'Sticks and stones may break my bones ...' Like most children, I learned this piece of wisdom with tears streaming down my face, hurt to the quick by the taunts of my playmates. At the time, it seemed a very foolish statement. What was this splitting of hurt into 'real' injury and 'unreal' feeling? I certainly felt hurt. Recently I learned that there is a second verse: 'When you die you'll go to hell, and suffer all you called me.' I think I would have liked these lines when I was a child. Growing up in a secular culture, I never expected retribution in another world - unreal words turned back into real hurts and visited on their perpetrators. I lived instead with a paradoxical stoicism: that insults were not injury, words were not deeds, representation not reality, and art not life, but at the same time that insults, words, representations and art were important in the realm of the real. This is a piece of casuistry necessary, as I see it, to First Amendment freedoms, liberal democracy and sanity. But that does not mean that it is any the less problematic than that first, childhood splitting of word and reality.

LRB 27 May 1993 | PDF Download