'Arcane Erotica and National ‘Patrimony’: Britain’s Private Case and the Collection de l’Enfer of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France' by Alison Moore in (2012) 18(1)
Cultural Studies Review 196-216
considers -
the broad politics of the creation and maintenance of two large erotica collections in European national libraries across their histories and in relation to definitions of censorship and obscenity. It also examines the popular and intellectual discourses that have surrounded the Collection de l’Enfer and the Private Case of the British Library, and imbued them with a particular cultural mystique as repositories of secret, hidden and privileged erotic knowledge. Censorship and repression of sexuality cannot account for the policies of these libraries which have policed public morals through their restricted access conditions, even as the works they deemed obscene were published without any legal sanction. By classing their contents into a discreet category, these collections have helped to frame erotic signification as a separate body of meaning. In France the notion of the Enfer’s place within national patrimony has particularly abetted the discourses of mystique and allure around it. In Britain, the bibliographers who have discussed the Private Case have done so through assumptions of masculine heterosexual privilege and normativity.
Moore comments that
Both Kearney and Legman invoked the spectre of the perverse erotica as a part of a protest against the censorship and library access restriction of the kinds of materials that appealed to their own tastes. The difficulties of using erotica collections (for Kearney) and the frustrations of state censorship (for Legman) thus both enabled an invocation of unjust hypocrisy in the repression of wholesome desires at the hands of perverse elites. The nonsensical order in which cheerful antique heterosexual smut remained unlisted in catalogues and locked in a safe in the basement of the British Library while tacky SM pornographic films like Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS could be purchased from mail-order catalogues, drove Legman and others to speculate that corrupt elites must be responsible for ensuring that their own perverse preferences were publicly circulated while more wholesome erotica lay out of reach.
For Legman ‘normally erotic art and literature’—a large proportion of the kinds of works that filled the Private Case—were ever vulnerable to ‘the sadists who are running the show owing to the tremendous monetary and power advantage their cold immorality gives them over the majority of normal people’. This is clearly a rather loaded remark, suggesting that sexual perversion cohabits necessarily with the highest of political elites and that a lack of all morals, which is necessarily indicated by an SM erotic disposition, is indeed even the very source of power for political elites who control state institutions. It is curious that Legman and Kearney attributed privilege to those ‘other’ desires, given that it was they themselves, with their self-assumed ‘normal’ sensibilities, who were precisely the ones to gain privileged access to the exclusive Private Case at the height of its inaccessibility.
This type of view about sadomasochistic desire as the cause and foundational pathology of authoritarian power was ubiquitous in postwar European cultures, and ensured that such fantasies both suffered from, and enjoyed, a level of taboo and exquisite unspeakability. As the work of Kriss Ravetto, Marcus Stiggleger, Andrew Hewitt, Carolyn J. Dean, myself and others have shown, the attempt, in one form or another, to create connections between aberrant sexual desire and Nazism has been a recurring theme throughout expression of World War II memory, in historical, philosophical, cinematic, media, political and literary forms. Legman’s and Kearney’s concern to assert a normative pleasure in association with their struggle for greater freedom from censorship and restricted access to erotic archives must be seen with the context of that larger Zeitgeist. But the assertion helped to suggest a view of erotica collections as secret, mysterious and arcane: if perverse elites were so keen to stop the masses from accessing their contents, then something both precious and forbidden must surely be contained within.
When the BNF opened its Collection de l’Enfer for public exhibition in 2008, the sexual content of its texts was revealed in all its antiquarian splendour. Although the themes and acts depicted in works such as the 1749 Memoirs of Fanny Hill or the 1771 Venus En Rut are explicit and varied, they could hardly compete in the stakes of obscenity compared to the vast array of freely available pornography now available to anyone with an internet connection. But in a more subtle regard, the knowledge of old erotica may indeed unsettle modern assumptions, namely the still-common myth that the late twentieth century has brought more imaginative liberation into sexual practices and fantasies in the post-industrial world through the greater availability of sexual imagery and the collapse of social mores relating to sexual and bodily containment. This is the teleological myth of sexual progress mentioned by Foucault. Pre-nineteenth-century erotic fiction in particular has the capacity to diversify appreciation of sexual possibilities through the fundamentally differing visions of pleasure and technique that can be found in many early modern erotic texts. As the work of Peter Cryle has shown, the pleasure structures of eighteenth-century libertine arousal lacked all concept of ‘foreplay’ and of the sudden climactic finality of the modern concept of orgasm. Many of the works contained in the Enfer collection are of that genre Foucault described as the ‘ars erotica’, in opposition to the later, medicalised ‘scientia sexualis’ of nineteenth-century texts. Although we now have a range of diverse views of sexual possibility, normality, necessity and satisfaction at our global electronic disposal, the understandings that contemporary erotica suggests are also still conditioned by a range of continuing medical discourses of sex. The Enfer and the Private Case texts may not deliver on the promise of forbidden secrets that their reputation has so long suggested, but perhaps in their vision of playful games, rebounding pleasures and artistic techniques of seduction and arousal, there is nonetheless an antidote to the banality of post-industrial porn?
