Censors At Work:  How States Shaped Literature, by Robert Darnton

There is a moment in this book where the author states that many of the functioned served by censors in unfree socities (like those discussed in the book) are served by book reviewers in free societies where market concerns rather than strict political concerns govern the availability of books.  Those who are familiar with problems with Amazon.com and other websites are no doubt aware of the way that book reviews can be very political, as I have found out over the course of my own reviewing.  Be that as it may, the book is fascinating in the way that it views censors as having far more than a merely negative result in writing, and also examines some of the ways in which censors viewed themselves and served a complex set of roles in different regimes that used them in order to aid the goals both of the production of desirable literature as well as the desire to discourage and suppress bad literature.  This is not an area I have read a lot about–although I have certainly been personally involved in affairs involving the censors of at least one country–but it was quite interesting to read this and to ponder the complex nature of criticism as it relates to writings.

This book is divided into three parts and takes up about 250 pages.  After a list of illustrations and a short introduction that discusses the author’s own studies of censors, the author begins by discussing the censorship of Bourbon France.  In this section the author contrasts the approaches of Bourbon censors that were repressive towards some literature, benignly tolerant of other literature that they could not endorse, but provided some literature with a privilege that was highly sought after by some writers, even to the point of helping writers improve their writing to the point where it could receive a privilege and what amounted to a positive blurb for the book by the censors themselves.  After that the author talks about censorship in British-ruled Bengal during the late 19th and early 20th centuries where again the desire to repress politically unacceptable literature was combined with an approach akin to writing book reviews of native literature as well as critiquing the sorts of plays and writings that were most popular among the local Bengali population.  Finally, the author discusses the censorship of Communist East Germany and even talks with a couple of censors who discussed the way that they sought to encourage writers to work for the glory of East Germany even as authors struggled with the problem of self-censorship.

It was pleasant but also somewhat disorienting to think of censors beyond the general negative view of their work.  Even if the author is hardly a fan of censorship, it is clear that in the interests of fairness that he also wishes the censors to show how they viewed themselves and their own work.  Of great interest is the way that censors sometimes participated in the writing and vetting of literature, and were sometimes even literary figures in their own right.  In one comical example an East German censor approved a work in which he had also served as an editor, which is nothing if not convenient.  Having lived in an area where censorship for matters of lese majeste was very common, there is a lot in this book that resonated with my own experience, in the way that censorship tends to provide a voice of self-censorship that the writer has to struggle against in order to be honest and authentic as a writer and avoid being compromised in the desire to avoid trouble for speaking obvious truths or worthwhile opinions or judgments.