INEXPRESSIBLES IN SOUTHWESTERN HUMOR

Milton Rickels

The humorists of the Old Southwest are sometimes credited with being the frankest of the ante-bellum writers in their situations and language. In 1930 Franklin Meine even called one of them Rabelaisian. However, during their time, 1830–1860, taboos against obscenities and profanities were strong and complicated. The best of these writers were close observers of American frontier and backwoods life; most were to some degree sophisticated craftsmen; and most relied heavily on the tradition of folk humor for some of their most striking effects. As students of the comic mode know, the use of obscenities and profanities is abundant enough to create within the culture of folk humor a large and ancient genre of obscene tales. Improper elements are still distressing enough to have delayed publication of Vance Randolph’s Pissing in the Snow for over 25 years—until its publication by the University of Illinois Press in 1976. As one reads Randolph’s anecdotes, he is struck with how many of their themes and meanings are to be found a little earlier in the work of the Southwestern humorists. But the language of this oral lore is markedly freer than are the vocabularies of Thomas Bangs Thorpe, Johnson Jones Hooper, Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, and George Washington Harris. A comparison of these oral anecdotes with the earlier written sketches illuminates the strategies that the older writers employed in order to give their readers some idea of the forms and meanings of the folk humor they wished to explore and in part to recreate.

One form of folk humor uses a special vocabulary—a set of words, abusive, mocking, and indecent—that is traditional and ancient. More than action or character, this traditional stock of words functions to create the most distinctive tone and meanings of folk humor. Mikhail Bakhtin’s method in his study of Rabelais can be applied to the examination of American folk humor. Bakhtin divides this traditional vocabulary into three categories: 1) abusive language, insulting words and expressions; 2) profanities and oaths; and 3) indecent expressions, that is, obscenities.’ All these categories, while not present in such great variety as in the French examples, are abundantly there in the speech of Randolph’s twentieth-century Anglo-Saxon Ozarkers.

In the culture of folk humor, there seem to have been specialists in this abusive language whose social function was to stimulate

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laughter in their little community by denunciation of some victim. Harden Taliaferro has left the fullest description of this artist in his Fisher’s River (North Carolina) Scenes and Characters (1859):

[Johnson Snow] had, moreover, a fund of sharp, provoking wit, running into satire when necessary, which Johnson maintained was "worth more than all yer college lingo, a plaguy sight." His waggish wit was a terror to the whole country. Woe to the man who happened to fall into some ludicrous mishap! He never heard the last of it from Johnson.

[In a crowd around stump speakers:] He now lets fly his provoking jibes in every direction, striking one, then another, producing all the time peals of laughter from all except himself. . . . The man that laughs heartiest Johnson turns upon him and he is "seisorified."²

But the Fisher’s River folk were restrained in their language perhaps, and certainly Taliaferro was. Indeed, all the Southwestern humorists employed vocabularies greatly modified from the folk tradition; all were inhibited by appearing in print and by their own tastes. Still, in spite of taboos within the standard culture, they managed to create a commendable variety and abundance of verbal improprieties and to achieve some of the esthetic effects possible with this vocabulary.

Oaths and profanities presented the simplest problem: for these the writers followed the long established editorial practice of omitting some letters from the objectionable word. The all-purpose American swear word is, of course, damn. In Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs (1845), Hooper filled the speech of his picaresque hero with damns and damned, which appeared as d—n, or d——d, or occasionally in comic mispronunciation, as damdibly. God may appear directly, but in an oath is given as G–d. Hell and devil appear both written in full or with omitted letters. Compared to Hooper and others, Longstreet created fewer examples of the speech of his folk characters. When he wrote, "Well, d—n the man!" he appended a footnote of apology: "I should certainly omit such expressions as this, could I do so with historic fidelity. . . ."³ Thorpe and Harris also depend on dialectal mispronunciations or omitted letters for their damns.

In addition to the standard profanities, the writers offer a variety of dialectal or euphemistic low colloquial forms. Dod and dad as deformations of God appear in such phrases as" ‘D rot it!" or "Yu dad dratted ole pot-head."⁴ Durn, darn, ding, and dang appear as low colloquial euphemisms for damn. Christ appears rarely, but once Harris’s Sut Lovingood curses a Jewish clothing dealer with

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"Whar’s my Breetches, yeu durned close clipt, Chist killin, hog hatin, bainch laiged son of a clothes hoss?" (Inge, p. 253). The number of these curses and profanities is very great in Hooper’s and Harris’s writings, and present enough elsewhere.

