MLQ: Modern Language Quarterly

MLQ: Modern Language Quarterly 65.2 (2004) 195-219

Other Hands in Pepys's Diary

Aaron Kunin

The Shorter Pepys will bring new readers the exceptional pleasure of this remarkable document, and old readers will be grateful that they need no longer face the dilemma of which of the nine volumes to take to bed at night.

Let's face it: this essay, which is going to discuss some pornographic books from the library of Samuel Pepys, has been written before. Not as many times as one might have predicted on the basis of the celebrity of some of these books, particularly the diary, not to mention the status of Pepys as a representative figure in the history of sexuality and in seventeenth-century history more generally, but more than once—often enough for the episodes out of which Pepys's sexual history has been reconstructed to have become almost annoyingly familiar. If you know that you're looking for sex in the diary, you already know where to look: the entry for February 9, 1668, which describes and, depending on how you read it, either shamefully conceals or playfully acknowledges a scene of reading whose two stages are (1) a series of masturbation sessions and (2) a series of transparent attempts to disavow and repress the masturbation that culminate in the destruction of the reading material, the pornographic novel L'école des filles ("and after I had done it, I burned it, that it might not be among my books to my shame").¹

Some of the familiarity of this passage undoubtedly derives from the exhaustive interrogation to which it is subjected in the opening pages of Francis Barker's essay The Tremulous Private Body.² This challenging, [End Page 195] self-consciously (and self-congratulatingly) revisionist reading uses the involuted rhetoric of the diary to define a relationship—what Barker calls "the modern settlement"—between the bourgeois subject and the private, shameful, delimited body. The mark of this relationship is not only the enclosed spaces that the body learns to inhabit, or the separation of the private life of the body from the public domain, but the desire of the bourgeois subject to occupy a space apart even from the pleasures and disturbances that the body affords—a private, interior space in which one is fully and truly oneself. In the entry for February 9, 1668, Barker argues, the diary does everything in its power to create some distance between Pepys and the act of reading L'école des filles: what is happening to the body is not happening to Pepys; what is being done to the body is not being done by Pepys. It is precisely the visibility of the distancing devices that allows us, finally, to locate Pepys in that scene of reading. Such arguments may no longer sound all that provocative, or as provocative as Barker, writing in 1984, makes them sound. Nonetheless, it may be salutary to recall that even as he argues that "the Pepysian moment" is a defining one for modernity, he refuses to identify with Pepys "across a gulf that we call history but which . . . is nothing more than the deployment of sameness along a chronological axis" (3).³ Against a tradition of reading the diary as an immediately intelligible record of a self-consciousness assumed to be transhistorical and permanent, Barker insists that the writing in the diary is illegible to us, that its characteristic effects are distancing effects, and that everything—everything the diary assumes, everything we assume about the diary—could be different. In this respect, his reading is still a challenging one: it should serve as a reminder that we need not encounter every blank space in the diary as an invitation to reaffirm our self-knowledge. Pepys doesn't have to be "a typical man" (9).

The challenge that this reading offers, however, has not been met in more recent criticism. The ongoing critical preoccupation with the [End Page 196] L'école des filles...