Regressing to the Mean
Why is a French publisher apologizing for a novel it hasn't published yet?
Just the other day I watched a video about Henry Miller’s book Tropic of Cancer. For decades this book was unavailable in North America and the United Kingdom. Right on the cover it even said: not to be imported to America or England.
Why was Tropic of Cancer banned? For it’s frank use of sex. It was considered obscene, and customs agencies would seize the book when people tried to import copies. Lawsuits went on for over 30 years over Tropic. People went to jail over the book. It went on trial in 1950: Besig v. United States. The 1953 ruling by the Ninth Circuit of Appeals declared the book obscene. From Judge Stephens’s ruling:
“(Tropic of Thunder) is written in the composite style of a novel-autobiography, and the author as a character in the book carries the reader as though he himself is living in disgrace, degredation, poverty, mean crime, and prostitution of the mind and body. The vehicle of description is the unprintable word of the debased and morally bankrupt… Nothing has the grace of purity or goodness.”
In his decision, Stephens compared Miller’s book to works by Aristophanes, Chaucer, Boccaccio and even the Bible, but said it went further than those works. Why? Said Stephens: “Dirty word description of the sweet and sublime, especially the mystery of sex and procreation, is the ultimate of obscenity.”
Indeed, it was not until a further 1964 ruling, Grove Press Inc. v. State, Gerstein that Miller’s book was allowed to be sold openly in the United States.
Today, Tropic of Cancer is found in pretty much any large bookstore. Indeed, several Indigo locations near me have copies in stock. Its ability to shock and provoke has vaned in the last 60-odd years, especially in light of more provocative works: A Clockwork Orange, for example. Or even Fifty Shades of Grey, a book that helped normalize BDSM practices in the mainstream.
But back in 1934, the only place you could legally get a copy of Tropic of Cancer was in Paris, through Obelisk Press. It was one of a handful of presses that published work deemed too obscene to print in the UK or United States. Writers like James Joyce and Vladimir Nabokov published their books there. Obelisk, Olympia Press and Shakespeare and Company quickly became known as places willing to take risks and publish books deemed too subversive or obscene to be published by more staid presses. Between this and the rise of public intellectuals like Sartre and de Beauvoir, France came to be seen as a place where literary merit was recognized.
Anyway, I was thinking about all this when I read the other day about Torrey Peters’s novel Detransition, Baby and its upcoming French publication. In a series of now-deleted tweets, Peters shared an excerpt from the translator's preface, which read in part:
“However, before reading this book, we want the readers to know why we chose to publish this in French. This forward is also a way to defuse criticism as Torrey Peters will not be here to defend her book.”
A pre-apology if I’ve ever seen one.
Rightly, Peters was upset over this, and before she deleted her tweets on the matter, so were a number of other trans writers. I was, too. Peters’s book is a lot of things: stylish, whip-smart, expertly-plotted. Controversial? Well, seems like a stretch.
When it came out early last year, Detransition, Baby set a high-water mark for trans literature. Peters has been profiled in magazines, had her book recommended by Good Morning America, and even optioned for a limited series. It wasn’t just the first time trans lit was published by one of the big five, it was the first time trans lit broke through into the mainstream. Peters became a standard-bearer for a whole school of writing: her book’s shadow was all over what writer Roz Kaveney called “The year of trans creativity,” a year that saw new books by Casey Plett, Isle McElroy, Jackie Ess and others, a year that felt like the beginning of something new. Or the cumulation of a decade’s worth of work.
Previously, trans women were only allowed to write a handful of books. If one was especially lucky, they could publish fiction, but it couldn’t touch on trans subjects: Jan Morris’s Hav comes to mind. Otherwise it was generally memoirs. Sometimes they mixed in theory: Kate Bornstein’s Gender Outlaw for example. Other times they were stories of losing everyone: Deirdre McCloskey’s Crossing, for example. But generally, they followed a pattern.
It didn’t do it alone, and it was arguably part of a literary scene that encompassed almost a decade’s worth of writing mostly centered in New York, but Detransition, Baby showed that trans lit didn’t have to fall into these same categories. It was a trans woman writing about trans issues, but not specifically for other trans people. And it was published by one of the big five. It mattered.
Which is what makes this French preface so maddening to me. It’s as if after all this, after a decade that saw presses like Topside and Instar push new voices into the conversation, after writers like Plett, Imogen Binnie and Jeanne Thornton starting getting accolades, after all these advances and gains… its like trans women aren’t allowed to speak for themselves anymore. That their work can’t stand on its own two legs. It needs a disclaimer which absolves the press of any criticism.
And from the same country that took so many risks in publishing works over the past century.
Granted, it’s not as if France is some leftist bastion in the world. In an election earlier this year, Marie Le Pen’s far-right National Rally party took in over 40 per cent of the national vote. France’s most well-known author right now is Michel Houellebecq, a political conservative who Mark Lilla once described as showing “a real understanding of people… who despise the present and dream of stepping back in history to recover what they imagine was lost.”
Which itself sounds like what a lot of current American politicians are doing when they attack books written by LGBTQ authors, banning them under the guise of “letting children by children.”
We are living in times where the pendulum seems to be swinging back to the right. England is awash in pageantry and pomp, the coronation of a new King and the funeral of an old Queen. Canada’s conservative party just elected a new leader in Pierre Poilievre, a man who just a few months ago marched alongside James Topp: a far-right activist with ties to Canada’s alt-right. And it was only a few weeks ago that an online troll far harassed and swatted a popular Twitch streamer to such an extent it became an international talking point.
Is Peters’s novel the latest casualty in this culture war? Is a French publishing house trying to talk over an author the latest sign of where things are headed? And most of all, are we seeing all the gains made by trans lit over the past decade starting to roll back? I certainly hope not, but I’ll admit I’m concerned.