The writers’ first objective was to be true to the language of the lower classes, as Longstreet’s pained note indicates. As technique, the vocabulary signals the reader that the text arises from direct observation, is honest, unmediated by "artificial" literary forms.⁵ Further, giving them their cursing does not function simply to degrade these backwoodsmen. The profanities are conceived as a break with the established norms of verbal address. They consciously refuse to conform to respectability or civility. These curses are present in sufficient numbers to transfer the speech beyond the limits of conventional language and to create the effect that these backwoodsmen and frontiersmen are frank and free in expressing themselves. This is not, then, the vocabulary of a deprived culture but of a different culture.

The second category of this traditional rural Billingsgate in folk humor is the insult. Like curses, insults abound in Southwestern humor, particularly in the work of Hooper and Harris. People are insulted for their appearance, for their filthiness, for their sex habits, and for being stingy, learned, pretentious, pious, oppressive. Hooper’s first book opens with the teen-aged Simon Suggs feeling anger at his father. His thoughts run, "Rot his old pictur.. . I wish to God he’d bust wide open, the old deer face," and to Simon’s look the father responds openly with "Simon! Simon! You poor unlettered fool. Don’t you know that all card players, and chicken fighters, and horse racers go to hell? You crack-brained creetur you," and as his parental concern warms, "Shet your mouth, you imperdent, slack-jawed dog. Your daddy’s a-tryin’ to give you some good advice. . . (p. 17).

Harris has Sal Simmons and Mam Lovingood fight because Pap Lovingood is visiting Sal at night. To Mam, Sal says, "You dirty, drabbil-tail, slop eatin’, ole louse pasture" (Inge, p. 288). Harris frequently uses slop for excretory matter. In reply Mam calls Sal a "merlatter lookin’ strumpit" (Inge, p. 289). In a Nashville newspaper sketch, 1866, Harris wanted his character Sut to call Yankee women bitches. He cuts off the word and uses rhyme to put it in his reader’s mind. Imagining the blessings that would follow the destruction of all Yankees, Sut says we would then have "No wooden clocks . . . nur higher law. No Millerism, mormonism, nor free love. No abolishunism, spirit rappins, nor crowin hens. No

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Bloomer bit—britches I meant to say" (Inge, p. 274).

The last story in Sut Lovingood’s Yarns includes one of Harris’s most repellent deforming devices—one which enables him to include a large number of traditional curses, insults, and obscenities. The subject of the sketch is old Pap Lovingood’s plan to teach his dog to bite and hang on. His method is to have himself sewn naked into the raw hide of a newly killed yearling bull. Then, cavorting like an animal, he has his son Sut set the dog on him, expecting the pup to bite and cling to the bull’s tail. Unexpectedly the dog goes in under the bull’s muzzle and catches Pap’s nose and upper lip. As man and dog whirl in rage and pain, Mam sees an opportunity to revenge herself on her beastly husband. She seizes a beanpole to strike Pap on the back each time he passes her. Crying in pain, Pap tries to explain the situation, but because of the dog’s hold he cannot pronounce his consonants. Main and Sut pretend not to understand. Pap’s first agonized plea is" ‘Oke ’e ’up ’od ’am yure ’oles." [Choke the pup God damn your souls.] Later, after several blows from his wife that knock the fundamental wind out of him, he bellows, "Quit, yu ’am ’itch, an’ let ’e ’ole lie." [Quit, you damn bitch, and let the pole lie.]

Their daughter rescues Pap by cutting man and dog apart with an ax. Her cry of pious rage against the dog is "Yu durn’d yaller son ove a b——h, I’ll break yer holt" (pp. 293, 296, 297). Although her term is simplest accuracy, Harris is constrained to omit the central letters.⁶

These insults and curses create a significant tone for Harris’s final story. First, to the rather sophisticated nineteenth-century male audience, the language established how far outside the known social world these Lovingoods existed.⁷ In this faraway world, these insults express the otherwise inexpressible hatred between husband and wife, father and son. But the hatred is ambiguous. Pap does not in fact kill his wife or offspring, nor they him. The curses and insults keep alive and vivid in them their mutual attachments as well as their hatreds; they are expanded in this language; it is the atmosphere in which they live, not in which they pine and die. Harris’s selection of this Vocabulary is a technique which enables him to create the impression that his characters are true to deep human nature. They arise in his pages enlarged, intense, wild, and free.

