ON CENSORSHIP

...She poisoned them, thereby Bill giving proof that her norms were those of the free society of the future...

...The word, moreover, is in competition with still and moving pictures, which are winning the race for expressiveness and in turn yield to the demands of the highest bidder...

...Humanity was divided into those who spoke but knew, or wanted to know little, and and those who knew a great deal but were silent...

...They are exhibits in an enormous, endlessly extended museum in which works of art from all civilizations and epochs—codexes, Bibles, Koransneighbor each other in a syncretic turmoil...

...Can one accept that entire burden and agree that what is, simply is, and that's that...

...Accounts of the poverty of peasants seemed like news from some exotic country...

...years ago, I read the Memoirs of Fanny Hill, in the only edition then available, the Parisian one...

...Censorship as prohibition thus loses its raison d'être when the tangible material world remains resistant to everything that is stated in terms of "as if," that is, to language, concepts, symbols...

...The dialogue form lends the work a quality of parody, of opera bufja, and one reads it with a smile, though it soon gives way to boredom since the endless descriptions of erotic frenzy are monotonous...

...Twenty years ago the works of Henry Miller were banned in America, today they can be bought in paperback...

...The book's aim is quite limited: it presents sexual excercises in the most tempting possible light and could probably serve as a stimulant for bored lovers and sluggish married couples...

...Not to mention the film's educational influence...

...It is not often that the public's apathy, a result of constant bombardment, is overcome and some measure of renown achieved...

...The language of naturalistic, almost clinical description seems particularly effective in the struggle for attention and money—while the interpretation of a work, on the other hand, is built into its very structure, concealed, and the phenomena described tend to pass for reality itself...

...Our eyes are spared nothing...

...The citadel of so-called public morality fell as soon as the first gap appeared in the wall— general agreement as to the inviolability of a work of art, i.e., the agreement that anything may be depicted in words, stone, line, or color if the goal is "artistic...

...If, in certain cases, the freedom of the individual should be limited in the name of the common good, a very great good would justify very great limitations— which means the same as great power in the hands of those who are to judge what is good and what is bad for the community...

...Such attempts, as we can see today, have been doomed to defeat on account of the ever greater intimidation of censors who have been branded fools and reactionaries...

...One reads it with nostalgia on account of its flagrantly artificial realism and its affirmation of simple pleasures enjoyed with out hatred for the world...

...Man as an economic creature behaves in one way rather than in another, not because philosophical generalizations arise in his head, but because he must satisfy his needs and can do so only by submitting to laws independent of his will...

...I allow two possibilities: either my mind, formed by Catholicism, Marxism, or just the historical convulsions of Europe, is somewhat totalitarian and accepts in silence that the spiritual nourishment given the "masses" should be controlled, thus usurping for itself knowledge of what is healthy and unhealthy for them or, as a result of the distance I have to the morals prevailing around me, I dare to detect a problem where others do not, since for them it would be uncomfortable to do so...

...The author, John Cleland, who wrote the book for money and later tried to redeem that youthful indiscretion by composing pious tracts, would be more than a little surprised were he to see his prank placed in the same class as Homer's rhapsodies...

...Scenes which not long ago could only be found in the novels of Cleland or de Sade are right here in front of me on the screen...

...If, however, that privilege is not conferred upon anyone, it becomes hard to deny that everyone is entitled to proclaim his own philosophy even if it offers profound and fundamental reasons for counseling murder and cannibalism...

...In Russia the Siberian penal colonies remained an obscure menace and even Dostoevsky in his Notes from the Dead omitted a great deal...

...For students at Berkeley, Bonny and Clyde was a spectacle arousing pity, directly against violence and indirectly against the war in Vietnam...

...Did we not see Oswald, shot by Ruby, clutch at his stomach...

...One can, but only by ruminating in a state of brutish contemplation like a cow...

...The technical apparatus that produces the • spoken, written, and pictorial language intercepts and co-opts every revolt for its own use, including the revolt against it...

...And Robert Kennedy falling the second after Sirhan shot him...

...The result is to favor anyone who shouts loudly, i.e., sex and violence get center stage...

...The horrifying spiritual emptiness, the meaninglessness of life reduced to chasing after a living leaves the more imaginative individual only one way out: gangsterism, that heroic epos of trampled souls...

...Nor does it matter if the author, director, or photographer want to stimulate or to warn, since the means they use are the same...

...at first, sexually, but later on, when the members of the circle are emboldened to begin breaking down the prohibitions she has received at home, she is already an eager student of their far-reaching sciences...

...Of considerable importance here has been the anxiety of the churches ready to make concessions just to maintain their new image as enlightened and progressive institutions...

...From him I heard that in spite of everything things were getting better and better...

...The story of a pair of gangsters is presented as "real history" with naturalistic precision...

...She looks on, clapping her hands, as her mother is lured to the chateau and raped, not only to humiliate her, but also to infect her with syphilis...

...Horror was then, as it is now, a part of existence, but formerly things were arranged so that horror was screened off from everyday life...

...The hunting of Negroes in Africa and the transportation of slaves undoubtedly troubled the minds of Europe's inhabitants, yet not so very much since it happened far away and their eyes were not exposed to the sight of torture...

