{"id":154,"date":"2016-07-03T21:12:55","date_gmt":"2016-07-03T21:12:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/?p=154"},"modified":"2022-06-27T12:35:58","modified_gmt":"2022-06-27T16:35:58","slug":"robert-darnton-censors-at-work-how-states-shaped-literature","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/2016\/07\/03\/robert-darnton-censors-at-work-how-states-shaped-literature\/","title":{"rendered":"Robert Darnton. Censors at Work: How States Shaped Literature"},"content":{"rendered":"

Robert Darnton. Censors at Work: How States Shaped Literature<\/em>. London: The British Library, 2014. The Panizzi Lectures <\/em>2013. 316 p., ill. ISBN 9780712357616. \u00a325.00 (hardcover).<\/p>\n

This excellent book represents a peak in Robert Darnton\u2019s long-term research and should indeed become compulsory reading for all those interested in censorship and, more generally, mechanisms of control in the age of print. Darnton takes the reader on an exciting voyage through censorship as exerted by three authoritarian systems in three different centuries: eighteenth-century France, the British Raj, and Communist East Germany. Instead of starting from definitions, he provides subtle \u201cethnographic\u201d insights into day-to-day censorial practices. By offering \u201ca \u2018thick description\u2019 of how censorship actually operated\u201d (19), he argues that the understanding of this phenomenon has to overcome not only the Manichean view of a writer struggling against a wicked censor but also the idea that anything that hinders communication can be labeled censorship.<\/p>\n

First of all, censors cannot simply be discarded as \u201cwatchdogs.\u201d Underpaid or not paid at all, the censors in Bourbon France were mostly prominent intellectuals\u2014sometimes working hard to improve the texts submitted and to defend the \u201chonor of French literature,\u201d as one of Malesherbes\u2019s men once put it. Even though they did defend the rulers and the clergy, \u201ccensorship was not simply a matter of purging heresies\u201d (29). Notably, it was not so much the ideas that censors deemed dangerous, but the risk of offending the potentates of the Ancien R\u00e9gime. However, the censors granting royal privileges (or tacit permissions) only represent one half of the story; the other half\u2014narrated in this case with a masterful literary touch\u2014is about the harsh police repression of the extensive corpus of illegal, \u201cclandestine\u201d books that were circulating under the cloak.<\/p>\n

British rulers in India resorted to violence as well. In theory, they were granting the subjects of the Raj freedom of expression. In practice, however, \u201cthe disparity between preaching liberalism and practicing imperialism\u201d (124) became overtly manifest when the colonial rulers felt increasingly threatened after 1900. British surveillance of the vernacular book production, initiated in the mid-century, was replaced by punishment. Courtrooms became hermeneutic battlefields and jails were filled with arrested writers, tried for sedition\u2014a legal notion vaguely defined as exciting feelings of \u201cdisaffection\u201d to the authorities. The rulers simply \u201ccould not allow the Indians to use words as freely as Englishmen did at home\u201d (142).<\/p>\n

Using brutal force was seldom necessary in totalitarian regimes. In East Germany, the Party control was so omnipresent that the major work\u2014the thorough self-censoring\u2014was already done by the authors. The rest was achieved by central \u201cplanning\u201d of the annual book production, a process that involved negotiations among authors, editors, officially non-existent censors (part of the governmental structure) and high officials of the Communist Party. But even in such cases, warns Darnton, \u201cit would be misleading to characterize censorship simply as a contest between creation and oppression\u201d (234).<\/p>\n

Although censorship in the three analyzed systems took quite diverse shapes and nuances, a common feature was its profound connection to the power structures. For Darnton, censorship is essentially bound to the state, to its monopoly of power and its ability to sanction. Moreover, it is precisely such a political understanding of censorship that prevents the object of research from dissolving as merely one of the many possible constraints in communication. Although Darnton refrains from conjecturing on more recent manifestations of censorship, his thorough insights into the ways in which policy makers have thought about it in the past might prove inspiring for a reflection on its manifestation in the present times. All the more so since today the state\u2014and this is how the author closes this seminal book\u2014\u201cmay be watching every move we make\u201d (243).<\/p>\n

Marijan Dovi\u0107<\/p>\n

ZRC SAZU Institute of Slovenian Literature and Literary Studies<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Robert Darnton. Censors at Work: How States Shaped Literature. London: The British Library, 2014. The Panizzi Lectures 2013. 316 p., ill. ISBN 9780712357616. \u00a325.00 (hardcover). This excellent book represents a peak in Robert Darnton\u2019s long-term research and should indeed become compulsory reading for all those interested in censorship and, more generally, mechanisms of control in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1888],"tags":[1912,1930],"class_list":["post-154","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-review","tag-censorship","tag-europe"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=154"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":593,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154\/revisions\/593"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=154"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=154"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=154"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}