty was offered for the death of Rushdie, who was thus forced to live under police protection for years to come. On 7 March 1989, the United Kingdom and Iran broke diplomatic relations over the Rushdie controversy.

The publication of the book and the fatwa sparked violence around the world, with bookstores being firebombed. Muslim communities in several nations in the West held public rallies in which copies of the book were burned. Several people associated with translating or publishing the book were attacked, seriously injured, and even killed.^[11] Many more people died in riots in Third World countries.

On 24 September 1998, as a precondition to the restoration of diplomatic relations with Britain, the Iranian government, then headed by moderate Mohammad Khatami, gave a public commitment that it would "neither support nor hinder assassination operations on Rushdie."^[12][13] Hardliners in Iran have however continued to reaffirm the death sentence.^[14] In early 2005, Khomeini's fatwa was reaffirmed by Iran's spiritual leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in a message to Muslim pilgrims making the annual pilgrimage to Mecca.^[15] Additionally, the Revolutionary Guards have declared that the death sentence on him is still valid.^[16] Iran has rejected requests to withdraw the fatwa on the basis that only the person who issued it may withdraw it^[15], and the person who issued it is dead.

Salman Rushdie reported that he still receives a "sort of Valentine's card" from Iran each year on February 14 letting him know the country has not forgotten the vow to kill him. He was also quoted saying, "It's reached the point where it's a piece of rhetoric rather than a real threat."^[17] Despite the threats on Rushdie, he has publicly said that his family has never been threatened and that his mother (who lived in Pakistan during the later years of her life) even received outpourings of support.^[18]

Hezbollah's failed assassination attempt

A 1989 explosion in Britain is believed to have been a Hezbollah "attempt to assassinate British novelist Salman Rushdie [which] failed when a bomb exploded prematurely, killing a terrorist in London."^[19] There is a shrine in Tehran’s Behesht-e Zahra cemetery for Mustafa Mahmoud Mazeh that says he was "Martyred in London, August 3, 1989. The first martyr to die on a mission to kill Salman Rushdie." Mazeh died priming a book bomb loaded with RDX explosives that took out two floors of a hotel in Paddington, central London. A previously unknown Lebanese group, the Organisation of the Mujahidin of Islam, said he died preparing an attack "on the apostate Rushdie". Mezeh's mother was invited to relocate to Iran and the Islamic World Movement of Martyrs’ Commemoration built his shrine in the cemetary that holds thousands of Iranian soldiers slain in the Iran-Iraq War.^[12] During the 2006 Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah declared that "If there had been a Muslim to carry out Imam Khomeini's fatwa against the renegade Salman Rushdie, this rabble who insult our Prophet Mohammed in Denmark, Norway and France would not have dared to do so. I am sure there are millions of Muslims who are ready to give their lives to defend our prophet's honour and we have to be ready to do anything for that."^[20]

Pakistani International Guerillas film

In 1990 a Pakistani film was released in which Rushdie, played by Afzaal Ahmad, was depicted as plotting, soon after his publication of The Satanic Verses, to cause the downfall of "Pakistan, the stronghold of Islam" by opening a chain of casinos and discos in the country. The hero of the story, played by Mustafa Qureshi, learns of the plot and decides to quit his day job as a police officer to recruit his unemployed brothers and create a mujahid (God's soldiers) group to pursue Rushdie and slay him before the plot can go into effect.^[21][22] The film was popular with Pakistani audiences, and it “presents Rushdie as a Rambo-like figure pursued by four Pakistani guerillas”^[23] and surrounded by the Israeli armed forces.^[24] Rushdie is protrayed as "a smug, bespectacled butcher in a double-breasted suit, who lives in palatial splendor, [and who] personally slaughters his enemies with a huge blood-soaked sword".^[25] In the end as the trio of brothers and their mother are being crucified by Rushdie, Allah frees them with bolts of lightning and "Rushdie is attacked by a quartet of floating holy books (the Koran, Tawrat, Zabur, and Injil), which shoot laser beams into his skull until he bursts into flame"^[25], "a scene that evoked shouts of approval from [Pakistani] audiences."^[23] The British Board of Film Classification refused to allow it a certificate, as "it was felt that the portrayal of Rushdie might qualify as criminal libel, causing a breach of the peace as opposed to merely tarnishing his reputation."^[24] This move effectively banned the film in Britain outright. However two months later, Rushdie himself wrote to the board, saying that while he thought the film "a distorted, incompetent piece of trash" he would not sue if it was released.^[24] He later said "If that film had been banned, it would have become the hottest video in town: everyone would have seen it".^[24] While the film was a massive hit in Pakistan, it went virtually unnoticed in the UK.^[24]

[source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salman_Rushdie]

Read More......