The third category of inexpressibles is obscenities. The taboo against obscenities in nineteenth-century American literary culture was stronger even than that against insults and curses. But obscenities are an important element of oral folk humor, and the

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Southwestern humorists felt a need to introduce into their writing sexual, bodily, and excretory images. Here, too, their strategies were circumlocutions, deformations, symbols, and poetic modifications. Among the more conventional devices was the use of poetic imagery, drawn from daily life or nature. For example, the female bosom has for millennia been the object of erotic attention, and the folk vocabulary is rich in images that range from the degrading to the poetic. Harris’s efforts are manifold. Describing Sicily Burns, he writes, "Sich a buzzim! Jis’ think ove two snow balls wif a strawberry stuck but-ainded into bof on em" (p. 75). Here he manages first an impropriety, second a satire on the cliché of the snow white breast, and third a complicated erotic suggestion. Elsewhere he modifies a final syllable to smuggle in a folk word: Massachusetts is misspelled or mispronounced as Massachutits. He employs once an infixed pun: the nineteenth-century false breasts he calls palpititytators (Inge, p. 280).

The human buttocks are constantly referred to in folk humor; Hooper and Harris often call attention to the rump. There are elaborate and fantastic kickings in this literature. Other devices to call attention to this part of the human anatomy include frequent use of the word jackass or the form jassack. Harris often calls an asylum an ass-lum, once with the syllables hyphenated, lest the reader miss the point (Inge, p. 250).

The words for the male and female sexual organs never appear, and reference to them is always in vague symbolism or indirection. Harris’s story "Sut Lovingood Reports What Bob Dawson Said, After Marrying a Substitute" (Chattanooga Daily American Union, 1868) is the retelling of a traditional (and still current) obscene anecdote about a man who discovers on his wedding night that all his bride’s physical charms are false cosmetic devices. As he lies in bed watching in amazement her undressing, he recapitulates: "False calves, false breasts, false teeth, false eye, false hair, what next? The most horrible idear that ever burnt an blazed in the brain of man, was now fast resolving itself into its dreadful shape in mine" (Inge, p. 280). When she says significantly that she is almost through, the bridegroom flees in horror—thus the unspeakable item in the series is left unexpressed but implied.⁸

The term inexpressibles appears in T. B. Thorpe’s "The Big Bear of Arkansas" (1841). This tale moves in the direction of myth in its creation of the image of the American wilderness and of the frontiersman. The story, like several of the others discussed above, is a careful literary creation which achieves some of its esthetic

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effects through the inclusion of forbidden elements of folk humor. Thorpe’s comically heroic frontiersman, the greatest hunter in Arkansas, almost fails to kill Arkansas’ greatest bear but indomitably prepares for one final hunt. As he later tells his audience on a Mississippi steamboat, "Well, stranger, on the morning previous to the great day of my hunting expedition, I went into the woods near my house, taking my gun and Bowie-knife [his dog] along, just from habit, and there sitting down also from habit, what should I see, getting over my fence, but the bar. . . . I raised myself, took deliberate aim, and fired. Instantly the varmint wheeled. . . . I started after, but was tripped up by my inexpressibles, which either from habit, or the excitement of the moment, were about my heels and before I had really gathered myself up, I heard the old varmint groaning in the thicket near by. . . ."⁹ When he goes to investigate, the frontiersman is astonished to discover that his shot has killed the animal.

This elaborate and veiled description, with its repetition of the phrase from habit, is to give us to understand that the great bear of the wilderness came upon the frontiersman at his morning defecations. Thus, in the vernacular phrase, he is caught with his pants down; but the proprieties of the time forbade Thorpe even the word pants or trousers; consequently we have inexpressibles. The critical question is why does Thorpe so elaborately create for us the image of the American frontiersman rising from his defecations, his pants about his ankles, to achieve his culminating heroism? Jim Doggett tells this about himself; he is, therefore, a modest, self-deprecating, New-World hero. The incongruity provokes laughter and ironically modifies heroism, but it also reminds us, as the obscenities of folk humor never tire of reminding us, that we rise to our actions out of our defecations, to which we shall return tomorrow out of utter necessity as well as habit. Although classic esthetics and traditional humanistic value systems offer few models for interpretation, the little scene is conceptually rich: we rise to our achievements out of our biological necessities; we are often entangled by inexpressibles; and certainly all squattings down create a soil out of which nature abundantly grows.

The imagery of defecation, like the imagery of sexuality, is not intended here to be merely shocking, cynical, or empty. Such images have been an element of folk humor for over 2,000 years. The presence of these words or images in Greek satyr plays, in comedies by Aristophanes, in French fabliaux, in Chaucer, Aretino, Rabelais, Shakespeare, Mark Twain, and elsewhere testifies to their significance.

