Graves, Robert
Robert Graves (1895–1985) was a versatile man of letters, a notable poet, novelist, anthropologist, and historian, whose works ranged from The White Goddess (1948), a study of mystery rites in ancient times, to I, Claudius (1934), a historical dramatization of the deranged Roman emperor. His contribution to the understanding of swearing consists of a small incisive volume originally issued under the title of Lars Porsena, or The Future of Swearing (1929), revised as The Future of Swearing and Improper Language (1936). In this work he drew partly on his experiences in the army in World War I, memorably documented in Goodbye to All That (1929), as well as his extensive knowledge of English literature. (The reference to Lars Porsena alludes to the opening line of Thomas Babington Macaulay’s highly popular poem “The Lays of Ancient Rome” (1842): “Lars Porsena of Clusium, by the nine gods he swore.”)
The future of swearing and foul language attracts great interest and speculation among the general public. The customary view is that the state of the language is so bad that it is hard to conceive of any further deterioration. Graves, however, advances a completely contrary argument. His basic thesis, relating swearing to social causes, is set out with admirable clarity and a slightly provocative tenor:
Of recent years in England there has been a noticeable decline of swearing and foul language, and this, except at centres of industrial depression, shows every sign of continuing indefinitely until a new shock to our national nervous system—envisageable as war, pestilence, revolution, fire from Heaven, or whatever you please—may (or may not) revive the habit of swearing, simultaneously with that of praying.
(1936, 1)
Graves clearly sees swearing, not as a continuous practice but as a verbal response to various crises in social development, contained in his examples of “war, pestilence [and] revolution.” This is a persuasive argument, and is supported by the great upsurge of xenophobic and vituperative terms generated in times of hostility and by political upheavals. The entries for war, disease, and ethnic insults cover these topics. His pointed reference “except at centres of industrial depression” underlines the social context, for both versions of his study appeared during the Depression. He also makes the observation, implied in the last phrases, that “the habit of swearing” and that of praying are related. This draws on the medieval period, which juxtaposed religious faith and the most appalling utterances of blasphemy.
However, his thesis obviously ignores at least three salient factors. The great efflorescence of swearing in Elizabethan and Restoration times took place during periods of great national prosperity and optimism, not depression. The terms related to the Plague appear decades, if not centuries, after the cataclysm. Furthermore, swearing of the excretory and genital kind shows a continuous history not dependent on national disasters as catalysts. Nevertheless, Graves has a point in claiming that swearing seems to be more fashionable or de rigueur at some periods than at others.
His ending is ironic: “As for The Future of Swearing , who is going to write about it? Not I. To begin with, I cannot believe that it has a future, at least, not one worth setting beside its past” (1936, 65). He proceeds to suggest a title (his own), but proposes to leave someone else “to do the dirty work,” offering a compendium of themes and causative factors varying in persuasiveness from the cogently plausible to the plainly ridiculous. They include:
the imaginative decline of popular swearing under industrial standardization and since the popular Education Acts of fifty years ago; the part played in this decline by the rise in the price of liquor and the shortening of drinking hours; following the failure of the Saints and the Prophets, and the breakdown of orthodox Heaven and Hell as supreme swearing stocks; the questionable compensation by such superstitious objects as hammers, sickles, swastikas, and shirts of different single colours, and by Freudian symbolism; the effects on swearing of the spread of spiritistic belief, of golf, of new popular diseases such as botulism and sleepy-sickness, of new forms of scientific warfare … of gallantly foul-mouthed feministic encroachment on what has been hitherto regarded as a wholly male province.
(1936, 65).
This curious list has some successful predictions but, on balance, more failures. Compulsory education has made the young aware of “improper” language, yet school is where most middle-class children learn to swear. The correlation between drunkenness and swearing seems sound, as does the decline in force of religious swearing. Political movements have indeed generated insulting labels, such as commie and fascist , but “spiritistic” belief (presumably emotive evangelism) has had little effect. Nor have new diseases, nor even scientific warfare, contributed to the word stock of swearing. “Freudian symbolism” seems a bizarre irrelevance, since it is the actual vulgar words for the genitalia and copulation, not the symbols, that were becoming current. Yet if “golf” (an especially frustrating game) is taken to symbolize sport in general, then there is no question that Graves has indeed anticipated a major source of modern profanity, although major golf players, unlike weekend amateurs, are invariably models of decorum.
Behind Graves’s pronouncements on the decline of swearing and improper language there lies, one surmises, a biographical factor. For a literary man who had been immersed in the copious profanity of the war, everything subsequent must have seemed very tame. In his memoir, Goodbye to All That (1929), he records a number of such episodes:
The greatest number of simultaneous charges that I ever heard brought against a soldier occurred in the case of Boy Jones, at Liverpool in 1917. They accused him, first, of using obscene language to the bandmaster. (The bandmaster, who was squeamish, reported it as: “Sir, he called me a double effing c?.”)
(1929, 70)
By the time that Graves died in 1985, there had in fact been a tremendous upsurge of swearing. But it had been brought about by less cataclysmic factors than he envisaged, such as the trial of Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1960), and Kenneth Tynan’s notorious articulation of “fuck” on B.B.C. television, over thirty years after Graves’s original publication. They show the difficulty of prediction in this strange linguistic field.
The Future of Swearing and Improper Language is typical of its time, being based on anecdote and literary knowledge rather than hard data and statistics. But Graves manages his material and marshals his arguments in an appealing and thought-provoking fashion, bringing out the paradoxes and inconsistencies of attitudes toward swearing. It was also a brave book to write at the time, as Graves mischievously reminds us at the outset: “It is to be hoped that this essay will steer its difficult course without private offence to the reader and without public offence to the Censor” (1936, 1).
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