Dirt for Art's Sake - by Elisabeth Ladenson (Paperback)

About the Book

Ladenson recounts the most visible of modern obscenity trials involving scandalous books and their authors.

Book Synopsis

In Dirt for Art's Sake, Elisabeth Ladenson recounts the most visible of modern obscenity trials involving scandalous books and their authors. What, she asks, do these often-colorful legal histories have to tell us about the works themselves and about a changing cultural climate that first treated them as filth and later celebrated them as masterpieces? Ladenson's narrative starts with Madame Bovary (Flaubert was tried in France in 1857) and finishes with Fanny Hill (written in the eighteenth century, put on trial in the United States in 1966); she considers, along the way, Les Fleurs du Mal, Ulysses, The Well of Loneliness, Lady Chatterley's Lover, Tropic of Cancer, Lolita, and the works of the Marquis de Sade.

Over the course of roughly a century, Ladenson finds, two ideas that had been circulating in the form of avant-garde heresy gradually became accepted as truisms, and eventually as grounds for legal defense. The first is captured in the formula ?art for art's sake the notion that a work of art exists in a realm independent of conventional morality. The second is realism, vilified by its critics as ?dirt for dirt's sake.? In Ladenson's view, the truth of the matter is closer to ?dirt for art's sake the idea that the work of art may legitimately include the representation of all aspects of life, including the unpleasant and the sordid.

Ladenson also considers cinematic adaptations of these novels, among them Vincente Minnelli's Madame Bovary, Stanley Kubrick's Lolita and the 1997 remake directed by Adrian Lyne, and various attempts to translate de Sade's works and life into film, which faced similar censorship travails. Written with a keen awareness of ongoing debates about free speech, Dirt for Art's Sake traces the legal and social acceptance of controversial works with critical acumen and delightful wit.

Review Quotes

A professor of French and comparative literature, Ladenson sets out to answer the question, 'How does an 'obscene' book become a 'classic'?' with this spry but exhaustive look at the history and culture surrounding the modern world's most controversial literature. Ladenson touches on numerous 'dirty' books, using a handful of landmark titles as jumping-off points for a wide-ranging survey: Madame Bovary, Les Fleurs du Mal, The Well of Loneliness, Ulysses, Lady Chatterley's Lover, Tropic of Cancer and Lolita. Using court records, novelists' letters, newspaper reviews and other books on the subject, Ladenson constructs a vivid composite of society's shifting relationship with such polarizing subjects as adultery, homosexuality and pedophilia--including the suppression thereof as well as the appetite therefor. Tracing the evolution of 'obscenity' from the 1850s to the late 20th century, Ladenson outlines the debates over 'art for art's sake, ' as well as the province of realism, illustrating the rocky process of acceptance for the twin concepts and the literature they provoked. Witty, well-written and relevant, including fascinating details from the lives of writers, court cases as recent as the 1960s and as far-flung as Japan, and attempts to reinvent controversial works for contemporary audiences (such as two film versions of Lolita), this highly readable study should make scholars and book junkies as happy as pigs in lit.

A witty and elegant study, written with an exceptional sensitivity to the multiple ironies regarding sex and censorship in literature.... With every text Ladenson so perceptively reads, she has something fresh and arresting to say. She is especially brilliant on Ulysses, along with Madame Bovary the most obvious work of genius under examination here.... Assuredly not an obvious work of genius is Lady Chatterley's Lover... and Ladenson's commentary on it is illuminating.... The chapter on Nabokov and Lolita is extremely funny: a chapter of accidents.... We still believe in censorship today. It's just that we're too hypocritical to call it censorship, and talk instead of 'inappropriate language' in regard to gender or ethnic stereotyping, and of the need to have our 'awareness raised'. Bah humbug, says Ladenson, in so many words.

An absorbing study of a century's worth of literary obscenity trials. Between the landmark year of 1857, when Britain passed the Obscene Publications Act and France launched prosecutions against Baudelaire and Gustave Flaubert, through the trials of Ulysses, Lady Chatterley's Lover and Fanny Hill, Western culture completely overthrew its traditional concept of the relationship between art and morality, obliterating the very idea of literary obscenity. Out went the old--literature's duty to uphold the ideal--and in came the new: art for art's sake (exempt from moral judgment), and what Ladenson calls dirt for art's sake, art's duty to be realistic, particularly in sexuality.

Elisabeth Ladenson's witty meditation on literary obscenity pivots on 'irony, paradox, and absurdity.' How, she ruminates, can one generation's 'dirt' be another generation's 'art'? 'How does an obscene work become a classic?' It's a fascinating set of hows. Ladenson takes, as her principal texts, seven ambiguously obscene classic works of literature.... What adds freshness to her discussion is chapters on that infamous period of Gallic censorship when public prosecutor Ernest Pinard took Flaubert and Baudelaire to court. By so doing, he installed himself in the annals of literature--as one of its clowns. They also serve who makes fools of themselves for art.

In witty analyses, she establishes common themes and cross-references from nine obscenity trials, revealing shifting sensibilities and legal rulings since 1857 in France, England, and the US, occasionally to comic effect.... Highly recommended. All readers; all levels.

We have come to applaud transgression, Elisabeth Ladenson argues, but only so long as the values transgressed are different to our own. Discussions of Flaubert, Joyce, Nabokov, and Sade each illustrate the point well, as we see how their most controversial texts have been rewritten in print and film in order to moderate the original provocation.

About the Author

Elisabeth Ladenson is Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She is the author of Proust's Lesbianism, also from Cornell.