Suspense through Censorship: On the Phenomenology of a Motif in Contemporary Fiction in East and...

© Beate Müller, Newcastle University – this paper is not for dissemination or publication

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Suspense through Censorship On the Phenomenology of a Motif in Contemporary Fiction in East and West

Beate Müller

Introduction

When talking about censorship, we usually associate with this term the censorship of

something, say a literary text. This paper, by contrast, will investigate the other side of

the coin, namely the motif of censorship in literary texts, or, to be more precise, in

post-1945 fiction. I'm interested in looking at the ways in which authors depict and use

censorship as a theme in their texts. Rather than looking at the censorship of literature,

I shall concentrate on the literature of censorship. I would like to put forward three

hypotheses:

1. In the texts I am going to talk about today, censorship has been functionalized for

the aesthetic discourse: it is a motive force of action, at times a catalyst of events,

and certainly a good means of creating suspense. Thus, the censorship motif can be

said to play a key role in those texts.

2. Literary texts written by authors who lived or live in democratic societies employ

the censorship motif differently from those texts which were written by authors

from non-democratic political backgrounds. (In the title, I've used the words 'west'

and 'east' as metaphors for these different political systems.) These differences are

ultimately connected with the diverging conceptions of the role of writers and

literature in 'eastern' and 'western' societies.

3. Censorship is such a popular motif in contemporary fiction because it allows writers

to explore issues of authorship, literature, and the reading culture which go beyond

the plots they narrate in their books.

Censorship Concept

Since the theory of censorship isn't the main focus of this paper, allow me to just

briefly sketch the understanding of censorship which informs my argument.

In recent scholarship, there have been attempts to widen the concept of

censorship beyond its traditional confines of pre- and post-publication censorship.


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Scholars who have become associated with the so-called 'new censorship' as

omnipresent because of censorship's alleged formative impact. Thus, Pierre Bourdieu

and Stanley Fish argue that the structure of a discursive field imposes and implies

censorship because it controls what can be said when by whom to whom and how. So

it would be inappropriate for me to tell you about my last holiday or shopping spree

here, rather than deliver something which has to do with German Studies, because if I

didn't inscribe myself into an academic discourse, I would fail to conform to the norms

of acceptable modes of speaking in an academic context. That's of course true, but I

don't think that those phenomena, although they effectively represent speech

regulation, should be described in terms of censorship because once a concept has

become all-encompassing, it ceases to be workable. For example, we could no longer

argue that a mother who, on a bus ride, tells her child to shut up doesn't exert

censorship, whereas an employee of the GDR's licensing branch of the Ministry of

Culture did.

Why would that be a bad thing? It would be misleading because censorship

involves intended (and thwarted) publicity. A writer wants to get his/her text published

for public reception and dissemination, and it is that text's entry or non-entry into the

public sphere which is controlled by the censor, as well as the public's access to the

text in question. The criteria governing this control are ideological ones. The censor

acts as the representative of an (identifiable, public, hierarchically structured)

organization such as the state, the church, or a publisher, which is why censorship is

always an institutionalized form of regulation. So if a three-year-old asks his/her

mother on the bus why that woman over there has such a fat bum, and is consequently

shut up by the mother, is not a victim of censorship because: a) the utterance wasn't

intended for the public but for the mother only (private context intended but failed),

and b) the mother isn't a representative of any organized body. And a publisher who

rejects a volume of poetry because s/he had rather churn out trashy detective novels

doesn't censor because the rejection is commercially motivated, not ideologically.

In the books I want to talk about today, it is censorship through authorities of

texts intended for public reception, which informs the novels and is used to create

suspense.


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Suspense

The creation of any suspense is dependent on open questions which are significant for

the further development of the plot. One can distinguish between two basic types of

suspense: a) analytical suspense, and b) conflict-based suspense. Analytical suspense

is created when a mystery (or enigma, Barthes) which occurred in the past is being

investigated and finally solved; the classic example is the detective novel with its

central Whodunit-question. Conflict-based suspense results from a conflict between

antagonists, which often culminates in a showdown. Of course, both types can be

combined with each other.