The History of Lawrence's Lady Chatterly's Lover

Between the years 1926 and 1928, D. H. Lawrence wrote his final Lady Chatterly's Lover three times. Finishing the third revision, he decided the book was ready for publication, but when he attempted to persuade his agents and publishers to print the work, all were obstinately opposed. Already, he was a seasoned veteran of battles over censorship against people whom he referred to as "morons," battles which put an added strain on his already failing health (Moore 9). He expected difficulty in finding a publisher brave enough to print the content as it stood. As he foresaw, they all refused to publish it unless he agreed to make some changes to the text which would show the public that it was a work of literary merit apart from all the sex and four-letter words. In A Propos of Lady Chatterly's Lover, Lawrence said that he was tempted to make such changes for money but that they were impossible. He said, "I might as well try to clip my own nose into shape with scissors. The book bleeds" (2).

He refused to bow to the demands of the "censor-morons" as he had for the publication of his first novel, The White Peacock. Being in poor health, it was no longer a question of money nor of the writer's creed "publish or perish." He was guided by the desire to speak openly, honestly, and fervently about matters which the majority would rather keep silent. No longer having the patience to veil what he perceived as truth, he met with a Florentine bookseller named Guiseppe Orioli who agreed to print the book in his Tipografia Giuntina using Lawrence's own capital. Orioli, the compiler, knew little English and even less trepidation, for when Lawrence warned him of the book's volatile content, the Italian replied smugly, "O Ma! We do it every day!" (Moore 20).

The 1,000 copies of this first edition printed in July 1928 were sold through Lawrence's close personal friends due to the expectation of trouble from the police. At only two pounds each, the book sold quickly so that by December, this first version was completely sold out (Draper 20). In November, he published another cheaper edition of 200 copies which sold as quickly as the first.

The novel, despite the fact that its audience was limited to only those who had ties to the black market, was a profitable one for Lawrence. In fact, he would have become extremely wealthy had he been given a royalty on all the pirated editions which sprang up almost immediately after its first publication. One bookseller felt guilty about selling an unauthorized novel, so he sent Lawrence a small percentage of the profits. Lawrence remarked that if this were just a drop in the bucket, as the bookseller had indicated, it must have been a wonderful bucket (Lawrence 12). As it was published privately, no copyright was issued, so the novel was free game to any and all who wished to pirate their own editions, and the pirates could sell them for as much as possible.

The immediacy and pervasiveness with which the pirated editions arose is astounding. Apparently, someone in America had ordered an edition from one of Lawrence's friends, and within a month of its arrival there, the first pirated edition was offered for sale in New York, usually at the price of fifteen dollars. Even the most `reliable' bookstores sold pirated editions to the public as if they were the originals (Lawrence 5).

By 1929, Lawrence himself possessed a pirated edition, a "filthy-looking book...containing my [his] forged signature by the little boy of the piratical family" (Lawrence 4). In response to this edition's appearance in London, Lawrence put forth a second edition in November 1928, again from the tiny Florentine print shop. This time he only printed two hundred copies and offered them at one guinea each as it was smaller and less expensive to print.

Lawrence also possessed a pirated edition that resembled a long Bible, a funeral version, and in America before the end of the decade, at least four pirated editions are recorded. In Europe, a pirated edition of 1500 copies was very near to the original. Only the corrections of a few of the spelling mistakes, which had been made to begin with by the English illiterate Orioli, the absence of the author's signature, and a slightly different binding identified it as a false version. Being so close to the original, the book was sold to an unsuspecting public at anywhere from 300 to 500 francs (Lawrence 7).

Several pirates offered Lawrence a guarantee of royalty from the sale of their editions if he would simply agree to authorize them. While this would not have made their editions any more legal, it would have served to make stiff-necked booksellers more ready to carry the books. However,, Lawrence was as opposed to this idea as he was to the idea of expurgating Lady Chatterly's Lover to appease the censor-happy publishers. He said, "It is understood that Judas always stands ready with a kiss. But that I should have to kiss him back-!" (Lawrence 8).

