Prose
The Life of God (As Told by Himself)
Franco Ferrucci
Translated by Franco Ferrucci and Raymond Rosenthal
University of Chicago, $22
by Allison Stark Draper
The Europeans, steeped as they are in their rich and self-sufficient
cultural history, are fond proponents of the occasional essay in a way that
Americans are not. The occasional essay, broadly speaking, is one that takes
as its genesis a single conceit, an amusing internal idea of the author's,
and spins it into a miniature and fully formed world. It is an intelligent
and delicate game, primarily concerned with the marriage of erudition and
wit, and therefore of less interest to Americans, who tend to prefer characters
to ideas. A handful of writers have won American followings, at least in part,
with occasional essays, most notably Jorge Luis Borges, who was educated in
Europe and whose Labyrinths embodies perfectly the profundity in tiny focus
of the form; Julian Barnes, whose History of the World in Ten & a Half
Chapters has been much discussed in this country, if not bought in any significant
numbers; and recently Roberto Calasso, with The Marriage of Cadmus & Harmony.
Franco Ferrucci, an Italian who lives and works in the United States and teaches
at Rutgers University, has written an occasional novel that, promisingly for
the American audience, takes the development of a character as its premise;
it is constructed as the autobiography of God.
The Life of God (As Told by Himself) is a smart and charming
knitting of secular and ecclesiastic views of the world. God himself rises
out of chaos and brings into being, with a scientifically approved chronology,
the specificities of the universe as we know it. "The truth is that the
world began when it dawned on me that I was all alone and I tried to do something
about it. Everything that came later was a consequence of that moment: of
the great shudder that scattered the form within me throughout time and space,
a closed fist that finally opens, a seed that explodes and shoots out leaves
in every direction." He creates the sun, other stars, and a group of
planets, of which he much prefers the Earth. He settles on Earth and creates
life, marine and amphibious. When he grows tired of reptiles, wanting "life
to meditate upon itself so as to better comprehend itself," he shifts
from eggs to live birth and mammals are born. Eventually he finds in the monkey,
originally conceived as a jester, the blend of humor and melancholy that impels
him to the creation of the human soul. Creation is the direct but slightly
random result of God's desires. "I would have a notion of a tree-and
bang, there it was, roots and branches and leaves and trunk and bark, rooting
in the earth, with arms flung wide in the open air." He can mold his
creatures, and does a great deal of work on the brain, whose complexities
he loves-"working on the brain made me feel as if I were creating a minuscule
Earth all anew and from scratch. The world itself was enclosed in that fleshy,
gelatinous sphere"-but nothing, once created, whether with delight or
with regret, can be undone. "Once I created something, I could not destroy
it. The sun was up there forever, or until its own natural death. I could
not play around with the created world, and make and unmake as I pleased."
The character of God is likable-sweet, utterly human, and,
although clearly male, white, and Eurocentric, I believe intended to feel
essentially "neutral." God is a pacifist. He believes in peace and
love and common sense. But he is neither omnipotent nor omniscient. Most crucially,
he does not know more than we do; he is constantly learning from his own creations
and he cannot interfere with the real action of the narrative of the universe.
He is like a novelist who has limned a world that has taken on a life of its
own, growing, according to its own sure internal logic, into a density and
complexity beyond the author's view. God's world is inhabited by characters
whose relationships are independent of him, who know more than he about the
topics he initially assigned them, who have power over one another with which
he cannot interfere. He can get inside the world to try to influence or redirect
the action, but he cannot alter its established internal rhythm.
In the beginning of the world, God is alarmed by the predatory
nature of his creatures. Later, he is alarmed and disgusted by the sadism
and cruelty of human beings, and he is continually slow to understand them.