...Even he, it seems, had to arrange things so the truth would be dismissed from consciousness, just like those numerous Europeans I knew who didn't wish to learn of the prisons and concentration camps since that would have weakened their faith in their party or leader...

...I do not take it upon myself to say whether this is because the book has been acknowledged as a "work of art" or because the line dividing works having artistic aims from those not having such aims has become hopelessly blurred...

...But his books, like books in general, now fill another function than they did once...

...Philosophy in the Bedroom is a treatise on murder...

...Moreover, the passing of time has lent Cleland's novel almost bucolic features...

...The Surrealists, combining Freud with Marx, dreamed of a revolution that would overthrow private property as well as bourgeois morality and change everyone into a poet or stenographer of his own unconscious...

...Things have not been much simplified for gentle liberals of that writer's type, for the hellish aura of the ghettos and the barracks for farm workers emanates from the television, settling like a toxic mist on the living-room furniture...

...But de Sade is also proposing a new morality and in this he is a forerunner of the Surrealists who published poetry in honor of the poisoner, Violette Nozieres...

...Sex and violence are a bit too conventional in his writings, not photographic enough...

...And in Vietnam, also for the first time, the enemy has been fired upon and men have fallen while being filmed...

...Such multitudes of people, ideas, means of communication, goods produced by technology and thrown out half-consumed...

...The film Bonny and Clyde may be taken as an example of this ambiguity...

...The tangible, material world can get along nicely without ideas...

...But that in no way excludes "tendencies," to use an old expression...

...Terseness, forcibleness, and brutality of expression are rewarded, and all ideas are simplified so that they may be conveyed by means of the most obvious and tangible "facts" without involving any complicated reasoning...

...France retained legislation directed against certain acts outraging public decency, hence the trials of publishing houses specializing in pornography...

...She learns that one is free to kill...

...Possibly all America was like that then, although one suspects that a shift from today to yesterday has taken place here because this is exactly how younger, educated Americans see life in a small town —stunted, debased, meaningless—and they will flee from it anywhere, even to Hollywood...

...No one, however, disturbed publishers printing pornographic books in English, later to be smuggled into England, Canada, and the United States...

...Liberating himself from lies and hypocrisy, the perfect libertine appoints his own pleasure as the sole standard of good and evil...

...Divine and human laws were invented to deprive the individual of his natural privileges...

...Did we not see, while drinking beer, the chief of the Saigon police kill an officer of the Vietcong, a prisoner of war, by shooting him in the temple...

...It lost out in competition with another European book, published somewhat earlier but read by millions of people, and which also prescribed a better arrangement of society: Mein Kampf...

...It would be naive to forget the great poverty of current information and the influence of all sorts of editing done by a censorship which works behind the scenes, but often in the open as well...

...And here everything I have written so far about censorship seems completely oldfashioned to me, as old-fashioned as regimes in which the state pays a large number of functionaries solely to pencil out whole sentences from novels or, when the need arises, to improve a poet's verses...

...This one example is enough to illustrate the general change...

...The viewer is given an unflattering picture of the small towns of the American Midwest in the 1930s...

...Bhuddists burning themselves alive in protest against the war died in an arena greater than any in ancient Rome...

...The world beats on us like unreason incarnate, like the creation of some mad gigantic brain...

...Violette's parents—they were bourgeois, they oppressed her, demanding she obey them, forbidding her to spend the night away from home, and so on...

...For one must be able to see the printed page along with everything else that surrounds us in quantities that would have confounded our ancestors...

...ON CENSORSHIP 433 Our imagination has a greater capacity than that of previous generations...

...Not the least and perhaps even the most essential thing in the film are the hunks of bloody, agonized flesh, in color, all that which the camera would not have dared to show a few decades ago...

...The torments people inflict upon each other, murder, slaughter, war, can be seen while we are sitting at home (on color television) . Whether someone is murdering or being murdered makes no difference: you watch...

...A dash of apocalypse or revolution can liven up a product and were it lacking, it would be necessary to invent it for commercial pur poses...

...Philosophy in the Bedroom is undoubtedly the most immodest work of literature ever written and not because it depicts an aristocratic circle collectively sampling all forms of copulation with a marked predilection for sodomy...

...The hero's sexual impotence is obviously symbolic, indicating his inner rejection of poverty and fundamental deprivation...

...The film Bonny and Clyde, as opposed to the real Bonny and Clyde who, it seems, were considerably more prosaic bandits, is about poor people deprived of their human heritage who shoot other people because that is the only way they can regain their dignity, their right to hope...

...But certainly many others who saw it were stimulated in a different manner, delighting in the poetry of rebellion and the well-aimed pistol shots...

...And so the imagination must accommodate the pain, debasement, violence, poverty, the absurdity of the beliefs and morals of the whole world, nothing is placated, nothing tamed by thought which, after all, does cure us of our anxiety a little if, asking "why?," we receive the answer: "because of...

...Europeans, inclined to self-pity, whose memories have retained incredible scenes, perhaps felt robbed since the knowledge of certain dismal features of human nature has ceased to be the exclusive property of those directly participating in the events...

