Anglia2016;134(4):739 744 - Philologisch-Historische … · remove them from the body politic in the first place: “forms of censorship para- ... Porete, William of Ockham, and Meister

Johanna Hartmann and Hubert Zapf (eds.). Censorship and Exile. InternationaleSchriften des Jakob-Fugger-Zentrums 1. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht,2015, 285 pp., 11 illustr., € 45.00.

Reviewed by Patrick O’Donnell,Michigan State UniversityE

˗ Mail: [email protected]

DOI 10.1515/anglia-2016-0085

The complex set of relationships that exists between censorship and exile is notimmediately transparent: the former is often considered a vehicle of state orreligious repression, while the latter is viewed as the voluntary or forced displace-ment of identities from familial, communal, or national confines. The seventeenessays collected in this volume, however, untangle this complexity from a numberof perspectives and show how censorship and exile can be thought of together fortheir effects on the production of art, the transmission of language, and theintertwined fates of the individual and the multitude. As the editors make clear inthe “Preface” to this collection, the relationship between censorship and exile canbe viewed as one of cause and effect: censorship, which “has the function ofexerting power by suppressing potentially destabilizing ideas”, can force authors“to seek refuge in other countries” where they may experience the “traumatizingexperiences of exile, political, religious or racist persecution, alienation, loss, thedeterioration of living standard aswell as restricted possibilities of publication” (6,7). Yet the consequences of censorship, they suggest, may prove totally contrary tothe intentions of those agencies that attempted to silence “destabilizing” voices orremove them from the body politic in the first place: “forms of censorship para-doxically reveal the self-consciousness andweaknessof the censoring institutions”(6), whilemany of theworks considered in Censorship and Exile reveal the power ofliterature to “transform the culturally suppressed into a source of [...] creativeenergy” (9). Moreover, as the range of essays gathered here attest, censorship cantake many forms other than that generated through state authority, and the mean-ings of “exile” can run the gamut from literal displacement to formsof internal exileand compartmentalization or the occupation of liminal imaginary spaces that bothreveal and cross boundaries of all kinds. With its historical and theoretical reach,Censorship and Exile is a particularly timely contribution to our understanding ofhow literature is created, published, anddistributedunder the threat of erasure.

The collection is divided into four sections, each focusing on censorship andexile successively from comparative, historical, political, and creative perspec-tives. The lead essay in the section on comparative perspectives, Heide Ziegler’s“Exile and Self-Censorship: Thomas Mann and Vladimir Nabokov”, offers the first

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and one of the most insightful analyses in the volume of the relationship betweenauthors in exile and forms of self-censorship in a revealing discussion of twoauthors who are rarely compared save under the most generalized categories ofmodernism. Through sustained, close readings of Nabokov’s Pale Fire and Mann’sDoktor Faustus, Ziegler introduces the suggestion that the pairings of John Shadeand Charles Kinbote in the former, and that of Adrian Leverkühn and SerenusZeitblom in the latter, can be identified with their respective authors as complexcensoring and enabling mechanisms. This gives rise “to the thesis that bothauthors, feeling insecure in their adopted countries because of their position asexiles, create an artist who calls up his own ‘internalized’ censor, thus producinga form of – positive or negative – self-censorship” (21). Ziegler shows how explor-ing the intricacies of this question in terms of the intersubjective relationshipsbetween author and reader generated by both Nabokov’s and Mann’s portraits ofthe artist enable “new ways of reading” (35) the authors comparatively acrosstime, space, and geography; her analysis, as well, convinces us that these novelstranscend the limitations of self-censorship as works of “art that will go ahead ofthe artist” (34–35).

Three additional essays in this section show how a comparative approach tocensorship and exile can produce new perspectives on authors who have enduredboth, but who have not often been considered together. In “The Jealousy ofDisplacement: James Joyce’s Exiles and Edward Said’s ‘Reflections on Exile’”,Christoph Henke applies Said’s notion of “extraterritoriality” to Joyce’s little-discussed play, and shows how both Joyce and Said experienced and manifestedin their work “the exile’s jealousy of the non-exile’s sense of belonging” (44). Saidis again brought into play in Katja Sarkowsky’s comparison of twomemoirs: AndréAciman’s Out of Egypt and Said’s Out of Place. While Sarkowsky points out sharpdistinctions between the agendas of the two writers in remembering lost home-lands, she finds that both insist on “‘out-of-placeness’ as a place, and ‘home’ as aplace that can only be re-membered, a process of ongoing integration of what islost into a sense of maybe not being in place but being in the world” (63). In acomparative study of Jamaicanmusic, language, and literature that concludes thissection, Lars Hinrichs shows how tropes of exile find their way into Caribbeanlanguages and dialects via the seemingly opposed and differentiated routes ofreligious belief and popular discourse; in so doing, he demonstrates the decontex-tualizing and recontextualizing energies of language in diasporic cultures.