Instead of succumbing to the requests of the pirates, he managed to publish a cheap edition in May 1929 of 3,000 copies in Paris. This edition sold out by August at sixty francs and was the first to include his prefatory essay entitled "My Skirmish with Jolly Roger," a defense, explication, and history of the novel that was published posthumously as A Propos of Lady Chatterly's Lover. In light of the multitudinous damning criticisms, such a volume was needed. Nevertheless, the publication came too late and few people took time to read it to figure out what Lawrence's intentions were when he set the pen to paper. Virtually every criticism of the book indicated to some extent that Lawrence was obsessed with sex. Some even went so far as to say that the entire book was laden with evil. An anonymous author in John Bull wrote a scathing review about the novel which "reeked with obscenity and lewdness...The muddy minded perverts peddled in the backstreets of Paris are prudish by comparison" (Draper 278). Like many other critics, he felt indifferent to people who wanted to be tainted by Lawrence so long as they kept their distance.

With such negative criticism, the flames of hatred against both the author and the book were ignited in the hearts of the general public, particularly the church-going crowd. Because of what others had said about it, most became so afraid of the book that they would not even allow it in their sight, much less read it for fear that immediate corruption would ensue. With this outcry from the religious community, police in England and America had their hands full preventing the sale of the novel. Undercover police approached a book shop in Oxford in September 1928 and asked if they carried a copy of the novel. The clerk denied indignantly that they stocked it but later approached the undercover officer as he was leaving and said that he could get a copy as a favor to a friend if no receipt was needed.

In America on November 25, 1930, an agent of the Watch and Ward Society purchased a copy of Lady Chatterly's Lover at the Dunster House Book shop in Cambridge, Massachucets. James Delancy, the manager, and Joseph Sullivan, his clerk, were both convicted of selling obscene literature, a crime for which Mr. Delancy was find $800.00 and assigned four months in the house of corrections while Mr. Sullivan was sentenced to two weeks in prison and a $200.00 fine (Morris 2603). The case was appealed to Superior Court on December 19 and 20, 1929. The defense attorney leveled his attack against the unscrupulous methodology employed by the Watch and Ward Society when black-mailing the defendants. He stated that they were "depraved and perverted" to manipulate the booksellers the way they did, and cared little about disagreeing that Lady Chatterly's Lover was obscene. Since he was defending the booksellers, not Lawrence, he was not concerned with the book's reputation. The prosecutor attacked the Watch and Ward Society so that when the trial was over, the Society was censured by the judge. Unfortunately for the two defendants, they were still considered guilty, and their sentences stood unchanged.

Among the hubbub of the anti-Lawrence community, a small group of people voiced support of the book. He received many letters from booksellers, critics, and readers praising the novel and asking questions about what happened to Lady Chatterly or complaining that their orders had not been received (Moore 20). In answer, Lawrence wrote in the margins of the letters and sent them to the Florentine publisher to be typed into formal replies. While most of the criticism condemned his obsession with sex and fowl language, few would deny that he was a man of genius. Even the bully in John Bull had this to say on his behalf: "Mr. Lawrence is a man of genius. As a psychologist he is in the front rank of living writers; as a stylist he stands supreme" (Draper 278).

Lawrence became extremely ill in late 1929 and moved to the Swiss Alps and then to the South of France in search of a healthy atmosphere, but news of the novel continued to follow him. It is likely that the strain of the publication details of Lady Chatterly's Lover hastened his death in 1930. One day in early 1930, he said, "The hatred which my books have aroused comes back at me and gets me here," pointing to his heart (Moore 25). He was a serious man who took news of his novel's acceptance seriously. Later that year, due to complications, he passed away in the South of France. With the death of Lawrence, publishers felt at liberty to expurgate it at will. Without a copyright, a publisher who could come up with a clean version had the promise of the novel's preceding reputation to back up its success. In 1932, two expurgated versions were published, 2,000 copies in America and 3,440 copies in England. Frieda Lawrence, D. H. Lawrence's widow, endorsed one expurgated version on the jacket sleeve stating that it "suggests to the greatest possible extent the original's strength and vigor" (Hazlitt 289). However, one can only assume that Lawrence would have published the novel in an expurgated version when he was alive had he so desired. He made so many attempts to defy authority and have his third version of the novel published the way he wanted that no one can assume he would have been pleased. To him, the detailed descriptions of the sex act were central to convey his philosophy on the issue, and the four-letter words were nothing more than all men knew. He used them in an attempt to capture or mirror what he perceived as reality.

