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Les Mots Et Les Choses: the Obscenity of Pierre Bayle

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Les Mots Et Les Choses: the Obscenity of Pierre Bayle Les mots et les choses: the obscenity of Pierre Bayle van der Lugt, Mara Date of deposit 12/02/2019 Document version Author’s accepted manuscript Access rights © Modern Humanities Research Association 2018. This work is made available online in accordance with the publisher’s policies. This is the author created, accepted version manuscript following peer review and may differ slightly from the final published version. Citation for van der Lugt, M. (2018). Les mots et les choses: the obscenity of published version Pierre Bayle. Modern Language Review, 113(4), 714-741 Link to published https://doi.org/10.5699/modelangrevi.113.4.0714 version Full metadata for this item is available in St Andrews Research Repository at: https://research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk/ LES MOTS ET LES CHOSES : THE OBSCENITY OF PIERRE BAYLE ‘Pourquoi se gêner dans un Ouvrage que l'on ne destine point aux mots, mais aux choses…?’ - Pierre Bayle, Éclaircissement sur les Obscénités. Why bother with words in a work devoted to things? asks Pierre Bayle, early modern philosopher and troublemaker extraordinaire. That is: why should the author of an historical-critical dictionary, which deals with things and acts and events, with the content of words rather than with words themselves, concern himself with such a trivial matter as the politeness of style?1 This question, of the relationship between words and things, and the responsibilities of authors using words to describe things, is at the centre of Bayle’s curious semi-provocative semi-apologetic essay or Éclaircissement sur les Obscénités. It is also part of an age-old argument attributed to the Cynics and sometimes the Stoics, which would become a locus communis for early modern discussions of obscenity. In one of his letters Ad familiares, Cicero responds to his friend Paetus, who had called the male member by its name, rather than resorting to euphemism. According to the Stoics, says Cicero, ‘[t]here is no such thing as obscene or indecent language. For if there is anything shocking in obscenity, it lies either in the matter or in the word; there is no third possibility.’ It can’t lie in the 1 Pierre Bayle, Éclaircissement sur les Obscénités (hereafter EC.IV), in Bayle, Dictionnaire Historique et Critique, ed. Pierre Desmaizeaux (4 vols. in folio, Amsterdam/Leiden/The Hague/Utrecht, P. Brunel et al., 1740), vol. 4, 647-64, at p. 651. All quotes in French, Italian and Spanish have been modernised. 1 matter, the Stoics argue, since in many cases two words mean the same thing, and only one of them is considered obscene. But neither can it lie in the word: For if that which is signified by a word is not indecent, the word which signifies it cannot be indecent either. You say ‘seat’, using a transferred word: why not use the proper one? If it’s indecent, you should not use the first even; if not, you should use the second. […] So there you have a Stoic lecture : ‘The Sage will call a Spade a Spade.’ […] For myself, I adhere (and shall so continue, since it is my habit) to the modesty of Plato.2 Elsewhere, in another commonly reprised passage, Cicero comments on the Cynic objection that ‘[r]obbery, fraud, and adultery, for example, are immoral in deed, but it is not indecent to name them’: why then should the mention of actions that are not immoral be ‘shameful’?3 In response, Cicero points out that human modesty follows nature in this: we avoid certain expressions just like we hide the parts and actions to which they correspond. Thus Cicero’s conclusion, in Emily 2 Cicero, Ad Familiares 9.22; Cicero’s Letters to His Friends (Penguin ed. 1978), transl. D.R. Shackleton Bailey, 2 vol., vol. 1, p. 325. 3 Cicero, De Officiis 1.35.128, trans. Walter Miller (London: Heinemann, 1913), p. 130-1; quoted in Emily Butterworth, ‘Defining Obscenity’, 34. See Emily Butterworth, ‘Defining Obscenity’, in Obscénités Renaissantes, 33-6, on the use of these passages from Cicero in various sixteenth century dictionaries, to define or illustrate obscoenitas, obscenum, obscoene. 2 Butterworth’s words, ‘while recognizing the logic of the Cynics’ position, sides with both nature and custom in regulating behaviour’.4 This tension between that which can and cannot be expressed, as well as the difficulty of finding a firm philosophical foundation for rejecting some words rather than others, is carried over into Christian thought, and while most Renaissance and early modern discussions of obscenity sided with Cicero and Quintilian against the Stoics, authors such as Montaigne came close to espousing the Stoic-Cynical position.5 Yet it was the seventeenth century, with its various public trials and scandals centred on authorial obscenity, that would return to such questions with new urgency.6 An influential attempt to provide a philosophical response to Cicero’s Stoics can be found in the Logique, ou l’Art de Penser, by the Jansenist duo Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole.7 Introducing 4 Butterworth, ‘Defining Obscenity’, p. 35; cf Cicero, De Officiis, 1.35.127-128. For another response to the Stoic-Cynic position, see Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, 8.3.38-39. Erasmus is influenced by both in his discussion of obscenity; see Hugh Roberts, ‘Erasmus’, in Obscénités Renaissantes, p. 102. 