26
STEVEN MARCUS
the reader will have learned enough about them from my pages, and
will be more than satisfied to have nothing further to do with them."
There is scarcely any point in analysing the impossibilities of this
utterance, particularly in view of what has immediately preceded
them. The point to be noted is that the several elements in Ashbee's
exposition-his "humour," the danger to both young and mature,
his
disavowal of moralizing, and at the same time the sanative moral
effect he expects his work to have-are not simply contradictory;
he is unaware of contradiction, and these conflicting tendencies exist
side by side in his mind yet function autonomously and in isolation
from one another. In addition to isolation, then, a whole series of un–
conscious displacements and denials are enlisted to make this kind
of thinking possible or acceptable to consciousness. And as we shall
have ample opportunity to observe, displacement and denial are
among the chief
modus operandi
of pornographic writing.
These contradictions are the very tissue of Ashbee's intellect;
they are to be found within single sentences as well as in adjacent
passages. In his Preliminary Remarks to Volume III, the
Catena,
for example, Ashbee concludes his discussion of the value for social
history of pornographic fiction with this statement: "Immoral, and
amatory fiction then claims our study, and must unfortunately be
acknowledged to contain,
cum grano salis,
a reflection of the manners
and vices of the times-of vices to be avoided, guarded against, re–
formed, but which unquestionably exist, and of which an exact esti–
mate is needful to enable us to cope with them." One hardly knows
where to lay hold of this sentence, it is such a mess. To begin with,
the grain of salt both cuts the ground out from under everything that
has gone before and breaks the sentence into which it is inserted in
half.
It
acts to nullify or neutralize (rather than to genuinely modify)
the positive assertions that have preceded it, and in a characteristically
ambivalent way allows the writer both to give and take at the same
moment, to feel that he is making a daring pronouncement which is
by a kind of magical simultaneity safely unexceptionable. And the
last part of the sentence repeats the substitution of fantasy for reality,
fuses past and present, and garnishes the whole with some sprigs of
moral parsley. Similarly in Volume II, when Ashbee is representing
the service his exhaustive study of "worthless books" will perform,
he adverts to his Pylades, "the student," who must, he says, "conse-
