Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship (review)

Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee's 1996 collection of essays, Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship, is about writers who "give offense" and the readers who muffle, torture, and kill them as a result. A collection that should be of great interest not only to Africanists but also to scholars of other regions where censorship has marred free expression, Giving Offense closely examines the works of South African writers such as Breyten Breytenbach and André Brink but also analyzes the psychology behind South African censorship policies under apartheid and how these codes and measurements affected South African writing and reading practices. Coetzee populates the embattled history of authorship with a wide spectrum of subjects and places—South Africa, the Soviet Union, the Western canon as represented by D. H. Lawrence, and the U.S. debate on feminism and pornography, among others—and unsentimental portrayals of those who have occupied a place in its history. The space that writers such as Osip Mandelstam, Brink, and Breytenbach come to inhabit is not a rarified, transcendent pantheon. Rather than set aside authors as a privileged class that courageously writes against tyranny, Coetzee's critique measures the degree to which censorship marks these writers and their work. This "twinship" (118) of writers and censors disfigures what Coetzee calls the "Oedipal" narrative (118–19) that elevates authors above their censors and the tyrannies that house them; he re-presents their work as made as much within, as against, state-sponsored censorship.

Across this volume, Coetzee explores the ironic and discursive relation between author-worship and author-oppression as coupled and materially bound ironies of history. Two authors figure most prominently in this analysis: the South African Afrikaner fascist writer Geoffrey Cronjé and the Russian Nobel Prize winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. In his "Apartheid Thinking," Coetzee explores what he calls Cronjé's "madness" and demonstrates how the fate of this writer came to reflect the fate of his beloved, doomed, and "mad" apartheid regime. For Coetzee, madness is best defined as "self-alienation"—when the representation on which one depends for self-definition begins to break down from within. The carrying together of both of these conceptual structures—the stability of a transcendent conceptual apparatus and the concomitant erosion of it—constitutes the authorial self-alienation Coetzee diagnoses in the psychological makeup of the subjects of this book. Mirroring the "rise and fall" of apartheid, Cronjé's work comes to reflect the degree to which the myth of ethnicity materially maintains the regime. When Cronjé's fanatical attachment to theories of race become embarrassing to a regime that began to "modernize" itself in the eyes of the world, Cronjé's work becomes more deliberately Afrikaner—and more and more alienating to Afrikaner power structures and audiences. The Oedipal relation, which has its center in the father-center signifier of apartheid theories of race and ethnicity, begins to deconstruct at the very point when, dialectically, the periphery of authorial signifiers becomes exposed for all to see. As a consequence, writerly representation, in whatever way it exemplifies fascist ideology, always exposes the ideology, and therein opens it to potentially embarrassing historical and political critique. Readers conveniently discard Cronjé's work once the very theory that sustains the state, the reader, and the author becomes too exposed by the very writers, like Cronjé, they once celebrated, making Cronjé into a pathetic spectacle clamoring for the readers he once possessed.

One of the ironies of history best explored by Coetzee in this book is that celebrated authors of liberal revolutions, such as Solzhenitsyn, have a similarly fateful relationship to their audiences as did Cronjé. Unlike Cronjé, Solzhenitsyn's work should signal the celebratory aspects of the Oedipal relationship of author to state. However, Coetzee's examination is quick to point out that ignoring the twinship of Solzhenitsyn and the state he condemns is to misread whole aspects of the author, the state, and the work—and to reconstruct all three into political-legal abstractions, most strongly seen in the "myth" of political-juridical...