Conclusions
Conclusions: A Literary Genealogy of Rousseau's Confessions
I am not the first author to have adopted the confessional approach, to have revealed life nakedly, or to have used language supposedly unfit for the ears of school girls. Were I a saint recounting his life of sin, perhaps these bald statements relating to my sex habits would be found enlightening... They might even be found instructive.
--Henry Miller
Following his death in 1778, the name Rousseau came to be synonymous with licentious and immoral behavior; as stated in the introduction, this soon became something of a national obsession: those who had known him, as well as those who did not know him, were equally appalled by his reputation. Published posthumously in 1782, the Confessions prompted an extreme public reaction: some people, such as the aristocratic Madame de Boufflers, reacted in horror. Dismissing the Confessions with a moral condemnation, she compared the work to "the memoirs of a farmhand worker or even lower." In addition, the Confessions were castigated by critics who felt that this non-literary work represented "the grazing ground of the ignorant," "the ruination of letters," and "the rabble of literature." However, a few years later an event occurred which would radically affect Rousseau's status, the French Revolution of 1789. Eleven years after Rousseau's death, Marat, Robespierre and the other revolutionaries constructed a mythical figure of the departed Rousseau as a thinker whose moral liberty was an example to others; through their efforts, he was canonized as a thinker who, through his writings, set forth a code of moral correctness.
By employing him as an iconic presence whose example pointed towards the creation of an ideal society, these same individuals elevated the status of Rousseau to a position equivalent to sainthood. Instead of being demonized for his moral deviances, the now mythological figure of Rousseau was imbued with qualities symbolizing the highest moral perfection. Kant proclaimed that Rousseau had "a sensibility of soul of unequalled perfection"; Schiller took him to be "a Christ-like soul for whom the angels of heaven are fit company"; Tolstoy, thought the works of Rousseau could be matched only by the texts of the Christian Gospels, in this way suggesting that Rousseau's work were of divine inspiration. Clearly, by the nineteenth century, the general opinion shifted to an affirmation of his moral uprightness; this shift can be seen in the appellation affixed by Georges Sand, who re-christened the earthly Jean-Jacques as "St. Rousseau."
After he had been acknowledged as a figure of eternal moral value, it became common for pilgrimages to journey to the site of Rousseau's tomb. Many of these pilgrims set out of their journey with the hopes of becoming more moral individuals through their close proximity to his saintly presence; they maintained a strict self-discipline so that they would be able to enter this sanctuary with absolute reverence and purity of heart. Once there they would sing the prayers they had composed, or sonnets they had written comparing Jean-Jacques to Jesus Christ. The tomb of the departed Rousseau became "a temple of religious mourning." Indeed, his attraction was so great that it compelled one individual to commit suicide at his tomb, in the hopes that he would be buried alongside his idol. Clearly, Rousseau had become something akin to a saint, a figure who was sanctified, not in the Church, but in the popular culture of his day. However, although after his death Rousseau came to be viewed with the stately reverence one would give to a religious figure, it should be remembered that earlier he was denounced as a scandalous figure, infamous for his sordid Confessions.
In a similar way, the works of Henry Miller were, at first, the object of great scandal and were prohibited from entering the U.S. However, although he was considered unpublishable in America, in April 1959, Barney Rosset, who had acquired fame as the man who had dared to publish D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), offered to pay Miller $10,000 for his Tropic of Cancer and agreed to pay the cost of all litigation himself if he would give Grove Press permission to publish his works. At fist Miller dismissed Rosset's offer, but after he learned that book-pirates were eager to publish the work themselves, he agreed. Cancer was first published in the United States on June 24, 1961. Reviews were terrific, almost completely positive and, after the first year, 100,000 hardcover copies had been distributed and over a million in paperback. However, the publishing of his work in his native country was not without incident: several booksellers were arrested and sentences to years in prison for selling Miller's pair of Tropics, and Grove Press became the target of several lawsuits; the first year after the publication of Cancer, Grove Press had to fight six legal cases and spend over $100,000 in legal expenses. In March 1963, the trial of the work of Henry Miller had become a national phenomenon; his books became the subject of heated legal dispute in many of the nation's highest courts, as well as the Supreme Court of the United States. The case of the People of the United States v. Henry Miller and Tropic of Cancer ended with Judge Samuel B. Epstein's proclamation that, although Miller's work contained "lewd, vile, vulgar and disgusting language," it ought not to be prohibited by law. Even though, in the end, his work was not judged to be obscene, this victory was not without its price, as Miller lost the anonymity he had treasured. However, Martin Jay writes that, much to Miller's chagrin, he quickly became a legendary figure who pornographic works were seen as more valuable than his literary productions: he had become the King of smut.
