Literature

In the Preface to the great Oxford English Dictionary , Sir James Murray set out in a famous diagram illustrating register, a hierarchy of linguistic usage ranging from “literary” down through “common” and “colloquial” to “slang.” The placing of “literary” above “common” reflected the prevailing sense of literary decorum in the late nineteenth century, evidenced in the great Victorian novelists and poets and their predecessors. Today it is questionable whether there is such a category as “literary” language at all, since it incorporates all the other categories, as well as two unmentioned by Murray, namely “obscenity” and “taboo.”

This entry is not designed to be comprehensive, but to give an overview of the topic, the names and categories in boldface highlighting entries containing more detailed treatment. The literary use of swearing and foul language is discontinuous, being largely absent in Anglo-Saxon literature, surprisingly prevalent in the Middle English period, especially in the work of Geoffrey Chaucer, William Langland, and much medieval drama, but erratic thereafter, when notions of decorum and the active intervention of censorship began to influence many authors and inhibit literary output. However, even these generalizations are problematic, since there are egregious examples of authors who remain impervious to such controls. These include the exponents of the extraordinary Scots tradition of flyting, including significant authors like William Dunbar and Walter Kennedy, the astonishing displays of obscenity by the Earl of Rochester and the robust translation of François Rabelais by Thomas Urquhart and Peter Anthony Motteux. Within the Elizabethan period, William Shakespeare erred creatively on the side of caution, while his contemporaries Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson were far more daring in testing the boundaries. Likewise, Jonathan Swift and Laurence Sterne were often outrageous, while their contemporaries Alexander Pope and Dr. Samuel Johnson stayed within the bounds of decency. Only in the Victorian Age could it be said that all the major authors subscribed to the same notions of propriety, possibly encouraging the growth of a thriving underground industry in pornography.

In American literature there are the same divergences. The general tenor up to the nineteenth century is polite and decorous, but Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851) is metaphysically and religiously a deeply disturbing book. However, since the ostensible narrative is about the monomaniac Ahab’s feud with the White Whale, it was not a socially threatening text. Mark Twain ’s Huckleberry Finn (1884), on the other hand, became the target of protests both upon publication for being “trash,” and in recent decades on account of the racist attitudes evident in the copious use of the word nigger . However, Jane Mills reminds her readers that “No pornography was produced in the USA until the middle of the nineteenth century” (1993, 218).

Even in the modern era, the generalization that swearing and foul language have become more frequent in literature, while sound in the main, is not absolute. There are the conspicuous exponents like D.H. Lawrence and Henry Miller, but they are counterbalanced by major authors like Henry James, Thomas Hardy, George Bernard Shaw, E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Joseph Conrad, T.S. Eliot, Somerset Maugham, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Samuel Beckett, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tennessee Williams, and William Faulkner, all of whose work is linguistically chaste. Shaw archly observed: “I could not write the words Mr Joyce uses: my prudish hand would refuse to form the letters” ( Table Talk 1925). The same division is found in contemporary writers: coarse language is a major feature of the novelists Philip Roth, Martin Amis, and Jeanette Winterson, the dramatist David Mamet, and the poet Philip Larkin. Yet it is virtually absent from significant authors like Iris Murdoch, Arthur Miller, John Barth, A.S. Byatt, and the Nobel laureates Harold Pinter, J.M. Coetzee, V.S. Naipaul, Seamus Heaney, and Derek Walcott. Xenophobia and anti-Semitism feature strongly in the popular novels of John Buchan and occasionally in the poetry of Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, but less so in their contemporaries. The British poet Tony Harrison is virtually unique in juxtaposing the classic styles of the English tradition and earthy demotic speech. W.H. Auden is a special case, most of his work being highly erudite and refined, but his astonishing pornographic and slightly comic poem “The Platonic Blow” appeared in an American magazine Fuck You , published by the Fuck You Press (1965).

In recent years issues of obscenity have often become sticking points in the award of literary prizes, no less than in the other arts. Thus James Kelman’s novel, How Late It Was, How Late won the prestigious British Booker Prize in 1994, but only after a division in the jury and a critical furor over the multitudinous repetitions of fuck and its derivatives. A similar controversy surrounded the copious use of fucken in the Booker Prize-winner for 2003, D.B.C. Pierre’s Vernon God Little . A reaction to these developments, essentially a protest against a perceived decline in literary standards, has been the institution of unofficial posthumous “Booker” awards for books published a century ago. The judges’ award for 1894 was George Moore’s Esther Waters .