Wenzel, Vorderer et al., Pfister, Barthes, Dietrich Weber, Koch.

The Aesthetics of Censorship

In order to illustrate what I mean by my hypothesis of a "functionalization of

censorship for the aesthetic discourse", I would like to focus briefly on three novels

written in democratic contexts: Christoph Ransmayr's Die letzte Welt [The Last World]

(1988), Umberto Eco's Il nome della rosa [The Name of the Rose] (1980), and Ray

Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 (1953). What these books have in common is that their

depiction of censorship is a key element of the plot and an important source of

suspense.

[other obvious examples would be Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four (1949), Robert Harris's Fatherland

(1992), or Antonio Tabucci's Erklärt Pereira (1994)]

Ransmayr's book is set in Tomi on the Black Sea (in today's Romania), nine years after

Ovid's banishment from Rome by emperor Augustus. Cotta arrives in town in order to

search for his friend Ovid, who vanished while being exiled there, together with the

manuscript of the Metamorphoses. Despite all his efforts, Cotta does not find the poet,

and of his work he finds only fragments. But Ovid's work seems to have come alive in

Tomi: the events that take place and the actions of Tomi's inhabitants mirror those of

the Metamorphoses. Cotta's journey to Tomi is motivated by censorial events which


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precede the time of the narrative, namely Ovid's banishment and the burning of his

papers. In a conversation with Pythagoras, Ovid's former servant, Cotta reflects on

Ovid's desperate step:

Gewiß, das Feuer an der Piazza del Moro hatte nur Nasos Handschriften verzehrt. Was von

seinen Elegien und Erzählungen veröffentlicht, gefeiert und angefeindet worden war, lag damals

längst geborgen in den Depots der Staatsbibliotheken, in den Häusern seines Publikums und in

den Archiven der Zensur. In einem noch am Tag seines Erscheinens beschlagnahmten

Zeitungskommentar aus Padua hieß es sogar, Naso habe dieses Feuer nur entfacht, um ein Fanal

zu setzen gegen das Verbot seiner Bücher und seine Vertreibung aus der römischen Welt.

(Ransmayr 1995, p. 19f)

It is true that Ovid burnt his papers himself, but it is clear that this was a reaction to his

banishment. The quoted passage paints the picture of a heavily controlled public

sphere where censorship was rife. Why Ovid was banned does not become entirely

clear in the novel, but both his literary works and his political behaviour seem to have

played a role in his fall from grace. Thus, Ovid is portrayed as a "dissident exiled by a

tyrant" (Christensen 1992, p. 140), and this antagonism between the emperor and the

unruly poet is used to create suspense, as are the speculations on what was behind the

ban. These initial mysteries - why was Ovid banished, why did he burn his papers,

what happened to him in exile? - lead to further open questions in the book: will Cotta

find the manuscript and its author? These mysteries revolve around censorship and

serve the creation of suspense and the plot formation in general.

In Eco's The Name of the Rose, the fate of men and books are intertwined too. The

novel is set in an abbey in northwest Italy, the time of action is November 1327. The

Franciscan William of Baskerville and his young scribe and disciple Adso of Melk are

investigating a series of murders. William finds out that all the deceased had illicitly

laid their hands on a forbidden book, the existence of which had been kept a secret: the

second book of Aristotle's Poetics. Eventually, it becomes clear that the old monk

Jorge, who effectively controls the abbey's library, had poisoned the pages of the book,

and had thus brought about the death of his fellow brethren. That the series of murders

should have something to do with a mysterious book becomes evident very early on.


