Folder 9: Personal Bibliography. Texts of Various Talks, Papers, Etc., Not Planned for Publication at Present, 1967

"Obscenity and the Nature of Narrative." This is a comment on an article written by Mr. Human in the publication, College English. Father Ong decided not to send this piece to College English.

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Main Author: Ong, Walter J.
Format: Online
Language:eng
Created: Saint Louis University Libraries Digitization Center 1967
Online Access:http://cdm17321.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/ong/id/1347
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author Ong, Walter J.
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Folder 9: Personal Bibliography. Texts of Various Talks, Papers, Etc., Not Planned for Publication at Present, 1967
author_facet Ong, Walter J.
author_sort Ong, Walter J.
title Folder 9: Personal Bibliography. Texts of Various Talks, Papers, Etc., Not Planned for Publication at Present, 1967
title_short Folder 9: Personal Bibliography. Texts of Various Talks, Papers, Etc., Not Planned for Publication at Present, 1967
title_full Folder 9: Personal Bibliography. Texts of Various Talks, Papers, Etc., Not Planned for Publication at Present, 1967
title_fullStr Folder 9: Personal Bibliography. Texts of Various Talks, Papers, Etc., Not Planned for Publication at Present, 1967
title_full_unstemmed Folder 9: Personal Bibliography. Texts of Various Talks, Papers, Etc., Not Planned for Publication at Present, 1967
title_sort folder 9: personal bibliography. texts of various talks, papers, etc., not planned for publication at present, 1967
description "Obscenity and the Nature of Narrative." This is a comment on an article written by Mr. Human in the publication, College English. Father Ong decided not to send this piece to College English.
publisher Saint Louis University Libraries Digitization Center
publishDate 1967
url http://cdm17321.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/ong/id/1347
_version_ 1798396422911950848
spelling sluoai_ong-1347 Folder 9: Personal Bibliography. Texts of Various Talks, Papers, Etc., Not Planned for Publication at Present, 1967 Ong, Walter J. Ong, Walter J.; Words, Obscene, in literature; Narration (Rhetoric); Language and culture Lectures; Presentations (communicative events); Abstracts (summaries) "Obscenity and the Nature of Narrative." This is a comment on an article written by Mr. Human in the publication, College English. Father Ong decided not to send this piece to College English. 1967 2011 text/PDF 64 1 1 5 9_Item 0001.pdf Series 1: Scholarship, 1926-2001 Items in this folder are from Sub-sub-Series 5: Texts of Various Talks, Papers, Etc., Not Planned for Publication at Present. This sub-sub-series contains texts of various talks, papers, etc., not planned for publication at present. In addition to these, in Father Ong's "General Files" series there are copies of dozens of addresses and/or papers that have never been published, plus notes for still other unpublished addresses, lectures, etc. Many of these were eventually published in one form or another -- many, however, were not. 64 1 1 5 9 Permission to copy or publish must be obtained from the Saint Louis University, Pius XII Memorial Library, Special Collections Department Saint Louis University Libraries Digitization Center text/image eng Saint Louis University Libraries Special Collections OBSCENITY AND THE NATURE OF NARRA'rIVE A Comment on Mr. Hyman's Recent Article By Walter J. Ong, S.J. Sa.int- Lou i~ Unive('sit';l Would that the springs of Helicon were llowing so clear as Lawrence W. Hyman would have them in "Obscene Words and the Function of Literature" in the March, 1967, issue of College English. What he says is true so far as it goes, and he does focus the question pointedly, "Why must intelligent and sensitive young men feel impelled to use such ugly words and describe such ugly feelings?" But one feels that although he has well scoured out some of the channels through which the creative imagination flows, there are other channels which are murky still. Mr. Hyman suggests that in passages incurring the charge of obscenity the integrity of art may be at stake. This is certainly what is often at stake when one is dealing with thoroughly competent and sophisticated produc-tions. But there is another very real consideration even in such cases and much more so in a college literary magazine. As Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg have suggested in The Nature of Narrative (pp. 191 ff.) it is quite likely that all novels or novelistic forms are autObiographical to a recog-nizable