Palimpsestual Profanity
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Sounds dirty, doesn’t it, getting your palimpsest on? In fact, it’s the broadest sort of euphemism for swearing. It’s not total absence of profanity from a text or conversation. Profanity is there, legible in occasional traces despite the better-behaved language that effaces it. When your grandmother says she never swears, I call bullshit. When authors avoid profanity but acknowledge that their characters (including a narrator) swear just beyond our hearing, I call bullshit, too. What motivates this caution but politeness that simultaneously evades and acknowledges the way we speak now?
Great literature eschews bad language — so goes the conventional wisdom — but the swearing is there anyway, because the literature is written and read by polite people who swear. Palimpsestual profanity shapes attitudes towards proper speech, that is, speech that’s proper in a fictional setting.
You can see how palimpsestual profanity works in the following remark by the Honourable Bertram Wilberforce Wooster about confronting Thomas, an ill-mannered child, in P. G. Wodehouse’s Very Good, Jeeves! (1930):
"Well young Thos," I said. "So there you are. You’re getting as fat as a pig." It seemed as good an opening as any other. Experience had taught me that if there was a subject on which he was unlikely to accept persiflage in a spirit of amused geniality it was this matter of his bulging tum. On the last occasion when I made a remark of this nature, he had replied to me, child though he was, in terms which I would have been proud to have had in my own vocabulary.
Bertie doesn’t employ profanity himself, nor does he report Thomas’ profanity; instead, he reports that there was admirable profanity involved, profanity Bertie should learn and use, just not in P. G. Wodehouse’s fiction.
So, don’t tell me that the Hons of mid-twentieth-century England didn’t swear, nor that the warm, stimulating bee-hum of a walk through the gardens of a stately house might not be punctuated with profanities. You won’t read it, but you are invited to imagine the place of profanity in manorial life.
Boys learn bad language at school, of course, so we can count on them to try it out on their relatives, friends, and guests. But contrary to our stereotypes of era and class, well-bred women swear, too. Rosie Little, wife of Bertie’s more or less lifelong more or less friend, Bingo Little, is a case in point: "A few years previously," Bertie tells us, "when my Aunt Dahlia had stolen [Rosie’s] French cook, Anatole, she had called Aunt Dahlia some names in my presence which had impressed me profoundly." Rosie is a novelist, and we know how much writers like to use all the words they know, except that, ironically, Wodehouse and Bertie both know bad words but won’t use them, preferring to imply their use by others, that is, justifying the phenomenon of swearing without actually doing swearing.
Swearing isn’t reserved for schoolboy potty-mouths or modern romance novelists, as Bertie acknowledges in Right Ho, Jeeves! (1934):
I suppose it was that word "upset" that touched Aunt Dahlia off. Experience had taught her what happened when Anatole [yes, the very same cuisinartist] got upset. I had always known her as a woman who was quite active on her pins, but I had never suspected her of being capable of the magnificent burst of speed which she now showed. Pausing merely to get a rich hunting-field expletive off her chest, she was out of the room and making for the stairs before I could swallow a sliver of — I think — banana.
Okay, maybe your grandmother the dowager doesn’t swear, but your aunt does, and the profanity never specified is drenched with the mud and sweat and class and privilege of the hunt, so is nothing that Bertie hasn’t heard before, exhilarating though it is to hear it forcefully expelled from Aunt Dahlia’s diaphragm.
Of course, Wodehouse couldn’t have sold copies of a sweary Wooster and Jeeves book, anyway, because profanity was considered obscenity in the early and mid-twentieth century, and shipping profanity in the form of books or anything else violated laws, in the United States, the Comstock Act. Right Ho, Jeeves! was published in the same year as Allen Walker Read’s article titled "An Obscenity Symbol" (in the journal American Speech), in which the symbol in question, the very word fuck, never appears in print. Indeed, the article is one big euphemism, an example of palimpsestual scholarship. But even had he been allowed to publish profanity, Wodehouse would have passed the opportunity by, because Bertie Wooster, by his own admission, is not an especially sweary guy. We couldn’t bear Bertie rushing into a room saying, "What the fuck?" rather than his characteristic "What, what what?" There’s profanity in the air in the Wooster world, urban and rural, but filtered by Bertie’s non-sweary perspective, it’s both there and not there.
Others who hide profanity underneath the surface of their stories have less excuse, and this opens up the question of motive: why hide what is everywhere around us? Last summer I sprained my ankle badly and relocated to the first floor of our house, shifting between work at the dining room table and resting my ankle while sitting in my comfortable chair in the front room. Weeks off one’s pins provides an opportunity to read a long work for which one usually hasn’t time, so I piled the twelve volumes of Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time next to the chair and read them through, all 2,998 pages in my four-volume University of Chicago Press omnibus edition. It’s written in a style that resists profanity, but I’m someone always on the lookout for it, so I couldn’t help but notice, and not for the first time, how infrequently (and unrealistically) one encounters profanity in those pages.
A bit of profanity surfaces in The Valley of Bones (1964). It’s inevitable there — as a war novel, it wouldn’t be credible without some acknowledgment of strong language. Thus, Dicky Umfraville, ne’er do well, says of Commander Buster Foxe, the "polo-playing sailor": "‘Buster’s a contemporary of mine […] a son-of-a-bitch in the top class. I’ve never told you my life story, have I?’" After six volumes of polite society, it’s refreshing to hear someone say what he really thinks, and readers may well hope to hear more of Dicky’s salty life story, but the gravity of the rest of the writing pulls us back into the chaste main narrative.