He is extremely mobile, capable of skimming through the cosmos and merging
with any one of his creations, from a quiet provincial exorcist to a lizard
torn to bits by little boys. But he cannot save Christ from crucifixion; he
cannot, in human incarnation, paint as well as Caravaggio; he nods a lot while
listening to Einstein, who assumes, erroneously, that God must naturally understand
the astronomical complexities of what he has wrought. Most of the Great Minds
with whom God interacts recognize him; some of them understand his true relationship
with the world, some of them ignore it, some of them reject it. Mozart is
predictably irreverent. Freud is particularly unpleasant. An unnamed painter
in Amsterdam paints God-who poses frequently, without being asked-"on
the pretext of painting himself." When God appears to Dante without concealment,
Dante sees him as he is: "father and son of my very own self, the fire
of intelligence that circulates through the cosmos and pours into human kind
in order to attain the form of thought and words. Through his mind flashed
the image of divine incarnation, the God who becomes man in order to be helped
rather than to help. It was too much for the pilgrim-poet. Dante's mind renounced
this final step."
The book is translated from the Italian by the author and Raymond
Rosenthal, and in an endnote we are told that "it often departs freely
from the Italian original and at points is better characterized as an adaptation."
Translation or adaptation, the prose is delightful; after a slightly precious
start, the writing is consistently witty and intelligent and periodically
hilarious. Ferrucci manages to blend sincerity and irreverence in all of his
descriptions. When God meets Teresa de Avila he tells us that she "had
adored me for some time in her fantastic and excessive way. . . she only wanted
to love me, and I was happy to have her do so. . . I recall her pleasure in
the swift rhythms of prayer, her eyes rolled back, her breath jagged, her
limbs gripped by ecstatic tremors. As I penetrated the folds of her soul,
a scent of incense swathed the nuptial couch and an ingenious carillon wrought
in gold beat out a sound of bells: the third, the sixth, the ninth."
The Life of God is a tight and tidy little history of certain
arbitrary world highlights. The "humanization" of God as fallible
and affable and buffeted by life is accomplished by the introduction of Darwinism
and the removal of divine special effects. God creates thunderstorms and he
adores them ("I am not talking about thunderstorms, which nobody likes
except me and a few other dramatically inclined souls, poets and lovers especially")
but he certainly cannot throw lightning bolts at erring individuals. He cannot
stop Moses from killing his lover as an adulteress; he is easily hoodwinked
by the Devil. This kindles, in the human reader, a sympathy for God the character,
this divinity in human form who lives serially among us, but also a certain
smugness that our world has grown so potently and intricately out of God's
control; that our human world is somehow larger than our God. Ironically,
the human world that Ferrucci
gives to us is not. Unlike his God, or the metaphoric novelist, Ferrucci has
not attempted to create something that lives beyond his sharply delineated
parameter.
The book's mission is to reconcile the chaotic progress of
human events with a higher but endearingly non-absolute power. It starts toward
this end buoyed by a deft usage of anachronistic simile; the dinosaurs are
"extremely conservative and not particularly bright-. . . like old aristocrats
in remote provincial towns, handing down to new generations both their idleness
and a disquieting physical resemblance." The constellation of Orion is,
early on, "a confused jumble of lights, like a chandelier shop."
Mixed among these adorable descriptions with alarming casualness are fairly
weighty and unscientific pronouncements attributed to this God who, though
no rocket scientist himself, is setting in motion the meaning beneath the
mystery of the natural world. After creating mammals, for instance, he informs
us that he "had chosen the females to carry the burden because they were
the more generous and patient gender." This is creepy not necessarily
because the opinion is inherently creepy, but because the entire path of God's
progress through human history is dictated by a similarly opinionated and
naturalized understanding of the world. It is worth noting that Emily Dickinson
is the only woman who figures among the Great Minds to whom we're introduced
and that almost all of them are white. God's favorite form seems to be music;
he spends much time silently inspiring musicians, all of them European, all
of them male, all of them white. He does spend a little time in "the
Orient," establishing a character contrast between East and West based,
for what it's worth, on the personalities of Buddha and Heraclitus.
