{"id":46814,"date":"2014-09-01T12:02:38","date_gmt":"2014-09-01T11:02:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=46814"},"modified":"2015-05-05T21:30:39","modified_gmt":"2015-05-05T20:30:39","slug":"dont-read-this-book-a-history-of-literary-censorship","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2014\/09\/dont-read-this-book-a-history-of-literary-censorship\/","title":{"rendered":"Don\u2019t Read This Book: A History of Literary Censorship"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reviews of Three New Works Concerned With Banned Literature<\/em><\/p>\n

\"A<\/a>

A Nazi book-burning. Photo: Getty<\/p><\/div>\n

The Zhivago Affair: the Kremlin, the CIA and the Battle Over a Forbidden Book\u00a0<\/strong>
\nPeter Finn and Petra Couv\u00e9e
\nHarvill Secker, 350pp
\n<\/em><\/p>\n

The Most Dangerous Book: the Battle\u00a0for James Joyce\u2019s Ulysses\u00a0<\/strong>
\nKevin Birmingham
\nHead of Zeus, 420pp
\n<\/em><\/p>\n

The Rushdie Fatwa and After:\u00a0a Lesson to the Circumspect\u00a0<\/strong>
\nBrian Winston
\nPalgrave Macmillan, 161pp
\n<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cI think you must distinguish between a passage which says that homosexuals are sometimes happy and a passage which says: come and be a homosexual,\u201d Frank Kermode argued at the 1967 obscenity trial in London for Hubert Selby Jr\u2019s novel Last Exit to Brooklyn<\/em>. In a later essay, he elaborated: \u201cWe have not always believed that poems, plays and novels should carry the label \u2018No road through to action\u2019, but we have believed it for a long time.\u201d Well, we don\u2019t seem to believe it any more, judging by the success of Oprah\u2019s Book Club and Alain de Botton, or by the ubiquity of biblio-memoirs and testaments about \u201cthe book that changed my life\u201d. And did we really believe it then? Although the Selby trial coincided with the battle for gay rights \u2013 homosexual acts were legalised the same year \u2013 and formed part of the story later charted in John Sutherland\u2019s book Offensive Literature: Decensorship in Britain 1960-1982<\/em>, the broader context for Kermode\u2019s remarks was the ongoing cultural cold war, in which the CIA and the Kremlin and, for that matter, a large contingent of professional critics believed strongly in the relationship between writing and advocacy, reading and action, as Kermode knew all too well.<\/p>\n

Earlier in 1967, Kermode had resigned from the co-editorship of Encounter<\/em> magazine over revelations \u2013 which came as news to just about no one \u2013 that its original backer, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, was in turn being funded by the CIA. Kermode later noted that his own business had mainly been with \u201cthe non-political part of the magazine\u201d, the arts and books pages, but the aim of the Congress for Cultural Freedom was not to liberate culture from politics but\u00a0to emphasise the connection between culture and liberal politics at a time of legitimate fears that literature was seen as\u00a0a\u00a0far-left pursuit. As Frances Stonor Saunders writes in her formidable book Who Paid the Piper?<\/em>: \u201cThe whole premise of the cultural cold war, of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, was that writers and artists had to engage<\/em> themselves in the ideological struggle.\u201d<\/p>\n

The CIA had made its most direct and best-known intrusion into cultural matters almost a decade before Kermode appeared at the Old Bailey, in what Peter Finn and Petra Couv\u00e9e, in their new book, call \u201cthe Zhivago affair\u201d \u2013 when agents energetically distributed copies of Boris Pasternak\u2019s novel, denied publication in the Soviet Union. (Its first publisher was based in Italy.) The cultural cold war wasn\u2019t an argument over whether literature had something to do with politics; it was a competition. The kind of book that the Soviets banned because it criticised the revolution \u2013 both semi-directly by exposing its bad products, and more implicitly, in its embrace of un-Soviet \u201cindividualism\u201d \u2013 was the kind of book the CIA wanted Russians to be reading. The belief underpinning such activities is that contemplation and action are closer than Kermode believed \u2013 or believed that \u201cwe\u201d believed. Finn and Couv\u00e9e quote a CIA spokesman who talked about literature\u2019s ability to \u201creinforce dispositions\u201d, to say, in essence, \u201cyes, you can be a homosexual\u201d, or \u201ccultivate your bourgeois instincts\u201d.<\/p>\n

