http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/22/magazine/an-unspeakable-word-is-the-word-that-has-to-be-spoken.html?_r=2&src=tptw
RIFF
‘An Unspeakable Word Is the Word That Has to Be Spoken’
Tom Gauld
By JENNY DISKI
Published: May 20, 2011
What have writers got but words? And what have people got but their own bodies to inhabit?
Related
Bonus Feature: Block Quote: The Case Against Cursing (May 22, 2011)
Readers' Comments
Readers shared their thoughts on this article.
What then if you’re a writer and the kind of person who has a body part that could be named by a word that can’t be used? At any rate, the word can’t be used in this magazine, nor can it be represented by a couple of letters with asterisks in between (too risqué, those stars), nor can it be referred to by its initial letter and “-word.” It’s that dangerous, that offensive. So for a writer and a woman, what could be more alluring and commanding than to write and vocalize the private part that dare not speak its name except in Latin and/or euphemism?
An unspeakable word is the word that has to be spoken if language is to be honored. It is a word that belongs colloquially to my anatomy if I choose it, but that has been so appropriated by misogyny and prudery that I am supposed to be horrified and distressed when it is used, as misogyny and prudery would require me to be.
In fact, the word is rather less unspeakable here in the U.K. than in the U.S. It can be used privately in a chummy way between men, between (some) women, between (some) men and women, as well as being aggressively used and deliberately vile. This is true of the best obscenities: they straddle affection, familiarity and offense. It’s all in the tone and the circumstance. That’s what is exciting about language — you can never be quite sure of it. I’ve heard the word used with multiple affect like this in an American context only in the remarkable HBO series “Deadwood.” The writers decided that the uncivil language of a gold-rush shantytown in the 1870s would have been mostly blaspheming and no longer effectively startling. (Who waits in hushed horror these days for God to strike blind the man or woman who has challenged God to do just that?) So among their other dramatic innovations (Shakespearean soliloquies alongside visual dirty realism), the “Deadwood” writers had their actors speak torrents of anachronistic modern obscenities between an equally anachronistic eloquent 18th-century English. In my house, the phrase “you loopy [word I can’t use in this magazine]” has become, as it is in “Deadwood,” a term of profound sweetness and affection, used by either sex to another.
Quite strangely, in the last six months, the word in question has found itself spoken three times on our revered, publicly financed BBC (not known with ambivalent affection as Auntie for nothing) by three different highly respected middle-aged male broadcasters. Twice on the radio, in apparent slips of the tongue when referring to the present government minister responsible for arts-financing cuts, Jeremy Hunt (you see the problem), and once by the unflappable anchor Jeremy Paxman, again misspeaking the word “cuts.” There is talk of a sweepstakes at the BBC: the last one “accidentally” to use the word is a sissy. Surely not. Nevertheless, over here, there is considerably more hilarity than outrage about it.
Perhaps the British tradition of bawdy has something to do with the word’s being more ambiguous in the U.K. Words like “quaint” and “cunny” were used by the likes of Chaucer and Shakespeare to get a dirty laugh from their audience. Between the 13th and 17th centuries, many towns had a Grope[the word I can’t use] Lane or Alley, and in Paris a rue Grattecon (which translates as “Scratch[the word I can’t use] Street”). Streets in England were named for the trades that were plied in them: Threadneedle Street, Pudding Lane, Silver Street, Bread Street and Grope[the word I can’t use] Lane. The former street names remain (as does Cock Lane, perhaps because of its proximity to London’s Smithfield meat market), but the latter became Grove Street in London and Grape Lane in York when times and sensibilities got purer, and things and the names of things became in general dangerous and shameful, while the activities and acknowledgment of the body parts continued in a more furtive fashion.
By 1811, that word (written as two letters with asterisks between) was defined in Francis Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue as “The chonnos of the Greek, and the cunnus of the Latin dictionaries; a nasty name for a nasty thing.” Signifier and signified. And there it was, the whole matter spelled out.
