Prudery and Philology
By C. S. LEWIS WE have had a good deal of discussion lately about what is called obscenity in literature, and this dis- cussion has (very naturally) dealt with it chiefly from a legal or moral point of view. But the subject also gives rise to a specifically literary problem.
There have been very few societies, though there have been some, in which it was considered sharneful to make a drawing of the naked human body : a detailed, unexpurgated drawing which omits nothing that the eye can see. On the other hand, there have been very few societies in which it would have been permissible to give an equally detailed description of the same object in words. What is the cause of this seemingly arbitrary discrimination?
Before attempting to answer that question, let us note that the mere existence of the discrimination disposes of one widely accepted error. It proves that the objection to much that is called 'obscenity' in literature is not exclusively moral. If it were, if the objectors were concerned merely to forbid what is likely to inflame appetite, the depicted nude should be as widely prohibited as the described nude. It might, indeed, be regarded as the more objectionable; segnius irritant, things seen move men morerthan things reported. No doubt, some books, and some pictures. have been censured on purely moral grounds. censured as !inflammatory.' But I am not speaking of such special cases; I am speaking of the quite general con- cession to'the artist of that which is denied to the writer. Some- thing other than a care for chastity seems to be involved. And fortunately there is a very easy way of finding out why the distinction exists. It is by experiment. Sit•down and draw your nude When you have finished it, take your pen and attempt the written description. Before you have finished you will be faced with a problem which simply did not exist while you were working at the picture. When you come to those parts of the body which are not usually mentioned, you will have to make a choice of vocabulary. And you will find that you have only four alternatives : a nursery word, an archaism, a word from the gutter, or a scientific word. You will not find any ordinary. neutral word, comparable to 'hand' or 'nose.' And this is going to be very troublesome. Whichever of the four words you choose is going to give a particular tone to your com- position; willy-nilly you must produce baby-talk, or Wardour Street, or coarseness, or technical jargon. And each of these will force you to imply a particular attitude (which is not what you intended to imply) towards your material. The words will force you to write as if you thought it either childish, or quaint, or contemptible, or of purely scientific interest. In fact; mere description is impossible. Language forces you to an implicit comment. In the drawing you did not need to com- ment; you left the lines to speak for themselves. I am talking. of course. about mere draughtsmanship at its simplest level. A completed work by a real artist will certainly contain a com- ment about something. The point is that, when we use words instead of lines, there is really nothing that corresponds to mere draughtsmanship. The pen always does both less and more than the pencil. • This, by the by, is the most important of all facts about literature. There never was a falser maxim than ut pictura poesis. We are sometimes told that everything in the world can come into literature. This is perhaps true in some sense. But it is a dangerous truth unless we balance it with the statement that nothing can go into literature except words, or (if you prefer) that nothing can go in except by becoming words. And words, like every other medium, have their own proper powers and limitations. (They are, for instance, all but impotent when it comes to describing even the simplest machines. Who could, in words, explain what a screw, or a pair of scissors, is like?) One of these limitations is that the common names (as distinct from the childish, archaic, or scientific names) for certain things are 'obscene' words. It is the words, not the things, that are obscene. That is, they are words long conse- crated (or desecrated) to insult, derision, and buffoonery. You cannot use them without bringing in the whole atmosphere of the slum, the barrack-room, and the public school.
It may of course be said that this state of affairs—this lack of any neutral and straightforward words for certain things—is itself the result of precious prudery. Not, to be sure, of 'Victorian' or 'Puritan' prudery, as the ignorant say, but of a prudery certainly pre-Christian and probably primeval. (Quintilian on the 'indecencies' which his contemporaries found in Virgil is an eye-opener; no Victorian was ever so pruriently proper.) The modern writer, if he wishes to introduce into serious writing (comic works are a different matter) a total liberty for the pen such as has nearly always been allowed to the pencil, is in fact taking on a much more formidable adver- sary than a local (and, we may hope, temporary) state of English law. He is attempting to rip up the whole fabric of the mind. I do not say that success is impossible, still less that the attempt is perverse. But before we commit ourselves to so gigantic an enterprise, two questions seem to be worth asking.
First, is it worth it? Have good writers not better things to do? For of course the present state of the law, and (what is less easily utterable) of taste, cannot really prevent any writer worth his salt from saying, in effect, whatever he wants to say. I should insult the technical proficiency of our contemporaries if I supposed them so little masters of the medium as to be unable, whatever their theme, to evade the law. Many perhaps would feel such evasion to be disgraceful. Yet why? The con- temporary state of sensibility is surely, like the language, part of the author's raw material. Evasion (I admit the word has a shabby sound) need not really be less creditable than the 'turning' of any other difficulty which one's medium presents. Great work can be done in a difficult metre; 'why not also under difficult restraints of another kind? When authors rail too much (we may allow them to rail a little) against public taste, do they perhaps betray some insufficiency? Thai), denigrate what they ought rather to use and finally transform by first obeying.
Secondly, do we not stand to lose more than we gain? For of course to remove all 'prudery' is to remove one area of vivid sensibility, .to expunge a human feeling. There are quite enough etiolated, inert, neutral words knocking about already; do we want to increase their number? A strict moralist might possible argue that the old human reticence about some of otir bodily functions has bred such mystery and prurience ('It is impossible,' says the girl in Shaw, 'to explain decency without being indecent') that it cannot be abolished too soon. But would the strict moralist be right? Has nothing good come out of it? It is the parent of three-quarters of the world's jokes.° Remove the standard of decency in the written word, and one of two results must follow. Either you can never laugh again at most of Aristophanes, Chaucer or Rabelais, the joke having partly depended on the fact that what is mentioned is un- mentionable, or, horrid thought, the oral tableau as we have all heard it in 'taproom (not by any means always vile or prurient, but often full of true humour and traditional art) will be replaced and killed by written, professional tableaux; just as the parlour games we played for ourselves fifty years ago are now played for us by professionals 'on the air.' The smoking-room story is, I grant, the last and least of the folk- arts. But it is the only one we have left. Should not writers be willing to preserve it at the cost of a slight restraint on their own vocabulary?
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