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REINVENTION OF OBSCENITY: SEX, LIES, AND TABLOIDS IN EARLY MODERN FRANCE, THE

Comparative Literature, Summer 2004 by Braider, Christopher

THE REINVENTION OF OBSCENITY: SEX, LIES, AND TABLOIDS IN EARLY MODERN FRANCE. By Joan Defean. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2002. xii, 204 p., 10 ills.

Drawing on Foucault's claim in "What Is an Author?" that "books . . . really began to have authors ... to the extent that authors became subject to punishment, that is, to the extent that authors could be transgressive" (as cited, p. 65), Joan Defean argues that the institution of modern authorship arises in dialectical tandem with the perfection of the apparatus of state censorship under Louis XIV. It is not just that, with the advent of the modern author as an autonomous center of cultural power, writers become a target of state control; the institution of authorship is largely constituted by its new legal status and the bureaucracy designed to enforce it. Conversely, the apparatus of state censorship demands the literary malefactions it polices. The modern book police and the modern author thus feed on each other in complex symbiosis.

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According to DeJean, the occasion for this symbiosis is the invention or (since the phenomenon transforms existing notions) the "reinvention" of the modern speech crime of obscenity. Though obscenity derives from Latin, the ancient obscenitas and obsce.nus had a wide range of meanings, none of which precisely maps modern usage. Obscenus covered everything from the "ill-omened" or "inauspicious" to the "filthy" or "indecent"; and when applied to sexual matters, where the aim was not simply to lampoon personal coarseness and folly, we get traditional "bawdy": the "priapic" celebration of "polymorphous" male desires whose comic emblem is the outsized phallus borne by the satyr-god Priapus. A first point then is that in modern usage obscenity becomes more specialized, narrowing its range to specifically sexual activities and the four-letter words that denote them. But this new specialization also entails an important change of emphasis. In abandoning the tradition's fixation on the phallus by which male sexual appetites were enacted on male and female objects pretty much interchangeably, modern obscenity takes a "heterosexual turn" in which female genitalia (formerly deemed merely disgusting) move to the fore; and with the new vectoring of female genitalia comes a growing interest in feminine desires.

Further, in adding the feminine to the polymorphously priapic, obscenity abandons its traditional generic and sociological setting: the "garden of Priapus" conceived both as the scene of bawdy doings and as the intradiegetic analogue of the exclusively male community that bawdy addressed. Though bawdy might be censured, it was never censored. This reflects in part the want of the judicial apparatus whose halting emergence DeJean chronicles. But it also suggests that the authorities felt no need for censorship. Often composed in classical languages accessible only to well-educated males, bawdy appeared in costly volumes only the élite could afford, and indeed (given the pervasive illiteracy of large segments of the population) only the élite could read, even in the vernacular. In addition to focusing on female body parts and desires, obscenity accordingly aims at an increasingly lower class public of which Claude Le Petit, a tailor's son burnt at the stake in 1662 by order of the civil authorities, is the luckless embodiment.

Dejean's story of obscenity's "reinvention" in its modern guise unfolds through three case histories. The first concerns the trial of Théophile de Viau in 1623 on charges of irreligion, immorality, and blasphemy stemming from the publication of what came to be known as the "Sodomite Sonnet." Appearing in Le Parnasse satirique, an anthology of bawdy verse first published in 1618 and then reissued in 1622, when Théophile's troubles begin, the sonnet complains of the venereal disease (syphilis) the poet has contracted from his anagrammatical mistress, the prostitute "Phylis." The poem then closes with the poet's vow to confine his future efforts to the anus-whether male or female is unspecified. The second case is that of the first classic of modern erotic literature, L'Ecole des filles of 1655. Highlighting a dialogue in which a mature woman initiates a younger one in the language of sexual pleasure, L'Ecole des filles set the standard that made Paris the capital not only of European taste, but also of European smut. Moreover, thanks to its small format and cheap paper and printing, L'Ecole became the model for those "obscene little books," easy to carry and inexpensive to buy, whose most disturbing feature was their wide distribution to a large and diverse reading public-as close to a "mass" public as contemporary socio-economic conditions would allow.

Finally, in the third case, DeJean turns to the controversy surrounding Molière's L'Ecole des femmes of 1662. Contemporaries were offended by the play's off-color wordplay-a dangling article (le) that, in the absence of the corresponding noun (which turns out to be the anodyne "ribbon"), contrives to evoke unnamed female body parts, and scatalogical allusions to "cream tarts" and to the sticking of fingers in other men's bowls of soup (this last in a burlesque explanation of the springs of male jealousy). Molière responded to his critics by producing another play, the Critique de l'Ecole des femmes, that staged a salon debate about the original wherein, attempting to pinpoint what she finds so offensive in L'Ecole des femmes, one of the characters supplies the first documented use of the term obscenity in its fully modern sense.

REINVENTION OF OBSCENITY: SEX, LIES, AND TABLOIDS IN EARLY MODERN FRANCE, THE

Comparative Literature, Summer 2004 by Braider, Christopher

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