A Cuntroversial Subject: Profanity and Language Programming
Shortly before Christmas, it was my job to lead a seminar with a group of first year undergraduates on Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting. Having previously written on Welsh’s immensely popular book – some time before it was academically acceptable to do so – I felt qualified to do this. But of course, I didn’t want to simply amble through some bland discussion of the graphic depictions of drug use and a comparison of the book and the film adaptation. Obviously, these issues were unavoidable, but I wanted to shake things up a bit.
To begin, I circulated excerpts from William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch. It seems remarkable to me that Trainspotting should have been – and continues to be – hailed as ‘groundbreaking’ in terms of its frank depictions of heroin addiction and for its fragmented, disjointed, discontinuous ‘mosaic’ narrative structure when Burroughs did it all, and better, over 35 years before. A week before the seminar, I had also provided a link to an essay on the influence of Burroughs’ Junky – again, a truly seminal text that most readers of Welsh’s book seem unaware of. (This shouldn’t really be all that surprising given that many readers of Trainspotting only picked it up because it was riding on the crest of a wave of popular culture overkill, and many had never read a book in their lives before, in much the same way as millions of first time readers have picked up the Harry Potter books and declared them the best things they’ve ever read and the best things ever written without having any kind of benchmark.) In short, I wanted to give the students some idea of the context of Trainspotting, and for them to gain some sense of literary history. Despite Welsh’s claims to the contrary (i.e. that he hadn’t really read much ‘Beat’ literature and while he liked the idea of the Beats, didn’t really rate the work, and, more preposterous still, that he wasn’t really much of a reader of fiction), I am personally of the opinion that no writer starts from no-where that’s it’s impossible to write (successfully) from a literary void and that influence is something that’s impossible to escape, that it seeps in however hard one fights it, even if it occurs subconsciously.
But I also wanted to dig into the nature of language. Much was made of the book’s use of Scots vernacular on its publication, and the strong language didn’t go down too well with a number of critics.
And so after a brief introduction and a short discussion through which I gauged the students’ initial responses to the book, I put my plan into action and wrote ‘CUNT’ in 9” high letters on the white board. And sat down again.
“Ok, discuss,” I said.
Of course, I didn’t leave it there, but gave it a moment to sink in first.
There were a number of points I wanted to make and issues I wanted to unravel.
First and foremost, I wanted them to consider the idea of shock tactics (I was planning this seminar around the time I wrote my blogged article ‘Controversy, Shock Tactics and... Nothing to Say’ (http://www.newsflavor.com/Opinions/Controversy-Shock-Tactics-And-Nothing-to-Say.326317) and wanted to introduce these ideas to a different, younger and largely unsuspecting audience. The word ‘cunt’ appears three times on the first page of Trainspotting: I wanted to explore the idea that shock, by its very nature, has limitations. At what point does shock give way to tedium? Presumably at the point at which saturation is reached, at the point when novelty yields to the mundane.
There’s also the matter of cultural differences. Having lived in Scotland for a number of years, I can vouch for he fact that they’re a sweary bunch of cunts, to put it mildly. Much of the criticism over the use of profanity unsurprisingly came from South of the border, and from the ‘literary’ types who can handle Will Self throwing in the odd ‘cunt’ but find such a splattering of vulgarity, and such overtly working-class diction offensive. So one has to ask, is it the words that are offensive, or the context in which they are written?
The broad consensus seemed to be that while in some instances, the context did matter, where ‘cunt’ is concerned, it’s very definitely the word itself that’s a issue. One of my female students said that she simply didn’t feel comfortable using... “that word,” a finger pointing toward the giant expletive I had writ large. I asked precisely why, what her issue was. “Well, I’ll say it if you like,” she replied. Of course, this wasn’t necessary and the last thing I wanted to do was make anyone feel uncomfortable – or more uncomfortable than they already were. But the aversion to cunt doesn’t appear to be a purely female issue: many men are wary of it too. I was curious to know why.
Of course, my main drive was to break down the way in which ‘cunt’ is imbued with such unparalleled power. Seemingly, Self can get away with the occasional ‘cunt,’ but it’s still going to upset some people, albeit less so than Welsh’s swearfest. And Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, despite the enormous respect they command from the middle class and the establishment, aren’t famed by the majority for their work as Derek and Clive, with sketches like ‘This Bloke Came Up to Me’ being considered simply too much by most. But why? Why, I asked, is cunt more offensive than fanny or twat or minge or flange or muff or gash or beaver or quim? The answers I received, amid a deluge of shrugs, essentially all suggested that cunt is offensive because society says so. And while, in my lifetime, the potency of fuck has been conspicuously eroded through use in Hollywood movies, cunt remains the last bastion of hardcore swearing.
But meanings are ascribed. A chair is only a chair because it has been named such. But call it what you will, it’s still a thing with legs that people sit on. And a cunt is a vagina in the same way a fanny is, and it’s still a derogatory term in the same way fanny is. The idea that it sounds somehow coarser and therefore carries more weight in the offence stakes is absurd. Fuck is much more abrasive in its phonetic construction. As is cock. And no-one gets offended when discussing chickens. At least, not on the same grounds, although the issue of battery farming and consumption of poultry can lead to some fairly ugly exchanges. But I digress. What we can infer from this is that there’s a long-standing social hang-up about the word ‘cunt,’ which exists because no-one really questions such things.
Yet it was not always thus. While ‘profane’ language is often referred to as ‘Anglo-Saxon’ which is most unfair on the speakers of Old English, it is also true that a number of historical cities including York, Whitby and Durham have streets with names such as ‘Grape Lane’ which were previously ‘Grope,’ ‘Grapcunt’ and even ‘Grope Cunt’ Lane. Your red-light districts don’t come much more plainly advertised than that, now. Clearly, people were less uptight about cunt back then. So why the shift? And just why is cunt considered so offensive now?
More often than not, when presented with something that offends an individual’s sensibilities, people will change the channel, turn off the television, close the book, leave the room, stop the CD. But what are the effects of forced and repeated exposure? There is inevitably a point at which desensitisation begins. Viddy well, my droogs. Eat Stilton every day for a month: you may come to like it. Listen to the whole of ‘This Bloke Came Up to Me’ and it may cease to shock after a couple of minutes. Or maybe not. And that’s assuming your average listener will make it that far. Ultimately, exposure often leads to acceptance, repetition erodes shock. The students in my seminar group broadly agreed that after a chapter or so, they ceased to even notice the prevalence of the word ‘cunt’ in Trainpsotting. But I think this theory is only true to a point. When something is so completely socially ingrained, it’s hard to break the conditioning. And the more ingrained it is, he harder to deprogramme a subject it becomes.
So to return to Burroughs, as I so often do, it seems that linguistic programming – fundamentally a form of brainwashing, an all-encompassing combination of nature and nurture – remains wholly embedded, at least for the time being. I can’t help but wonder, though, if with the increasing prevalence of txt spk, our language is (d)evolving at a rate which may just break those hard-etched habits we’ve spent hundreds and thousands of years embedding within our genetic makeup. And while I’m no fan of this reduced bastardization of our language, I do like the idea of sniping in and taking advantage of the opportunity to re-educate. Hell, the opportunity’s been a long time coming. So at last, there’s a chance that this final vocabularic taboo could be smashed in the near future, or even the here and now. Yes, the cunt might have its day. But I sense there’s more that can be done in terms of advancing writing and language here. Yes, I’m talking about a future when linear narrative really isn’t considered the only way, a future in which the old conventions of ‘the novel’ and all those tired old genre distinctions finally become obsolete. As a (part-time) educator, and as a writer, I’m up for it... are any of you cunts with me?