The Writer, the Critic, and the Censor: J.M. Coetzee and the Question of Literature

Seen against the background of the vast scholarly and polemical literature on censorship, J. M. Coetzee's Giving Offense (1996) stands out as an avowedly singular intervention. As Coetzee himself points out in the preface, the twelve essays that make up the volume, most of which originally appeared between 1988 and 1993, constitute neither a "history" nor a "strong theory" of censorship. Rather they represent an attempt, first, "to understand a passion with which I have no intuitive sympathy, the passion that plays itself out in acts of silencing and censoring," and second, "to understand, historically and sociologically, why it is that I have no sympathy with that passion."¹ These prefatory remarks prepare the way for a wide-ranging interdisciplinary study that is at once psychoanalytic, literary, historical, sociological, and autobiographical. They also make plain the antirationalist spirit of Coetzee's enquiry, which centers not so much on legislative history or the practice of censorship as on the passions revealed and concealed in writings for or against it. One of the most important essays, "Emerging from Censorship" (1993), seeks, for instance, to understand the curiously "contagious power" of the censor's "paranoia" (37). Why is it, Coetzee asks, that writers—and here he includes himself—so often "record the feeling of being touched and contaminated by the sickness of the state" (35)?

The antirationalist spirit of this question is as evident in the essays on specific censors and dissident writers as it is in some of Coetzee's own general arguments against censorship. "Censorship is not an occupation that attracts intelligent, subtle minds," he notes at one point, adding that it "puts power in the hands of persons with a judgmental, bureaucratic cast of mind that is bad for the cultural and even the spiritual life of the community" (viii, 10). Characteristically, given the focus of his enquiry, he bases his objection not on matters of principle but on judgments about the censors' quality of mind and the pernicious public effects of their authority. A similar logic underlies his analysis of the censors' more immediate impact on writers. What concerns him most in this case is the psychological damage censorship inflicts irrespective of whether or not a writer's works are banned, an effect he feels he can represent only in an arrestingly precarious series of gendered and highly sexualized figures. In ideal conditions, the "inner drama" of writing could, he suggests, be construed as a transaction between the writer and the "figure of the beloved," the internalized reader whom the writer "tries to please" but, as important, "surreptitiously to revise and re-create" as "the-one-who-will-be-pleased." "Imagine what will happen," he then asks, "if into this transaction is introduced in a massive and undeniable way 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 a parodic version of the figure-of-the-father." The logical consequence of this consciously Freudian chain of figures is inevitable. "Working under censorship is like being intimate with someone who does not love you, with whom you want no intimacy, but who presses himself in upon you. 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" (38).

Once again Coetzee conducts the argument not in terms of principle—he makes no appeal, say, to the language of rights—but through a "speculative" analysis of the censor's passion and the effects of his "contagious power" (37). He also argues from personal testimony. Though never banned, he did have the misfortune to begin his publishing career in the 1970s, one of the worst decades in the history of South African censorship under apartheid...