In 1932, while lawyers argued in a Manhattan courthouse about obscenity in James Joyce’s Ulysses, the dapper and immensely popular mayor of New York, Jimmy Walker, scoffed to reporters, “No girl was ever seduced by a book.” America’s intellectuals and literary critics, many of whom had submitted testimony about Ulysses for the trial, howled in outrage at this proof of American provincialism.
And they were right to howl: The man who does not understand that books are dangerous things is a fool. Clarence Darrow, fighting in 1924 to save the student murderers Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb from the death penalty, argued that the theories of Nietzsche they had read in their college courses were more to blame than the students who insanely put those theories into practice. The federal judge in the obscenity trial of Ulysses eventually allowed Joyce’s book into the United States precisely because he did not find in it what he knew books could contain: the “leer of the sensualist” and an “aphrodisiac” effect. In a powerful chapter in last year’s widely noticed study Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography (St. Martin’s Press, 369 pp.; $26.95), the literary critic Roger Shattuck demonstrates a connection between the unspeakable “Moors Murderers” in Britain in the 1960s and the Marquis de Sade’s accounts of sexual torture.
But Mayor Walker nonetheless had a point that his critics-caught in the curious position of having to argue both that books are dangerous and that Ulysses isn’t-were incapable of appreciating. If any girl ever did get herself lured into bed by a book, the book is much less likely to have been a censorable volume like Joyce’s Ulysses or the Marquis de Sade’s Philosophy in the Bedroom than it is to have been something like Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese or one of those Harlequin Romances that clog the checkout counters in local supermarkets. A book’s danger exists within a set of social conditions so complicated and rapidly fluctuating that the censor’s attempt to distinguish a corrupting volume remains extremely difficult.
The attempt, in fact, often makes things worse. In his new book, Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship, the South African novelist J. M. Coetzee argues that some part of the very existence of censored books derives from the existence of censorship. The point is not the uninteresting linguistic tautology that nothing gets censored without a censor. In this collection of essays written over the last several years, Coetzee is out after the logical and practical connections between censorship and the political, theological, and erotic works to which censorship is applied. A great deal-indeed, too much-of Giving Offense involves an overcomplicated analysis of the ways in which censorship logically requires something undesirable to censor: While a word like unknowable means “incapable of being known,” Coetzee observes, undesirable does not mean “incapable of being desired” so much as “ought not to be desired”-and the censor needs the undesirable to define the permissible limits of desire. But the remaining and better portion of Giving Offense considers the ways in which undesirable literature demands attempted censorship to gain notice.
The censor is like a man with a gun demanding quiet: If he shoots, he makes the noise he is trying to prevent; if he won’t shoot, he commands no silence. In Forbidden Knowledge, Roger Shattuck performs a relentless and precise demolition of Sade’s Justine and Philosophy in the Bedroom, demonstrating the logic with which Sade, like all pornographers, requires the existence of moral prohibitions in order to achieve the perverse sexual satisfaction of violating them. But there is a further logic connecting pornography and censorship in which the pornographer creates pornography in search of censorship-in which the attempt to censor a work gives it its reason for existence.
This is the logic by which Larry Flynt-founder of the vile Hustler magazine, self-righteous author of a new autobiography, and subject of this winter’s Oliver Stone-produced film, The People vs. Larry Flynt (directed by Milos Forman and starring Woody Harrelson as Flynt and Courtney Love as his wife)-can declare himself a “constitutional hero” for claiming First Amendment protections for his obscenities. It is the logic by which Robert Mapplethorpe becomes an icon for both his supporters and his detractors precisely because he managed to find at last a photographic presentation indecent enough that someone in America attempted to censor his work. “I am not sure,” Coetzee writes, “what to think about artists who break taboos and yet claim the protection of the law.”
Even where there are no laws to which the artist can appeal, however, and where the penalties are much sterner than they are in the United States, undesirable literature quickly develops a game of teasing the censor, a sort of daring of the man with the gun to shoot. Though under the communist regimes in Eastern Europe, Coetzee claims, censors sometimes outnumbered writers ten to one (and by even more in apartheid South Africa), the censors proved astonishingly incapable of containing language-as though the very existence of a line drawn by the censors created a game in which the reading spectators would watch writers try to cross the line without being censored. In essays on various twentieth-century writers whose works were banned-D. H. Lawrence, the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, the Russian novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert, and the South African poet Breyten Breytenbach-Coetzee shows how a kind of hidden language for putting censorable thoughts in uncensorable words develops with almost the complicity of the censors.
There emerged in America and Western Europe through the 1980s, in response to the heroism of Eastern European writers, something that was almost an envy of persecution, as though the stance that Václav Havel called “living in truth” were possible only when oppressed. If it does nothing else, Coetzee’s analysis of censorship in South Africa reveals that oppression of writers doesn’t necessarily lead to truth, and his analysis of pornography in the United States reveals the falseness of the envy for persecution. South Africa, for Coetzee, is a culture in which the censors were so powerful that nearly all South African writers developed an internal censor under whose eyes they would write-and with whom they would play out the same language games of teasing and rebellion. This movement from an external to an internal police is for Coetzee the key to understanding art in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Just as the artist struggles to sneak the truth past the state censor, so after internalization he struggles to sneak the truth past his own censoring impulses.
We might add (as Coetzee does not) that “self-censorship” is itself a metaphor, borrowed from Freud’s notion that subconscious sexual and violent impulses are expurgated in their expression as speech and even thought by a “moralizing” psychological force. The effect of using a model of censorship to describe what all artists do in the act of creation is to assume the “naturalness” of the sexual and violent images with which the artist pushes against the censor. This is not a metaphor of health; it is a metaphor of disease-of the diseased soul and of the diseased culture in which law is conceived solely as force, solely as the tyrannical father, solely as an iron lid of rationality held down by brute strength on the boiling cauldron of desire.
The analysis in Giving Offense might have been more helpful had the author been willing to draw “a sharp line between censorship on political and on moral grounds.” Taking almost all his examples from political censorship, and then assuming that the censorship of pornography follows the same pattern, his analysis remains of uncertain application to America, where our censorship problems do not involve politics. And in a long and somewhat confusing essay on Erasmus’ Praise of Folly that contains Coetzee’s own proposed “humanistic” solution to censorship, he seems to argue for a paradoxical “living in uncertainty” that requires us to censor ourselves whenever we think we have found a certainty with which to censor anything. Here we have the quintessential contemporary stance (some would say “postmodern”): We are exhorted to be tolerant of everything but intolerance.
On the interdependence of censorship and undesirable literature in a sick society, however, Coetzee is utterly persuasive. Perhaps Jimmy Walker was right after all: No girl was ever seduced by a book. But we have all been seduced and corrupted by prurience and titillation-the filthy-minded game in which pornographers and censors alike have joined.
J. Bottum is associate editor of First Things.
Copyright(c) 1997 by Christianity Today, Inc/Books & Culture Magazine.
Mar/Apr 1997, Vol. 3, No. 2, Page 30
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