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For every monk who dies handled that book shortly before his death. As the book soon

vanishes, William is now looking not only for the murderer but also for said book. His

search is impeded by the fact that he is not given free access to the library, that

"labyrinth of the books" (p. 37):

The abbot rose, almost starting, with a very tense face. "You can move freely through the whole

abbey, as I have said. But not, to be sure, on the top floor of the Aedificium, the library. [...] The

library was laid out on a plan which has remained obscure to all over the centuries, and which

none of the monks is called upon to know. Only the librarian has received the secret, from the

librarian who preceded him, and he communicates it, while still alive, to the assistant librarian,

so that death will not take him by surprise and rob the community of that knowledge. And the

secret seals the lips of both men. Only the librarian has, in addition to that knowledge, the right

to move through the labyrinth of the books. [...] Only he decides how, when, and whether to

give it [ie a book] to the monk who requests it; sometimes he first consults me. Because not all

truths are for all ears, not all falsehoods can be recognized as such by a pious soul. [...] The

library defends itself, immeasurable as the truth it houses, deceitful as the falsehood it preserves.

A spiritual labyrinth, it is also a terrestrial labyrinth. You might enter and you might not emerge.

And having said this, I would like you to conform to the rules of the abbey." (pp. 35 and 37f)

This policy of restricted access to the library is defended, by the abbot and other

figures of authority such as Jorge, on the grounds that impressionable monks have to

be protected from the potentially corrupting influence of "books of falsehood" (p. 38)

which are kept in the library. What is dressed up as a pedagogical and moral argument

is but a thinly veiled attempt to prevent the reception and dissemination of 'subversive'

ideas which could endanger the mono-logical hierarchy of the monastery, and the

monopoly on knowledge of its powerholders. The microcosmic world of the abbey is

rife with arguments about books, access to them, and ways of interpreting them. These

issues transcend the abbey, belonging, as they do, to the central theme of what Theresa

Coletti has called the "competing views of language and meaning" in a novel which

allegorizes "a debate between interpretive positions" (1988, p. 173f). One of the topics

at stake here is censorship, as Coletti points out: "The novel is about censorship, not

just of Aristotle's lost book, but of a theory of language and interpretation. William's

final words in the novel indirectly - and fittingly - address the subject of censorship:


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what is it possible and permissible to communicate?" (p. 197). These abstract

discourses are made concrete by processes of visualization and emplotment. Thus,

William's and Adson's secret investigations of the library and their gradual unveiling

of its mysteries are voyages of discovery of the medieval world, as well as reading

tours ("Entdeckungsreisen durch die mittelalterliche Welt", "Lesereisen", Suerbaum

1984, p. 209). The demystification of the library and the logical deductions which

enable William to identify the decisive book without ever having seen it, as well as the

fact that the book disappears more or less under William's eyes a couple of times, are

used to create suspense in ways which are familiar from detective fiction. Questions

about the construction of the library are worded, reactions to its mysteries are

described, the reader is led astray - above all by the erroneous assumption that the

murders are connected to the Apocalypse -, William's failures retard the solution, and

in the end, this solution of all the mysteries is connected with a showdown-like

confrontation between William and Jorge, the blind murderer, which leads to the death

of the old monk and the destruction of the library.

While in Eco's novel, it is the censorship of one particular book which leads to the

death of its unruly readers, in Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 the possession of any book is

a death warrant. The novel is set somewhere in the US, at some unspecified time in the

future. In this society, it is the job of the fire brigade to destroy all the books they can

lay their hands on. If anyone is found out to possess any books, their lives are

forfeited, and their houses are burnt, together with the books. This strict censorship of

"a million forbidden books" (p. 41) is motivated by a policy to brainwash the

population and to extinguish any critical thought, allegedly in order to ensure

omnipresent everlasting happiness. Thus, the firemen are described as "custodians of

our peace" and as the "official censors, judges, and executors", as the fireman Beatty

explains to his subordinate Guy Montag:

The important thing for you to remember, Montag, is we're the Happiness Boys, the Dixie Duo,

you and I and the others. We stand against the small tide of those who want to make everyone

unhappy with conflicting theory and thought. We have our fingers in the dyke. Hold steady.

Don't let the torrent of melancholy and drear philosophy drown our world. (p. 68f)


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But Montag becomes intrigued by books, and secretly starts to collect and read them.

Feeling increasingly alienated from his wife, his job, and society at large, Montag

sides with bookish outsiders he gets to know - marginalized individuals who seem to

be deplorably ill-equipped to stand up against the technologically superior repressive

authorities. When Montag is betrayed, the firebrigade are called out to his own house.

