When is a Book Pornographic?

I was much relieved to see published at the time the six steps suggested by the Co-ordinating Committee on Indecent Publications. Apparently this is what the Committee required of the New Zealand Government:

(1)	The restriction on the display of pornographic books in milk bars, groceries and stationers.
(2)	The simplification of the process by which books may be brought to the notice of the Tribunal. page 385
(3)	The shortening of the time lag between the arrival of books in the country, and their being brought before the Tribunal.
(4)	The more stringent exercise of the powers of the Tribunal as to price, place of sale and readership of the books which it has passed.
(5)	The exercise by the Tribunal of its veto on the publication of its decisions in the Press.
(6)	The provision from the banning from display of books brought to the notice of the Tribunal, pending its decision.

I had been led by publicity on the matter to fear a general and unintelligent reaction which could have brought about the abolition of the Tribunal and the restoration of the former foggy state of affairs when the opinion of a Customs official was sufficient to prevent the entry of a doubtful book into the country. In the event I am glad to find that I was wrong. The proposed six steps, if moderately and prudently applied, would in my opinion do no harm, and could do some good.

But a problem of subjective judgment still remains. I find it imbedded in the first suggested step – ‘The restriction on the display of pornographic books in milk bars, groceries and stationers. . . .’

What is pornography? How do we recognise a pornographic book when we see one? I turn to the two thousand pages of Webster’s International Dictionary for help, and find only this meagre statement: ‘Pornography (from Greek, porne, a harlot) – licentious painting or literature; especially the painting anciently employed to decorate the walls of rooms devoted to Bacchanalian orgies. . . .’

This scholar’s definition may seem no help at all; yet in fact it does help a little. Those pictures on the walls of houses in the red light district of ancient Pompeii, to which Italian guides will only escort the male tourists, these are, in the strict sense of the word, pornographic. The picture of a semi-nude film star on the wall of a young man’s room – would that be the modern equivalent? No; it would not. One would have to find something much more specifically designed for the promotion of orgies; something quite unusual. The modern equivalent would be a deliberately obscene photograph, produced to cater to the perversion of voyeurism. Such a work should not be too hard to identify. But I have never seen one for sale in the country.

When we come to the written word, identification is more difficult. Still the principle should remain roughly the same – pornographic writing is writing deserved to serve a specific (and incidentally non-aesthetic) purpose. It is writing designed to help people to loosen up for a sexual orgy of one kind or another. The fact that a given reader is shocked by a given book does not prove that that book is pornographic. Many humorous works contain a shocking element; many great satires are shocking. Even the obscene may have its place in a non-pornographic work – there are passages in Dante’s Inferno which page 386 are undoubtedly obscene, yet they have their place in the total pattern of the poem and do not turn it into a pornographic work. There is only one Dante. Yet even a mediocre writer may justly claim that the intention to instruct or entertain gives him the right to include passages that might, taken in isolation, be counted obscene. And I rather doubt, from the limited evidence of my own reading, whether the books displayed in ‘milk bars, groceries and stationers’ in this country are strictly pornographic at all. If they were, we would have good reason to ask that they should be withdrawn from circulation completely; whereas what the Co-ordinating Committee on Indecent Publications is demanding is merely an extension of pastoral censorship, so that some books which could be harmful to some readers – I think they have the young readers chiefly in mind – should have a more limited circulation.

In these circumstances there should be another phrase to describe the books in question: ‘doubtful; potentially inflammatory; books which have a marked erotic emphasis’ – I think phrases of this kind would be more accurate than the general term, ‘pornographic’, which could mean no more in this context than an indication that one would keep the book on one’s own shelves, but would prefer one’s children not to read it.

I don’t doubt that a given book may at a given time present a real danger to the soul of a given reader. But there are three glaring factors in this equation. Any book may present such a danger. I have known adolescent boys who were unable to read certain passages in the Old Testament without rousing erotic impulses which they found it very difficult to control. At that age my own difficulties came from some sections of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

The state of the soul too may vary greatly. A schoolgirl and a grandmother may be assumed to have different views of life. A man who has read ten thousand books is not likely to be overwhelmed by a rough passage in Rabelais or the anti-Christian satire of Voltaire. But the third factor, the one of time, is, to my mind, the crucial one.

In a negative and susceptible frame of mind one may take a book from the bookcase and after turning a few pages find oneself tempted to engage in a bout of unbelief or a pornographic reverie. And here I would like to stress that a book which is in itself by no means pornographic may be made the occasion of a pornographic reverie by a susceptible person; and, strictly, the fault for this does not lie in the book, but in the attitude of the reader.

Does one then burn the book? Or does one curse the writer as if he or she was a poisonous reptile? No – I suggest that the reasonable course would be to put the book back firmly in the bookcase, say a prayer perhaps, and then do something quite different, preferably one or other of the spiritual or corporal works of mercy. Another day one might read the same book with profit and innocent enjoyment.