Though noteworthy for the exceeding honesty with which it depicted the role of sexual desire in a writer's life, in reality, Miller differed drastically from the libidinous desiring-machine that narrates his text; any notion of his being like the sexually insatiable narrator of Capricorn is a pure myth: even in his sex life there was more love, companionship and mutual caring than there ever was sex. In fact, Norman Mailer describes Miller's childhood years as a period spent "hermetically sealed against sexuality," for he came out of an American society that saw sexuality as being intrinsically linked with obscenity. As a result, during his teenage years, he had a habit of being overcome with emotion whenever a woman looked at him tenderly; each time he would feel that this was the woman who would provide him with the love his mother had not given him since childhood. Even when he reached adulthood, his sexual appetite was nothing like the narrator of Capricorn, who desire women simply on the basis of their sexual appeal; he was much more selective than that. Indeed, Jay reveals that Miller was secretly a romantic, saying that he wanted to have "a passionate love-affair." As Miller wrote to his friend Savington Crompton: "I [want] to make a woman happy, enrich her. But I refuse to make an alliance just for the sake of sex. ...I want to give her everything I've got." Instead of a relationship based purely on sex, what he yearned for was a woman who could both represent all of his 'unhappy' sexuality and, simultaneously, would also embody the healthy sexual energy that Miller needs to live.
In recent years Miller's reputation has a suffered a seemingly fatal blow, as feminist writers such as Kate Millet, who declared in Sexual Politics (1970) that Miller's writing was the product of misogynistic thinking, sought to annul any influence his work might have. Seeking to rehabilitate Miller's reputation, Erica Jong re-evaluated Miller's intentions in composing his works; in her opinion, Miller's writing ought to be seen as his attempt to use the body as a way of transcending the body, in this way allowing him to extend the freedom he has found in sexuality to his readers. However, seeing the naivete of his goals, Miller realize that society would prefer to institute a commodified, liberalized version of sexual love rather than achieve the full liberation of sexuality. Disappointed with a world that refused to change, nevertheless, Miller continued to write about sex, not so much to advocate this kind of behavior so much as to simply point out that it exists.
Miller expressed his displeasure to his biographer, Martin Jay, saying that he doubted whether a single man could alter the moralities of his own age; however, in Jay's opinion, Miller's work has been profoundly instrumental in creating profound changes in American society. When such changes were attributed to him, Miller was not pleased. In 1976, when an interviewer praised him for contributing to the sexual revolution, crediting him with changing the moral climate of his time, he reacted by saying, "Sexual revolution? Oh I consider it a misfortune that we entered into such things." He felt that his original intentions for the society of liberated sexuality were nothing like the society that had been constructed in his name. "I don't give a damn for sex and all that business," he muttered, denying any role in the sexual revolution, saying that it was not what he wanted at all. What he wanted was "a revolution in sensibility, an upheaval in consciousness." However, this mythic image of Miller as a sexually omnivorous figure still persists. Even today, his notoriety as an author is derived largely from this aspect of his work, a fact which he abhorred; in his later years, he claimed to dislike vulgarity as much as he despised his reputation as a pornographer.
Responding in Miller's name to critics who, like Millet, accuse him of holding to patriarchal beliefs, Jong declares that patriarchy is not something which can be removed from society simply by restructuring the social order; rather, this impulse to dominate is something which resides in the fabric of consciousness, and this accounts for its power as a form of oppression. In light of this statement, one can see that Miller's sexually explicit style of writing is his way of approaching the central core of desire, taking part in the production of desire in order to acquaint oneself with the powers of creation. While some of the passages in Capricorn seem to be obscene or even pornographic, Miller's aim in writing such passages was significantly different. He regarded these passages not as pornography, but as "pieces of symbolic prose, in the metaphysical tradition." As he explained to Erica Jong in 1974: "The real Henry Miller is not a sex addict or an adventurer, you're dealing with a metaphysician...always looking for the secret of life."
However, unlike Miller, Howard Stern proudly wears the title of the King of Smut. He writes that many industry sources had predicted that his book would be an embarrassing failure. Instead, Private Parts was a resounding success, breaking all sales records in Simon and Schuster's seventy year history. Yet even with all its success, he notes that he is still unhappy because of the public's reaction to his book, for Private Parts incited a string of controversies after its national debut. In order to give his paperback readers the opportunity to follow the events which occurred after the hardcover publication (or, as Stern says, "How I'll get you to buy the paperback after you've already bought the hardcover") he includes a chapter of extra material in the paperback version which, by reproducing articles from newspapers and magazines, chronicles the public's reaction to the book.