In the ensuing confrontation between Beatty and Montag, Montag kills Beatty and

narrowly escapes his pursuers. Again, as in The Name of the Rose, we witness a

gripping showdown between two men whose conflicting values are illustrated in their

opposing views on censorship. In a no man's land outside the big city, Montag joins a

group of book-loving dissidents who learn books by heart to preserve them for

posterity.

If one considers the settings of these three novels, it becomes evident that they are set

in remote worlds: Ransmayr tells a story which takes place in a remote corner of the

ancient Roman empire, Eco goes for the Middle Ages, and Bradbury depicts an anti-

utopian (American) future. This is significant because all three authors lived in

Western democracies when they wrote their books, ie in political contexts in which

there is less intense censorship than in countries under totalitarian or authoritarian rule.

It follows that for these writers, the topic of censorship can be exploited for literary

purposes only if it is imagined in remote times and places. I would like to argue that

this is the case because these authors lack the personal experience of a society which is

characterized by intense censorship. Therefore, these authors either turn to historical

contexts in which there was censorship, or they invent future settings in which there

could be censorship.

There are (at least) two obvious objections to this hypothesis. Firstly, one could argue

that my choice of texts was governed solely by the question of whether or not

censorship featured as a topic in a given novel so that the texts I chose simply are not

representative of postwar fiction and that their censorship theme constitutes a mere

coincidence, not a pattern. Secondly, one could point out that the censorship motif


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might not primarily be related to an author's personal experience but could rather be

the result of the author's choice of genre: historical novel or dystopia. For it is hardly

surprising, one might say, that in texts with premodern or anti-utopian settings

censorship should feature, alongside other forms of repression. However, I think this

would mean putting the cart in front of the horse - given that censorship plays a central

role in the novels chosen, it cannot be a coincidence that their authors chose remote

settings for its depiction.

Moreover, if one compares these three novels with contemporary fiction on censorship

written in non-democratic political contexts, one realizes that in the latter books, the

censorship motif is very differently situated. While writers from democratic political

backgrounds go for remote settings, writers from non-democratic societies turn to their

own present. When they depict past events, these are relatively recent and lead up to

the present, and when they narrate phantastic incidents, these are related to the present.

It is the here and now of the writers in question which is illustrated.

Let me demonstrate this by analyzing three novels written by authors who are from

East European countries: the Russian Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita

(1967), Jurek Becker's Irreführung der Behörden (1973), and Günter de Bruyn's

Märkische Forschungen (1978); both Becker and de Bruyn lived in the GDR when

they wrote these books.

[other examples: Johnson, Das dritte Buch über Achim (1961); Imre Kertész, Fiasko (1988); Wolf,

Was bleibt (1990)]

Bulgakov's novel must be the most famous Russian novel of the 20th century to depict

censorship. This book, set in 1930s Moscow, features two main plots: one revolves

around the city falling victim to a visitation by the devil and his entourage who bring

about chaos, and the other plot is that of the Master, his book, and his lover Margarita.

In both narrative strands, issues of literature, censorship, and the devil are intertwined.

In the opening chapter, the poet Besdomny is criticized by Berlioz, the editor of a

literary journal and president of Moscow's writers' union MASSOLIT, because Berlioz

does not much like Besdomny's anti-religious poem he had commissioned. The devil


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appears, joins in the discussion and denies that Christ never existed. On the contrary,

he says, he himself had been present at the second interrogation of Jesus by Pilate. His

description of this historic encounter fits in well with the reinterpretation of the trial

and death of Christ by the Master in his novel about Pilate. This novel cannot be

published; the Master remembers the editor's reaction to his manuscript:

Oh yes, he read it. He looked at me as if I had a swollen face, avoided my eyes and even giggled

with embarrassment. He had smudged and creased the typescript quite unnecessarily. He asked

me questions which I thought were insane. He said nothing about the substance of the novel but

asked me who I was and where I came from, had I been writing for long, why had nothing been

heard of me before and finally asked what struck me as the most idiotic question of all - who

had given me the idea of writing a novel on such a curious subject? Eventually I lost patience

with him and asked him straight out whether he was going to print my novel or not. This

embarrassed him. He began mumbling something, then announced that he personally was not

competent to decide and that the other members of the editorial board would have to study the

book [...]. He asked me to come back a fortnight later. I did so and was received by a girl who

had developed a permanent squint from having to tell so many lies. [...] Trying not to look at

me, the girl informed me that the editors had enough material for two years ahead and therefore

the question of printing my novel became, as she put it, 'redundant'. (p. 165f)

When a short excerpt is printed in a magazine, a major press campaign against the

hapless author ensues. He loses his mind, burns his manuscript, and is hospitalized in a

mental asylum. The devil frees him and reunites him with Margarita before ending

their worldly existence and transferring them to a "home for eternity", an "everlasting

home" (p. 431) where they are supposed to find freedom and peace of mind. Although

the Master was convinced that he knew his book by heart and could recreate it (p.

418), he now loses his memory - and thus, by implication, the novel is lost too ("the

master's memory, his accursed, needling memory, began to fade", p. 431). The world,

we may conclude, is no place for an unruly author whose work refutes canonical grand

narratives - a novel which denies Christ's resurrection still implicitly acknowledges

Christ as a historical figure, and in Stalinist Russia, both the author and his text go to

hell.


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Jurek Becker's Irreführung der Behörden (1973) depicts the career of Gregor Bienek, a

fictitious GDR writer. The first part of the novel is about the young Bienek's vain

attempts to find a publisher for his literary projects. His stories are rejected because

they can be read as parables of the GDR's shortcomings. For example, he tells an

editor about his plans for a story about a man whose dentist realizes that his patient's

teeth consist of a precious material hitherto unknown to scientists. Even small

quantities would be invaluable for research purposes and technological progress. The

man is persuaded to have his teeth pulled, and thus loses one tooth after the other until

he becomes a "zahnloses Männlein". Of course, the editor understands the symbolic

message:

"Die Wunderzähne im Mund Ihres Helden symbolisieren Rechte, eins nach dem anderen wird

ihm gezogen. Rechte im Allgemeinen gibt es nicht, es gibt nur Rechte im Besonderen. Welche

meinen Sie?" [...] Ich sage etwas von Meinungsäußerung, Information, Kritik, ich merke selbst,

daß es en bißchen nach Rias-Kommentar klingt, und fühle mich nicht wohl dabei, die Frau hört

nicht auf zu lächeln. [...] "Für meinen Geschmack hat Ihr Mann zu viele Zähne," sagt sie. "Aber

das ist Ihre Sache. Richtig ist, daß wir an kritikwürdigen Zuständen keinen Mangel leiden, doch

hüten Sie sich vor bequemen Pauschalurteilen. Vergessen Sie nicht, daß alle Leute, die bei uns

den Sozialismus machen, dies zum erstenmal tun, ohne eine einzige Ausnahme. Ich habe in

letzter Zeit so viel über freie Meinungsäußerung diskutiert, daß es mir schon zum Halse

heraushängt. Ich kann Ihnen nur sagen, ich finde es völlig in Ordnung, daß beispielsweise mein

Verlag nicht das druckt, was sich am besten verkaufen läßt, sondern das, wovon er glaubt, es

könnte die Leser verändern. Es steht Ihnen völlig frei, jede Geschichte zu schreiben, die Sie

schreiben wollen. Und uns steht es frei, sie zu drucken oder nicht." (p. 40)

Bienek sells out. He adapts to the aesthetic, thematic, and political preferences of those

who make the decisions in the publishing world and the film industry. Consequently,

he becomes a successful author and scriptwriter. But he becomes increasingly

depressed for having compromised his creative integrity and leading the life of a

hypocrite. In this novel, there is a parallel between the unfolding of the censorship

motif and the development of suspense. Censorship as an external, institutional force is

gradually replaced by self-censorship. And while suspense initially results from

conflicts between Bienek and various administrators of culture, the narrated conflicts


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later revolve more and more around Bienek's problems with himself (and his wife),

because Bienek has effectively stopped resisting political pressure. Thus, suspense

arises from the question of how Bienek's personality will develop.