I can’t see that any censorship can be devised to remove personal responsibility from the reader especially in our own literate, complex, multi- page 387 religious society. We Catholics should not, however, be obliged to exercise that responsibility unhelped. Our priests should be aware of the problem (most of them are) and approach it in a liberal way, by instruction in habits of reading, rather than by an external attempt to curtail our choice of reading (few of them do instruct us, perhaps because their own reading habits are too severely canalised).

One might consider Brendan Behan’s Borstal Boy, that magnificent Catholic document, alive with an understanding of the life of the poor. True, Behan fell away from the Church, chiefly because he was refused absolution as an impenitent member of the I.R.A. But his innocent use of four-letter words, as they were used in the Borstal and the Dublin pubs he later frequented, might alienate many a pious Catholic reader who has forgotten or never learnt that there is more than one kind of purity. This is the Church’s loss. Since the Reformation, and more deeply since the rule of the middle class became complete at the beginning of the last century, we seem to have grown hidebound and timid. Fundamentally it is a matter of taste. I would certainly grant any neighbour his or her right to their personal taste – to like or dislike Behan’s book, for example, to be shocked by it, if such were their training and inclination – but I would be gravely disturbed if such a neighbour began a drive to have Behan’s book excluded from milk bars and stationers’ shops, under the vague impression that the work was pornographic.

In actual fact the definition of pornography will always be to some extent subjective. The decisions of the tribunal are bound to come from the subjective reactions of its members; and I take it that the reason the tribunal was constituted in the first place was because a number of people felt that they would prefer to have their reading censored – if at all – by a group of literate people rather than by a possibly illiterate official. The abolition of the tribunal, if it should ever occur, would be a retrograde step.

The core of the problem seems to me to lie in the area of pastoral censorship – that is, the kind of censorship that parents exercise over the reading of their children, and that teachers exercise over the reading of their pupils. Personally I regard such pastoral authority as being benign and inevitable, though I prefer to see it exercised in a liberal fashion. And I can recognise that a parent or teacher who has forbidden the reading of certain books to a young person may feel justifiably perturbed if that young person simply toddles down the street and buys the book in question at the local milkbar. There is a good case for graded reading, for the tribunal to release some books for only a limited distribution. One is well aware that the chief motive for a wider distribution, the minds of publishers and booksellers, is not public enlightenment but a gross commercial exploitation of the teenage market.

On the other hand, I think we Catholics must beware of even seeming to try to legislate for the reading of our adult neighbours. I do not question the formal right of the Church to exercise her pastoral authority over the page 388 reading of her members; though how, where and when it should be exercised, and whether by advice or edict, is quite another matter, open to discussions and even hard dispute. But in the recent past the existence of the Index of Forbidden Books was a real stumbling-block to many people outside the Visible Church, who had grown up in a different tradition where no pastoral authority over the reading of adults was recognised; and I think we should in these circumstances be particularly careful not to fall back unconsciously to a conservative position from which we have only recently shifted. The Church is now asking us to use our Catholic freedom. It would be a pity to disappoint her. Vague tirades (we sometimes have heard them from the pulpit) about the ‘flood of filthy books’ entering the country will only do ourselves and the Church harm. It is not a flood, but a trickle, and nearly all the books are not ‘filthy’ at all, but at most doubtful reading for the young. We have to keep the matter in perspective and not suppose that we are ourselves in possession of an infallible nose for smelling out what is morally harmful.

With these provisos, I think the steps suggested by the Co-ordinating Committee may be positive ones; though I would still be interested to know precisely what ‘the simplification of the process by which books may be brought to the notice of the tribunal’ would involve. I suppose it means that private organisations or individuals could bring a particular book to the tribunal’s notice. This in itself seems to me a reasonable step, provided that not too much pressure is brought to bear, and the Tribunal duly appointed, is left free to do the job it was appointed for. In the voices of some of those who complain about the Tribunal I have detected a note of irritation, as if they felt they had appointed a judge, and he did not turn out to be a hanging judge after all. Judges are judges; and the wisest of them are generally the most lenient.

I am not entirely sure of the fifth step – ‘the exercise by the Tribunal of its veto on the publication of its decisions in the Press’ – for this may be a measure of undue secrecy. If books are banned from distribution in this country, then they are banned and we cannot buy them here; but surely, if one may criticise the Tribunal for too great leniency, it should also be open to criticism from the opposite quarter; and this cannot happen if we do not know what books are being banned. I doubt very much if such normal openness would affect the exercise of pastoral censorship within the family. A lad who does not find a particular book for sale in the corner milkbar is not going to write to England or the U.S.A. for a copy of it just because he has seen it mentioned in the newspaper; and if he does, his motives are more likely to be literary than prurient. I dislike any assumption that we are a nation of immature and prurient people. If I genuinely thought we were like that, I would argue for a total abolition of all censorship, since censorship, being negative, is not in itself an educative influence; whereas even the worst book can at times be that, since it is an expression of human thought.

1967 (452)