The best way to read this book is as a slender, if erudite,
entertainment, and not to take personally that it is essentially a backconstruct
of God from the experiences and for the purposes of the white, male, heterosexual,
Christian (and probably Catholic) European. The occasional essay was never
intended as an analytic or prescriptive form; its topics are traditionally
slight, intriguing, and arbitrary, protected by the boundaries of their own
defining idiosyncrasies. The specious completeness of the subject matter of
The Life of God undermines its efficacy, and to some extent its charm. The
decision to characterize the higher power who has set us all in motion as
both sentient and chaotic, amiable and divine, is clever, compelling, and
eminently readable. But ultimately the book does less and more than we want.
It promises us the personality of God and it gives us a chronological set
of solutions to certain historical questions about his activities: Did Moses
really spend all that time with God? Why are Bach's symphonies so inarguably
divine? Did Einstein ever have anyone to talk to about his work? This is simultaneously
a very small and a very large idea; and while its whimsy protects it from
serious criticism-after all, the book only smilingly claims to be about everything
that ever happened-its limited scope prevents it from the serious exploration
for which the ingeniousness of the idea makes us hunger. n
Slowness
Milan Kundera
Harper Collins, $21
by Erik Rieselbach
Milan Kundera's most recent novel is the fourth in succession
with an abstraction as its title; like its predecessors, it's organized around
certain philosophical themes, explored alternately through the antics of its
characters and pages of essayistic analysis.
One theme here is given by the title: the contrast between
the modern world's headstrong craving for speed, which Kundera equates with
a rush toward forgetting, and the slowness of an earlier world, whose tempo
afforded the leisure to experience things in their full complexity. A second
theme involves those whom Kundera calls (rather unjustly) "dancers":
people who strut across the global public stage, celebrating themselves and
their morality in a series of flamboyant gestures of one-upmanship. Berck,
a French politician, is such a dancer. Upstaged when a political rival plants
a kiss on an AIDS patient, he hastily flies off to an Asian country to show
his support for its oppressed. (His haste undoes him, and he arrives, instead,
in some "tiresomely peaceful country.") Dancers are relentlessly
public people, and their insistence on making their challenges and proposals
in public forces their opponents to spring into action with an assent or risk
humiliation. Hence, there is no time to consider the matter, develop alternatives,
and counterproposals (here the two themes cross).
This talk of dancers is put into the mouth of Pontevin, a café
intellectual. A young entomologist, Vincent, is something of a devotee of
Pontevin's; his adoration of his mentor is mixed with a certain degree of
resentment, since Pontevin is invariably listened to with delight when he
speaks, while Vincent has to struggle to make himself heard. With typical
Kunderian irony, these mockers of "dancers" are themselves desperate
performers. The novel's main events take place at an entomologists' convention,
where Vincent picks up a lovely woman named Julie. Here he crosses paths with
Berck, who meanwhile has been tortured by the reappearance of a woman he'd
lusted after many years ago. This memory refuses to jibe with his carefully
crafted public persona, since she'd always humiliatingly rebuffed him (there's
that desire to forget again), and consequently he now loathes her. Having
seen him on television (of course), she begins writing him letters reminding
him of "their innocent love" and how he'd called her his "Immaculata,
sweet bird of night that troubles my dreams." Immaculata is herself a
television journalist, and when she encounters him at the convention, she
springs the cameras on him, forcing him to act magnanimous until he can get
her aside and whisper hatefully in her ear-much to her shock and dismay.
For Pontevin and Vincent, Berck is the dancer par excellence,
and so Vincent is hardly surprised to see him surrounded by cameras. Vincent
makes a dismissive speech along Pontevinian lines, only to be scornfully mocked
by an onlooker. In the public space of the hotel bar, Vincent has no time
to think before he responds. To assuage his wounded feelings, he drags Julie
off to the hotel's swimming pool with a desire to shock everyone by fucking
in public-meanwhile endlessly thinking of the great story he'll be able to
tell Pontevin. Julie assents, although Vincent can't get an erection-he's
performing, not really fucking-but when they are interrupted by a mournful
Immaculata, Julie rushes off and is lost to him forever.