The publishers of this version euphemistically referred to it as an `abridged' edition. Whole pages were left out with nothing but confusing asterisks left to mark their omissions. There was no consistency in the use of these astriks; some deleted pages were not even mentioned. Every description of the act of sex and all four-letter words which could have been remotely objectional were left out. Moreover, the reader was not made aware of when his or her "chastity was being protected from the depraving influence of the original volume" (Hazlitt 289). It would have been better had the editors simply been consistent in their omissions.

Criticism of this expurgated version often focused on the inconsistency of the omissions but was generally in favor of the clean version, although the name carried with it a certain dubious reputation which prohibited its purchase by the religious community. They were still afraid of it. In America, literary criticism was caught up in the worries of the Great Depression, and concerns over Lady Chatterly's Lover took a back seat to the more immediately important issue of keeping food on the table. Nevertheless, its popularity evidently did not die. The National Union Catalog records fifteen different printings of expurgated versions between the years 1932 and 1943 in America, England, and Paris. A considerable number of these novels were sold, and the black market still carried a full line of assorted unexpurgated copies.

Further evidence of the novel's continued popularity lies in the 1944 printing of Lawrence's first version of the novel. Printed under the fitting title, The First Lady Chatterly, Dial Press expected to capitalize on the novel's reputation. It was this reputation, however, that led to a court battle in November 1944.

Earlier that year in May, Charles Sumner, raided the offices of Dial Press in New York City seizing four hundred copies of the novel. When it came to trial, two of the three justices hearing the case decided that there was reasonable doubt as to the obscenity of the novel.

Besides lacking the four-letter words that lit so much controversy over the third version, this edition also differed in characterization. The character of the gamekeeper, Mellors, was originally named Parkin who was more of a social figure. In the third version, with Mellors, the social motif was not as direct, and the love theme was thereby emphasized more exclusively (Moore 20). Parkin speaks only in the vernacular while Mellors speaks the common language in affectionate scenes and the king's English when he wishes. "In Constance Chatterly, the changes are perhaps less drastic, but they are no less important to her motivation" (Schorer xxxi). Clifford Chatterly gradually comes to be bitter in the first version, whereas he is already bitter at the start of the third. All of these changes lend themselves to the theme which evolved in Lawrence's mind as he wrote the book. Therefore, the strongest criticism against accepting this first version as authoritative lies in the fact that the message Lawrence wished to convey through the story was not perfected until the final version.

Most critics agreed that there was nothing wrong with the idea of publishing this version of the manuscript. Lawrence had not included much of what made the third version so hated, and a respectable literary opinion centered on the idea that this version was at least as good if not better than the third draft which Lawrence preferred. Indeed, had Lawrence been satisfied with his first draft of the novel, it would have been published with very little commotion. Still, it is impossible to say how the novel would have been viewed critically were it not for the controversy it generated. Evidence points to the possibility that the novel would not have enjoyed great popularity. Many critics agreed that the plot was too simple and that the characters were utterly dead inside, that it was a bleak, depressing novel. It simply was not Lawrence's best work.

Even though the book may not have been his best, the idea of not being able to legally purchase the third version was difficult to accept, even for those who did not necessarily care for the novel itself. The gradual push for the publication of the third version without abridgement continued. In 1953, a collection of Lawrence's essays regarding his sexual ideology entitled Sex Literature and Censorship was edited by Harry Moore. In this book Moore called for the publication of an unexpurgated third version: "Now, twenty years after the legalization of Ulysses, we might expect a publisher to undertake the genuine Lady Chatterly's Lover" (26). He would have to wait six years more until Grove Press accepted that portentous task.

