[In the following essay, South African author Coetzee explores the influence of censorship on the psychological state and work of writers.]

From the early 1960s until about 1980, the Republic of South Africa operated one of the most comprehensive censorship systems in the world. Called in official parlance not censorship but “publications control” (censorship was a word it preferred to censor from public discourse about itself),¹ it sought to control the dissemination of signs in whatever form. Not only books, magazines, films, and plays, but T-shirts, key-rings, dolls, toys, and shop-signs—anything, in fact, bearing a message that might be “undesirable”—had to pass the scrutiny of the censorship bureaucracy before it could be made public. In the Soviet Union, there were some 70,000 bureaucrats supervising the activities of some 7,000 writers. The ratio of censors to writers in South Africa was, if anything, higher than ten to one.

Paranoids behave as though the air is filled with coded messages deriding them or plotting their destruction. For decades the South African state lived in a state of paranoia. Paranoia is the pathology of insecure regimes and of dictatorships in particular. One of the features distinguishing modern from earlier dictatorships has been how widely and rapidly paranoia can spread from above to infect the whole of the populace. This diffusion of paranoia is not inadvertent: it is used as a technique of control. Stalin's Soviet Union is the prime example: every citizen was encouraged to suspect every other citizen of being a spy or saboteur; the bonds of human sympathy and trust between people were broken down; and society fragmented into tens of millions of individuals living on individual islets of mutual suspicion.

The Soviet Union was not unique. The Cuban novelist Reinaldo Arenas wrote of an atmosphere of “unceasing official menace” in his country that made a citizen “not only a repressed person, but also a self-repressed one, not only a censored person, but a self-censored one, not only one watched over, but one who watches over himself.”² “Unceasing official menace” punctuated with spectacles of exemplary punishment inculcates caution, watchfulness. When certain kinds of writing and speech, even certain thoughts, become surreptitious activities, then the paranoia of the state is on its way to being reproduced in the psyche of the subject, and the state can look forward to a future in which the bureaucracies of supervision can be allowed to wither away, their function having been, in effect, privatized.

For it is a revealing feature of censorship that it is not proud of itself, never parades itself. The archaic model for the censor's ban is the ban on blasphemy, and both bans suffer an embarrassing structural paradox, namely, that if a crime is to be satisfactorily attested in court, the testimony will have to repeat the crime. Thus it used to be that in the public sessions of the rabbinical courts witnesses to blasphemy were supplied with codified euphemisms to utter in place of the banned name of the Holy; if the actual blasphemy had to be repeated to make conviction conclusive, the court moved into closed session, and testimony was followed by rituals of purgation on the part of the judges. Embarrassment went even further: the very notion that the name of the Holy as a blasphemous word could curse the Holy was so scandalous that for “curse” the word “bless” had to be substituted.³ Just as a chain of euphemisms came into being to protect the name of the Holy, so in an age when the state was worshipped the office that protected its name had to be euphemized. That office waits for the day when, its functions having been universally internalized, its name need no longer be spoken.

The tyrant and his watchdog are not the only ones touched by paranoia. There is a pathological edge to the watchfulness of the writer in the paranoid state. For evidence one need only go to the testimony of writers themselves. Time and again they record the feeling of being touched and contaminated by the sickness of the state. In a move typical of “authentic” paranoids, they claim that their minds have been invaded; it is against this invasion that they express their outrage.

The Greek writer George Mangakis, for instance, records the experience of writing in prison under the eyes of his guards. Every few days the guards searched his cell, taking away his writings and returning those which the prison authorities—his censors—considered “permissible.” Mangakis recalls suddenly “loathing” his papers as he accepted them from the hands of his guards. “The system is a diabolical device for annihilating your own soul. They want to make you see your thoughts through their eyes and control them yourself, from their point of view.”⁴ By forcing the writer to see what he has written through the censor's eyes, the censor forces him to internalize a contaminating reading. Mangakis's sudden, revulsive moment is the moment of contamination.