The Iranian critic Azar Nafisi, in her memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran<\/em>, recalls the experience of having her disposition as a secular feminist in 1990s Iran reinforced by nothing more direct than the \u201cmultivocal\u00adity\u201d of Pride and Prejudice<\/em>: \u201cWe needed\u00a0no message, no outright call for plurality . .\u00a0. All we needed was to read and appreciate the cacophony of voices to understand its democratic imperative. This was where Austen\u2019s danger lay.\u201d One of the narratives in Philip Hensher\u2019s new novel, The Emperor Waltz<\/em>, about a gay bookshop, offers a nuanced picture of what homosexual literature might be saying to the reader. The Big Gay Bookshop isn\u2019t in the business of conversion\u00a0exactly, but it likes the idea that novels provide consolation or comfort, assuring \u201cone person after another . . . that you could live your life openly\u201d.<\/p>\n

For Nafisi and Hensher, literature\u2019s capa\u00adcity to communicate ideas and even messages is not a betrayal of its subtlety, but one of its greatest virtues \u2013 and one that depends on \u201cliterary\u201d qualities. (Nafisi\u2019s heroes are Austen, F Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James and Vladimir Nabokov; Hensher\u2019s are Angus Wilson, Edmund White, Robert Liddell and Alan Hollinghurst.)<\/p>\n

An often heard literary argument against censorship is that \u2013 as well as misrepresenting novels \u2013 it dominates their reputations. Kermode, in one of many essays on Pasternak, expressed the hope that the \u201cfortuitous political celebrity\u201d of Doctor Zhivago<\/em> \u201cwill not predispose readers to treat it as primarily a brave piece of propaganda\u201d. But it would be hard to argue that Pasternak had not intended \u2013 if never solely \u2013 to challenge orthodoxies and wound sensibilities.\u00a0Kermode reasoned that Doctor Zhivago<\/em> touches on revolutionary politics only to compare them to \u201cnatural plenitude and true human liberty\u201d; even putting the argument in those obscuring terms, it is clear why the novel might have given a fearful government cause for concern.<\/p>\n

A more legitimate literary objection to censorship is its implicit portrayal of a reader as the sort of person who jumps\u00a0off a cliff when asked. Notions such as \u201cobscenity\u201d or \u201cabasement before the west\u201d make literary language a tool of subversion and ascribe to the novelist the hypnotist\u2019s capacity for making a previously obedient\u00a0or prudish member of the public throw stones or unzip. In censorship\u2019s official, airbrushed view of the reading experience, dispositions are imposed, not reinforced. As J M Coetzee argued in Giving Offence: Essays on Censorship<\/em>, \u201cit is a feature of the paranoid logic of the censoring mentality that virtue, qua<\/em> virtue, must be innocent, and therefore, unless protected, vulnerable to the wiles of vice.\u201d<\/p>\n

James Joyce\u2019s novel Ulysses<\/em>, published in France in 1922, is a special victim of this paranoid logic, having suffered censorship for diametrically opposite reasons. In the Soviet view, Joyce \u2013 or \u201cDzhois\u201d, as he was known \u2013 didn\u2019t criticise the revolution and its products, but he was accused by Stalinist critics, mainly in the 1930s, of showing decadence in form and pessimism about the future, which made him an opponent of socialist realism (one judgement said that \u201cJoyce\u2019s path and the path of Soviet literature form an angle of 180 degrees\u201d).<\/p>\n

But as Kevin Birmingham records in The Most Dangerous Book: the Battle for James Joyce\u2019s Ulysses<\/em>, long before the cold war or its cultural offshoot, the novel was being equated with Soviet tendencies. John Sumner, head of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, posited links between Joyce and the Bolsheviks, and a London police inspector declared a Stepney librarian who requested a copy \u201ca red hot Socialist\u201d. Joyce was too bourgeois for the east and too Bolshevik for the west, though the official charge in England and America was obscenity, the relevant definition being that of an 1868 interpretation of the Obscene Publications Act, or \u201cHicklin rule\u201d, which put the emphasis on \u201cthe tendency . . . to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall\u201d.<\/p>\n

