'A Calumny, a Scurrilous and Bitter Jest'

Since 1968 the Motion Picture Association of America has rated films for audience suitability and stamped them G, PG, PG-13 and so forth. I’ve always resented someone making up my mind for me, presuming to tell me – and my sons, when they were younger -- what we will find offensive or otherwise inappropriate. Significantly, the ratings are, broadly speaking, not aesthetic but moral. Crap like Star Wars or the latest super-hero cartoon gets a free pass. The system rewards bad taste.

Something similar but more insidious has happened with the fashionable phenomenon of “trigger warnings.” How I would resent opening a book – say, Titus Andronicus, The Iliad or Lolita – and finding the literary equivalent of an NC-17 or X imprimatur on the title page. How insulting to any self-respecting reader. The texts of great books change us. No text should be changed or labeled to suit our sensitive sensibilities. A good reader is a strong, limber reader, prepared for challenges of many sorts. I was under the impression that few students, even Ph.D. candidates, needed an excuse to avoid Shakespeare, Homer or Nabokov. That’s been taken care of for them.

I happened upon what may be the first description of “triggering” in the Western tradition. You’ll find it in the section titled “Scoffs, Calumnies, bitter Jests, how they cause Melancholy” in Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621):

“It is an old saying, ‘A blow with a word strikes deeper than a blow with a sword’: and many men are as much galled with a calumny, a scurrilous and bitter jest, a libel, a pasquil, satire, apologue, epigram, stage-play or the like, as with any misfortune whatsoever.”