ABSTRACT
History may indeed prove to be the last refuge of porno-journalism. If the past is a foreign country, you might well be able to get away with anything there. In the here-and-now the lurid-cum-lewd reportage of sexy crimes of passion—a standard ingredient in our daily newspaper fare—may jade and fall out of favor. The scandals of public life, entailing the same over-familiar incursions into privacy by bugs, tapes, and voyeuristic long-distance lenses, can begin to bore; and the new, younger genera-tions will surely not be titillated by the once-daring semi-euphemisms that once amused their more conventional fathers and mothers. In this game of pseudo-shy suggestiveness, of transparent dissimulation, the Americans play a little rougher. In this chapter, the author follows the acute students' of words and meanings, Anthony Burgess and George Steiner. As Steiner wrote, the present danger to the freedom of literature and to the inward freedom of society is not censorship or verbal reticence.
