Ah-ah-ah-ah! The term ‘faux pas’ kept jumping out at me. Fou pa. Fox pas. Are there literary fox pas? Don’t think so. I know what you’re thinking: she’s sitting on her high horse. But horsey is dead, although I didn’t kill it—what I’m trying to say is that the notion of the ‘faux pas’ can come to exist in something like a binary, where conceptions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ run amok in the house of heaven and hell. There is one thing though … although I wouldn’t call a ‘faux pas’, more than it’s an outright wrong: and that’s fascism. Emotional fascism. Literal fascism. Intellectual fascism. When ideas reach a dead end, and which do not allow for other ideas to flourish. All the things she said, all the things she said, running through my head—as the editors’ note in the first issue of US literary journal n+1, commenting on the critical mores of liberal publication The New Republic at the time, went, ‘You can go through the defence of taste and come out the other side, as if you jumped out the kitchen window into the alley dumpster. There is a kind of fake refinement that turns into a vulgarity baser than any other. It doesn’t come from saying the worst, it comes from deciding what other people can’t say—and adopting a bullying, innuendo-ish, dishonest tone in trying to shut them up.’

They continue: ‘A word that turns out is “tasteless”. They use it in the same way you might reprove a toilet joke at the dinner table or around relatives. But with them it takes on moral weight. It’s a very damaging mistake: the idea that sniffing out the tasteless is the same as taste itself. It confuses censoriousness with a faculty of judgment that links the aesthetic to the moral sense.’ And since we’re thinking in French terms, I think about what the philosopher Derrida once wrote in his 1979 meta-book of letters The Post Card, ‘I have necessarily written upside-down and in order to surrender to Necessity. […] There would only be facteurs (factors), and therefore no vérité (truth).’ It’s simply not enough.