In the first week after the publication of Private Parts, the publisher had to order an additional 500,000 copies of the book, as it had climbed to number one on many of the nation's bestseller charts. In its second week of publication, there were 850,000 copies of the book in print. The director of merchandising at Barnes and Noble, Inc. declared Stern's book to be the fastest-selling book in the history of their chain. As a bookseller reported in The Cleveland Times, October 20, 1993, the only other time he had seen a book selling as quickly as Private Parts did, it was Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, a work which had received much coverage in the press because of its inflammatory reputation. This may be used to bolster the argument that Stern, like Rousseau and Miller, is seen as forging a new morality through the transvaluation of all moral values. Most of the early reviews of the book were favorable, for example, The Entertainment Weekly called Stern "the most brilliant--and misunderstood--comic artist in America." Many reviewers compared Stern to Lenny Bruce, whose How to Talk Dirty and Influence People is considered to be a masterpiece of comic autobiography.
However, more negative reviews started appearing after the book had already become a success. A reprint of an editorial from the United Methodist Relay contains one such negative commentary; the writers of this piece call for bookstores to cease promoting the book, displaying it in store windows, and to discontinue selling it. In sum, they attempted to see this book banned, even though, as they unapologetically admit, they have not read it. Sharing similar feelings as this newspaper's editorial board, one distributor, the Caldor's chain of department stores, decided that Stern's book did not conform to its mainstream image, removed it from its stock and adjusted its bookshelves so that Private Parts was no longer featured in its display of New York Times bestsellers. More controversy followed when Private Parts was removed from public libraries in Texas for similar reasons. Curiously, Stern's book was deemed too obscene to be held in the collection, while other books, such as Alice Walker's Warrior Marks, a work which dealt with female genital mutilation, and sexual manuals such as How to Make Love to a Man were readily available. Evidently, some types of sexuality are permitted, while other forms, such as those expressed in Stern's book, are not. It is interesting to note that many of the terms in which Stern's book was censured were very similar to the way the leading French intellectuals condemned Rousseau's autobiography in the 18th century.
At this point the censorial emphasis shifted from constricting the availability of Stern's book to the outright banning of Stern's physical presence. After he appeared on the Phil Donahue talk-show to promote his book, some stations refused to air the program, deeming its content to be inappropriate. Lastly, Stern met with some resistance when he was refused permission to appear at a book signing in West Hollywood, California, unless he agreed to pay $43,000. ($25,000 against the damage the crowd could potentially cause and $18,000 to pay the police needed to control the event.) Apparently the town, hearing of how Stern drew over 10,000 people to a book signing in New York City, had some misgiving about the possibility of a similar occurrence in California. Stern, of course, refused to offer payment, and expressed his anger at what he saw as yet another example of censorship in America.
In attempting to present a conclusion, one realizes the a mere list of the ways in which these three texts operate within structures which bear correspondence with one another is not enough. Ideally, one would prefer to have demonstrated, not only a relationship of contingency between these authors, but a relation which reveals a deeper congruence between them. As it may be seen, from Rousseau, to Miller, to Stern, one sees the shifting of various pieces and their solidification into a pattern, as the central themes of Rousseau's Confessions finds a new literary basis in Howard Stern's Private Parts, vis-a-vis Henry Miller's Tropic of Capricorn, a bridge of narcissism between Rousseau's obsession and Stern's repression.
Reading these three autobiographies, one sees an evolution in the concept of meaning: starting from Rousseau, who vouches that his feelings are all-important for the truth of his life; to Miller, who locates the foundation of truth in contradictions; to Stern, who views truth through the ironic eye of the satirist. This evolution begins with the entrance of Rousseau onto the literary stage, bringing the anti-social personality into the public eye and, as a result, prompting the aristocracy to fall into decline. This event laid the historical foundation for a new culture, a new system of morality to accompany this transition period. For the reader who passes from Rousseau to Stern, the formation of an ironic American culture where self-deprecation becomes the only way one can present oneself, seems to be the inevitable outgrowth of valorizing a text such as the Confessions. Their particularized conceptions of the truth does not mean that these writers have resigned themselves to the belief that any attempt to communicate the facts must be seen as a subjective analysis; they suggest that the facts of reality are merely a weaving of fictions which have been legitimized by society.
Having established this trinity of names, the figure of Rousseau becomes a single player in a historical movement, which culminates in the development of post-modern society of late capitalist Americas, a land where Rousseau's revolutionary notions, freedom of religion and the liberal codes of sexuality are no longer revolutionary, but are the standards of the status quo. In the contemporary period the names of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Henry Miller and Howard Stern become a series of links in a chain, a concatenation of three literary presences, as traces of each figure may be found in the others; not only does Stern obtain his person from Rousseau and Miller, but it may be seen that Rousseau is the first modern celebrity, the Howard Stern of the 18th century. Not only does Rousseau's Confessions make the literary productions of Miller and Stern possible, but the works of Miller and Stern allow us to read Rousseau with a view towards the future of literature. Indeed, the same thought-process may be found to occur in each author: as a result of positioning themselves as figures who are isolated from the rest of society, as individuals who, through the fullness of their being, have ascended above the affairs of this world, they prevent their being judged according to the same standards as others; these three moral prophets, in trying to escape the injunctions of moral society, find the freedom to create their own moral systems and their individual sets of ethical values.
