詩と発話行為論 : 『吠える』裁判（1957）におけることばの猥褻性

This paper examines the boundary between obscenity and literariness in words used within poetry, from the viewpoint of speech-act theory by J. L. Austin, focusing on the trial on Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems in 1957. Several critics, such as Richard Ohmann, Charles Altieri, and Terry Eagleton, discuss the importance of speech-act theory in literature. Reconsidering these analyses, the authors of this paper try to add the new idea to the relationship between speech-act theory and words used in poetry. Then we argue the difference between obscene literature and poems using obscene words, and finally clarify the characteristics of words used in poetry.
Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems contains ordinary language, vulgar words, sexual descriptions, and four-letter words, of which few poets tried to use in their works at that time. The owner and clerk of City Lights Book Store were indicted for obscenity charge in the state court in California in 1957 since they sold this book. In this trial, there were two points at issue: “The first one being that the book is to be construed as a whole.... Number two, whether or not the use of certain words which may in their separate context be considered vulgar or coarse or filthy or disgusting... whether they, together with passages that may encompass them ... are just put in there for no purpose at all except to excite erotic or lustful desires”(Ehrlich 37). The judgment document concludes“ the defendant is found not guilty” (Ehrlich 127).
What did the prosecution and the attorney argue in the trial? In order to make the conditions for obscenity on Howl and Other Poems clear, we return Austin’s How to Do Things with Words and pick up some key concepts for words used in poetry, such as “ordinary / special circumstances”(22), “the normal conditions of reference may be suspended”(104), and “meaning, sense, reference”(157) in his commentary referring to poetry. By using Austin’s analytical frame, especially in his “special theory”(148), we can see how the obscene words lose their obscenity in poetry, and grasp some of characteristics of words used instead, and finally, are found not obscene but having literariness such as in Howl and Other Poems.