In Günter de Bruyn's satire Märkische Forschungen (1978), the censorship of non-

literary texts is dealt with. The naive and upright village school teacher Pötsch is

obsessed with the poet and freedom fighter Max von Schwedenow, who lived in

Pötsch's corner of the world around 1800. Accidentally, Pötsch meets the sleek and

cunning Menzel, Professor of History and author of a forthcoming book on

Schwedenow, in which Schwedenow is being hailed as a "Vertreter deutschen

revolutionären Demokratismus" of the Vormärz (p. 14). Pötsch and Menzel become

antagonists because their findings on Schwedenow are incompatible. Pötsch is

surprised that in his manuscript, Menzel does not admit that Schwedenow's death in

the 1813 battle of Lützen cannot be verified. His own research uncovers that the poet's

name was but a pen-name of Max von Massow, who did not die in battle but lived to

see the early years of the restoration after the 1815 Congress of Vienna:

Es handelte sich um das Einfachste und Bequemste: in Bibliographien und Katalogen

nachzusehen, ob es von diesem Massow Bücher gäbe. Die gab es, und zwar tatsächlich nur

(Wie sich jetzt alles ineinander fügte!) zwischen 1815 und 1820, sogar erstaunlich viele,

nämlich sieben, wenn auch nur Broschüren, auf deren letzter auch des Verfassers Rang

angegeben und sein Amt unabgekürzt genannt war. Das rätselhafte O.-Z.-K. enthüllte sich als:

Ober-Zensur-Kollegium. Die Komik, die in dieser Entdeckung lag, sah Pötsch nie, und lange

dauerte es, bis er begriff, daß sich an der Wandlung dieser Person und ihres Werks die ganze

unglückliche Entwicklung dieser Jahre darstellen ließ. Denn die politischen Broschüren

Massows waren seinem Rang entsprechend. Eindeutig, wenn auch unausgesprochen, nahm der

'Märkische Jakobiner' seine Jugend-Progressivität zurück und denunzierte nun in ekelhafter

Weise revoltierende Studenten als Jakobiner. (S. 90)

The initial mystery 'who was Schwedenow?' is replaced by the question whether

Menzel's or Pötsch's research results will hold up. The discrepancy in power and

experience between the professor and the teacher intensifies this conflict-based

suspense. Menzel refuses to discuss his work properly with Pötsch so that the teacher


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decides to sum up his discoveries in an essay which he presents to the professor on the

occasion of his 50th birthday. Confronted with Pötsch's unwelcome dissenting views,

Menzel turns against his rival and squashes him:

Die Arbeit enthält gefährliche Thesen eines Hobby-Historikers, die zu beweisen er nicht fähig

ist. [...] Der Aufsatz war doch ein Geschenk? Also gehört er mir, und ich kann damit machen,

was ich für richtig halte. Das Beste für dich, für mich und die Wissenschaft wird sein, ich stelle

ihn in meine Bibliothek und lasse ihn dort stehen - bis zum Jüngsten Tag. (p. 134)

Pötsch does not give up and tries to publish his essay, but fails because of Menzel's

far-reaching influence:

Noch ehe die Hitzewelle vorbei war, sandten die Zeitschriften freundliche Schreiben, die Pötsch

die Ferien verdarben. Die Redaktion der Literaturzeitschrift teilte Pötsch mit, daß sein Artikel

zwecks Begutachtung an den für dieses Gebiet zuständigen Fachmann, Herrn Prof. Menzel,

gesandt, von diesem aber aus einleuchtenden Gründen für eine Veröffentlichung ungeeignet

befunden worden war, und die Historiker urteilten ähnlich. Nur fehlte ihrem Brief der Hinweis

auf Menzel, was verständlich war, weil der Professor dort offiziell dem Redaktions-Beirat

angehörte. (p. 138)

Needless to say, Menzel also refuses to employ Pötsch in his institute, which he had

promised to do. Thus, Pötsch is cut off from places where he could speak with

authority (Bourdieu) - the state's representative silences an unorthodox voice. Both

Pötsch and Bienek could achieve publication only on condition that they yield to the

ideological wishes and preferences of their 'superiors'.