Another passionate account of the operations of introverted censorship is given by Danilo Kis:

The battle against self-censorship is anonymous, lonely and unwitnessed, and it makes its subject feel humiliated and ashamed of collaborating. [It] means reading your own text with the eyes of another person, a situation where you become your own judge, stricter and more suspicious than anyone else. …

The self-appointed censor is the alter ego of the writer, an alter ego who leans over his shoulder and sticks his nose into the text … It is impossible to win against this censor, for he is like God—he knows and sees all, he came out of your own mind, your own fears, your own nightmares. …

This alter ego … succeeds in undermining and tainting even the most moral individuals whom outside censorship has not managed to break. By not admitting that it exists, self-censorship aligns itself with lies and spiritual corruption.⁵

The final proof that something has, so to speak, gone wrong with writers like Arenas or Mangakis or Kis is the excessiveness of the language in which they express their experience. Paranoia is not just a figurative way of talking about what has afflicted them. The paranoia is there, on the inside, in their language, in their thinking; the rage one hears in Mangakis' words, the bafflement in Kis's, are rage and bafflement at the most intimate of invasions, an invasion of the very style of the self, by a pathology for which there may be no cure.

Nor am I, as I write here, exempt. In the excessive insistency of its phrasing, its vehemence, its demand for sensitivity to minutiae of style, its overreading and overwriting, I detect in my own language the very pathology I discuss. Having lived through the heyday of South African censorship, seen its consequences not only on the careers of fellow-writers but on the totality of public discourse, and felt within myself some of its more secret and shameful effects, I have every reason to suspect that whatever infected Arenas or Mangakis or Kis, whether real or delusional, has infected me too. That is to say, this very writing may be a specimen of the kind of paranoid discourse it seeks to describe.

For the paranoia I address is not the imprint of censorship on those writers alone who are singled out for official persecution. All writing that in the normal course of events falls under the censor's eye may become tainted in the manner I have described, whether or not the censor passes it. All writers under censorship are at least potentially touched by paranoia, not just those who have their work suppressed.

Why should censorship have such contagious power? I can offer only a speculative answer, an answer based in part on introspection, in part on a scrutiny (perhaps a paranoid scrutiny) of the accounts that other writers (perhaps themselves infected with paranoia) have given of operating under regimes of censorship.

The self, as we understand the self today, is not the unity it was assumed to be by classical rationalism. On the contrary, it is multiple and multiply divided against itself. It is, to speak in figures, a zoo in which a multitude of beasts have residence, over which the anxious, overworked zookeeper of rationality exercises a rather limited control. At night the zookeeper sleeps and the beasts roam about, doing their dream-work.

In this figural zoo, some of the beasts have names, like figure-of-the-father and figure-of-the-mother; others are memories or fragments of memories in transmuted form, with strong elements of feeling attached to them; a whole subcolony are semitamed but still treacherous earlier versions of the self, each with an inner zoo of its own over which it has less than complete control.

Artists, in Freud's account, are people who can make a tour of the inner menagerie with a degree of confidence and emerge, when they so wish, more or less unscathed. From Freud's account of creative work I take one element: that creativity of a certain kind involves inhabiting and managing and exploiting quite primitive parts of the self. While this is not a particularly dangerous activity, it is a delicate one. It may take years of preparation before the artist finally gets the codes and the keys and the balances right, and can move in and out more or less freely. It is also a very private activity, so private that it almost constitutes the definition of privacy: how I am with myself.

Managing the inner selves, making them work for one (making them productive) is a complex matter of pleasing and satisfying and challenging and extorting and wooing and feeding, and sometimes even of putting to death. For writing not only comes out of the zoo but (to be hypermetaphorical) goes back in again. That is to say, insofar as writing is transactional, the figures for whom and to whom it is done are also figures in the zoo: for instance, the figure-of-the-beloved.

Imagine, then, a project in writing that is, at heart, a transaction with some such figure of the beloved, that tries to please her (but that also tries continually though surreptitiously to revise and recreate her as the-one-who-will-be-pleased); and imagine what will happen if into this transaction is introduced in a massive and undeniable way another figure-of-the-reader, the dark-suited, bald-headed censor, with his pursed lips and his red pen and his irritability and his censoriousness—the censor, in fact, as parodic version of the figure-of-the-father. Then the entire balance of the carefully constructed inner drama will be destroyed, and destroyed in a way that is hard to repair, since the more one tries to ignore (repress) the censor, the larger he swells.

