Bilingual Obscenities: James Joyce, Ulysses, and the Linguistics of Taboo Words

Abstract

In letter Nora Barnacle, one of the infamous dirty James sent her from Dublin in the winter of 1909, wrote: you know, dearest, I never use obscene phrases in speaking. You have never heard me, have you, utter an unfit word before others. When men tell in my presence here filthy or lecherous stories I hardly smile (SL 182). (1) This from the same man who wrote Ulysses, the book that was banned on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean for its professed obscenity. Yet where his work is concerned, at the time of this letter Nora he was right: there had been little obscenity in his writings far. In fact, there is little obscenity in any of writings until Ulysses, apart from the private, sexually explicit letters he wrote Nora. Printers and publishers had objected the word bloody in Dubliners, where, after endless negotiations with the publisher, appears four times, and words like fart and ballocks in A Portrait of the Artist as Young Man, and they had refused set in print large section of Portrait's chapter three, in which Stephen thinks about his wanderings around Dublin's red light district (Potter 28). Yet these instances are tame compared some of the language in Ulysses, especially in the Circe and Penelope episodes. language of was sexually explicit and blasphemous that was not just considered obscene by law, but by many of literary peers as well. (2) book raised blush upon the cheeks of Virginia Woolf (231), who complained Lytton Strachey: First there's dog that p's--then there's man that forths, and one can be monotonous even on that subject (234)--too much of prude write the words pee and fart; Katherine Mansfield found so repellent that it was difficult read it, as she wrote Sydney Schiff: shocks me come upon words, expressions and on that I'd shrink from in life (432); and Arnold Bennett claimed that Ulysses is not pornographic, but is more indecent, obscene, scatological and licentious than the majority of professedly pornographic books (qtd. in Potter 96). Even D. H. Lawrence, himself no stranger allegations of obscenity and recurrent user, in his works, of bad words such as fuck, cunt, and balls (all of which Lady Chatterley 's Lover uses more frequently than Ulysses, according British prosecuting counsel Mervyn Griffiths-Jones [qtd. in Conley, Joyce's Bad Words]), wrote in horror his wife: The last part of [Penelope] is the dirtiest, most indecent, obscene thing ever written. Yes is, Frieda. It is filthy.... This muck is more disgusting than Casanova (qtd. in Meyers 362). This repellent, licentious muck was written by man whose young alter ego, Stephen Dedalus, had been shocked to read the word Foetus cut several times in school desk in Portrait of the Artist, where the obscene word startled his blood (89) and disturbs him profoundly. If the earlier and later of works are indeed a meeting of extremes... between the early romantic phase in which Stephen Dedalus vowed forge the 'uncreated conscience' of his race, and the monumental profanities of the later Joyce (Parrinder 13), then what gave rise this dramatic shift in style? At least in part, cause may be found in increased involvement with Italian during the eleven years, from 1904 1915, he spent in Pola, Rome, and Trieste. During this period of his life, gained an almost native competence in Italian. As I will suggest in this essay, his fluency in Italian had important consequences for his writing, especially with regard his use of obscene language. Psycholinguistic studies of language emotionality suggest that late bilinguals (people who, like Joyce, become bilingual as adults) process emotional words differently in their respective languages. Linguists have found that affective processing is deeper in the native language than in languages that have been learned as adults. …