One of the main ways in which these writers portray a new concept of morality is in their view of sex. Their works indicate the road to the liberation of the self in that they each speak of the benefits to be gained by exploring human sexuality, deviant sexual psychology, and the sublimation of being made possible in the world of sex. Just as Rousseau presents the reader with new possibilities of human existence, so do Miller and Stern bequeath additional possibilities through their works. One might suppose that by falling in love with these possibilities, society may someday enshrine Henry Miller or Howard Stern, just as the fathers of the French Revolution enshrined Rousseau's historical personage. These authors are to be seen as three moral myth shatterers, enacting through their work a transvaluation of all moral values, as their autobiographies run counter to the moral code that is ordained by modern society in its regulation of the individual's sexual-behavioral development. Rousseau, who shows that the immediate gratification of one's desires in childhood may lead to the deformation of one's adult genital desires; Miller, who uses sex as a metaphor for his approach to the spiritual center of humanity; and Stern, who focuses on his fear that he is sexually aberrent, that he deviates from the norm, as a way of showing that there is no standard to measure one's self by. The works of these three authors clear the way for a new type of thinking about sexuality, a state where sex is not a forbidden, 'dirty' aspect of human consciousness.
These three writers believe that this idyllic desire to create a standardized world is much more harmful than the acceptance of one's physical desire, in this way legitimizing all forms of human existence; in their view, all desire is to be seen as normal. For Rousseau, Miller and Stern, sex is immanent and form-less in nature; however, they differ in the way they react to their sexual desires. By trying to position himself outside of society and failing in his attempt to do so, Rousseau fashions a moral code around himself, incorporating a most particular form of sexual ethics: this code will prevent him from enjoying any sexual or sexual pleasure, but will spare him none of the more humiliating sexual experiences of life. Miller, too, has a code of sexual ethics but, while a casual reading of his work would lead one to suspect that his code allows him to enjoy sexual pleasures to their fullest, in all of his descriptions of sexual acts there is curious omission--that of the pleasure he derives from sex. When one reads his descriptions of his sexual experiences, one gets the feeling that he is not even present; the bodily experience which Miller relates seems intangible, distant, removed. This is not at all surprising, considering that Miller is not concerned with the self in a romantic way, in a Rousseauistic way, or any other idealistic way; rather, he is concerned with investigating the metaphysics of sex, not the pure flesh, but what lies concealed behind it. Contrary to what many people believe, Stern, too, plays by rules prescribed according to his own code of moral correctness.
The work of these three individuals witnesses the evolution in our understanding of the sexual-morality of the child, which Deleuze says, "has not to do with the sexual nature of desiring-machines, but with the family nature of this sexuality." Stern takes up the same problem of sexuality which was discovered through an analysis of Rousseau's autobiography, and re-focuses it onto the tensions which arise in reconciling the morality of infantile sexuality, a sexuality which is traditionally thought of as being of a univocal order, with the polymorphous, multiplicity of moralities that coexist in the expression of adult genital sexuality; this can be seen in Stern's emphasis on the social presence of marginalized types of sexuality. The inclusion of Stern roots this essay in the present, lending a historical continuity which, simultaneously, permits us to grasp the inherent problematization of sexual ethics which occurs in the transition to a sexually liberated state and what is, ultimately, the irreconcilability of flesh with power.
Each of these three authors stands as both saint and sinner in that they point the way to the transcendent experience of the individual. My suggestion that one ought to view these writers as saint implies that these three men have been able to achieve sainthood through an act of confession, revealing how each of them has lived the life of a great sinner. These three authors see clearly what it is that society needs: they realize that society has no use for saints who regard God as the one indispensable thing needed to complete the world; rather, society needs individuals such as Rousseau and Henry Miller who, wholly absorbed by the pursuit of their own goals, are able to turn a blind eye to every other desire but their own. Nor does society need individuals who enclose themselves within the space of the self; rather, society needs people like Rousseau and Howard Stern who are able to stand away from it in order to see it for what it is, to comment on it and so allow others to see as they have seen. As the work of these three authors show, the individual does not need to be further alienated from society by his inability to grasp a privileged intellectual discouse; instead, humanity needs those kinds of saints who provide us with the moral possibilities which allow one to experience the happiness of being alive, saints who permit us to say 'Yes!' to the joy of existence.