By way of contrast, Kundera retells the story of Vivant Denon's
18th century novel Point de lendemain, which describes one long, slow night
of seduction and lovemaking between a young chevalier and an older woman.
The chevalier is ignorant of her motives in seducing him, and she causes the
tensions between them to build and relax symphonically over the course of
the long evening, thus "giving the small span of time accorded them the
semblance of a marvelous small architecture. . . for what is formless cannot
be grasped, or committed to memory. Conceiving their encounter as a form was
especially precious for them, since their night was to have no tomorrow and
could be repeated only through recollection."
The chevalier will embrace his past through memory; Berck wishes
to expunge his; Vincent will replace his with a story-a performance, a lie,
a kind of suicide. It's not hard to see where the author's sympathies lie.
Ah, if only Vincent had slowed down! He could have had a wonderful night with
the lovely Julie! Kundera has spilled much ink lately in protesting against
"messages" in novels, but this one has a rather obvious one, and
unfortunately it boils down, basically, to "Stop and smell the flowers."
The great pleasure of Kundera's previous novels is the way in which the contradictions
of the characters' mundane lives illuminate all sides of an issue: the respective
laughters of the angels and devils, for example, in The Book of Laughter and
Forgetting. This time around the analysis is all too one-sided. Only the unnamed
man who mocks Vincent gives brief voice to a counterargument:
We cannot choose the era we are born into. And we all of us
live under the gaze of the cameras. That is part of the human condition from
now on. . . . When we want to protest against anything, we can't make ourselves
heard without the cameras. . . . Either we're dancers or we're deserters.
You seem to regret, dear sir, that time marches on.
This is a reasonable response-though an unwelcome one-and developing
it further would have added some meat to the book.
Because they chiefly serve to underscore the author's points,
the novel's figures are rather thin. Vincent's inner justifications only emphasize
his shallowness. Berck and Immaculata have skeletal motivations at best. Julie
is a complete cipher. Only the minor figure of the Czech entomologist Cechoripsky
has the ironic richness one expects from Kundera: a figure neither admirable
nor scornful-or perhaps both admirable and scornful. A dissident by accident,
simply for not having the wherewithal to deny some real dissidents the use
of his facilities, Cechoripsky still has a certain rootedness that the others
lack, if for no other reason than that he knows who Jan Hus was and that Mickiewicz
was a Pole, not a Czech, as Berck proclaims grandiosely to the assembled cameras.
The scene in which Cechoripsky goes up to read his entomological paper is
the best thing in the novel.
Curiously, Kundera seems to have saved up all his unspent irony
for himself. Midway through the book, his wife, Véra, says to him:
You've often told me you wanted to write a novel someday with
not a single serious word in it. A Big Piece of Nonsense for Your Own Pleasure.
I'm frightened the time may have come. . . . Stop making jokes. No one will
understand you. You will offend everyone, and everyone will end up hating
you. . . . You know they're waiting for you, the wolves are.
No overt claim is made that this is that book, but one can't
escape the sense that he's carefully crafted himself an out for the most message-ridden
of his novels. Slowness is the first to be written in French instead of Czech
(he's lived in France for two decades now), and it feels a bit like an attempt
to graft old themes onto a new context. The Communist government of Czechoslovakia,
like that of the USSR, consciously obliterated the past by force, and by opposing
to this the laughter of the devils, Kundera was able to delineate a human
essence that went far outside the bounds of his homeland. Politicians were
comic figures, but with an edge: They could destroy your life. Intellectuals
were comic, but with an edge: They were trying to find a way to live freely
within oppression. Western politicians and intellectuals lack that edge: You
can take them or leave them. A Berck and a Vincent don't have the existential
gravity to hold together a novel; there's nothing at stake to balance their
shallowness.
