Why filthy literature should not be cleaned up
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Version 0 of 1. Thanks to reading my books to my father in bed, at the age of 84 my mother has finally learned to say “fuck” aloud. Though my father revealed his wife’s new skill to me with rueful chiding, I felt proud. Late in the day, my mother has discovered that potty mouth can’t sully her moral interior with ineradicable sewage. It’s the same favour she did for me when shining a torch into a murky bedroom closet: “Look, no monsters.” An app created in Twin Falls, Idaho, would keep the likes of my mother in the dark about the fact that words can’t bite. Clean Reader blanks out dirty, scary words in ebooks. If you poke at the empty space, the app provides a bland substitute, sometimes producing a biological inaccuracy that could make prose even racier. For Americans, if you replace “cunt” with “bottom”, the body part in question migrates to the posterior, and risks implying that church-sanctioned, reproductively sound heterosexual intercourse, perhaps between characters married in the sight of God, is instead anal sex. The outraged reaction of many writers to this comical bit of kit is OTT. Yes, this is censorship of a sort. Yes, countless works will be marred by these inane substitutions, though the real victim is not the author but the reader. But this goofy app is not, as Joanne Harris has asserted, a slippery slope to “burning libraries and erasing whole civilisations from history”. It is an apt junction at which to consider what, exactly, such anachronistic bashfulness is meant to protect, especially in a world where profanity is so ubiquitous that it has lost the power to shock – even, I’m betting, in Idaho. (The couple who created Clean Reader were moved to design it when their daughter said that a book’s foul language made her “a little sad” – which is a far cry from “drove me to self-harm with an axe” or “inspired me to bestiality with our dog”.) This app could clearly render a George Carlin routine as baffling as the Nixon tapes, which were so blighted with “expletive deleted” that little remained besides “a” and “the”. Yet in most contexts, the word obscured is going to be obvious. When our puritan encounters FREAK in a giant balloon on-screen, what goes through this reader’s head? FUCK. Behind the veil of prissiness, the real word shouts more loudly than in the original text. How is this protection? What is being protected is an idea of yourself – as pure, untainted, unworldly, literarily chaste. Why, if evangelicals in Idaho didn’t know these words already, they wouldn’t be sufficiently acquainted with the terms to be offended by them. So this app offers up a fictionally pristine self. It services a vanity. That vanity is not exclusive to the American hinterland. Publications such as the Daily Telegraph persist in pursuing a similar editorial policy. This week it reported: “Clarkson is said to have called Mr Tymon a ‘lazy Irish c---’”. What is being protected here? Can we not work it out? The Telegraph is servicing its own vanity – perpetuating the conceit of the “family newspaper”, even in an age when the kids are all stuck into internet porn. The bleeping-out recalls a rectitudinous, bygone Little England of glass milk bottles on doorsteps and fastened top buttons on shirt collars. But like most falsities, the coyness backfires. The majority of modern readers feel insulted, condescended to, and irked by having to count the hyphens after “b” to distinguish “bitch” from “bastard”. Both the Telegraph and Clean Reader provide fig leaves that are deliberately diaphanous. The fact that “fuck” packs a more aggressive punch than “intercourse” is the product of both the hard, monosyllabic, fricative quality of the sound and a long linguistic tradition of prohibition. Many years of taboo went into building that wonderful word’s sense of violation, yet it only took a few decades to take the edge off. Over my lifetime, heavy usage has woefully eroded profanity’s power. So maybe we need these prisspots, to maintain some semblance of an obscenity’s once-prodigiously transgressive properties. For what good are expletives if no one is offended by them any more? These blushing Midwesterners are doing us a favour, preserving the delicate sensibilities without which “cocksucker” blends harmlessly in with “boy” and “go”. Bloody hell, I can’t even mortify my mother any more. At least I can still goose churchgoers in Idaho. |