I am not the first author to have adopted the confessional approach, to have revealed life nakedly, or to have used language supposedly unfit for the ears of school girls. Were I a saint recounting his life of sin, perhaps these bald statements relating to my sex habits would be found enlightening... They might even be found instructive.
--Henry Miller
Following his death in 1778, the name Rousseau came to be synonymous with licentious and immoral behavior; as stated in the introduction, this soon became something of a national obsession: those who had known him, as well as those who did not know him, were equally appalled by his reputation. Published posthumously in 1782, the Confessions prompted an extreme public reaction: some people, such as the aristocratic Madame de Boufflers, reacted in horror. Dismissing the Confessions with a moral condemnation, she compared the work to "the memoirs of a farmhand worker or even lower." In addition, the Confessions were castigated by critics who felt that this non-literary work represented "the grazing ground of the ignorant," "the ruination of letters," and "the rabble of literature." However, a few years later an event occurred which would radically affect Rousseau's status, the French Revolution of 1789. Eleven years after Rousseau's death, Marat, Robespierre and the other revolutionaries constructed a mythical figure of the departed Rousseau as a thinker whose moral liberty was an example to others; through their efforts, he was canonized as a thinker who, through his writings, set forth a code of moral correctness.
By employing him as an iconic presence whose example pointed towards the creation of an ideal society, these same individuals elevated the status of Rousseau to a position equivalent to sainthood. Instead of being demonized for his moral deviances, the now mythological figure of Rousseau was imbued with qualities symbolizing the highest moral perfection. Kant proclaimed that Rousseau had "a sensibility of soul of unequalled perfection"; Schiller took him to be "a Christ-like soul for whom the angels of heaven are fit company"; Tolstoy, thought the works of Rousseau could be matched only by the texts of the Christian Gospels, in this way suggesting that Rousseau's work were of divine inspiration. Clearly, by the nineteenth century, the general opinion shifted to an affirmation of his moral uprightness; this shift can be seen in the appellation affixed by Georges Sand, who re-christened the earthly Jean-Jacques as "St. Rousseau."
After he had been acknowledged as a figure of eternal moral value, it became common for pilgrimages to journey to the site of Rousseau's tomb. Many of these pilgrims set out of their journey with the hopes of becoming more moral individuals through their close proximity to his saintly presence; they maintained a strict self-discipline so that they would be able to enter this sanctuary with absolute reverence and purity of heart. Once there they would sing the prayers they had composed, or sonnets they had written comparing Jean-Jacques to Jesus Christ. The tomb of the departed Rousseau became "a temple of religious mourning." Indeed, his attraction was so great that it compelled one individual to commit suicide at his tomb, in the hopes that he would be buried alongside his idol. Clearly, Rousseau had become something akin to a saint, a figure who was sanctified, not in the Church, but in the popular culture of his day. However, although after his death Rousseau came to be viewed with the stately reverence one would give to a religious figure, it should be remembered that earlier he was denounced as a scandalous figure, infamous for his sordid Confessions.
In a similar way, the works of Henry Miller were, at first, the object of great scandal and were prohibited from entering the U.S. However, although he was considered unpublishable in America, in April 1959, Barney Rosset, who had acquired fame as the man who had dared to publish D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), offered to pay Miller $10,000 for his Tropic of Cancer and agreed to pay the cost of all litigation himself if he would give Grove Press permission to publish his works. At fist Miller dismissed Rosset's offer, but after he learned that book-pirates were eager to publish the work themselves, he agreed. Cancer was first published in the United States on June 24, 1961. Reviews were terrific, almost completely positive and, after the first year, 100,000 hardcover copies had been distributed and over a million in paperback. However, the publishing of his work in his native country was not without incident: several booksellers were arrested and sentences to years in prison for selling Miller's pair of Tropics, and Grove Press became the target of several lawsuits; the first year after the publication of Cancer, Grove Press had to fight six legal cases and spend over $100,000 in legal expenses. In March 1963, the trial of the work of Henry Miller had become a national phenomenon; his books became the subject of heated legal dispute in many of the nation's highest courts, as well as the Supreme Court of the United States. The case of the People of the United States v. Henry Miller and Tropic of Cancer ended with Judge Samuel B. Epstein's proclamation that, although Miller's work contained "lewd, vile, vulgar and disgusting language," it ought not to be prohibited by law. Even though, in the end, his work was not judged to be obscene, this victory was not without its price, as Miller lost the anonymity he had treasured. However, Martin Jay writes that, much to Miller's chagrin, he quickly became a legendary figure who pornographic works were seen as more valuable than his literary productions: he had become the King of smut.