5 On Montaigne, see Emily Butterworth and Hugh Roberts, ‘‘L’Obscène’ in French Renaissance Texts’, in Obscénités Renaissantes, p. 90-2. On especially the sixteenth century, see the entire volume of Obscénités Renaissantes. 6 Especially during the controversy on Molière’s École des Femmes, and the trial against Théophile de Viau. On both, see Joan Dejean, The Reinvention of Obscenity: Sex, Lies, and Tabloids in Early Modern France. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). For an overview of recent literature, see Hugh Roberts, ‘Obscenity in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century France’, French Studies, Vol. 67 (2013), No. 4, 535‒42. 7 I use the first edition of 1662. While the Logique was revised several times up to the final edition of 1683, the chapter used here (part 1, ch. 12 in the 1662 edition; part 1, ch. 14 in the 1683 edition) 3 the concept of accessory ideas, they argue that definitions often describe only the principal idea associated with a word, not the various accessory ideas that are sometimes attached to it. For instance, to suggest that someone has lied is different from claiming they have said something contrary to what they believe; to say the former is to add an insult to the factual claim. Such accessory ideas can be joined to words by habit or usage, but also by individual language users, through such things as tone of voice and body language. This, they argue, is why the Stoics are wrong: the same thing can be expressed honestly by one sound and dishonestly by another, if one of these sounds joins another idea to it that covers it with shame. For instance, words like adulterer and incest and abominable sin are not indecent: though they do represent indecent actions, they cover them with a veil of horror, ‘de sorte que ces mots signifient plutôt le crime de ces actions, que les actions mêmes.’ But there are also words that express these actions without giving a sense of horror, ‘plutôt comme plaisantes que comme criminelles’, and which even join to them ‘une idée d’impudence et d’effronterie’. These words are shameful and indecent, ‘infâmes et déshonnêtes’.8 Similar to others in the long tradition of thinking about obscenity, the authors of the Logique are aware that words change meaning in time. Some words are originally decent, but become obscene with usage. For instance, Montaigne describes how spongia became ‘un mot obscène’ because the remains unrevised. See also the English translation of the 1683 edition, Logic or the Art of Thinking, trans. Jill Vance Buroker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1996). 8 Antoine Arnauld et Pierre Nicole, La Logique ou L’Art de Penser (Paris 1662 ; facsimile edition Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt : Friedrich Frommann Verlag 1965), vol. 1, p. 98 (Cambridge ed. : p. 69). 4 ancients used sponges to wipe ‘le cul’.9 Such words, having become obscene, then need to be replaced by new words or euphemisms, but sometimes these euphemisms themselves fall into discredit. Thus Cicero describes how the male organ could originally be designated by its proper name, mentula, until it had to be replaced by the euphemistic penis (lit. ‘tail’), which in turn became an obscene word.10 Similarly, Erasmus mentions that amare used to be ‘an acceptable euphemism for sexual intercourse’,11 but could no longer be used in his day. As Hugh Roberts comments: ‘Paradoxically, then, the very process of euphemism advocated by Cicero, Quintilian and Erasmus itself leads to obscenity through change of usage.’12 The Port-Royal logicians pick up on this question and use the concept of accessory ideas to explain why some words are deemed honnête in one time and honteux in another: through usage and habit, they lose certain accessory ideas and/or acquire others. For instance, some words used in the Bible or by the Fathers were attached to accessory ideas that shed a veil of pudeur on the object – but lacking this idea, the word has become shameful. This is why words like lupanar [brothel], meretrix [whore], and leno [pimp] could be used freely and honestly by the Fathers, but not by us, ‘parce que ces mots ne signifient pas en effet la même chose que ceux dont les Pères se sont servis’.13 While the principal idea may be the same, the accessory ideas have changed.
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