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Most of the Southwestern humorists taxed their ingenuities to include these forms when feeling against such imagery was strong. Clearly they signal not a private neurosis but employment of a universal stylistic element in folk humor. These images of bodily life imply fertility, freedom, growth, change, abundance. They are esthetic techniques to express joy in being alive.¹⁰ Emphasis on eating, drinking, defecation, urination, and sexual activity provides a counter pressure toward pleasure and joy, toward the rehabilitation of the body, toward keeping alive the irrational dream of freedom against the pressures of reason and civilization.

Mikhail Bakhtin’s judgment of Rabelais’ torrential Billingsgate illuminates the function of this vocabulary in the work of Thorpe, Hooper, and Harris:

Abuses, curses, profanities, and improprieties are the unofficial elements of speech. They were and still are conceived as a breach of the established norms of verbal address; they refuse to conform to convention, to etiquette, civility, respectability. These elements of freedom, if present in sufficient numbers and with a precise intention, exercise a strong influence on the entire contents of speech, transferring it to another sphere beyond the limits of conventional language.¹¹

Improper words signal that the author speaks freely, that he calls things by their real names, that he offers an unofficial view of the reality of the world. In the work of Thorpe, Hooper, and Harris, this traditional vocabulary had to be presented indirectly, but it enabled them to create their unique vision of backwoods America, to celebrate its energy and vitality, and to express their ambiguous hopes for and doubts about a new world beginning on the American frontier. Thus, in their works, these abuses, curses, profanities, and improprieties are by no means gratuitous, or simply historical realism. Instead, they are a cultivated stylistic form, achieving a significant set of esthetic functions.

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHWESTERN LOUISIANA

 NOTES

   ¹Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T.Press, 1968), pp. 16-17. See also Richard M. Dorson, "The Identification of Folklore in American Literature," JAF, 70 (1957), 1-8, and Arlin Turner, "Seeds of Literary Revolt in the Humor of the Old Southwest," Louisiana Historical Quarterly. 39 (1957), 143-51.
   ²Reprinted in Arno Press collection, International Folklore, under editorship of Richard M. Dorson, New York, 1977. pp. 30-32.
   ³Augustus Baldwin Longstreet. Georgia Scenes (New York: Sagamore Press, 1957), p. 33. First published 1835.
   ⁴Johnson Jones Hooper,Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs (Chapel Hill: University of North

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Carolina Press, 1969), p. 16. Subsequent references included in the text are to this edition. The final quotation in the sentence is from George Washington Harris, Sut Lovingood’s Yarns (New York: Fitzgerald Publishing Co., 1867), p. 35. Subsequent page references in the text will be to this ed., or to George Washington Harris, Sut Lovingood’s Yarns, ed. by M. Thomas Inge (New Haven: College and University Press, 1966) which includes the hitherto uncollected newspaper sketches. Citations to this text will include the editor’s name.
   ⁵For some meanings of uninstitutionalized genres of literature, see Lionel Grossman, ‘The tnnocent Art of Confession and Reverie," Doedalus, 107 (Summer, 1978), esp. 59, 61.
   ⁶But Longstreet can allow his character Fat John Fuiger to say of gold coins, ‘Oh you little shining sons a’ bitches!" (p. 104). Perhaps reference to the inanimate authorizes the freedom.
   ⁷For the nineteenth-century audience of these sketches, and a broad examination of authors and editors, see Norris ‘.V. Yates, William T. Porter and the Spirit of the Times (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1957), esp. chaps. 1-3.
   ⁸Versions of the theme of the false vagina are reported in G. Legman, Rationale of the Dirts’ Joke, First series (New York: Grove Press, 1968), p. 376. In the decade of the 1970s my students collected two versions of this joke in southwest Louisiana.
   ⁹Quoted from the definitive anthology by Walter Blair, Native American Humor (New York: American Book Company, 1937), p. 347. For a full study see J. A. Leo Lemay, ‘The Text, Tradition, and Themes of ‘The Big Bear of Arkansas,’ " American Literature, 47 (November 1975), 321-42. For William Faulkner’s response to Thorpe’s story, see Waiter Blair and Hamlin Hill, America’s Humor (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), pp. 200-201.
   ¹⁰For some meanings of excremental imagery in the European culture of folk humor, see Bakhtin, pp. 175-6, 30-32, 29, and 318-22. See also Theodore H. Gaster, "Editor’s Foreword" to Francis MacDonald Comford, The Origin of Attic comedy (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, 1961), pp. xviii-xx for the continuity of some of these themes.
   ¹¹Bakhtin, pp. 187-8. Maledicta, The International Journal of Verbal Aggression, edited by Reinhold Aman, began publication summer, 1977, with descriptive and analytic essays from a great variety of languages.

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