"Like water pressure that has slowly built up behind a cracked dam, the suppressed book suddenly burst upon us" (Evans 144). Once the novel was available in pure, unexpurgated form, the greatest battle in its controversial history exploded culminating in a trial at the U. S. District Court under Judge Frederick vanPelt Bryan. Opponents and proponents voiced their opinions openly. Among the more eminent figures opposed to the book were Post Master General Arthur E. Summerfield and President Eisenhower. When Summerfield showed the President a copy of the book in which he had marked some of the four-letter words and sex scenes, the shocked President replied "Dreadful...We can't have it." (Evans 145). The religious community backed the President in an outcry against the novel. The publisher at Grove Press was thankful for those who stood up in defense of the novel as it was banned from the mail system. He had printed 30,000 copies which were projected to sell rapidly, and were it not for the testimonies of distinguished people such as Aldous Huxley and the thoughtful foresight of Judge Bryan, Grove Press might have been forced into bankruptcy (Kazin 34).

Summerfield had been charged by Congress with the duty of excluding obscenity from the mails, and when copies were mailed by Grove Press in the spring of 1959, he was challenged with fulfilling this obligation of office. When he denied it from the mails, the publisher immediately sued in the Federal District Court asking that the ruling of the Postmaster be laid aside. He called on some of the paramount literary critics to defend the novel as a work of art, and all of them contended that it was one of the most important novels of the century. The work was characterized as one containing dignity. "They even went so far as to stress its high `religious quality' and `consecrated vein'" (Evans 146).

Once both sides had argued their case, Judge Bryan, having read the novel himself, decided that Lady Chatterly's Lover was "an honest and sincere novel of literary merit" (qtd. in Evans 146). He thought that the scenes which the Postmaster General had pointed out as obscene were necessary to the plot structure in conveying the author's intent. The language that the President regarded as `dreadful' "seemed to him not inconsistent with character, situation or theme" (Evans 146).

In this light, Judge Bryan issued an order that the book be allowed all the privileges of the mail, a ruling which outraged many citizens. J. Benedict, in the title of his essay regarding the matter, called the case "A Legal Leftwing Softening of Public Morality" (3). Many were afraid that this decision would only lead to the freedom of the press to publish anything and everything, which it may have done to a certain extent. They feared that what may result from the decision would be "the noisiest censorship yap since James Joyce's Ulyesses was declared literature by Federal Judge John M. Woolsey in 1933" (Morris 88). Some were puzzled. They thought that if the Postmaster General were charged with keeping obscenity from the mail, he should be able to decide exactly what obscenity was.

Nevertheless, the ruling stood firm and became a precedent in other censor cases as the Ulysses case had done. Just after the ruling, Alfred Kazin observed that Lady Chatterly was out of date for 1959. Some of the contempory novels (the names of which he failed to mention) dealt with matters that made Lady Chatterly's Lover pale by comparison. "One was about necrophilia, another on sodomy between priests, a third on incest"(33). Kazin condemned the way people choose to ignore and repress what they are afraid of. He said, "There is something about the American mind that is quick to identify what it is afraid of or just ignorant of as immoral" (34). Sonya Rudikoff supported the novel and "the purgative effects of intentional frankness" (408).

It is likely that the first movie version from Paris added a new dimension to the trial. Arriving in America at approximately the same time as the unexpurgated version, the risque sex scenes evoked horror in the minds of people who were barely accustomed to the antics of Howdy Doody. This was one of the first and most deeply felt blows to U.S. film censorship that had yet come about. The state of New York had banned the film from public viewing, and controversy over the book caught the film in its whirlwind so that the case went to the U.S. Supreme Court. The decision regarding the film was as shocking as the ruling on the book. Our constitutional rights were being violated by New York, and as adults, we should be allowed to view the film if we so desire.

These two decisions serve as landmarks in the struggle for freedom of expression. They played a minor part in the sexual revolution of the sixties, and widespread open-mindedness. One must be careful not to go too far in measuring the degree of profundity these cases had on future generations. However, we can note that they served as precedents, and once they were established, there was no going back to equal days of suppressing ideas. The effects are still being felt today in that the mind set of the general public was totally altered. Perhaps the present push for nudity and violence on public television programs, such as N.Y.P.D Blue, has its roots in Lady Chatterly's Lover.

Whatever the effects of Lady Chaterly's Lover, America was at the forefront in making bold steps towards true liberty of thought. England followed in our footsteps almost immediately, and soon allowed the unexpurgated third version admittance to bookstores, this time to be put on shelves legally.

