Just around the corner at 3 Quarks Daily, Gary Borjesson had an interesting post about love: Can Love Last? A (mostly) encouraging story about the fate of romance over time, which dealt with love and sex, security and adventure. Here’s a comment I made:
Western culture has worked very hard to integrate these things. As a quick example, start with Pride and Prejudice early in the 19th century. Sex is just barely there. You have to look hard to find it. But why do you think Lydia ran off with the handsome charming soldier? Late in the century we have Tess of the D'Urbervilles, which seethes with sexual energy, a peasant seduced by her master, a birth out-of-wedlock, a just-married husband who deserts his wife when he learns that she'd been with another man, a reconciliation...and then Tess is hanged in the end. Yikes! But we don't see sexual activity depicted on the page. That's confined to under-the-counter pornography, which was plentiful. Then, early in the 20th century we have Lady Chatterley's Lover. At last, sex on the page, but rather tame by today's standards. When the unexpurgated version of that book was published in 1960, the publisher was tried for obscenity in the British courts.
And now! Now, dear reader, I blush to think about it.
Think about that for a moment – and that trial is hardly the only obscenity trial the 20th century has seen. The courts are an instrument of the state. The state was asked to make a determination about whether or not the verbal description of sexual intercourse should be permitted to become common knowledge.
Here I’m using “common knowledge” as a technical term in game theory. Common knowledge is knowledge, not only that everyone has, but everyone knows that everyone else knows it. It is thus distinct from shared knowledge, which is knowledge that everyone has, but they don’t necessarily know that everyone shares that knowledge.
The distinction between shared knowledge and common knowledge is important in the folktale, “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” When the naked emperor proudly parades his “new clothes” before his subjects, all of them can see that he is naked. They share that knowledge. It isn’t until the little child blurts out, “he’s naked!” that the knowledge becomes common knowledge. Everyone hears the child’s cry and everyone knows that everyone else has heard it. Above all, the emperor has heard it. If the kid hadn’t cried out, the charade could have gone on indefinitely. But once he blurted out the truth, the deception was finished.
Getting back to those novels, let us assume for the sake of argument[1] that everyone who read Pride and Prejudice was aware of sexual intercourse and so everyone knew that, upon marriage, Elizabeth Bennett would have intercourse with Fitzwilliam Darcy, just as they knew that, when Lydia ran off with Wickham, they would be having intercourse. So why not put it on the page?
I think that question requires a more subtle answer that I am prepared to provide, more subtle and certainly longer. In Elizabeth’s case, the marriage doesn’t happen within the compass of the story (why not, pray tell?). But why not Lydia and Wickham? Tricky. It’s possible that they had not actually “done it” within the compass of the story, how convenient, but maybe they had, who knows? On the one hand there is the actual effect that reading such a depiction would have on readers. That’s one thing. That’s beyond the scope of this post.
What this post is about is the difference between shared knowledge and common knowledge. If Jane Austen had actually written such a scene – would she have been capable of doing so? (are you? are you sure?) – that act would have transformed shared knowledge into common knowledge. That’s what interests me.
By the time we get to Lady Chatterley’s Lover the act, sexual intercourse, is there on the page. We have no choice but to acknowledge it. And the state was forced to ratify that knowledge. Tess of the D’Urbervilles is intermediate between the two, but much more can be depicted than was in Lady Chatterley. Think of Henry Miller, heck, think of Fifty Shades of Grey, which I hear is quite explicit, but I’ve not read it – though I must admit that I’m now curious, you know, like I used to buy Playboy for the interviews (Bertrand Russell, Jean Paul Sartre) and not the pictures.
One of these days I’m going to have to think and write about this at greater length. This is enough for now. I just wanted to put the issue on the table.
How many degrees of sexual detail and explicitness are there? When have they shown up in fiction? I suppose one could write about those millions of sperm swimming toward the egg – and surely someone has done it, as Woody Allen has put it into a movie – but that would kill the eroticism, wouldn’t it?
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[1] Back in the previous millennium I read all five volumes of Peter Gay’s The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud (1984-1998). I have a vague recollection that some (middle and upper class) women may not have known about sexual intercourse by the time they got married. Alas, my library is in storage so I can’t provide a citation.
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My post on sexual shame is relevant here: In which I ask Claude 3.5 about sexual shame and confusion in humans.
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