Book Review: 'Censors at Work' by Robert Darnton
The censors of 18th-century France functioned like peer reviewers today, writing blurbs for books they liked.
God Dog
I fell in love at a debate about pornography. It was 1975, on the day the Order of the Garter commemorated Haile Selassie, the recently deceased emperor of Ethiopia, at Windsor Castle. The link between the two events was the Earl of Longford, the eminent socialist statesman and my fellow guest-speaker at the debate, who arrived just in time, having represented Britain's prime minister at the imperial obsequies. He turned up in court dress and top hat, dripping with medals, to take his seat on the platform alongside my future wife (the secretary of her college debating society). At the time, the earl was busy with what he called his "crusade against pornography." Against a passionate peer and a beautiful girl, I could not hope successfully to extol pornography. Instead, I concentrated on the evils of censorship. I won the woman and lost the debate.
I still think that my argument was right. Pornography, libel, sedition, hate speech and lies are a fair price for freedom of speech. They would be powerless in a justly ordered, well-educated society. If pornography incites your lust, commend the pornographer for success and condemn yourself for succumbing. If you believe the propagandist, he or she has done his job: It is your critical faculties that are at fault. If the advertiser exaggerates, caveat emptor.
Censors at Work
By Robert Darnton
Norton, 316 pages, $27.95
Robert Darnton, who is justly renowned as a scholar, is, in a mild sense, a pornographer himself: In the appendix to "The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Prerevolutionary France" (1996), he translated "Thérèse philosophe," one of the fruitiest of the Enlightenment's erotic novels. But I am not sure that Mr. Darnton would have been on my side in the debate. In "Censors at Work"— a vivid, fascinating study of would-be controllers of literary output in Enlightenment France, British India and communist East Germany—he takes an equivocal stance.
On the one hand, he says that he believes "in the right to freedom of speech with all the fervor of my fellow citizens." On the other, he appeals to the examples of Milton and Diderot, who collaborated in censorship, to justify compromises with "a real world of economic interests and political lobbies." Mr. Darnton sees freedom as "an ideal to be defended," not demanded. He disclaims relativism but advocates what he calls an anthropological approach, acknowledging that censorship's meaning is different in changing cultural circumstances.
Censors, those generally friendless individuals, emerge with some honor from Mr. Darnton's book, which unfolds a "human comedy" full of intriguing revelations. He makes modest heroes of the state's officially appointed censors in 18th-century France. Dedicated more to licensing good literature than excising heterodoxy, they functioned like peer reviewers today, focusing for little or no pay on the quality of submissions and writing blurbs for books they liked. The public could rely on their imprimatur as a measure of excellence. Books they rated as bad but tolerable got tacit assent. They wrote their reports "as men of letters," and Mr. Darnton shows that their decisions, when self-interested (like those of many modern reviewers), were influenced more by obligations of patronage and friendship than by matters of principle. Of course, the censors did censor, but what they identified as pernicious appeared illegally or abroad and, in most cases, reached the public without difficulty.
The bureaucrats who monitored literature in British India, too, emphasized matters of taste more than politics. They "could not allow the Indians to use words as freely as Englishmen did at home" but genuinely sought beneficent government, good literature and the rule of law. They practiced censorship by deterrence, exercising repression retrospectively, by means of trials for sedition or libel. The Raj was feebly repressive and never stifled criticism from prolific presses or innumerable street performers.
Although East German censorship is a well-troweled field, Mr. Darnton approaches it from a fresh angle and wrests new perceptions, partly from sallies in the archives and partly from his interviews with former censors, whom he found defensive but unrepentant. Their job, as they saw it, was "to make literature happen" in a Leseland—a land of books and readers protected from the trash-culture that infected the West. Like their 18th-century French predecessors, they were cultivated, literate men and women, who developed personal and often fruitful editorial relationships with writers whose work they vetted. They were sometimes a liberalizing influence.
