The Years of Writing Dangerously

Is literature better when produced under pressure? Cultural or political censorship can be a crucible, a subject quite dear to the blog's heart. Without endorsing it, here's a recent CHE commentary on the subject that raises some interesting points:

In 1857, by contrast, Charles Baudelaire was put on trial and forced to pay a fine of 300 francs for the "insult to public decency" that his volume of poetry Les Fleurs du mal was judged to be. However, it is hard to imagine any democratic country now imposing an interdiction on a mere volume of poems. "If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the Inquisition might have let him alone," noted Thomas Hardy, acknowledging society’s indifference to his art. It is true that publication in 1988 of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses provoked a violent backlash and a ban. It is also true that this year, under pressure from Hindu activists who took offense at its portrayal of their religion, Penguin India withdrew Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus: An Alternative History (2009) from sale. Neither prurience nor obscenity was at issue in the cases of Rushdie and Doniger. By contrast, E.L. James has had no trouble publishing and selling (and selling and selling) her raunchy erotic romance, Fifty Shades of Grey. In no small part because of Joyce and his patrons, publishers, lawyers, and devotees, the nations of North America and Western Europe no longer employ literary censors.

Yet anyone who, like Philip Roth, observes how peripheral literature has become to the common culture might regard the victory for freedom of expression as pyrrhic. If everything goes, does anything matter?

Easy to assert; a bit more difficult to recommend. The difficulty in producing great literaure has held steady against practically all forces. Maybe the ability to appreciate major works lags; even the ability of editors in a time of dwindling profts for publishers and agents is just as powerful as an overwhelming police state. Self-censorship remains an ardent foe. Try reading Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and imagine how he might respond to the lack of obstacles or deterrents today, how that response might be to just not write anything at all. Maybe in 21st century America he becomes an oral surgeon or a hedge fund manager. Now that is a dangerous thought.