Vulgarity, Excess, and Writing

The other day, science fiction author John C. Wright advised Rob Sawyer to listen to his mother, at least when it came to writing about the unpleasant things in life, including unpleasant language. Sawyer was pointing out that his writing had been artificially restrained by this thought of his sainted mother perusing his potentially crude offerings and disapproving. The original advice, I think, was sound: writing to the disapproval, or even the approval, of any one person or particular group of people can leave you pretty limited. In that event, you’re sort of writing with one eye over your shoulder and the internal editor left unfettered, which can be crippling, especially for the novice.

On the other hand, Wright’s counter-advice is not to be ignored either. There is a level of vulgarity that is excessive or, to use the most appropriate word, gratuitous. There’s little constructive or transgressive about truly gratuitous sex, violence, and vulgarity, and some of the author’s skill comes in walking that line, knowing (or guessing) what’s enough for realism, or at least verisimilitude, and what’s excessive and (dare I say it) masturbatory. The writer can certainly not go wrong by having someone peruse the work afterwards and help take the edges off, but there’s a world between that and writing with someone’s approval in mind.

That’s one of the many reasons Elizabeth Moon says that writers need editors. (Okay, so she doesn’t say that, in so many words, but it’s part of what she’s saying.)

In his post, Wright goes further, though, to take on the question of curse words themselves and their appropriateness, or lack thereof. Personally, I’m not convinced by Wright’s arguments, especially since he makes such a dramatic and perhaps overstated case for his personal preferences, claiming a moral high ground in terms of having standards and not uttering words unfit for the ears of women and children. Not that I’d suggest a person should abandon a standard of behavior because it is becoming dated, but language is one of those things that evolves, sometimes dramatically so, and clinging to a particular mode of speech because can make you look like all those Russian aristocrats in the early 19th century who were caught looking dumb when Napoleon invaded because all they could speak was French.

That comes to mind because I’m currently reading Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia by Orlando Figes, and the isolation of the ruling elites is one of the themes of the work. Now, that is certainly an example of something taken to extremes, but at its peak much of the aristocracy was literally incapable of communicating with the lower classes because society regarded Russian as vulgar, barbaric, and uncouth. And I think that’s a risk a writer runs when he or she attempts to maintain a standard that is significantly removed from the way most people speak. I doubt Wright is in danger of such, but he seems to think that writing in general would be more timeless were it to eschew vulgarity.

Possibly true, possibly not. Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, and George Carlin are considered heroes of comedy and may well be remembered well past their time, in part because of the transgressive nature of their performances. And I don’t think there’s any question that there is positive value in making society face up to its standards, which are often double standards. That is, one standard for public life, and one for private. Russia found great cultural benefit in reconciling these double standards as, post-1812, they opened up to the “Russian character” and, in large part, rejected the false appropriation of Western European standards and styles. Out of that rejection came the greats of Russian literature and poetry–Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy–and it’s impossible to say that Russia or Russian lit is worse off for it.