Re Sexual descriptions

[Paul Mackin]

Apologies for my parochialism about censorship and the lifting thereof.

Is there comfort in shared misery?

First time I remember the f-word showing itself in print  was in
Hemmingway's early fifties _Over the River and Into the Trees_.
Was only ONE of the ways Papa disgraced himself (it was said
at the time). (Didn't get to Ulysses until a few years later.)

Earlier ('47??) in _The Naked and the Dead_, Mailer had resorted to
"fug" to render that essential WW II epithet.

Spell checker wants to change it to "fugue". Spelling is a form
of censorship.

				P.
----------
> From: Craig Clark <CLARK at SHEPFS2.UND.AC.ZA>
> Kerneels Breytenbach, whom we missed on Friday night, wrote:
> 
> >  Paul Mackin wrote about the sexual descriptions in GR and the fact that
> > not many people remember the pre-Lady Chatterley days. GR was officially
> > unbanned in South Africa late in the eighties. When I tried to get hold
> > of a copy in the seventies, I was informed that it had been deemed
> > undesirable because of explicit sexual descriptions. Fortunately I knew
> > an air stewardess (as they were known in those days). Lady Chatterley,
> > along with most of Henry Miller's novels.
> 
> When I registered for my Master's Degree in 1985 I had to apply for 
> permission from the Department of Home Affairs for permission to 
> import a copy of _GR_ for study purposes. Inter alia, I had to sign a 
> document agreeing to keep the book under lock and key when I was not 
> using it, and undertaking only to quote it for bona fides academic 
> purposes. It goes without saying that I used to hold court in the 
> University Canteen, reading passages aloud... I finished the draft of 
> my dissertation in late 1986, spent a year revising it, and submitted 
> it a few weeks before _GR_ was unbanned in January 1988.
> 
> During my honours year, many works on the American fiction syllabus 
> were banned, including Richard Wright's _Native Son_ and Norman 
> Mailer's _The Armies of the Night_. Phillip Roth's _Portnoy's 
> Complaint_ had just been unbanned, but you could only purchase a 
> copy if you carried proof that you were over the age of 18. _Lady C_ 
> was unbanned much earlier - about 1981 - as were _Lolita_ and _A 
> Clockwork Orange_. The Kubrick movie of the latter was unbanned in 
> 1984 - for more details on the conditions attending its unbanning, 
> see "A Clockwork Naartjie", an essay I wrote on the subject of the 
> censorship of Kubrick's films in SA. It's to be found on the
<alt.movies.kubrick> 
> archive website, at http://www.netins.net/showcase/sahaja/essays.html. This
article 
> also explores the rather arcane world of the South African censor - 
> the mechanism involved in getting things banned.
> 
> Many of these bannings were attributed to "obscenity" or 
> "pornography", though the real motive was political. I've always 
> suspected that _GR_ was one of these.
> 
> Craig Clark
> 
> "Living inside the system is like driving across
>  the countryside in a bus driven by a maniac bent
>  on suicide."
>    - Thomas Pynchon, "Gravity's Rainbow"