Birmingham has unearthed every last detail about the novel\u2019s tribulations, but his argument is tendentious and short-sighted. He wants to portray the modernist \u201cbattle\u201d against obscenity laws as consistent not just\u00a0with its author\u2019s lifelong desire to create mischief \u2013 \u201cJoyce\u2019s record of foul language began when he was seven years old\u201d \u2013 but\u00a0with the anti-establishment mood of the early 20th century. If sentimental misconceptions about literature\u2019s subtlety and discreteness lie at one extreme of commentary on censorship, then sentimental misconceptions about its crusading power, its evergreen friendship with progressive causes, lie at the other extreme.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor modernist writers,\u201d Birmingham writes, \u201cliterature was a battle against an obsolete civilisation . . . Censorship was the tyranny of established cultural standards.\u201d Knowledge of the book\u2019s reception is read back into its author\u2019s intentions, almost as if Joyce wrote the book in order to expose the stupidity of obscenity law. But as Birmingham knows, Joyce\u2019s target, the one he waged war against with \u201cwhat I write and say and do\u201d, was the Catholic Church \u2013 hardly dominant in the countries where Ulysses<\/em> was prosecuted. Birmingham\u2019s Joyce \u2013 Joyce the foul-mouthed libertine \u2013 can never be truly free because he is so much a slave to his disobedience, his refusal to \u201cyield to the demands of bourgeois governments and markets\u201d. There is a difference between breaking rules and living for nothing else, and Birmingham, in presenting the fate of Ulysses<\/em> as the most significant thing about it, has clouded the distinction.<\/p>\n

Everything is seen through the lens of obscenity law. Birmingham ascribes F R Leavis\u2019s isolation at Cambridge to his decision to assign Ulysses<\/em> as a text for study. As shown by his impatience with the trial of Lady Chatterley\u2019s Lover<\/em> \u2013 and his refusal to testify for the defence \u2013 Leavis cared nothing about freedom as an end in itself. He wanted to teach\u00a0 Ulysses<\/em> because he thought it was relevant to a course he was teaching, rather than as a\u00a0way of giving the finger to Cambridge or the government.<\/p>\n

Birmingham says that \u201cdecades later\u201d people were still saying, \u201cWe don\u2019t like the books he gives undergraduates,\u201d yet Leavis, in the article Birmingham quotes, recalled remarks like that \u201cat the time of Lawrence\u2019s death\u201d in 1930 \u2013 four years after Leavis had entered the Galloway & Porter bookshop to\u00a0request a copy of Ulysses<\/em>. In the subsequent decades, Leavis did plenty to irritate his colleagues. (Ironically, the central proof of his lack of favour was that he was never made professor, a title Birmingham gives him more than once.) A reference to Nab\u00adokov is similarly skewed: \u201cLolita<\/em> . . . would not have been possible without Ulysses<\/em>. \u2018Oh, yes,\u2019 Nabokov said, \u2018let people compare me to Joyce by all means, but my English is pat ball to Joyce\u2019s champion game.\u2019\u201d In context, and even out of it, this remark has nothing whatsoever to do with obscenity; coming as it does at the end of Birmingham\u2019s book, it reminds you of all the ways in which, by adopting the polar opposite of Kermode\u2019s stance, he has short-changed his subject and\u00a0understated Joyce\u2019s literary importance.<\/p>\n

Ulysses<\/em> and Doctor Zhivago<\/em> belong to the same volatile era, when a book could be punished for threatening or celebrating bourgeois ideals. That era came to an end in the 1980s. Glasnost fulfilled what Khrushchev\u2019s \u201cthaw\u201d \u2013 the period in which Doctor Zhivago<\/em> was smuggled out of Russia \u2013 had only promised; Pasternak\u2019s novel became formally available to the Russian public in 1988 when Novy Mir<\/em>, the literary journal, began publishing excerpts, and Izvestia<\/em> began serialising Ulysses<\/em>, legally available in England and America since the mid-1930s, in Russian translation the following year. Attention in the west shifted from obscene publications to visual pornography. Novels on erotic and homosexual themes were published without reprisal. But then, in February 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini sentenced Salman Rushdie to death for insulting Allah in The Satanic Verses<\/em>, starting a familiar but subtly distinctive argument and raising the curtain on yet another \u201cbattle\u201d.<\/p>\n