Though noteworthy for the exceeding honesty with which it depicted the role of sexual desire in a writer's life, in reality, Miller differed drastically from the libidinous desiring-machine that narrates his text; any notion of his being like the sexually insatiable narrator of Capricorn is a pure myth: even in his sex life there was more love, companionship and mutual caring than there ever was sex. In fact, Norman Mailer describes Miller's childhood years as a period spent "hermetically sealed against sexuality," for he came out of an American society that saw sexuality as being intrinsically linked with obscenity. As a result, during his teenage years, he had a habit of being overcome with emotion whenever a woman looked at him tenderly; each time he would feel that this was the woman who would provide him with the love his mother had not given him since childhood. Even when he reached adulthood, his sexual appetite was nothing like the narrator of Capricorn, who desire women simply on the basis of their sexual appeal; he was much more selective than that. Indeed, Jay reveals that Miller was secretly a romantic, saying that he wanted to have "a passionate love-affair." As Miller wrote to his friend Savington Crompton: "I [want] to make a woman happy, enrich her. But I refuse to make an alliance just for the sake of sex. ...I want to give her everything I've got." Instead of a relationship based purely on sex, what he yearned for was a woman who could both represent all of his 'unhappy' sexuality and, simultaneously, would also embody the healthy sexual energy that Miller needs to live.
In recent years Miller's reputation has a suffered a seemingly fatal blow, as feminist writers such as Kate Millet, who declared in Sexual Politics (1970) that Miller's writing was the product of misogynistic thinking, sought to annul any influence his work might have. Seeking to rehabilitate Miller's reputation, Erica Jong re-evaluated Miller's intentions in composing his works; in her opinion, Miller's writing ought to be seen as his attempt to use the body as a way of transcending the body, in this way allowing him to extend the freedom he has found in sexuality to his readers. However, seeing the naivete of his goals, Miller realize that society would prefer to institute a commodified, liberalized version of sexual love rather than achieve the full liberation of sexuality. Disappointed with a world that refused to change, nevertheless, Miller continued to write about sex, not so much to advocate this kind of behavior so much as to simply point out that it exists.
Miller expressed his displeasure to his biographer, Martin Jay, saying that he doubted whether a single man could alter the moralities of his own age; however, in Jay's opinion, Miller's work has been profoundly instrumental in creating profound changes in American society. When such changes were attributed to him, Miller was not pleased. In 1976, when an interviewer praised him for contributing to the sexual revolution, crediting him with changing the moral climate of his time, he reacted by saying, "Sexual revolution? Oh I consider it a misfortune that we entered into such things." He felt that his original intentions for the society of liberated sexuality were nothing like the society that had been constructed in his name. "I don't give a damn for sex and all that business," he muttered, denying any role in the sexual revolution, saying that it was not what he wanted at all. What he wanted was "a revolution in sensibility, an upheaval in consciousness." However, this mythic image of Miller as a sexually omnivorous figure still persists. Even today, his notoriety as an author is derived largely from this aspect of his work, a fact which he abhorred; in his later years, he claimed to dislike vulgarity as much as he despised his reputation as a pornographer.
Responding in Miller's name to critics who, like Millet, accuse him of holding to patriarchal beliefs, Jong declares that patriarchy is not something which can be removed from society simply by restructuring the social order; rather, this impulse to dominate is something which resides in the fabric of consciousness, and this accounts for its power as a form of oppression. In light of this statement, one can see that Miller's sexually explicit style of writing is his way of approaching the central core of desire, taking part in the production of desire in order to acquaint oneself with the powers of creation. While some of the passages in Capricorn seem to be obscene or even pornographic, Miller's aim in writing such passages was significantly different. He regarded these passages not as pornography, but as "pieces of symbolic prose, in the metaphysical tradition." As he explained to Erica Jong in 1974: "The real Henry Miller is not a sex addict or an adventurer, you're dealing with a metaphysician...always looking for the secret of life."
However, unlike Miller, Howard Stern proudly wears the title of the King of Smut. He writes that many industry sources had predicted that his book would be an embarrassing failure. Instead, Private Parts was a resounding success, breaking all sales records in Simon and Schuster's seventy year history. Yet even with all its success, he notes that he is still unhappy because of the public's reaction to his book, for Private Parts incited a string of controversies after its national debut. In order to give his paperback readers the opportunity to follow the events which occurred after the hardcover publication (or, as Stern says, "How I'll get you to buy the paperback after you've already bought the hardcover") he includes a chapter of extra material in the paperback version which, by reproducing articles from newspapers and magazines, chronicles the public's reaction to the book.
