Out, Out!—Violence, Obscenity, and the Recovery of Language

Recently I took my family to Mass at St. Louis Cathedral in New Orleans. As with many New Orleanians, we only rarely visit the French Quarter—not from any disgust or disdain so much as from reluctance to undergo the strenuous task of ushering four young children along those lovely, crumbling, crowded little avenues where the music of the street performers mingles with the clink of cups, where the tender agony of the calliope rising from the paddle wheelers on the river plays against the silver clangor of the cathedral bells—the only clean thing in the Quarter, as Blanche DuBois says at the end of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire. Desire and decay are ever at odds, ever intertwined in the Vieux Carré.

Those who visit the cathedral motivated by the desire for Heaven need only look about to be reminded of the passing character of all things beneath the moon. Here is a bit of crumbling plaster, there an iron support rod, here a marble angel with a crack in the neck courtesy of some inebriated visitor. Any building erected here will show in short order the effects of water and wind, of heat and subsiding earth. And a building that has stood here for 170 years will show better than most what water and wind and heat and sin and foolishness can do in the service of decay.

We met with decay of a different sort outside the cathedral. As we came across Decatur Street to the foot of the French Market, a woman seated beneath a holly tree looked up, appraised me, and proceeded to apply to me, with volume sufficient to carry her judgments well down Dutch Alley, a number of epithets, beginning with “Mormon” and going downhill from there. I’ll not detail the encounter, which was entirely one-sided and almost entirely unprintable.

It’s the sort of thing one might occasionally experience, no doubt, in most urban centers, where people are hot and close together and subject to hosts of social and mental ills. But it stood out to me as a particularly pointed example of a kind of violence which is smoldering everywhere just beneath the surface of contemporary society. We might call it the violence of the obscene—that sort of behavior or speech which in the theaters of the Greeks and the Elizabethans as well as on the dramatic stages of well-formed societies is played, when it is played at all, off stage. Out, out, go Oedipus’ eyes, but not before our own.

While examples of the ways obscenity has crept into daylight could be advanced from many spheres of life, I am here especially concerned with language. Not only in the Quarter do I hear the curses ring. Obscenity is everywhere: in the grocery, on the playground, and in the schools; in graffiti and television shows; on bumper stickers and yard signs; in the music blaring from a passing car or the conversation of a wandering stranger. At the risk of sounding old lady schoolteacherish, to borrow another expression from Dame Blanche, I am continually surprised to hear people I’ve just met casually cursing as though we were old war buddies.

My quarrel here is not with the old war buddies of the world but rather with a society which, verbally as well as physically, has become inured to violence. And while the news reels of assassination attempts and bombings are by many measures more serious than a shouted curse on a sunny morning, I propose that the two are intimately linked.

Frequently, those who deploy obscene language in public do so as if at a loss for the words they really need. A woman grows frustrated at Costco and fires off a salvo of curses. A pair of friends amble along applying pungently flavorless participles to their chatter. As literacy rates fall among us, we find ourselves more and more engaged in an obscene game of mad libs, with curses morphing into all possible parts of speech according to the (in)capacity of the speaker.

While there are many casualties of such a situation—perhaps most especially children, who should not be rewarded for learning to read by having to wonder what it means to have intercourse with ICE, and their parents, who shouldn’t have to explain to their children why the driver of the car in front of them evidently wants to fornicate with people’s feelings—it is no doubt those who are reduced in their language to the almost constant usage of the verbal equivalent of nothingness who suffer the worst. They do not indulge in the joy of pressing out the juice of language, a fruit surely related to that of the tree of life; and they do not harmonize their daily speech with the life of the Word, according to whom all of our words will one day be judged.

Indeed, if Christ is the Word, then our own usage of words is a way of participating in His life and must be treated as such. Our cathedrals demand renovation in the service of the one who makes all things new, and our language demands that renovation as well. If, as Catholics, we hope to leaven society, we must undertake that work of renovation. There are hopeful signs already, as for instance in the classical education movement, dedicated primarily to the restoration of the Trivium, or the three language arts, which governed the heart of Western education until the 19th century, or in the current revival in Catholic literature in the United States.

But we can participate in that renovation in smaller ways, too: by attending carefully to the sort of music we listen to, the stories and poems we read, the attention we pay to Scripture. We can work to inculcate anew a sense of honor and shame in the way we behave. And we can take proper care in saying what we mean to say with the best possible words to say it, that every word and work of ours might give glory to the Father.

The woman who shouted at me on Sunday surely did so from a place of deep hurt. I pray for her and hope that she and I and you might be merry some day in Heaven, as St. Thomas More so often hoped for those around him. And I pray, too, that we Catholics who hope earnestly for Heaven and for the final intermingling of all heavenly and earthly things will work for that consummation by our use of words, tuning them to the key of the Word Himself.