The fall of the Berlin Wall, welcomed by the right as \u201cthe end of history\u201d, with democracy as the outright and eternal victor, ought to have made things easier for the left, cutting Marxism-Leninism off from actually existing totalitarianism. With crimes no longer being committed in his name \u2013 at least not in Europe \u2013 Marx could once again become the author of numerous articles in defence of free expression, which Stalinists had preferred to dismiss as products of the young Marx, still gulled by \u201chumanism\u201d.<\/p>\n

Instead, the situation became newly complicated. The cold war had produced an Anglo-American backlash not of cultural neutralism and retreat from politics, but of wholesale politicisation, with particular emphasis on feminist, post-colonial and Marxist readings; beyond the academy, a similar process of revisionism and wrong-righting was at work in political correctness. As Brian Winston points out in his thoughtful new book, The Rushdie Fatwa and After: a Lesson to the Circumspect<\/em>, liberal acceptance of\u00a0alien belief systems hobbled liberalism\u2019s \u201cability to deal with any root-and-branch rejections of its values\u201d. Cultural relativism\/political correctness found it as hard to defend Rushdie against the charge of hurting Muslim feelings as it did to condemn Khomeini\u2019s fatwa \u2013 or, as it became when the ayatollah died in June 1989, hukm<\/em> (a fatwa dies with its issuer).<\/p>\n

Winston\u2019s book is helped by the public nature of the Rushdie affair. Birmingham, a literary historian eager to emphasise the importance of the Ulysses<\/em> trials, thanks \u201ccountless\u201d librarians; Finn and Couv\u00e9e, respectively a reporter and a translator, found material for a non-fiction thriller (they describe the CIA book-smuggling programme as a \u201ccaper\u201d). But there is nothing clandestine, nothing cloak-and-dagger, about a fatwa. The facts have been amply documented, most recently by Rushdie himself in his strange and unappealing memoir Joseph Anton<\/em>. Winston is therefore free, having cantered quickly through the logistics, to consider the ironies and contradictions, and to offer \u201ca lesson\u201d.<\/p>\n

He is also helped by the clarity of the charges made against Rushdie. Unlike\u00a0obscenity or political subversion, blasphemy is seen as an end in itself. Ayatollah Khomeini, in ordering Muslims to punish Rushdie, made no reference to a knock-on effect. The reply, often enough heard, that the fatwa turned literature into agitprop is not strictly accurate. Rushdie wasn\u2019t accused of saying \u201cbe a sceptic\u201d, but was said to have shown disrespect to Allah, which by most definitions he did.<\/p>\n

The relevant reply is not that literature doesn\u2019t incite, implore, proselytise, recommend, disrespect, but that it can incite, implore, proselytise, recommend, disrespect whatever it pleases. To the peculiar emphasis on Rushdie as a \u201cfictionist\u201d \u2013 the word used by Christopher Hitchens, his shrewdest supporter \u2013 Winston calmly points out: \u201cClaiming such writing as fiction is pointless because what is fiction, in any case, but lies? . . . Fiction, like drunkenness in a case of dangerous driving, exacerbates the offence.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another thing that distinguishes Winston\u2019s book is the live reality, the continuing urgency and pathos, of the conflict he describes \u2013 his \u201cafter\u201d isn\u2019t over. Birmingham recounts the Ulysses<\/em> scandal as a piece of Whig history; there\u2019s a happy-ever-after tone to his claim that \u201cyou do not\u00a0worry about your words being banned partly because of what happened to Ulysses<\/em>\u201d. Finn and Couv\u00e9e end their book by quoting the description by David Remnick, a Moscow correspondent during perestroika, of ordinary Russian men and women on the Metro, reading their sky-blue copies of Novy Mir<\/em>. When Pasternak had died in 1960, Kermode referred to the \u201creinstatement which will follow at some convenient time in the future\u201d; and here it was, less than 30 years later. But it is difficult to show such confidence about the day when the people of Tehran will be permitted to read The Satanic Verses<\/em> or the \u201cmore objectionable passages\u201d (still banned) of Ulysses<\/em>; to follow or ignore the guidance they may or may not be offering.<\/p>\n

____________________________<\/p>\n

Leo Robson is the New Statesman\u2019s chief fiction reviewer.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 newstatesman.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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