The East German censors had to filter out taboo words such as "ecology," "critical" and "Stalinism," but when they wished they could find ways around the system. They smuggled politically repugnant works onto the approved list, such as Volker Braun's "Hinze-Kunze Roman," which exploded scandalously on the regime like an "intellectual bomb," criticizing the system implicitly through an examination of the relationship between an apparatchik and his chauffeur. The censors also deliberately committed significant editorial lapses, as when the real name of the prison in which the novelist Erich Loest was confined appeared by contrived "error" in a fictionalized context. The censors even allowed Christa Wolf's influential "Kassandra," whose depiction of classical Troy had much in common with oppressive East Germany, to appear with dots in place of deletions: Readers could restore the missing parts using texts circulated by samizdat means. On at least two occasions the censors banned books because they were too crudely apologetic about the regime.
In East Germany, the weakness of censorship was compensated for by harsh repression, deterring dissent by cruel and capricious acts of exemplary violence. The human comedy shaded into tragedy. In 18th-century France, at least in Mr. Darnton's telling, comedy predominated, animating relationships between the police and their victims. Mr. Darnton relates, for instance, the engaging story of Pierre-Auguste Goupil, inspector of the book trade, who ended as an arch-pornographer. Police action targeted illegal publications if they were seditious or obscene, but the effect hardly seems to have inhibited the output. There were moments when state and church issued a virtual "declaration of war against the Enlightenment," with book burnings and bans on sales, but these seem to have been more about relieving outraged feelings than restricting trade.
Nevertheless, Mr. Darnton concludes, even without coercion, in a suitably crafted atmosphere authors become complicit in self-censorship and mutual denunciation. Sometimes "the system censors," and for East Germany and similar regimes he demonstrates this convincingly. Some writers collaborated as a sacrifice for socialism; others because they believed censorship was inevitable—implicit in capitalism, candid in communism, but morally equivalent in both. Others hoped their compromises would mitigate the state's hold on literature. Alexander Solzhenitsyn made calculated concessions over the text of "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. " Some writers even appear to have relished censorship as an extra source of discipline in their art.
A logical difficulty arises that Mr. Darnton never confronts. If writers are saying what they want to say—if they willingly defer to the culture that surrounds them, if they want to be apologists for a regime or an ideology or spokesmen for their own clique or country, is their "self-censorship" censorship in more than a metaphorical sense?
Mr. Darnton's definition is narrow: He wants to limit the term "censorship" to interventions by the state or religious bodies. What matters, however, is the power relationship between censor and censored. Anyone—a publisher, for instance, or a university, or a patron—who pressures or compels me to suppress or change my words by pulling rank or making credible threats is practicing censorship as surely as a government that bans my work. States are not the only, or even perhaps the commonest, enemies of free speech. Political censorship is peculiarly pernicious only because states are peculiarly powerful.
It is hard to believe that Mr. Darnton, as a practicing academic and published author, has never been a victim of this sort of attempted censorship. I have often confronted it, sometimes in comically trivial instances. One author's heirs, for instance, objected to an introduction I wrote for the publisher of her collected stories because of my mild animadversions on her snobbery: I published the piece in the Times of London instead. One another occasion, a U.S. copy editor tried to make me change my description of Japan as "a long, thin country" on the grounds that it might offend fat people. Recent, serious alleged cases of non-state censorship include the attempt of Louisiana State University to silence a teacher who criticized the Army Corps of Engineers and the effort of publishers Taylor & Francis to block a critical report on for-profit academic publishing in the journal Prometheus.
Should we privilege morally inspired censors by allowing special concessions to their well-intentioned objections? Mr. Darnton makes no distinction between censorship for political reasons and censorship for pornographic improprieties—rightly, because the frontier between different kinds of obscenity shifts with changes of regime. Corruption, like persuasion, requires the assent of the reader or viewer. I do not want to re-engage in the fight I lost to my wife 40 years ago, but I still believe it is better to allow pornography than to empower prudes, and better to license excess than endorse censorship.
— Mr. Fernández-Armesto is a professor at Notre Dame and the author, most recently, of "Our America: A Hispanic History of the United States."
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