What's disconcerting about Véra's speech is the idea
that anyone would be offended by this novel to the point of wanting to devour
its author (there are no Ayatollahs in France); far more likely is that they'll
simply dismiss it. And in some ways it's worse to be dismissed than hated;
after all, novelists are dancers too. n
Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music
Simon Frith
Harvard University Press, $27.95
by Ivan Kreilkamp
What do tastes in popular music reveal? What sorts of cultural
effects do value judgments about pop have? If such judgments are more than
just consumer choices-rock in aisles one and two, rap and r&b in three,
soundtracks and oldies in the back of the store-then what do they tell us
about ourselves?
These are the questions that preoccupy Simon Frith in Performing
Rites, a learned, wide-ranging, often brilliant investigation of pop music
aesthetics from a sociological perspective, and of pop music sociology from
an aesthetic perspective. Frith has written and edited some of the best-known
volumes of popular music criticism of the past 15 years-including Sound Effects:
Youth, Leisure, and the Politics of Rock and Roll and On Record: Rock, Pop,
and the Written Word. For many years a full-time rock reviewer for London's
Sunday Times and a columnist for The Village Voice, he is also a Berkeley
Ph.D., director of Scotland's Economic and Social Research Council's Media,
Economics and Culture program, and chair of the English department at the
University of Strathclyde. While the sight of tweedy professors slipping,
Clark Kent-like, into leather jackets to go to raves or rock clubs is less
rare than it once was in the United States, Frith's double life is in some
ways peculiarly British; he is a critic in the Birmingham-school tradition
of cultural materialism inaugurated by such figures as Richard Hoggart, Stuart
Hall, and Raymond Williams (who wrote a TV column in a popular magazine in
the late 1960's). And although Frith is no longer an active rock critic, this
book dissolves the normally firm boundary between applied criticism and academic
theorizing.
Performing Rites takes for granted that pop music deserves
to be taken seriously-but the book refuses to conform to either of two critical
traditions. The first, the Romantic aestheticist approach, values pop music
as a demotic art making up for what it lacks in complexity and gravity with
the spontaneous virtues of a folk culture. The second, sociological, tradition
explains music "entirely in terms of its social function, the organization
of taste." Frith faults the aesthetic approach for failing to consider
social context and the interpretive communities in which tastes develop, yet
the rock critic in him isn't entirely satisfied with a sociological analysis
either. It's hard to spend years writing record reviews, after all, if you
don't at some level want to convince the world that your tastes are more than
just the referent of your own social position, that they are the right tastes;
that's part of what caring about pop music means. So Performing Rites stages
a dialectical encounter between the two professional and philosophical positions
Frith has occupied, trying to arrive at a theory of pop music's value that
will do justice to both identities.
Frith believes that the meaning of popular music cannot be
separated from the value judgments that accompany its consumption and performance;
the common judgments people make about which songs or groups they like and
which they don't are integral to what pop music is, to what it means. In his
incisive opening chapter, "The Value Problem in Cultural Studies,"
Frith argues that academic study of popular culture has been vitiated by a
failure to understand the centrality of "making judgments and assessing
difference" in pop's consumption and production. Sifting through the
products of the 1990's boom in academic Madonna studies, Frith muses, "I
couldn't tell whether Madonna was a good singer (as well as a skilled media
operative); whether she was an engaging dancer (as well as a semiotic tease);
whether I'd actually want to play her records and videos as well as read about
them."
In his own criticism, then, he combines aesthetic and sociological
concerns. His discussion of the mixed meanings of American accents in British
pop and British accents in American pop, for example, yields a variety of
insights about the way voices "move between languages within a song."
A singer's adoption of a foreign accent might indicate envy of a superpower's
cultural riches, appropriation of an exotic subculture's energy, or ironic
allusion to a distant musical tradition; that much the sociology of pop tells
us. But analysis of a song needs to go further, to consider the aesthetic
yield of particular choices. How well, for example, does Madonna pull off
her lounge-singer act, her 1940's film star or 1980's material girl personae?
