TO THE CENSOR WITH LOVE
-David Chorlton
| An Austrian writer friend reports to me that during a recent visit to Bulgaria he reached the conclusion that the old communist system served literature better than what the Bulgarians have now. He is not the first to lead me to my conclusion that democracy is threatening to art. Czech writer Ivan Klima, interviewed over National Public Radio on the day the last of the Russian soldiers left his country, told his American listeners that Czechs were taking advantage of their new freedom by reading trash and pornography. Klima was matter-of-fact about the situation and more concerned that people have access to publications previously denied them. During my visit not long ago to the Czech Republic, I saw for myself what Klima meant when I surveyed the material for sale at railway station kiosks and small town stores. This is not to say that serious art and peep shows compete for the same audience, but that the audience for the latter is a more reliable source of support than for the former. Members of the US Congress routinely act as if art itself is in poor taste and therefore unworthy of public funding. It has been possible to decimate the National Endowment for the Arts because of a common public view that art does not matter. Close to home, an art teacher in Phoenix tells me he gave up on a school where he taught when the principal told him that art is not important. Such opinions in a professional context call up the specter of a world in which art is irrelevant and education need only produce technicians and salesmen. This situation calls for a drastic response. I suggest censorship.
The censor is a seductive figure, and was often the most serious reader a poet, for instance, could expect in the former East Germany which expelled Wolf Biermann, a poet and songwriter, and hounded Reiner Kunze, a poet critical of the regime, away from his home in 1977. Kunze's poems, as penetrating as they were for citizens living under communist duress, would scarcely raise an eyebrow in our freedom drenched society. One of the readers in the service of censorship wrote of one Kunze book published in what was then West Germany as "a political provocation opposing our state and its politics. The position taken in these poems by the author must be estimated as far more negative than his previously known position. From the poems, three essential theses are evident as represented by the writer: 1. The DDR is a large prison, which is to be understood as meaning that there is not only a limitation of freedom of movement, but also a narrowing of spiritual life and the development of personality and talent." This is a review I would be proud to receive from a critic. Reiner Kunze's files also included an account of a reading he gave to an audience of some 400 to 500 students, hosted by an evangelical group which was allowed to promote such events. Poets in the United States rarely address hundreds of listeners, but we also do not expect that audience to include state spies. We learn from the horrific reports assembled by the 97,000 strong secret police force in the DDR that serious art mattered. Elsewhere, the lessons of freedom have been similar. Slavenka Draculic, a writer from Croatia, has stated that eastern European writers dreamed of freedom, but when it arrived it was not what they had in mind, rather a green light to write whatever they want to even if nobody reads it. This sounds disturbingly familiar. There is, in the end analysis, no difference between the erstwhile censor and the Phoenix school principal when it comes to the presence of art in a society. A trivial culture is difficult to oppose. It is popular and comforting in that it does not encourage challenging thought unless the thinker is prepared to live on the fringe, which is exactly where the status quo wants him or her to be. The fact of our freedom is a built-in defence against criticism. The seductive presence of a censor with whom the writer enters a discreet correspondence could provide a scenario in which the public is alerted to the value of books languishing unread. Precedents point in a hopeful direction. Allen Ginsberg's HOWL was one of the highest selling books of poetry in the USA following attempts to have it banned back in 1958. So, dear censor, bring out your felt tip pens and keep the coffee close at hand. Consider my words as intimate whispers as I solicit your blessing in a society pledged to serious passions. (c) 2000 by -David Chorlton
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