In the first week after the publication of Private Parts, the publisher had to order an additional 500,000 copies of the book, as it had climbed to number one on many of the nation's bestseller charts. In its second week of publication, there were 850,000 copies of the book in print. The director of merchandising at Barnes and Noble, Inc. declared Stern's book to be the fastest-selling book in the history of their chain. As a bookseller reported in The Cleveland Times, October 20, 1993, the only other time he had seen a book selling as quickly as Private Parts did, it was Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, a work which had received much coverage in the press because of its inflammatory reputation. This may be used to bolster the argument that Stern, like Rousseau and Miller, is seen as forging a new morality through the transvaluation of all moral values. Most of the early reviews of the book were favorable, for example, The Entertainment Weekly called Stern "the most brilliant--and misunderstood--comic artist in America." Many reviewers compared Stern to Lenny Bruce, whose How to Talk Dirty and Influence People is considered to be a masterpiece of comic autobiography.
However, more negative reviews started appearing after the book had already become a success. A reprint of an editorial from the United Methodist Relay contains one such negative commentary; the writers of this piece call for bookstores to cease promoting the book, displaying it in store windows, and to discontinue selling it. In sum, they attempted to see this book banned, even though, as they unapologetically admit, they have not read it. Sharing similar feelings as this newspaper's editorial board, one distributor, the Caldor's chain of department stores, decided that Stern's book did not conform to its mainstream image, removed it from its stock and adjusted its bookshelves so that Private Parts was no longer featured in its display of New York Times bestsellers. More controversy followed when Private Parts was removed from public libraries in Texas for similar reasons. Curiously, Stern's book was deemed too obscene to be held in the collection, while other books, such as Alice Walker's Warrior Marks, a work which dealt with female genital mutilation, and sexual manuals such as How to Make Love to a Man were readily available. Evidently, some types of sexuality are permitted, while other forms, such as those expressed in Stern's book, are not. It is interesting to note that many of the terms in which Stern's book was censured were very similar to the way the leading French intellectuals condemned Rousseau's autobiography in the 18th century.
At this point the censorial emphasis shifted from constricting the availability of Stern's book to the outright banning of Stern's physical presence. After he appeared on the Phil Donahue talk-show to promote his book, some stations refused to air the program, deeming its content to be inappropriate. Lastly, Stern met with some resistance when he was refused permission to appear at a book signing in West Hollywood, California, unless he agreed to pay $43,000. ($25,000 against the damage the crowd could potentially cause and $18,000 to pay the police needed to control the event.) Apparently the town, hearing of how Stern drew over 10,000 people to a book signing in New York City, had some misgiving about the possibility of a similar occurrence in California. Stern, of course, refused to offer payment, and expressed his anger at what he saw as yet another example of censorship in America.
In attempting to present a conclusion, one realizes the a mere list of the ways in which these three texts operate within structures which bear correspondence with one another is not enough. Ideally, one would prefer to have demonstrated, not only a relationship of contingency between these authors, but a relation which reveals a deeper congruence between them. As it may be seen, from Rousseau, to Miller, to Stern, one sees the shifting of various pieces and their solidification into a pattern, as the central themes of Rousseau's Confessions finds a new literary basis in Howard Stern's Private Parts, vis-a-vis Henry Miller's Tropic of Capricorn, a bridge of narcissism between Rousseau's obsession and Stern's repression.
Reading these three autobiographies, one sees an evolution in the concept of meaning: starting from Rousseau, who vouches that his feelings are all-important for the truth of his life; to Miller, who locates the foundation of truth in contradictions; to Stern, who views truth through the ironic eye of the satirist. This evolution begins with the entrance of Rousseau onto the literary stage, bringing the anti-social personality into the public eye and, as a result, prompting the aristocracy to fall into decline. This event laid the historical foundation for a new culture, a new system of morality to accompany this transition period. For the reader who passes from Rousseau to Stern, the formation of an ironic American culture where self-deprecation becomes the only way one can present oneself, seems to be the inevitable outgrowth of valorizing a text such as the Confessions. Their particularized conceptions of the truth does not mean that these writers have resigned themselves to the belief that any attempt to communicate the facts must be seen as a subjective analysis; they suggest that the facts of reality are merely a weaving of fictions which have been legitimized by society.
Having established this trinity of names, the figure of Rousseau becomes a single player in a historical movement, which culminates in the development of post-modern society of late capitalist Americas, a land where Rousseau's revolutionary notions, freedom of religion and the liberal codes of sexuality are no longer revolutionary, but are the standards of the status quo. In the contemporary period the names of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Henry Miller and Howard Stern become a series of links in a chain, a concatenation of three literary presences, as traces of each figure may be found in the others; not only does Stern obtain his person from Rousseau and Miller, but it may be seen that Rousseau is the first modern celebrity, the Howard Stern of the 18th century. Not only does Rousseau's Confessions make the literary productions of Miller and Stern possible, but the works of Miller and Stern allow us to read Rousseau with a view towards the future of literature. Indeed, the same thought-process may be found to occur in each author: as a result of positioning themselves as figures who are isolated from the rest of society, as individuals who, through the fullness of their being, have ascended above the affairs of this world, they prevent their being judged according to the same standards as others; these three moral prophets, in trying to escape the injunctions of moral society, find the freedom to create their own moral systems and their individual sets of ethical values.