How do these different "languages" translate into a given performance-and
is it one you would want to hear more than once?
Sociologists have usually identified value in pop music with
social or class position. Traditionally, the academic critic's job, in examining
the meanings of, say, heavy metal in 1980's suburban New Jersey, or of mod
in 1960's Manchester, was to trace the links between the genre of music and
the social groups who identify themselves with it. Why a given person or group
favors The Who and hates the Small Faces, or loves Metallica and hates Megadeth,
isn't important; what matters is that these various tastes define membership
in subcultures. But, as Frith eloquently argues, this critical strategy underestimates
the degree to which listening to and evaluating music "is itself a social
process." "Music gives us a way of being in the world, a way of
making sense of it: musical response is, by its nature, an ethical agreement.
The critical issue, in other words, is not meaning and its interpretation-musical
experience as a kind of decoding-but experience and collusion: the 'aesthetic'
describes a kind of self-consciousness, a coming together of the sensual,
the emotional, and the social as performance." Thus, the preference of
certain kids for Metallica does not simply point backward to a pre-existing
subculture, but itself helps to create that culture. Loving Metallica doesn't
place someone in a stable social category; it actively shapes one's particular
experience of being in the world.
Frith claims throughout that discriminations in pop music,
exercises of taste, are important forms of "sociability": "Music,
we could say, provides us with an intensely subjective sense of being sociable.
. . . It both articulates and offers the immediate experience of collective
identity." With this argument, Frith allies himself with the ideas of
the American Marxist critic Fredric Jameson, who argues in The Political Unconscious
that we should read texts as at once constrained by the particular social
structures in which they are produced, and also reaching toward an imaginary
political/social utopia. Similarly, Frith suggests that even if the particular
choices we make about culture mark us out as occupying a necessarily limited
social sphere, that process of making distinctions may also open up a more
liberating experience of "being in the world" with others. The vaudeville
stage of the 19th century music hall has given way to the private, individualized
domestic interior of our bedroom stereo system; but even our most secluded
listening experiences, Frith insists, participate in a system of social meanings.
To hear a piece of music, and interpret it as music rather than noise, is
to participate in an interpretive community, a community shared with and shaped
by others.
The 13 chapters of Performing Rites develop a steady stream
of provocative ideas, explicating them in the widest context of scholarly
and journalistic explorations of popular culture. (Citations range from Adorno
to the fanzine Why Music Sucks; my favorite footnote is the one that begins,
"Most rappers would agree, I believe, with Henri Lefebvre. . .")
The book does have two limitations. It is rather less coherent than it sets
out to be. Certain chapters, while extremely interesting on their own terms,
are written as if they are independent essays and fail to advance the book's
central thesis. More problematic is Frith's reluctance to make judgments himself
in a book about the centrality of the exercise of taste in popular music;
he drops only tantalizing clues about his own preferences (he loves the Pet
Shop Boys and seems to dislike U2). Given its subject, Performing Rites gives
short shrift to precisely those concrete declarations of personal preference
that Frith so convincingly defends. And ultimately, he begs the fundamental
question of whether some tastes are better than others. He seems at times
to promote a musical pluralism even as he also argues that we define who we
are, and who we aren't, by liking some kinds of music, and despising other
kinds. Though he implies that there are such things as good taste and bad
taste, at least within specific contexts, he never directly addresses this
controversial point.
But this is an impressive and entertaining book, one that deserves
crossover
success among critics and listeners.
Resoundingly discrediting the old saw
that about tastes there is no disputing, he demonstrates how deeply the manner
in which we dispute our tastes is bound up with our identities and our communities.
n
Giving Offense: Essays on
Censorship
J.M. Coetzee
University of Chicago Press, $24.95
by Mark Sanders
Censorship comes virtually at the beginning of Dusklands, J.M.
