These closely argued essays on censorship's insidious subtleties
make for dense but rewarding reading. As a noted South African
writer under apartheid, Coetzee (The Master of Petersburg, 1994,
etc.) long suffered the stifling shadow of the censor. Indeed,
almost half of the essays in this collection concern South Africa's
particular brand of censorship and how it was leveled at fellow
writers such as Andre Brink and Breyten Breytenbach. Broadening his
examination, Coetzee also looks at Solzhenitsyn's struggles with
the Soviet state, undercuts Catherine MacKinnon's dogmatic
anti-pornography stance, deconstructs D.H. Lawrence's belief in
breaking taboos, and closely reads the works of several writers
operating under censorship conditions. Those looking for simple,
ringing denunciations of censorship's evils will be disappointed.
Coetzee explicitly rejects such noble tritenesses. Instead, drawing
on the works of modern theorists such as Lacan, Foucault, and
Girard, he pursues censorship's deeper, more fickle meanings and
unmeanings. In his essay on the South African Publications Appeal
Board, for example, he reveals the unreasoning paranoia that
governs even the most "enlightened" censorship. In other words,
censorship can never be a wholly rational act. Almost every page is
thick with such provocative insights and ideas, but Coetzee does
not always do his arguments justice. Unlike his lucid, elegant
fictions, here he is often unnecessarily opaque and obscure. He has
the South African intellectual's fatal fondness for academic jargon
(though not the usual accompanying cant), and his logic
occasionally short-circuits. But his erudition and intelligence
remain truly formidable throughout. And as Coetzee's own experience
has shown, censorship ultimately fights a losing battle: "The
artist, if he is patient enough and persistent enough, always wins,
or at least emerges on the winning side." (Kirkus Reviews)
In Giving Offense, South African writer J. M. Coetzee presents a
coherent, unorthodox analysis of censorship from the perspective of
a writer who has lived and worked under its shadow. Widely
acclaimed for his many novels, Coetzee is also a brilliant literary
critic and essayist. The essays collected here attempt to
understand the passion that plays itself out in acts of silencing
and censoring. Subscribing neither to the myth of the writer as a
moral giant nor to that of the writer as persecuted innocent,
Coetzee argues that a destructive dynamic of belligerence and
escalation tends to overtake the rivals in any field ruled by
censorship. From Osip Mandelstam commanded to compose an ode in
praise of Stalin, to Breyten Breytenbach writing poems under and
for the eyes of his prison guards, to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
engaging in a trial of wits with the organs of the Soviet state,
Giving Offense focuses on the ways authors have historically
responded to censorship. It also analyzes the arguments of
Catharine MacKinnon for the suppression of pornography and traces
the operations of the old South African censorship system. Finally,
Coetzee delves into the early history of apartheid and critizes the
blankness of contemporary political science in its efforts to
address the deeper motives behind apartheid.
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