ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the 1960 R v Penguin, paying particular attention to the political dimension of the defence’s argumentation. It begins by examining the changes brought in by the 1959 Obscene Publications Act and the effect this had on the options available for a legal defence against obscenity. It then explores the critical re-appraisal of D.H. Lawrence that took place between the time of his death in 1930 and the time of the trial: the newly found centrality of Lawrence in the discipline of English criticism, stemming mostly from the work of F.R. Leavis, formed the majority of the defence’s justification of the text’s literary worth. Linked to this critical history, this chapter also emphasizes the emergence of a new master signifier operative in this critical apparatus: Life. A text’s relation to life becomes the means by which a text’s value is evaluated. The Lady Chatterley trial represents a crucial shift in the law and literary criticism’s relation to each other because the grounds for the defence of the text are given in biopolitical terms: Lady Chatterley is not obscene because it is on the side of life. Making use of Lacan’s schemas of the four discourses, I argue that the trial enacts a supplementation of the master by the university; specifically here, the discourse of literary criticism supplants the function of the law as it relates to the management of bodies and texts. Finally, this chapter looks at exemplary testimony from key academic witnesses, the unpublished witness proofs of T.S. Eliot as well as key documents of the defending counsel held at the Penguin archive at the University of Bristol.
