Bruce's Reviews > Censors at Work: How States Shaped Literature

[3 1/2 stars, actually.] Censorship, specifically the state-sanctioned suppression of literary works, is the subject matter of this book. Well, not exhaustively. Darnton doesn't do a full historical review, he cherry-picks three specific regimes from three different centuries to research and discuss: enlightenment-era France, Victorian-era British India, and Soviet-era East Germany. Too, he omits periodicals from his purview, which leaves off much of a good censorship program's daily grind. Oh, and he isn't proposing to be definitive with his approach. While he gleans some stats here and there from his eighteenth and nineteenth-century archival dives, he'll be the first to tell you his East German section was cobbled together from first-hand interviews and some spot-checking of newly-opened Communist Party files; you'll want to look up some of the professional papers he cites to gain a hard-core understanding.

This book still screams academia, but don't be put off as it's very consciously written in a lay voice (an effort that I, as a lay reader, very much appreciated). So disregard the organizational structure that reads like someone's dissertation book pitch,* published contingent on a willingness to pad it up with a few comparatively more recent examples. Darnton's concluding chapter goes some way to tying it all together by singing vive la difference, although it's hard to know whether that's a truism for censorship practices generally or just an outgrowth of a survey approach that doesn't remotely try to be anthropological or sociological. I write this, by the way, not as complaint but rather so readers might have their expectations set correctly when plucking this off a library shelf.

This is genuinely worth your time as a casual read, and not just for the informal tone (if I had a nickel for each time Darnton wrote, "What's going on here?" I'd be in the vanity publishing business). Functionally, the approbationistes of Malesherbes, cataloguers of the reading matter available to Bengali sepoys, and the apparatchiks of the GDR were as much critics as scissor-wielding hacks. Those in France even enjoyed (and occasionally, suffered) seeing their opinions published as frontmatter to the texts they covered, among the earliest blurbs in publishing. Darnton's work is well-seasoned with representative excerpts of this meta-discourse, and whether intended for one or more internal audiences or the public at large it's frequently entertaining in its display of equal parts erudition, snobbish conceit, and petty vindictiveness. Few acts appear as futile or as paradoxical as officialdom's attempts to staunch the flow of ideas by talking about how horrible they are.

The author presents a solid case that censorship practice and intent varied in different places and times. In France, they sought to avoid embarrassment arising from the endorsement inherent in state-controlled publishing rights as much as to corral the competitive instincts of courtiers that tended toward anonymous libels. In the British Raj, the drive for a better barometer of local discontent resulted in an annual Overstreet of yellowed jatras then in circulation within the Jewel in the Crown. The dual bureaucracies of East Germany's Leseland (state reporting to party) wrote up five year plans for works to be written not just to impose ideological conformity, but also to assure topical diversity and meter out a limited supply of available paper. In all cases, however, censorship was about control, prosecution and persecution each a matter of exegetical interpretation. Likewise, all viewed market competition as the universal challenge to state-sponsored thought-control, whether the threatening market was to be found in entrepreneurial European neighbors (as in the cases of France, who wished to keep out purveyors of grey market goods, and Germany, who flat-out needed the West's money) or sympathetic voices in Parliament (as with India). Throughout Darnton demonstrates that effective censorship marks the triumph of paranoia over stupidity.**

While I personally found the anecdotes from Stasi-prying Berlin to be the most engaging, India really came across as the standout case of the three. Censorship there ultimately took the role of post hoc criminal prosecution, and only arose in the face of a rising Indian independence movement around 1905 or so. Talk about an ineffective cat-out-of-the-bag approach: freedom of speech meant you could always more or less publish whatever you wanted but might be whisked away to jail for a spell in consequence. Copies of newly notorious works might continue in underground circulation until their authors could resume oversight of their distribution upon release from the chokey. Not that there weren't legitimate threats to maintenance of colonial control, but Britain's inconsistent application of authoritarianism more often than not come across as self-inflicted wounds. Her Majesty's Empire would appear to have lost its colonies around the globe mostly by the haughty refusal to integrate and share. Can you imagine the hegemonic power of a United Kingdom whose voting states included the Australia, Canada, India, South Africa, and the USA?

I'll end by quoting the author on the Wolf Biermann affair, which struck me as the most ridiculous and tragic case related here (page 198).

[T]he nonconformist poet and singer with a razor-sharp wit… had been permitted to leave on a concert tour of the FRG [West Germany] in November 1976. Then, after he had given a performance in Cologne, the Party's Politburo dramatically stripped him of his citizenship and refused to let him return. Twelve prominent East German writers… signed a letter of protest, which was…. followed by a wave of repression. Students were arrested, writers blacklisted, dissidents silenced. Sarah Kirsch, Jurek Becker, Gunter Kunert, and other prominent authors went into exile. Jurgen Fuchs was imprisoned for nine months and then left for the FRG…. Erich Honecker had… declared at the Eighth Party Congress in December 1971 that there would be "no more taboos in art and literature." The Biermann affair exposed the hollowness of that statement.

Darnton compiles a depressing laundry list of oppressed authors, intellectuals, and careerists. However, it's the absurdity of the whole thing that flattens me. Censorship seeks to impose conformity of thought and action by forcibly muting dissent. It instills in its victims the desire to escape and makes that desire practicable by creating a sympathetic neighboring market to works branded as forbidden fruit. Yet the parallel uses of exile as a state punishment and a means of protesting banishment have only adolescent logic.

Darnton's whole book is the documentation of a feedback loop of tantrums in which A begins by saying, "I saw you stick your tongue out at me. I'll send you to your room!" B responds then with "Don't bother, I'm leaving!" and this escalates into, "And take your crummy books with you!" leading inevitably to "Fine, I will!" and ending with both in chorus, singing: "You never loved me! I'm burning down the house!" This is a game that Eric Berne called "Uproar," one to which I can only quote the Mills Brothers. And Sparklehorse.

You always hurt the one you love,
The one you love the most,
And the more I try to hurt you,
The more it backfires.

* An imagined title: Bourbon France - Privilege and Repression: The extension and withholding of privilege to guild printers in Versailles and Paris under L'Ancien Regime, 1722-1789

** With due respect to those whose profession requires constant vigilance for the more violent practitioners of liberte, it takes some serious processing power to project ominous portents onto your average fairy tale or folk song. Satire's best reception always came from those willing to expend the effort in connecting all the illicit dots.