The five essays in the historical perspective section include a suite of essayson Medieval censorship (Iris Zimmermann on censorship in Medieval love lyrics,Freimut Löser on censorship in the fourteenth century, and Klaus Wolf on censor-ship and exile in Medieval and Early Modern universities), Kirsten Belgum oncensorship and piracy in early nineteenth century Germany, and Katherine Arens

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on self-censorship in modern academic cultures. All of these provide valuablecontexts for understanding the relationship between censorship and exile fromthe twentieth century to the present: Zimmermann’s structural analysis of textualtransmission, Lösers’s case study of censored religious writers such as MargueritePorete, William of Ockham, and Meister Eckhardt, and Wolf’s discussion ofscholars censored by their own academies in the fourteenth, fifteenth, andsixteenth centuries provide complex insights into the destructive and (occasion-ally) productive results of censorship and exile. Belgum’s “Censorship and Piracy:Publishing and State Control in Early Nineteenth Century Germany” takes us intothe modern age with a detailed, revealing discussion of the ways in whichpublishing piracy covertly assisted state censorship in Prussia as well as thepersonal agenda of Adolf Müllner, a lawyer, dramatist, and pamphleteer. Themost impressive essay of this group is Arens’s “Self-Censorship, Self-Immolation:Intellectual Exiles and Violence in Academic Cultures”. An important contribu-tion to the intellectual history of modernity, Arens carefully considers the ways inwhich two major developments in German and Austrian intellectual history – thework of Freud’s disciples and that of the “Vienna Circle” of logical empiricism –when imported to the United States by leading European intellectuals in exile,became subject to various forms of institutional control that dramatically affectedthe distribution and radicality of psychoanalytic and philosophical thought in theU. S. Arens concludes with the provocative thesis that she has located the “histor-ical source for a new kind of self-censorship in the era around the Second WorldWar” evident “in the growing anti-Germanism of the US academy and the increas-ing number of attempts to establish US scholarship, especially in the humanitiesand social sciences, as indigenous and coeval with Europe’s” (153).

The essays on censorship and exile in political perspective include HannahChapelle Wojciehowski on ‘archaeological censorship’ in Foucault, ChristianeFäcke on censorship related to the Holocaust, Elżbieta Baraniecka on Polishplaywright’s Sławomir Mrożek’s theater of the absurd, and John Morán Gonzálezon linguistic difference, censorship, and exile in Julia Alvarez’s How the GarcíaGirls Lost Their Accent. Wojciehowski provides an illuminating discussion of theways in which Foucault’s L’archéologie du savoir was affected by his temporaryself-exile in Tunisia, and the forms of censorship exercised on student revolution-aries that he witnessed and experienced while there. Her consideration of transi-tions in Foucault’s thought to a more activist mode of discursive interventionpost-1968, while necessarily brief, provides directions for new explorations of thetrajectory of his philosophy in the context of the 1960s and its aftermath. Focusingon the town of Homberg in Northern Hesse, Fäcke provides a narrative of theexperiences of a Jewish family during the Third Reich and the ways thoseexperiences were either tabooed, or much later, remembered in the complex

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process of repression, disavowal, and reconstruction that attends Holocaustmemorization. The result is a question about how willing all involved may be toconfront the many difficult and contradictory truths of the Holocaust in a way that“truly respect[s] the victims” (191).

Baraniecka’s essay on Sławomir Mrożek offers a study of how modernisttechniques (those relevant to the theater of the absurd) can serve to resist stateand social censorship – in this case, that of the USSR as exercised upon Polandfrom 1945 to 1989. Developing the category of “the socialist absurd”, Baranieckashows how Mrożek’s work differs from its “existentialist counterpart” under-girded by “the human desire for a rational explanation of human existence andthe silence of an indifferent universe” (196), and instead focuses on the bizarrediscrepancies between an official, state-mandated ‘reality’ and the reality actuallyexperienced in the ordinary lives of Polish citizens. Making use of transnationaltheory and discourse, González brings us to a contemporary setting in NorthAmerica in his incisive discussion of the way that Julia Alvarez’s landmark novelis representative of a “literature [that] foregrounds the contradictions and discon-tinuities of nationalist narration thematically and structurally in ways that high-light the censorship by, and exile stemming from, nationalist constructions oflinguistic difference” (207). Advocating for a new perspective on Alvarez’s noveland others that manifest “reciprocal translations between Hispanophone postco-lonial spaces and Anglophone U. S. spaces” (209), González convincingly demon-strates that linguistic difference and its effects can only be fully understoodthrough scholarly methodologies that go well beyond those of “U. S. paradigms ofimmigrant or ethnic literature” (210). One of the strongest essays in the collection,González’s “‘Trying to get the accents right’” reveals in its citational title theintricate relation between grammar and nation, and linguistic censorship andlinguistic difference, that demand serious revision in a transnational context.