Coetzee's first work of fiction. He imagines a writer (Eugene Dawn) imagining
a character (Coetzee), a censorious other-self whose judgment interferes with
the writing process, but for whom the writer nonetheless finds himself forced
to write:
Coetzee has asked me to revise my essay. It sticks in his craw:
he wants it blander, otherwise he wants it eliminated. He wants me out of
the way too, I can see it. I am steeling myself against this powerful, genial,
ordinary man, so utterly without vision. I fear him and despise his blindness.
I deserved better.
More than 20 years later, the essays in
Giving Offense address the dynamics
of censoring in Eastern Europe, South Africa, and England, as well as feminist
anti-pornography activism and apartheid. Coetzee again asks readers to consider
what the novelist knows about the paranoiac rivalry that accompanies censorship.
Coetzee's book is subtitled Essays on Censorship, but it attends
to the "censor" rather than to systems of "censorship,"
plotting the dynamics of contending desire more than it maps patterns of institutional
power. The essays can be read as relating the agon of two characters: the
censor and the writer. Their tale is told by a rational-skeptical intellectual,
who "does not particularly respect his own being-offended," and
who would prefer not to take sides in their rivalry.
Giving Offense is part of a larger project of claiming a position-or
rather "nonposition"-away from, and critical of, the scene of political
rivalry. Coetzee uses René Girard's account of mimetic desire to link
this project with the issue of censorship. According to Girard, human desire
is triadic: The desirer takes another's desire as a model, and imitates it.
What ensues is a dynamic of escalating rivalry over the desired object, in
which desirer and model become increasingly indistinguishable. Girard makes
it possible for Coetzee to read writer and censor as vying for the attentions
of a reading public, and helps him to "pass by two tired images of the
writer under censorship: the moral giant under attack from hordes of moral
pygmies and the helpless innocent persecuted by a mighty state apparatus."
Studies of individual writers form the core of Giving Offense.
The longest and most interesting deals with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and his
role in Cold War anti-censorship polemic. Coetzee shows how certain of Solzhenitsyn's
Western readers unwittingly "betray their champion" as a novelist
by pitting him against a crazed Stalin, in effect merely mirroring state diagnoses
of madness with Cold War counter-diagnoses. In so doing, the critics reduce
the two to indistinguishable warring twins, and indeed act out the very antagonistic
rivalry they stage between writer and censor. The Russian author's often rivalrous
self-presentation no doubt contributed to their misreading, but, according
to Coetzee, "The judgment on Stalin that emerges from Solzhenitsyn's
chapters [in The First Circle]. . . is above all moral and spiritual."
He links Solzhenitsyn's judgment of Stalin to novel-writing, asking:
Yet what is Solzhenitsyn doing. . . but, by a meticulous process
of
detail-by-detail admission of
Stalin. . . establishing both his own likeness to Stalin yet at a higher
level his difference from Stalin? (Is that not one of the essential functions
of character-creation: to define the self by defining what
the self is not but is no longer
afraid to entertain the possibility of being?)
In Solzhenitsyn's case, writing Stalin "is the painstaking,
healing rebuilding of the possibility of difference."
Reflecting on his own practice, the
novelist describes the phenomenon of censorship and self-censorship with an
intimacy that histories of legislation and institutions cannot match. The
art of the novelist depends, then, not on defeating the censor in a violent
show-down, but on learning to manage the figure of the censor-no less than
any other character, a part of the self.
A number of the essays in Giving Offense are South African
in focus, and reveal profound parallels between censorship in Eastern Europe
and the fraternal intimacy of apartheid-era censorship. Reading them, one
is led to speculate on the extent to which Coetzee's account of the censor
as figure-of-the-psyche is informed by the experience of Afrikaans writers;
especially Breyten Breytenbach, who, even in his non-prison writings, carried
on a "hidden contestatory dialogue" with "voices against which
[he] speaks."
