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Wallowing once again in humanity’s darkest places (in this case France, and a Robert Crumb exhibition), Mr Slang suffers a bout of troubled introspection…

Forgive me: I’m pondering work again.

I went to an exhibition at Paris’ Musée de l’Art Moderne last week. It was dedicated to the work of Robert Crumb, former ‘underground’ cartoonist’ now internationally celebrated creator considered worthy of a substantial show – some 600 pieces – in a major temple of capital-A art. That it is in France combines both the country’s long-time respect for what are called bandes desinées, and the fact that Crumb lives there, in the south-west. As it always has been his work was outstanding, much of it taking me back 40 years to my own ‘underground press’ career; there was even, in a large montage that rounded off the show, the cover of a magazine on which I was working in summer 1970.

I haven’t really kept up with Crumb. I read some graphic novels, especially French romans noirs – among them work by Jean-Patrick Manchette, Didier Daeninckx or Leo Malet – re-created in this new format and illustrated by the pen of Jacques Tardi whose work has also encompassed the Paris Commune and World War I (below).

But mainly I still opt for traditional blocks of text.  So I had missed a pair of Crumbs that, without comment, but each in their 3-page entirety, were among those original artworks included in the show. Both had appeared in 1993. One is entitled  ‘When the Niggers Take Over America’. a companion  is ‘When the Goddam Jews Take Over America’. Both trade on the grossest of racial stereotyping, underlined by a wide range of slang’s stock-in-trade, racial slurs. They are not all there – African-Americans and Jews topping out by a wide margin any other of slang’s race-based viciousness – but there are enough.

I cannot speak for others – all of whom were French while I was there and these, the original drawings, were not translated – but my response was barely muted laughter. Especially for that which dealt with my people. Crumb’s unfettered parading of every racist trope had gone so far over the top; how could one not laugh, albeit that we would not cry. This was Swiftian satire of the highest order. How else could Crumb’s glorious parodies of bigotry’s mindset possibly be interpreted.

Back home, since I’d missed them first time around,  I started googling for background. I was wrong. The cartoons had caused widespread offence. Crumb was condemned as both a racist, despite his proven adoration for the black musicians of the 1920s, his well-documented obsession, and an anti-semite despite having a 30-year marriage and working relationship with a Jewish woman, Aline Kominsky.  Piety and pomposity ruled. Sorrow, perhaps, but much more anger. And not just offence, celebration: a neo-Nazi rag promptly and approvingly reprinted the works. Crumb expressed regret but withdrew nothing. As I say, I was wrong.

This is not to judge Crumb, self-confessed as deeply neurotic, an artist, hardly the first, whose internal demons inform his genius. For what it is worth, I do not agree with his PC critics, let alone those who hijacked his satire to be supportive of their own sickness. My thought, and I have had it before, is this: where does my own response leave me? Have I missed something, is there something missing in me? Am I, as the god-bothering and wilfully obtuse Mary Whitehouse used to claim of the consumers of pornography, corrupted in some way by my work. Or if not corrupted, then coarsened beyond understanding, hardened against empathy, careless of the feelings of those more sensitive. I prefer to think not. I am, however, beyond shock and whether this is a lifetime’s cynicism or 30 years of researching words that pursue their existence in humanity’s lower depths I cannot unequivocally say. Perhaps it is a closed, and in every sense vicious circle.

The slang lexicographer, usually middle-class, middle-aged, law-abiding and white, is ultimately a voyeur. Nor, as I have written elsewhere, are we merely voyeurs upon the sensational. Disinterested, unmoved,  we are heartless; we have no human interest. Nor human interest stories. Just words, words, words. The beggar is whipped, the whore has a back-story, the junkie dies. We do not care. Only if frustratingly, impudently, they remain mute.

And the victim of racial abuse remains un-noticed, other than for my grateful citing of Crumb’s use of the terms.

The problem, if there is a problem, is that if one takes one’s occupation seriously, and I take mine very seriously, one has no time for debate. For shifting the gaze from the central issue. I would imagine that Crumb would say the same, though I would not compare my abilities to his. Slang by its nature has no time for kindness. It lacks empathy. All price, no value. Cruel and heartless though it is, its role is to forsake wishful thinking,  highlight what is, not what should be. That is not to say that the racist slurs are correct, they remain vile, but that however we may deplore them, they are. The dictionary-maker is a witness, not a judge.And yes, like any witness, is parti pris.

If there is an effect then it is on my world-view. All men are violent, all women promiscuous, all politicians corrupt, all rich men megalomaniac, all authority venal. Fill in your own despairing adjectives. A noir horizon that stretches out in every direction. If there are solutions they are noir too: such as those offered in Horace McCoy’s No Pockets in a Shroud or Daeninckx’ Le Der des Ders (‘The War to End Wars’) in both of which the hero, on the final page, on the very edge of winning through, is murdered.

Forgive, once more, these ponderings. It’s the job, you see.

image ©Gabriel Green

You can buy Green’s Dictionary of Slang, as well as Jonathon’s more slimline Chambers Slang Dictionary, plus other entertaining works, at his Amazon page. Jonathon also blogs and Tweets.