Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

88
D.H. Lawrence
grew increasingly conscious of practical needs of the moment; hence
the restored sexual vocabulary, and hence a further attempt to justify
it in the pamphlet Pornography and Obscenity, published in the same
series as one by Joynson-Hicks which stated the opposing case.
Of all Lawrence’s writings, this is the work that has kept best as
a contribution to a continuing debate. It states the need for true sex
in art, and the rightness of genuine sexual stimulus; Boccaccio seems
to him less pornographic than Jane Eyre or Tristan und Isolde. True
pornography, however, ought to be censored; it is what does dirt on
sex. And here Lawrence tames and uses an old theory of his:
The sex functions and the excrementory functions in the human
body work so close together, yet they are, so to speak, utterly
different in direction. Sex is a creative flow, the excrementory
flow is towards dissolution, de-creation . . . In the really healthy
human being the distinction between the two is instant. . . .
But in the degraded human being the deep instincts have
gone dead, and then the two flows become identical. This is the
secret of really vulgar and of pornographical people: the sex flow
and the excrement flow is the same to them. It happens when
the psyche deteriorates, and the profound controlling instincts
collapse. Then sex is dirt and dirt is sex, and sexual excitement
becomes a playing with dirt (Phoenix, 176).
The clarity of this insight will survive the criticism that it does
nothing to aid a censor’s choice between the creative and the excrementatory
in literary sex, much less enable unqualified lawyers and
juries to make it. Its survival is a function of its utter seriousness,
its dedication to the idea that life must be kept up, that sex is not a
“dirty little secret,” though it can be made so by pornographers and
magistrates alike. Thus the abstractions of the metaphysic prove to be
rooted in life; and this is what people mean when they declare that
Lawrence was always, whatever he might seem to be doing, a most
moral writer.
Lawrence’s disgust at pornography depends in a measure upon his
hatred of masturbation, a practical way of turning a procreative into an
excrementatory function. Masturbation is another consequence of the
lies we tell about sex; to be free of the lies would mean to be free not
only of masturbation but of the lies that “lurk under the cloak of this