The Censors

If ancient Sparta had ever produced an intellectual, which is not to suggest they haven’t, I’d place good money that such an intellectual would have walked, talked, and written a good bit like the famed South African novelist J.M. Coetzee.

Even bothering with adjectives seems futile when talking about an author who has written two Booker Prizes (1983, 1999) and a Nobel Laureate (2003) onto his shelves.  Or at least somewhere into his attic; Coetzee rarely speaks in public, and did not even collect his Bookers in person.  He keeps a firm schedule, rarely delivering his own speeches himself (relying on proxies to read them), and avoids personal indulgences like smoking, meat, alcohol, and who knows what else.  So it was something of a treat to hear him in person at the LBJ Library on campus this evening, and a favor from him to his alma mater.  Coetzee took a doctorate from the University of Texas at Austin in 1969 in languages and literature, his dissertation being done on the notebooks of Samuel Beckett.  Tom Staley, the director of the world [in]famous Harry Ransom Center where Beckett’s notebooks (and now Coetzee’s works) are housed, beamed as he introduced the novelist to us.

I’ve only read Disgrace (1999), but it remains one of the more haunting novels I’ve encountered.  In a certain sense it’s more violent that McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West, which has been once of my favorites since I read it over a year ago.  While McCarthy’s violence is frequent, Coetzee’s is scarring.  The violence in Disgrace happens for a handful of pages but marks every paragraph in the book, even those earlier parts of the novel that would seem unrelated.  Coetzee’s description of the violent actions in the book are so minute, so precise, so nuanced, that the whole plot revolves around a few well-written words.  And Coetzee’s writing is nothing if not well-written and nuanced.  He leaves no room for simple excuses from the reader on behalf of a character’s actions.  The ability to write so accurately over the course of an entire career is profound, but it has also been a source of frustration for me.  In Disgrace it seemed that there was nothing near a purely good moral action, since everyone was caught up in a tangled web of oppression and coercion.  But these moral dilemmas are compounded by Coetzee’s insistence that good actions must nevertheless be taken.  Most thinkers who examine the complexity of moral actions do so to claim license in spite of seemingly unsolvable ethical problems.  Coetzee’s stern and unflinching descriptions of these characters, and by extension his suggestions about his readers’ lives, seem to lack any kind of grace or charity.

So when I heard his speech today, I set his remarks against this backdrop of an exacting morality.  Coetzee’s speech, thankfully light on cheerleading for Austin and UT, focused on the issue of censorship.  After his graduation in 1969, Coetzee returned to South Africa and began his life as a fiction writer.  At the time, South Africa had a censorship policy oriented towards maintaining good morals and preventing Communist writings from being allowed into the country.  These twin goals (Coetzee termed them the utopian and realpolitik styles of censorship) aimed at supporting the white ruling structure at a time when, in the minds of South African whites, Western Europe was descending into moral chaos by enforcing racial equality.  As a result, novels had to be submitted to a government censorship board and “pass” their inspections before being shipped off to London for printing.

When Peter McDonald, author of The Literature Police, went through the records of these South African censors, he discovered files on three of Coetzee’s novels: In the Heart of the Country (1977), Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), and The Life and Times of Michael K (1983).  His colleague, Hermann Wittenberg, contacted Coetzee regarding the discovery, and within a week, the files on these novels were sitting on the laureate’s desk.  Coetzee was fascinated with the documents, which seemed to categorize him as an intellectual writer who would never have much of a popular following.  Of In the Heart of the Country, one censor wrote that the novel would be “read and enjoyed only be intellectuals,” since it was a “work of stature” beyond most people.  Waiting for the Barbarians was said to “[lack] popular appeal.”  Even if it did have a popular following, the depiction of interracial intercourse occurred “nowhere near South Africa.”  And regarding The Life and Times of Michael K, a censor wrote that it was a universal novel, and not to be understood as a particular depiction of South African problems.  And again, it was a novel for intellectuals.

These dismissals, for Coetzee, were humorous given his broad appeal and devoted readership.  But he became absorbed the by the censors themselves.  As it turned out, Coetzee knew many of these censors personally.  One was an author, and another was a friend of his father’s who had invited the family to a barbecue.  Still others were professors, novelists, and other literary intellectuals with whom he had some affiliation.  Coetzee’s stereotype of the censor as a nit-picking moralist or a crusading clergyman were destroyed.  Instead, literary types had adopted the role of the censor.  Writers had, with a great deal of moral seriousness, become the redactors.  But these redactors, these censor-writers, were playing a role in the English-speaking “republic of letters” as well.

These censors functioned not only as guardians for the popular moral imagination; they worked to protect writers as well.  While keeping out trash literature, they permitted good works to pass in spite of their serious critiques of South Africa.  One could hardly imagine Coetzee’s work to be bland or neutral on problems in South Africa, or his work ignorable, but nevertheless it went into circulation.  In this way, suggests Coetzee, they acted as wardens of literature and worked to promote a vibrant South African literary culture.  And if professors and authors, in short, those would could discern a novel’s quality, failed to take up the job, however unfortunate it might have been, someone less qualified would have kept important works from publication.

Coetzee anticipates that scholars will find this true of most instances of censorship in history, and went as far in suggesting that Tsar Nicholas I, a figure notorious who sought to keep decadent Western works out of nineteenth century Russia, should serve as a kind of patron saint of censors.  Nicholas I, who established a government apparatus for censorship, chose to personally “censor” the works of Alexander Pushkin, which is to say he did not censor them at all.  Nicholas I realized how important Pushkin’s work was and acknowledged that it was of such stature that it required publication.  So if we’re to accurately write the history of censorship, we must give a fair shake to the censor as an historical actor, and not merely the ground level enforcer of anti-liberal policies.

And that’s what you can expect a speech from a Nobel Laureate to cover.  I don’t know how to describe the state in which I left the speech, but I do remember thinking that two or three graduate students just found their dissertation topics.

But I also realized my imagination of Coetzee as a harsh and unrelenting judge was a bad one.  Instead of seeing Coetzee that way, it’s clear the austere morality he demands of others and himself is a morality developed in small but highly significant actions.  And these small steps, like a censor choosing to overlook that objectionable content on page 117 that would fail the book, contribute to the larger moral development of us all.  Through the work and intentional negligence of these censors, Coetzee’s bibliography has heightened the moral and ethical sense of innumerable readers.  And after that speech, I can’t wait to heighten my own moral sense this summer.  Coetzee went from a potential summer reading list entry to a priority.  With a bullet.

• Coetzee