The Valley of Bones also includes a dirty story, a Powellian rarity. Welsh soldiers jokingly discuss their war experience:
When the balloon was in the sky, the air began to leak something terrible out of it, it did, and Dai was frightened, so frightened Dai was, and Dai said to Shoni, Look you, Shoni, this balloon is not safe at all, and the air is leaking out of it terrible, we shall have to jump for it, and Shoni said to Dai, But, Dai, what about the women, and Dai said, oh, fook the women, and Shoni said, But have we time?
The fuck here might draw even more attention were it not presented as a dialectal euphemism, much like Irish feck and similarly coy, not in the soldiers’ speech, but in Powell’s less vernacular narrative style. Having decided to present his Welshmen as naturally sweary, but unwilling to pile profanity on profanity, Powell manages to suggest two uses of fuck simultaneously in the punchline. Of course, the profanity is indirect, not in the narrative voice, but supposedly observed by the narrator.
In Powell’s fictional world, women swear as much as soldiers. In the final volume of the series, Hearing Secret Harmonies (1975), the wife of a corporate director comments on her recent reading: "I believe I’ve read something by Ada Leintwardine — The Bitch — The Bitches — something like that. I know bitches came into the title." Partly, we can attribute this freedom with profanity to the difference between books written and read in 1964 and 1975, respectively. Partly, too, we might see this as women’s profanity about or even against women, which is probably more acceptable than men disparaging women with a word like bitch, or even Dicky Umfraville’s deploying it against another man.
Once or twice in Powell’s novels, women’s profanity is flamboyant, yet deflected by narrative details. In A Buyer’s Market (1952), we’re introduced to Milly Andriadis, a late-night hostess. "Mrs. Andriadis let go my arm, and ran swiftly towards the door, which she wrenched open violently, just in time to see a taxi drive away from the front of the house. She made use of an expletive that I had never before — in those distant days — heard a woman employ. The phrase left no doubt in the mind that she was extremely provoked." Class is an issue of course, but the Honorables, once you get to know them, seem likely swearers, too. Note that, when it comes to representing class in the books, the only hard swears belong to the lower social strata — soldiers and hostesses — and the upper classes aren’t exposed for the swearers they really are.
Powell, though palimpsestual, was no prude. Still, his public profanity was usually indirect. In his memoirs, To Keep the Ball Rolling (I own the abridged edition of 1983), he delights in telling sweary stories about Maurice Bowra, long Warden of Wadham College and finally Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford. "The Bowra world was one in which there must be no uncertainty. A clearcut decision had to be made about everything and everybody — good, bad — desirable, undesirable — nice man, shit of hell," the shit Powell’s own yet "really" Bowra’s. Thus, "Bowra always refer[ed] to Kolkhorst as ‘Kunthorse.’" Why is it that so many powerful people have to degrade others with bad language? It’s all part of describing the crusty behavior of the upper crust.
Powell approaches profanity with restraint — he’s not for all swearing all the time — but he can’t resist telling on Bowra, who apparently swore unreservedly, when he and the Powells met "on one of these Hellenic Cruises":
Four letter words have been rather overdone of late years, but, when the ex-Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University, president of the British Academy, holder of innumerable honorific degrees and international laurels, expressed his feelings (and the feelings of all of us), it was intensely funny. "Fuck!" The monosyllable must have carried to the African Coast.
A great moment in swearing, indeed, as regards Bowra but also in the narrative maneuver that justifies printing the word without it sticking to the author. No life or narrative without swearing, but, simultaneously, no narratological responsibility taken for the swearing.
In this attitude and maneuver, Powell was in step with other English writers of his time. Late in To Keep the Ball Rolling, Powell introduces his friendship with Kingsley Amis, the novelist, poet, critic, and curmudgeon. Amis had plenty of advice for writers, some of which he wrote into his posthumously published The King’s English: A Guide to Modern Usage (1997). He devoted three pages to "four-letter words" and advised "Use them sparingly […] for special effect only." He thought "They may be used in dialogue," and "An attempt at humour will often justify their appearance. The power of making one male character say to another, ‘She’s a fucky nuck case’ is not one to be lightly surrendered." In Stanley and the Women (1984), Amis did not surrender it.
Amis, then, would support Powell’s account of the Welsh soldiers’ dirty dialogue, but even like minds disagree on the degree of palimpsest required in good style. Amis insisted that "Even in low farce, never use any [four-letter word] in its original or basic meaning unless perhaps to indicate that a character is some kind of pompous buffoon or other undesirable. Even straightforward excretory ones are tricky." But Powell’s anecdote of the Welsh fookers is not farcical but affectionate. Does the punning in that passage sufficiently cover fook’s basic meaning? I venture not — rather, it calls attention to basic fooking while hiding beneath the pun. Mid-twentieth century English novelists found many ways to write over profanity with gentility, but, if only palimpsestually, the profanity is there for our reading pleasure.
https://stronglang.wordpress.com/2024/02/11/palimpsestual-profanity/