Censorship and Exile concludes with four essays that develop creative per-spectives on the topic. Censorship and creativity, and exile and inspiration, arenot pairings that come immediately to mind in thinking about this topic. First,Matt Cohen considers Walt Whitman’s “Eidolons” as a form of self-representationthat instantiates Whitman’s response to the censoring of his poetry: in Cohen’sview, Whitman succeeds in manufacturing a “depiction of himself as a nationalpoetic orphan” aligned with the “international distribution efforts” that resultedfrom prohibitions placed upon his work in America (223). Cohen argues that, inWhitman’s case, censorship at home had, for the censors, the unintended effectof enhancing his celebrity abroad, and served to inspire the poet to considerhimself an imaginary exile and his “Eidolons” (in Greek, meaning ‘phantoms’ or‘idealized images’) the embodiment of a “fantasy of the already distributed, theemissive and transformative qualities imminent in all endeavors, all of the moods

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of the poet, even before they hit the page” (237). Elizabeth Richmond-Garza nextconsiders an equally notorious case of censorship – that of Oscar Wilde. ForRichmond-Garza, Wilde’s performative, queer body of work, which necessitatedan artistic life led under censorship, social exclusion, and censorship, droveWilde to manufacture an image of ‘place’ as, in Marc Auge’s notion, a non-place,or a liminal, transitory space that he would come to occupy in exile from thesocial order. She argues that Wilde’s “contextual presentation of a mobile, multi-ple and always queer exilic self is not simply a function of trauma” (244), but alsoa form of self-invention as not-self, or as a spontaneous collage of multiple selves.Though neither cite Deleuze and Guattari, both Cohen and Richmond-Garzaappear to approach their subjects from a Deleuzian perspective that endorses therhizome (which could easily be substituted for the “[e]idolon” in Cohen’s analy-sis), deterritorialization, and the immersion of the self into the multitude as thecreative ‘effects’ of censorship and exile.

Ulrich Hohoff’s “Literary Creativity and Censorship: Authors in the GermanDemocratic Republic and Their Readers 1949–1989” offers a detailed catalogue ofcreative responses to censorship imposed upon both authors and readers duringthe four decades of Soviet rule in former East Germany. Under the rubric of “self-censorship”, Hohoff discusses how authors such as Christa Wolf, Fritz RudolphFries, Bertolt Brecht, and Stefan Heym deployed strategies like the modernizationof narrative technique, taking the outsider’s perspective, insisting on socialistprinciples (while covertly exposing their limitations), or publishing in samizdatformats in order to preserve creative dissidence within the system. In the final,brief concluding essay of the collection, Rotraud von Kulessa considers howHaitian-Canadian writer Dany Laferrière represents exile and censorship as in-ducing forms of trauma, and how his writing becomes a strategy for transgressingexile. Von Kulessa shows that various strategies in Laferrière’s work – the use ofirony, the elision past and present, or the metaphorization of spatial displace-ment – allow him to overcome a traumatic past: “[l]iterature”, she writes, underthese circumstances, “gains a therapeutic function” (280). This section on creativ-ity thus ends, appropriately, on a hopeful, generative note.

The editors of Censorship and Exile inform us that the collection came aboutas the result of intensive collaboration between the faculties of the UniversitätAugsburg and the University of Texas at Austin, and more specifically, betweenthe English and American Studies departments of those institutions. The collec-tion is, thus, international in scope, but as the summaries of approaches de-scribed above clearly indicate, also avowedly interdisciplinary. As with anycollection as capacious as this one, there are essays that stand out as exemplary:those by Ziegler, Arens, Baraniecka, González, and Cohen strike me as especiallyworthy of note, but every entry in this volume offers valuable insights on the

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many-faceted topic of censorship and exile. There is a rich assortment of leads forfuture research, and the editors are to be congratulated for bringing together thisconsiderable group of scholars in literary studies, theory, history, linguistics,translation, and cultural studies, all well-focused on the multiple correspon-dences between censorship and exile. In a time when the massive movements ofpopulations across the earth occur alongside, and as the consequence of, theproliferation of censorious regimes, this volume is especially welcome.

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Anglia2016;134(4):739 744 - Philologisch-Historische … · remove them from the body politic in the first place: “forms of censorship para- ... Porete, William of Ockham, and Meister