Indeed, the whole world felt the shock of Lady Chatterly. In Japan, the book stirred up as much trouble as it did in America, only there, the big trial came sooner. The unexpurgated edition of the novel was translated into Japanese by Sei Ito of Waseda University, and it appeared in Tokyo in the spring of 1950. At once, lawyers, civic leaders, authors, journalists, professors, publishers, and general readers created one of the biggest outrcries in Japan since World War II. In 1952 and 1953, trials resulted in the conviction of Hisajiro Koyama, the publisher. To obtain this conviction, the prosecution called on a long list of witnesses including the chairman of the Committee on the Regulation and Control of Cinema Ethics, the president of the Society for the Reform of Manners, and the chief of the Diet Library. Japan believed that Lawrence's purpose in Lady Chatterly's Lover was to encourage adultery and sexual promiscuity (Moore 29). They did not take into account the extreme differences in culture which pose great obstacle in understanding the motivations of people, even literary characters. Therefore, they were limited to begin with in their ability to comprehend why Mellors used colloquial, sometimes vulgar speech, and especially why Constance would meet with him for a secret rendezvous.

In China, governmental resistance against Lady Chatterly led to more than a conviction; it culminated in bloodshed. During the late sixties and early seventies, a period known to the Chinese as the Great Cultural Reformation, people were thrown in prison where they spent the remainder of their lives for possessing a copy of the forbidden book. It was and is considered a threat to the security of the state. In the 1990s, only the prominent are allowed to read the book, and they are only given this privilege once they have obtained a certificate signed by several superiors and stating that they will only use it for academic purposes. Otherwise, possession of the book will lead to a prison sentence. (Wang)

Elsewhere in the world, a `cleaner' version was published in Czekloslovokian, Danish, Polish, and Spanish by 1932. Hungarian followed in 1933, and Portuguese obtained a translation in 1938. Nowadays, virtually every language has a translation of one form of the novel or another.

One question still remains: What happened to the second version that Lawrence wrote and why was it not published instead of the first and third? Nothing "happened" to the version. Critics simply felt that the first and the last versions were of much higher literary quality. Apparently, the only printing of the second manuscript version is in Italian. Piero Nardi published this second version in an Italian translation by Carlo Izzo. Otherwise the version is unavailable (Draper 25).

Without a doubt, "few works by established authors have had as much difficulty getting published in full, unexpurgated form as the `shocking' version of Lady Chatterly's Lover" (Evans 145). Despite this difficulty, Lady Chatterly has taught us an important lesson in First Amendment rights. The bad side to the situation is that in blasting open the road to tolerance, Lawrence accidentally made it possible for a number of less skillful artists to slide into popularity right behind him. Yet this is part of America's philosophy. We want to have the right to see and read everything, even the cheesy works.

Thinking back on what might have happened if Lawrence had been satisfied with his first version, none of the censorship battles would have occurred. Similar battles might have developed over a different work of art or another, but Lawrence should be given a good deal of credit for opening up our minds to a more healthy view of sexuality. He took three times to get it right, and we should be glad that he did considering all that the novel has accomplished. From it we have partially learned the value of honesty.

Works Cited

American Library Association. National Union Catalog, pre-1956
Imprints. Vol. 382. London: Mansell, 1968-80.

Draper, R. P., ed. D. H. Lawrence: The Critical Heritage. London: Redwood Press Limited, 1972.

Evans, Bergen. "Lady Chatterley's Lover" Coronet. 12.2 (1959):
144-151.

Hazlitt, Henry. "Henry Hazlitt in Nation." Ed. R. P. Draper. D. H. Lawrence: The Critical Heritage. London: Redwood Press Limited, 1972.

Kazin, Alfred. "Lady Chatterley in America." Atlantic. 204 (1959): 33-36.

Lawrence, D. H. A Propos to Lady Chatterly's Lover. London: Mandrake Press, 1930.

Moore, Harry T. Sex Literature and Censorship. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1953.

Morris, John. "Fine and Imprisonment for Selling Lawrence's Book Lady Chatterly's Lover." Publisher's Weekly. 116 (1929): 263.

Rudikoff, Sonya. "D. H. Lawrence and Our Life Today: Re-reading Lady Chatterly's Lover." Commentary. 28 (1959): 408-13.

Schorer, Mark. Introduction. Lady Chatterly's Lover. By D. H. Lawrence. New York: Grove Press Inc., 1959.

Wang, Zhe. Personal interview. 20 November 1993.

[source: http://web.ukonline.co.uk/rananim/lawrence/lcl.html]

Read More......