Really nothing much changed after that. Men used it mostly to abuse and demean women, and women still appear mostly to take it that way. In 1928, D. H. Lawrence put in a strong bid in “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” to redeem the nasty from the name and the thing. Gamekeeper Mellors tutors his lady: “But [the word I can’t use]’s a lot more than that. It’s thee, dost see: an’ tha’rt a lot besides an animal, aren’t ter?” James Joyce, a little earlier in “Ulysses,” refers less ecstatically to the Dead Sea as “the grey sunken [the word I can’t use] of the world.” Later, in 1953, Samuel Beckett, in “Malone Dies,” wrote with a fine degree of metaphorical accuracy: “I am being given, if I may venture the expression, birth to into death, such is my impression. The feet are clear already, of the great [the word I can’t use] of existence.” Or as Nietzsche said, “There are no moral phenomena at all but only a moral interpretation of phenomena.”
In my teens I found myself among an older generation of writers, poets and dramatists who’d had enough of politeness and impatiently tapped their feet in the 1950s and early 1960s waiting for the ’60s properly to begin. It wasn’t that they once knew better words and now only used four-letter words, as Cole Porter once put it. All of them had fine vocabularies, more than adequate for the books and criticism they wrote, but their speech was peppered and spiced with short Anglo-Saxon expletives that pointed to sexual activity and parts, as well as powerfully and paradoxically expressing incoherent rage. These words arrived as small explosions inside rational discussion, an embroidery on the background discourse, a commentary on cant, and were immensely pleasurable to speak and hear. We cringed at Norman Mailer’s testosterone-heavy males tamely “fugging” at the brute world. We did it certainly to shock the wrinkled skin off the Brown Windsor soup of the British 1950s, but it became part of regular speech, the way we spoke to each other, and still do. We used the words also in a sexual context, as markers of intimacy and freedom between lovers. On the one hand the grenade of the four-letter word (including the one that can’t be used here) and on the other the neutralizing of the spuriously obscene by the everyday and affectionate. Again, the gameness of language and how you used it. Like the old answer to the question “Is sex dirty?”: “Only if you’re doing it right.”
During the late 1960s, women’s consciousness-raising groups began to take control of the knowledge of their bodies. It was done with specula and mirrors to get a view of what previously only medics and men had been able to gaze at freely. Women’s groups put up posters of vulvas on the walls and confused men and boys who had been looking at much the same thing in porn magazines. Knowing ourselves, taking back our own bodies, we called it. “Our Bodies, Ourselves,” by the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, was constantly reprinted, telling and showing women all the world over what they hadn’t known about themselves before, because it had been technical and masculine knowledge. We looked with some surprise. Is that my cervix right up there beyond my . . . ? All well and good, but what are we going to call it? Some of us used, or began to use, its short, familiar name, but others took exception to sharing the world and words with men. Even now, for some people, the cultural power of the word is so strong that, although they might agree that it’s an irrational response, it remains so dirty — “you wash your filthy mouth out with soap” — that they can’t bring themselves to form the word in their mouths and release it into the world. There is a visceral resistance, like a gagging reflex.
In the early 1980s I attended an all-women seminar at University College London, titled “Vaginal Iconography.” Thirty or so women sat in a room listening and viewing slides of artworks present and past that were, or were said to be, based on the vagina. There was a good deal of discussion about whether it was, to be precise, vaginal or vulval iconography, and some confusion even among the academics about which name represented which part of the female suite of sex organs. Eventually, I asked why no one had used the word I can’t use here, and the room fell silent, apart from a couple of indrawn breaths of disapproval. Finally, one woman put me out of my misery. “Because the word has been appropriated by men.”
Couldn’t we, then, reappropriate it, take it back, make it ours, what with its being quite a good and descriptive word, and at least not an already appropriated Latinized metaphor: vagina (sheath) or vulva (wrapper) to serve the purpose of the male penis (tail)? Reappropriation worked interestingly when African-Americans took back their unmentionable word and yelled it ironically to one another in the street, while rendering non-African-Americans dumb. So did the gay community when they took up their term of abuse so that now universities offer courses in Queer Studies.
But back in the ’80s in the seminar room, the answer to my question was not even no. There was no answer at all, just silent censure. It seems to me that by merely taking offense and refusing to repossess the word that I still can’t use here — but that you can hear anytime, used casually in a street near you — and therefore make it our own, we remain just as much victims as when we faint gratifyingly or fail to laugh outright in the face of the would-be abuser. I demand it back: my word for my private part, thank you very much.
No comments:
Post a Comment