Charlot s'amuse, onanism and the question of literature

Abstract

This paper examines the obscenity trial sparked by the publication of Paul Bonnetain’s Charlot s’amuse (Charlot plays with himself), a late nineteenth-century French novel about the life of an onanist, or compulsive masturbator. Bonnetain’s lawyer argued that the novel should not be considered as an obscene text because it was a work of scientific merit contributing to the medical discussion of onanism. This paper examines the interpretative assumptions behind this argument, and posits an alternative reading which suggests that the novel in fact interrogates some of the fundamental ideas in the scientific discourse on onanism in the late nineteenth century. It concludes that this interrogation can be said to form the foundation of the novel’s ‘literary’ status, and that Bonnetain’s text emerges from the trial as a site in which the possibility of judging another human being becomes problematised.