he impulse to censor is as old as the impulse to create. Plato, not the most liberal of men, suggested that the work of storytellers should be carefully examined “and what they do well we must pass and what not, reject.” His purpose was to moralize literature; others, over the centuries, have offered equally noble motives. Ibn Khaldun, the great Arab historian, reported that in the seventh century, when Muslim soldiers invaded Persia, they discovered an extraordinary number of books; wishing to carry them off as loot, they asked Omar bin al-Khattab, second caliph of the Muslims, for permission. Omar’s answer became legendary and was applied to other book destructions: “Throw them in the river! If they hold a guide to the Truth, God has given us a better guide in the Holy Quran. And if they hold nothing but lies, may God rid us of them.” In our own time, the president of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, forced Google and Twitter to remove content objected to by his government or risk blackouts, arguing that “these regulations do not impose any censorship at all on the Internet. . . . On the contrary, they make it safer and freer.” Morality, truth, civilized society, freedom: All these have been invoked to defend what most people would understand as censorship.
But what exactly is censorship? This is the question with which Robert Darnton, the foremost historian of the book and the art of reading, begins his enthralling new volume, “Censors at Work.” “Rather than starting with a definition and then looking for examples that conform to it,” Darnton writes, “I have proceeded by interrogating censors themselves.” The censors Darnton has interrogated belong to three very different historical settings: the Old Regime in France, British rule in India and the Communist state that existed under the name of the German Democratic Republic from 1949 to 1990. Darnton spoke with the German censors in the flesh, and with the ghosts of the French and British ones through the vast archives they left behind. Thankfully for Darnton, thankfully for his readers, the one incontrovertible fact about censors is that they love paperwork.
Most historians of censorship, like Fernando Báez in his excellent “A Universal History of the Destruction of Books,” assume that the censor’s task has always been to forbid and destroy. Darnton shows that this is not the case. The first period he explores is also that with which he is most familiar, having written numerous books on 18th-century France. He begins by looking at a book printed in Paris in 1722 that carries the “approbation and privilege of the king.” These approbations, as Darnton notes, qualify as censorship because they were “delivered by royal censors.”
But rather than what modern readers would expect from a censoring hand, they are something closer to our present-day blurbs. One of these censors, a professor at the Sorbonne, notes: “I had pleasure in reading it; it is full of fascinating things.” Another, a theologian, remarks with obvious delight that a book inspired “that sweet but avid curiosity that makes us want to continue further.” As Darnton makes clear, censorship under the Bourbon monarchy was not a system of limitations; it was a way of channeling the power of print through the figure of the king and his representatives, asserting royal authority over everything, even the word. Royal censors were not mainly on the outlook for subversive voices: instead, they worked like copy editors, concerned with matters of style, grammar, readability and originality of thought, even going so far as correcting spelling and redoing math. A book approved by the king should not be badly written.
In the 1750s, the term “bureaucracy” appeared in France to describe the increased reliance of the system on a complex hierarchy of clerks. Bureaucracy both simplified and complicated the job of the censor by requiring the participation of all kinds of other actors in the process of filtering and allotting or denying privileges to books. Darnton traces this system through a web that included not only authors, printers and booksellers, but also peddlers, smugglers and warehouse keepers. As becomes evident, censorship was not a problem that concerned only the intellectuals.
During the second period explored by Darnton, that of British rule in India, Darnton says, “in principle, the press was free but the state imposed severe sanctions whenever it felt threatened.” He relates the case of a certain James Long, an Anglo-Irish missionary in Bengal, who attempted “to survey everything printed in Bengali between April 1857 and April 1858” in order to help the newly established Indian Civil Service track what was being written. If censorship in 18th-century France manifested itself primarily as a sort of literary criticism, in British India the main impulse seems to have been an obsessive ethnographic curiosity. Long appears to have been driven by an interest in all aspects of the “other” culture — philology, folklore, religion and Hindu philosophy — rather than by any concern with seditious plotting against British rule.
But Long’s interest in Bengali literature led to his downfall. In 1861, he arranged for the publication in English of a melodrama about the oppression of native workers by British planters that he thought might interest the public back home. The planters accused him of libel; Long was found guilty, fined a thousand rupees and sentenced to a month in prison. British law in India upheld freedom of speech, so the authorities needed to employ other means of controlling the spread of possibly subversive voices. The laws against libel and sedition became the British Empire’s censorship tools in the subcontinent.
In investigating the 40-odd-year rule of Communists in East Germany, Darnton was able to meet censors in person: a man and a woman who worked for the state and had never before met an American. They disliked the word “censorship.” What they did, they explained, was “planning,” since in a socialist system literature was “planned” like everything else. Darnton shows how, behind their bureaucratic activities, lay a complicated tangle of motives — ideological ones certainly, but also tactical politics and personal revenge. So ingrained was the German censors’ notion of duty to this system that even after the dissolution of the Communist state, they continued to report for work.
This last example of censorship is, of the three chosen by Darnton, the one that comes closest to the popular understanding of the term. On Nov. 25, 1988, the East German novelist Christoph Hein delivered a daring speech at a congress of the Authors Union in Berlin, urging the abolition of censorship. “The printing-authorization procedure,” Hein said, “supervision by the state, or to put it briefly and no less clearly, the censorship of publishing houses and books, of publishers and authors, is outmoded, useless, paradoxical, hostile to humanity, hostile to the people, illegal and punishable.” Hein’s words are, in their essence, true at any time in the embattled history of censorship, even today. Considering electronic censorship in China and the unrestricted surveillance of the American National Security Agency, Darnton asks: “Has modern technology produced a new kind of power, which has led to an imbalance between the role of the state and the rights of its citizens?”
As Darnton clearly shows, the labors of censors affect not only books and their makers, but vast sections of society. There are two possible ways of looking at censorship, he says: a narrow one, concentrating exclusively on the censors’ strategies, and another, more generous one that considers literature “as a cultural system embedded in a social order.” It’s obvious which of the two Darnton believes is the most important.
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