One of the main ways in which these writers portray a new concept of morality is in their view of sex. Their works indicate the road to the liberation of the self in that they each speak of the benefits to be gained by exploring human sexuality, deviant sexual psychology, and the sublimation of being made possible in the world of sex. Just as Rousseau presents the reader with new possibilities of human existence, so do Miller and Stern bequeath additional possibilities through their works. One might suppose that by falling in love with these possibilities, society may someday enshrine Henry Miller or Howard Stern, just as the fathers of the French Revolution enshrined Rousseau's historical personage. These authors are to be seen as three moral myth shatterers, enacting through their work a transvaluation of all moral values, as their autobiographies run counter to the moral code that is ordained by modern society in its regulation of the individual's sexual-behavioral development. Rousseau, who shows that the immediate gratification of one's desires in childhood may lead to the deformation of one's adult genital desires; Miller, who uses sex as a metaphor for his approach to the spiritual center of humanity; and Stern, who focuses on his fear that he is sexually aberrent, that he deviates from the norm, as a way of showing that there is no standard to measure one's self by. The works of these three authors clear the way for a new type of thinking about sexuality, a state where sex is not a forbidden, 'dirty' aspect of human consciousness.
These three writers believe that this idyllic desire to create a standardized world is much more harmful than the acceptance of one's physical desire, in this way legitimizing all forms of human existence; in their view, all desire is to be seen as normal. For Rousseau, Miller and Stern, sex is immanent and form-less in nature; however, they differ in the way they react to their sexual desires. By trying to position himself outside of society and failing in his attempt to do so, Rousseau fashions a moral code around himself, incorporating a most particular form of sexual ethics: this code will prevent him from enjoying any sexual or sexual pleasure, but will spare him none of the more humiliating sexual experiences of life. Miller, too, has a code of sexual ethics but, while a casual reading of his work would lead one to suspect that his code allows him to enjoy sexual pleasures to their fullest, in all of his descriptions of sexual acts there is curious omission--that of the pleasure he derives from sex. When one reads his descriptions of his sexual experiences, one gets the feeling that he is not even present; the bodily experience which Miller relates seems intangible, distant, removed. This is not at all surprising, considering that Miller is not concerned with the self in a romantic way, in a Rousseauistic way, or any other idealistic way; rather, he is concerned with investigating the metaphysics of sex, not the pure flesh, but what lies concealed behind it. Contrary to what many people believe, Stern, too, plays by rules prescribed according to his own code of moral correctness.
The work of these three individuals witnesses the evolution in our understanding of the sexual-morality of the child, which Deleuze says, "has not to do with the sexual nature of desiring-machines, but with the family nature of this sexuality." Stern takes up the same problem of sexuality which was discovered through an analysis of Rousseau's autobiography, and re-focuses it onto the tensions which arise in reconciling the morality of infantile sexuality, a sexuality which is traditionally thought of as being of a univocal order, with the polymorphous, multiplicity of moralities that coexist in the expression of adult genital sexuality; this can be seen in Stern's emphasis on the social presence of marginalized types of sexuality. The inclusion of Stern roots this essay in the present, lending a historical continuity which, simultaneously, permits us to grasp the inherent problematization of sexual ethics which occurs in the transition to a sexually liberated state and what is, ultimately, the irreconcilability of flesh with power.
Each of these three authors stands as both saint and sinner in that they point the way to the transcendent experience of the individual. My suggestion that one ought to view these writers as saint implies that these three men have been able to achieve sainthood through an act of confession, revealing how each of them has lived the life of a great sinner. These three authors see clearly what it is that society needs: they realize that society has no use for saints who regard God as the one indispensable thing needed to complete the world; rather, society needs individuals such as Rousseau and Henry Miller who, wholly absorbed by the pursuit of their own goals, are able to turn a blind eye to every other desire but their own. Nor does society need individuals who enclose themselves within the space of the self; rather, society needs people like Rousseau and Howard Stern who are able to stand away from it in order to see it for what it is, to comment on it and so allow others to see as they have seen. As the work of these three authors show, the individual does not need to be further alienated from society by his inability to grasp a privileged intellectual discouse; instead, humanity needs those kinds of saints who provide us with the moral possibilities which allow one to experience the happiness of being alive, saints who permit us to say 'Yes!' to the joy of existence.
posted by Andrew B. Noselli at 7:59 AM
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