Thus, in the three East-European novels, suspense results from the fight of the fictional

author-figures for a public forum for their new works. The difficulties they have to

overcome either set in when they are writing their texts - think of Bienek's self-

censorship -, or when they try to publish and disseminate their works (as is the case

with the Master and Pötsch). Thus, these novels accentuate the writing process, a text's

coming-into-being, and the problems faced when trying to turn this 'private' text into

one which is publicly available.


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By contrast, in the novels from democratic backgrounds, the texts under threat tend to

be completed and published canonical texts of outstanding significance (most of which

exist in the real world and not just in the narrated one, as is the case with Goldstein's

book in Nineteen Eighty-Four). They are either threatened by impending physical

destruction (by burning, usually), or at least their further reception is prevented. For

example, William of Baskerville is looking for Aristotle's theory of comedy, the

"legendären Text des Vaters der Philosophie" (Lauretis 1989, p. 265). Cotta is

searching for the Metamorphoses, Ovid's most famous work. The list of endangered

books in Fahrenheit 451 reads like an inventory of patriarchal, occidental, North

American, and oriental culture: Millay, Whitman, Faulkner (p. 15), Dante, Swift,

Marcus Aurelius (p. 57), Little Black Sambo, Uncle Tom's Cabin (p. 66), the Bible,

Plato, Shakespeare (p. 83), Matthew Arnold (p. 108), Gulliver's Travels (p. 158),

Darwin, Schopenhauer, Schweitzer, Aristophanes, Mahatma Gandhi, Buddha,

Konfuzius, Thomas Love Peacock, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Byron,

Thomas Paine, Machiavelli (p. 159) und Thoreau's Walden (p. 160). The bibliophile

dissidents learn these texts by heart so that they become living books themselves

("livres vivants", Faye 1993, p. 203). None of them has any creative ambitions, they

only want to preserve their cultural heritage.

All of these figures - William, Cotta, as well as Montag and his companions - are

readers, none of them is an author. And he who reads is (mostly) a good man. At least

that is what a comparative analysis of the protagonists in the the novels by Ransmayr,

Eco and Bradbury would seem to suggest. Those figures we identify with are keen

readers, or at least lovers of books. However, not everybody who is well read is a

positive character - Jorge is the best example of an unsympathetic but very well

educated man. What seems to be decisive is the character's attitude to books. Whoever

holds books in high esteem - like William, Cotta, or Montag do -, whoever wants to

preserve and protect books, wants to be inspired or enlightened by books, is a hero. By

contrast, those figures who hold books in contempt, want to destroy them, criticize


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their content and neither want to read them, nor allow others to do so, become

suspicious, if not outright villains, like Jorge or Beatty.

Why are books idealized in this way? Should the narrated totalitarian worlds not

inspire the protagonists to take direct political action, rather than merely reach for the

nearest bookshelf? Especially since, in Fahrenheit 451 at least, the ardently defended

authors and works are not exactly advocates of the freedom of art, of tolerance or

democracy - neither Plato's famous denunciation of poets as liars and his support of

censorship, nor the church's long-standing strive for hegemony and its defense of the

existing world order as a divine one, least of all Machiavelli's manual for autocrats

seem particularly well suited to instil anybody with criticism of existing repressive

socio-political practices. The uncritical adoration of books as practised by Montag and

his companions, gives rise to the suspicion that Bradbury's novel subscribes to the

optimistic belief (or is it wishful thinking?) of the chattering classes in the

indestructibility of book culture. The emphasis on the all-importance of books is tied

up with a very middle-class ideology. After all, most of the endangered books and

authors are as mainstream and high culture as you can possibly get, a fact which

betrays an elitist concept of culture. Preserving the classics might partly be motivated

by humanistic concerns, but there is a conservative subtext here, in so far as this

respect for the grand récit is reinforced, and the masterpiece is worshipped like an

icon.

