Thursday, March 24, 2005
Phil Wade did a really great thing when he invited novelist Lars Walker to co-blog with him at the fine literary blog Brandywine Books. Recently Walker published a dandy of a post -- "My dirty mouth problem" -- pondering the dilemma Christian writers face when they want to depict the world -- more specifically, the way "the world" often talks -- authentically.
It seems to me that when I write a work of fiction, I've entered into a tacit contract with the reader. The reader agrees to pretend that the things I'm writing actually happened (or will happen) in the way I describe them. I, in return, am expected to present a picture of the world that isn't too obviously unbelievable. If I present objects and events that don't exist in our world, I have to justify that in some minimally believable way. And I have to take particular care to present people more or less as they are.
This leads to many problems. People do lots of things that I don't care to describe in much detail. Generally it's possible to close the curtains or turn off the camera where I wish, so that I don't have to portray sex or violence in more than general terms. I don't apologize for that. You can't show everything, even if you want to. It's the artist's prerogative to prune.
But dialogue is a harder problem. Dialogue drives a story. If you're presenting a conversation, you can't keep cutting away from it or close your authorial ears. And (I'm sorry to say) we've entered a time in history when cursing and obscenity are becoming more and more acceptable in conversation. I don't think they're still quite as usual in most people's speech as Hollywood would like us to believe, but they're certainly more common than when I was a boy (around the time of Cotton Mather).
So how do I handle this, if I'm to present my modern characters in a believable manner?
In my first novel, my small town police captain says "sheesh" a lot. He uses it in a variety of ways. I thought it was endearing and cute. He's a gruff but devout guy, and he wouldn't cuss.
The editor of the publishing company who was most interested in the book was convinced I had done a Find/Replace All, that originally my police captain was saying "sh*t," and I did a quick fix before submitting it to a Christian publisher. He said it was "obvious."
I was a little offended by that. I told him that it was originally "sheesh," each and every time.
In my second novel, Black Dog Man, important characters include a prostitute, a drug runner, a murderer, a government assassin, and a gay CIA agent. Not all of them have clean vocabularies. I have gotten around the dilemma of authentic dialogue by just writing "So-and-so cursed," only occasionally hinting at what sort of profanity is uttered. (I know purists hate such things, but I don't find such circumlocutions all that silly.)
One big revelation in the story, crucial to character and plot, is revealed through one word -- an uttered profanity. I issued this revelation with a description in Spanish, saying that the character muttered "una cuatro-letre palabra."
Hopefully the fact that I'm not printing the offending word coupled with the fact that I'm not even describing it in English will incline prospective publishers to give it a pass.
Writer Dan Edelen responded to Walker's post:
Given your questions, I wonder how any literature came into being before the 1950s! Some of the greatest works of fiction seem to exist without profanity.
So I have to ask, Why can't we just write without profanity?
I'm a writer, too; I just don't write profanity. I think that if you truly asked people, no one would miss it at all if writers left it out. Honestly, what does it add? Nothing. And the first rule of editing a work is to trim everything that fails to add to the whole.
Just don't do it. Write timelessly. Profanity only mires a work in the slang of the day. Let your craft make up for whatever an editor/publisher might think about the lack of vulgarity in your works.
Edelen's point is valid, but I do take issue with some of the particulars.
I don't think Lars is (and I know I'm not) saying that we must write profanity. We're just trying to figure out how to render realistic modern-day scenarios without acknowledging that modern-day people use profanity from time to time.
I don't really take to the idea of "writing timelessly." For one, I'm not sure exactly what that means.
But the best novels, the most timeless ones, are almost invariably novels of their time. Novels written before the 1950s tend not to feature profanity because the average person used less then. But nearly all of the great novels I can think of off the top of my head, from any time, portray specific times and cultures. The works of Dickens are classics, but they aren't "written timelessly," as if they don't depict specific times.
And as for being mired in the slang of the day, would you say the same for Joyce, for Fitzgerald? Heck, for Shakespeare?
All of them and more mire their dialogue in the voice of the age depicted.
I think Christian artists, more than any other "type" of artist, owe it to their readership/audience to depict the world authentically. That doesn't mean we have to use profanity or describe/depict sex and what-have-you. But we shouldn't act as if those things don't exist.
The biggest complaint I and many people I know have about contemporary Christian art is that it acts like the real world doesn't exist. It is almost gnostic in its avoidance of the world's evil. Dialogue doesn't ring true; there are coincidences galore; actions are sanitized, Guideposts-ized; the invisible hand of Providence is replaced by the deus ex machina.
You can't portray grace without depicting sin (somehow). This isn't an argument for licentiousness or immodesty or vulgarity in the name of artistic freedom. But it is an argument for authenticity and a wrestling with the world in the name of artistic duty.
Just a thought: Take a look at how Raymond Chandler did it in his hard-boiled detective novels. You felt gritty all over after reading those things, but you couldn't find a word of profanity.