IS NOTHING SACRED? CHILDREN'S novelist Jacqueline Wilson had her latest bestseller My Sister Jodie removed from Asda shelves after a complaint about the use of a swear word in the text. Random House is to reprint the book with a single letter changed, making the offending word read "twit" instead.
It seems contemporary literature is awash with vulgarisms, from the salty lexicon of James Kelman, Irvine Welsh et al to the more noble art of poetry. Whenever Nobel laureate Harold Pinter writes a poem these days he uses a profanity. In fact, every
other word is a profanity.
Perhaps we should not be so censorious. After all, arguably the best-known line of 20th-century verse is Philip Larkin's "They f*** you up your mum and dad".
All the greats of literature have commonly used profanities. In 1773, Goethe's hero Götz von Berlichingen delivers the finest obscenity on the German stage when he is asked to surrender: "Send your captain my regards and tell him he can lick my arse."
This is the first recorded instance of the phrase which has since passed into common usage. In fact, the insult sounds much better in Goethe's original tongue: "Er kann mich im Arsche lecken," though it was still rendered in asterisks until the 20th century.
Shakespeare excelled himself when it came to crudity. Of Cleopatra he wrote, "She made great Caesar lay his sword to bed / He ploughed her and she cropped." Now that's just indecent.
The French were so appalled by the Bard's debased language that it took them 300 years to come near to an accurate translation of his plays. Voltaire condemned him for his "witless vulgarity" though conceded there were "a few pearls in an enormous dung heap". One man's pearl is another man's poison. The Bard is surely at his best when he is at his most coarse ("You egg, you fry of treachery"; "You whoreson, cullionly barbermonger"; "Thou art a boil, a plague sore, an embossed carbuncle in my corrupted blood").
In François Rabelais, the French bequeathed to the world one of the most famously bawdy writers and his influence on world literature has been immense. Only last year Milan Kundera hailed him as an equal of Flaubert.
In its original Latin, "vulgus" meant the crowd. The vulgar tongue is the vernacular spoken by the ordinary people. Swearing is wot people do, innit? And literature would be a poorer place if we deprived Harold Pinter of four-letter words. Nevertheless, it seems that even he has exhausted the F-word. Perhaps Jacqueline has just taken his place.
The full article contains 438 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