degree, even when they are not at all autobiographical in form. The novelist's world, by contrast, say, with that of the Iliad or the Aeneid or eve~ The Faerie Queene or~King Lear,is an individual's own life_world transformed by art, but recognizable. This curious fact about the novel is common knowledge, advertised by the novelist's conventional disclaimer of any resem-blance between his fictional characters and real characters. The disclaimer of involvement in real life testifies to the tendency to be involved. -2- Moreover it is a commonplace that the earlier a novel or novelistic writing occurs in an author's development, the more grossly autobiographical the writing is likely to be. The attenuation of autobiographical commit-ment as Joyce matures from Stephen Hero to Ulysses is classic evidence of this state of affairs. And Joyce's case is not unique. Anyone fruniliar with undergraduate writers knows the pattern. We know also how the world of the novel invades other genres today, It is a commonplace that most present-day works of fiction and indeed a today great deal of theater and poetry~ is novelistic in nature. Eugene O'Neill's A Long Day's Journey into Night and Arthur Miller's After the Fall are' typical instances of the novelized drama by contrast with Oedipus Rex or Othello. Sophocles' characters may trail through our individual psycho-logical histories, but they do so in heavy dramatic disguise. The world of the classic drama is not autobiographical. O'Neill's treatment of the same Greek themes clearly is. Our culture is such that ,more than ever before, I the young creative writer can hardly escape autobiographizing to a noteworthy degree. writing O~hM What",bothers many readers about ~ obscenit, •• in undergraduate """,,-...ti "The<'" tluMi,~) i~~that they sense, however vaguely, its autobiographical cast. Sensing the absence of full artistic competence or command of the medium, they feel, often quite correctly, that preoccupation wi~h sexual details is frequently,in fact if not in avowed intent, exhibitionism, somehow involving the writer's own life -- actual or fantastic -- and his own personal (not just literary) struggle for maturity. It is quite true that today a great deal of art grQ10lSout of exhibi-tionist impulses. Certainly some of the worst does. Maybe some of the best. It may even be possible that all ait involves a certain exhibitionism at least -3- kiY1d. of some vague sublimated ~ Let us assume, at any rate,that there exists adult artistic exhibitionism of a symbolic sort. But how about an adolescent indulging in what he does not quite fully recognize as exhibitionism because he thinks the gesture is a sign of maturity when it is all too painfully a sign of the opposite? A basic question is, Should a young person be pro-tected against this self-inflicted violation of his own privacy? And how about the audience? It is a commonplace that exhibitionism, often if not always, is an invitation to reciprocal exhibitionism on the part of others. When should an audience be expected to welcome this sort of invitation? An exhibitionist stage forms a part of childhood sexuality. The way to negotiate the stage is not by mass producing it. I rather think that the resentment against some passages of the sort Mr. Hyman has in mind has this deep sub-conscious foundation. I'he reader feels imposed on by being symbolically invited to a kind of infantile orgy. The relationship of the artistic impulse in general to exhibitionism is a large problem, much too vast to go into here. But I believe the fore-going considerations are warranted and relevant. If a given bit of student writing is eXhibitionist-autobiographical or even exhibitionist-pseudo-autobiographical and has maybe a ten or fifteen percent claim to be serious art, how much encouragement and support and promulgation should be provided by others to whom the exhibitionism is painful if not insulting? Would the ends of art and the struggle for personal maturity be served better if young writers found it necessary to contain such impulses or to sublimate them more thoroughly in the achievement of great aesthetic distance? Has no one but the youthful writer himself any responsibility here? When do you help or hurt a person in aiding and abetting his exhibitionist drives? Or even in tolerating them? SAINT LOUIS UNIVERSITY SAINT LOUIS, MO. 63103 De ar Fa ther Ong: lr @SCENITY AND THE NATURE OF NARRATIVE has been read and approved for publication. Sincerely yours, o Y./J~. VJ A. H. Scheller, S.J. April 26, 1967 http://cdm17321.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/ong/id/1347

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