...People were killed in war, but no one filmed it live...

...The Marquis de Sade, rendered less shock ing by his status as a literary classic and less CZESLAW MILOSZ attractive by his style from another era, is also further neutralized by new rivals in extremity who keep appearing every day...

...Translated from Polish by RICHARD LouRIE 434 CZESLAW MILOSZ...

...Such at least appears to be the hidden premise allowing one to relate with more tolerance than hostility to culture, to the museum, to treat it as something that "satisfies intellectual curiosity" and also softens the severity of life...

...Divine and human laws cannot, however, be overthrown effectively until they are attacked at their very bases, the point where they are automatically accepted by everyone...

...In the fate of the Marquis de Sade we see that a public opinion bound to a definite moral code was ill-disposed to such philosophical proposals and that it displayed great self-confidence in combating them...

...Moreover, it is not certain whether the ideas locked in the reservoir of "culture" will always be con tent to remain there...

...The very essence of Western technological civilization is incompatible with censorship, for the latter presupposes an authority to decree what should be allowed and what forbidden —whereas the entire adventure of discoveries and inventions began with a revolt against authority...

...But in common belief there is something worse than killing a human being and thus Eugenie passes her examination in another fashion: she admits that she hates her bigoted mother and joyfully consents to the plan for punishing her...

...Today that "classical" pornographic novel, endowed with all the merits of 18th-century style, can be bought in paperback anywhere in America...

...Even the most daring philosopher shudders before crossing a certain line...

...The word "censorship" immediately provokes a hostile reaction since traditionally it indicates the intention of authorities, whether clerical or secular, to curtail freedom...

...She had committed "a revolutionary act...

...Then, as in The Grapes of Wrath, the emphasis was on injustice and material poverty, while here, in accord with another intellectual fashion, the emphasis is on alienation, spiritual poverty...

...The 16-year-old Eugenie is initiated by degrees...

...The programs of anarchists, predictions of the end of the world, calls for political assassination, encouragements to flee to the forests and mountains in order to devote oneself to contemplation, advertisements of leagues whose members get together and "groove," drug propaganda, hymns in honor of totalitarian regimes—all have equal rights and satisfy the needs of the market...

...Many years ago, right after the war, during my first stay in America, I had a con versation with a certain famous writer, no doubt a humanitarian, about the Negro ghettos...

...ON CENSORSHIP The works of the Marquis de Sade, including his Philosophy in the Bedroom, are also available in paperback, and what is of interest to me here is my instinctive opposition...

...The point is that neither the former nor the latter will ever be able to erase those hunks of bloody flesh from their imagination...

...Nevertheless, although parliamentary systems have guaranteed freedom of scientific inquiry and the right to proclaim political heresies, there has been an effort in our century, as in the past, to retain the concept of an offense against what is called public morality...

...Only the readiness to commit murder for one's own pleasure proves that the fetters of a completely artificial commandment have been left behind...

...All the bedrooms, all the battlefields...

...These requirements are exactly the opposite of those found in systems where the market is scorned, where language becomes a labyrinth of mutable meanings, where the censorship frugally portions out "facts," though great effort goes into their interpretation...

...Any school book can furnish abundant examples of censors making fools of themselves, beginning with Gallileo's persecutors and ending with judges ordering literary works confiscated for immorality, precisely those works which subsequently enter the classical canon of required school reading...

...That, however, is not a poverty of "facts," which are the more marketable as they are more shocking...

...Even in the most sinister countries, as, for example, in the industrializing England that inspired Karl Marx's wrath, there were zones of gentleness and tranquillity...

...Thus it is a film of social criticism, different from the films of social criticism made before World War II...

...If we are capable of compassion and at the same time are powerless, then we live in a state of angry exasperation...

...To be sure, this premise is somewhat dubious since the means of mass communica tion, i.e., language, are the driving force of an economy that is constantly creating new needs with the aid of advertising...

...In Paris in 1934 the Surrealists published a collection of poetry in honor of an adolescent criminal, Violette Nozieres, who was sentenced by a court of law to a correctional home for poisoning both her parents...

...Censorship, or the lack of it, seems to originate in a fundamental choice whose consequences cannot be imagined while that choice is being made...

...While the printing of such works as Philosophy in the Bedroom for mass consumption can be explained as a weakening of the standards of judgment, another factor probably weighs more heavily here: the unspoken assumption that the influence of the written word on institutions and morals is small or nonexistent...

...Here surely is one of the causes of the ferocity which I have elsewhere called neo-Manichean...

...Did we not see children burned by napalm...

...The Marquis de Sade was a total revolutionary, the most radical of the radical, and he set about his philosophical enterprise seriously...

...Although in the poems praising her action one can detect some reflection of that collective self-disgust that was quite widespread in the France of the '30s, the volume appeared in a small edition and its influence surely did not extend beyond the circles of artistic bohemia...

...ubiquitous necessity replaces them...

...As recently as ter...

...432 The most extreme injunctions neutralize and demolish each other, immediately turning into "culture...

...My surprise stayed with me for a long time after that conversation: why did he say that, he whose works, translated into many languages, are like ancient tragedies told in prose...