The most intriguing of the South African essays is not on censorship
per se, but on apartheid theorist Geoffrey Cronjé. "Apartheid
Thinking" follows the obsessive metonymic association of Blacks with
disease in Cronjé's academic writings. Although identifying a degree
of self-censorship in Cronjé, Coetzee does not directly relate Cronjé's
"counterattack upon desire" to the activity of "the censor"-whose
business is, as Coetzee puts it, "track[ing] 'the undesirable.'"
This could nevertheless still be done: Giving Offense does not mention it,
but Geoffrey Cronjé chaired an official Commission of Enquiry in regard
to Undesirable Publications which tabled its findings and recommendations
in 1956.
Coetzee's application of the mimetic model of desire complicates
our understanding of censorship by showing how "follow[ing] the censor
as he tracks 'the undesirable'" is also a journey into the fictionalist's
unconscious. As one reads the essays, one wonders, however, whether the account
the book gives of writing under censorship could not apply to fiction-writing
in general, with or without the presence of an institutionalized censor. Meditating
on his own activity as a novelist in a country "Emerging from Censorship,"
Coetzee is led to suspect that his writing might be inflected by the self-censoring
paranoia described by Danilo Kis as "'reading your own text with the
eyes of another person. . . where you become your own judge stricter and more
suspicious than anyone else.'" This paranoid dynamic is, according to
Coetzee, "a contest with the censor . . all too likely to assume an importance
in the inner life of the writer that at the very least diverts him from his
proper occupation."
What is a writer's "proper occupation?" Giving Offense
does not explicitly say. On the one hand, writing could itself be described
as a "proper" occupation, being "a very private activity, so
private that it almost constitutes the definition of privacy: how I am with
myself." On the other hand, though, the creative writer addresses others:
"Insofar as writing is transactional, the figures for whom and to whom
it is done are also figures in the [unconscious]: for instance, the figure-of-the-beloved."
What is the difference, then, between the "censor-figure" and "the
figure-of-the-beloved," if both are figures for whom and to whom the
writer writes? Coetzee asks us to picture the following scenario:
Imagine, then, a project of writing that is, at heart, a transaction
with some such figure of the beloved, that tries to please her. . . and imagine
what will happen if into this transaction is introduced in a massive and undeniable
way another figure-of-the-reader, the dark-suited, bald-headed censor, with
his pursed lips and his red
pen and his irritability and his
censoriousness-the censor, in fact, as parodic version of the figure-
of-the-father. Then the entire
balance of the carefully con-
structed inner drama will be
destroyed. . . .
The censor is an intrusive
reader, a reader who forces his way into the intimacy of the writing transaction,
forces out the figure of the loved or courted reader, reads your words in
a disapproving and censorious fashion.
The censor usurps the beloved. Does
Coetzee mean that, were there no
institution of "censorship," there would be no unconscious censorship,
no un-
conscious censor-figure to interrupt a
writer's "carefully constructed inner
drama?"
Indeed, on the mimetic model,
dyadic desire is a nostalgic fiction, and
such interruption and rivalry cannot
be avoided. When one subject's desire
is coordinated through another's, can
the writer, writing for the beloved,
avoid also writing for the censor? Is
the censor-or at least the censorious
reader-not, therefore, a hidden ad-
dressee of all writing as Coetzee describes it, and not just that done "under
censorship?" Or, alternately, is there always
censorship?
Coetzee's essays provoke these
questions, and leave them open.
Teaching us that the institution of
censorship cannot reliably be reached through the censor, that the censor
may not always be its representative,
Giving Offense refuses the self-certainty
of protest writing on censorship.
Yet, as Coetzee's first novelistic
work and his thoughts on writing
unequivocally testify, no fiction (and,
one would think, not only fiction
in the narrow sense) can be written
while the censor is in the way. Between Eugene Dawn and the censorious
Coetzee of Dusklands, and "the carefully constructed inner drama"
designed to
get the censor out of the way, lie most
of J.M. Coetzee's novels. The new
essays, themselves the outcome of
scrupulous character-creation, invite us
to reread that fictional project for signs
of the censor, and of the writer's negotiations with him. 