This hagiographic attitude towards the book and its creator points to a long tradition:

that of a privileged role of the 'Dichter und Denker', which is either morally,

epistemologically, or aesthetically legitimized. Zola's catchphrase of the writer as the

conscience of the nation could be cited as an example here, as well as the Romantics'

cult of the genius. Hauke Brunkhorst traces this ultimately elitist concept of writers

and intellectuals back to classical metaphysics, or, to be more precise, to what he calls

Plato's 'intellectualism', this "Lehre von der Unzerstörbarkeit des Geistes, der Vernunft

oder der Seele" (2000, p. 91f).


15

All the novels I have discussed subscribe to such a hagiographic view of books as

sources for and a means to uncover eternal truths. The narrated fictional texts are, at

once, targets of an ideologically motivated threat, they are a means of oppositional

forces to combat the political powers that be, they are a symbol of non-conformism

and subversion, they help create a sense of identity by bridging past, present, and

future, and finally, they embody the hope for a better future.

This complex role assigned to the narrated book is only partially due to its creative or

aesthetic value; accordingly, some of the texts mentioned in the novels are non-literary

ones. What is more important than their generic nature - fiction or non-fiction - is their

written nature. For the written text gives permanence to language, which is essentially

transient. This liberation of the enunciation from its situational context is the

prerequisite for any dissemination of ideas. This is one of the reasons why the narrated

- as well as really existing - repressive regimes attempt to control not only spoken but

especially written language. It is not surprising, then, that language becomes a weapon,

as David Sisk puts it: "Twentieth-century dystopias in English universally reveal a

central emphasis on language as the primary weapon with which to resist oppression,

and the corresponding desire of repressive government structures to stifle dissent by

controlling language." (1997, p. 2)

By implication, books are taken very seriously by the authorities - at least by the

fictional ones, who deem them important enough to instigate censorial measures.

However, in the real world, things are rather different. Whereas writers played an

important role in East European socialist states for supporting the intended realization

of the communist utopia, writers in today's western world are by no means at the

centre of power - they are seen as mere entertainers, and not only by politicians. The

differences in the depiction of the censorship motif in contemporary fiction in East and

West illustrate the different views which writers in East and West have of themselves

and their relative political significance or insignificance. Of course it is true that

writers in the East had to fight against the Stalinist instrumentalization of authors as

"engineers of the soul", and all the patronizing and censorship that went with it, but


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this assignment of a political role also meant an increase in significance, and thus

power, for writers. I think one of the reasons why East-European authors do not

concern themselves, in their novels, with the censorship of establishment texts of

yesteryear but with the censorship of today's texts written for tomorrow's readership,

lies in this more political function and the more utopian dimension of literature under

socialism. The other reason being, of course, that these authors would probably want

to protest against the censorship they are subjected to by writing about it. [smuggling

of critical ideas = Aesopian language, Lev Loseff]. And maybe the fact that in today's

Western world books do not count for much in political terms, makes Western authors

turn to remote settings for their fictional censorial scenarios not only because they find

it difficult to describe censorship in their present world but because of their Romantic

longing for days in which literature had a higher status than it does today - after all, in

the sunken worlds or dictatorial regimes they depict, books and authors are, albeit

threatened, at least taken seriously. And that ties in well with the writer-intellectual's

wishful thinking about an invigoration of the political significance of culture.

What unites all the novels I have talked about is the basic conviction that it is worth

fighting for books, whether the survival of canonical texts or the publication of new

texts is at stake. In both cases, it is the political order of the day which prevents

freedom (and diversity) of thought. In the literature of censorship, Wittgenstein's

dictum "Die Grenzen meiner Sprache sind die Grenzen meiner Welt" holds true. The

fictional protagonists fight for extending the boundaries.

Suspense through Censorship: On the Phenomenology of a Motif in Contemporary Fiction in East and...

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