Working under censorship is like being intimate with someone who does not love you, with whom you want no intimacy, but who presses himself in upon you. The censor is an intrusive reader, a reader who forces his way into the intimacy of the writing transaction, forces out the figure of the loved or courted reader, reads your words in a disapproving and censorious fashion.

One of Stalin's principal victims among writers was Osip Mandelstam. From the case of Mandelstam—which I take up in greater detail in Chapter 6—I extract certain important and appalling lessons about the paranoid state.

In 1933, Mandelstam, then 42 years old, composed a short but powerful poem about a tyrant who orders executions left, right, and center, and relishes the deaths of his victims like a Georgian munching raspberries. Though the tyrant is not named, the reference is clearly to Stalin.

Mandelstam did not write the poem down, but recited it several times to friends. In 1934, his home was raided by security police looking for the poem. Though they did not find it—it existed solely inside the heads of the poet and his friends—they arrested him. While he was under arrest, the poet Boris Pasternak had a telephone call from Stalin. Who is Mandelstam, Stalin wanted to know? In particular, is he a master? (The word is the same in Russian as in English.)

Pasternak correctly inferred the second half of the question: Is Mandelstam a master or is he disposable? Pasternak replied, in effect, that Mandelstam was a master, that he was not disposable. So Mandelstam was sentenced to internal exile in the city of Voronezh. While he was living there, pressure was brought to bear on him to pay tribute to Stalin by composing a poem in his honor. Mandelstam gave in and composed an adulatory ode. What he felt about this ode we will never know, not only because he left no record, but because—as his wife persuasively argues—he was mad when he wrote it, mad with fear, perhaps, but mad too with the madness of a person not only suffering the embrace of a body he detests, but having to take the initiative, day after day, line after line, to caress that body.

From this story I isolate two moments: the moment when Stalin asks whether Mandelstam is a master, and the moment when Mandelstam is ordered to celebrate his persecutor.

“Is he a master?” We can be sure Stalin was not asking because he regarded great artists as above the state. What he meant was something like, Is he dangerous? Is he going to live, even if he dies? Is his sentence on me going to live longer than my sentence on him? Do I have to be careful?

Hence the command later on that Mandelstam write an ode. Making the great artists of his day kowtow to him was Stalin's way of breaking them, of making it impossible for them to hold their heads up—in effect, of showing them who was master, and of making them acknowledge him as master in a medium where no lie, no private reservation, was possible: their own art.

Side by side with the case of Mandelstam let me set a case from South Africa, comparable in dynamic if not in scale.

In 1972 the poet Breyten Breytenbach published a poem in Afrikaans entitled “Letter to Butcher from Foreign Parts.” As the poem made clear, the butcher to whom the letter was addressed was Balthazar John Vorster, then prime minister of the Republic of South Africa, the man who had done most to create a security-police empire with huge powers over life and death, untouchable by the law, above the courts.

At the end of the poem, Breytenbach lists the names of men who had died, probably under torture at the hands of the security police, and for whose deaths the courts had found no one culpable. The poem baldly lists the names, as if asserting, “It is I that will live in memory and in history, not the court records.” The heart of the poem, however, is a passage addressed to the butcher himself in which Breytenbach asks Vorster in the most intimate of ways what it is like for him to use fingers red with blood to fondle his wife's private parts. It is a shocking and obscene question, all the more obscene when uttered in a highly puritanical society. The poem was, of course, banned in South Africa.

Two years later the tables were turned. Breytenbach found himself under arrest and in the dock. Though the substantial charge was that he had tried to recruit saboteurs, his writings, particularly the poem against Vorster, soon emerged as a subtext to the proceedings. The goal of the prosecution, as it emerged, was to break him in much the same way that Mandelstam had been broken. This goal was attained: Breytenbach was brought to apologize to Vorster in open court, repudiating his own poem as “crass and insulting.”

Confronting the vast machinery of the state, including its well-developed machinery of censorship, both Mandelstam and Breytenbach were clearly powerless. Yet their respective heads of state—both, as it happened, philistines—responded to their writings as if deeply offended, and deemed the cases important enough to merit personal attention. Why could the two poems in question, however insulting, not have been ignored like the pinpricks they were? Why need the antics of writers concern the state at all?

To answer this question, to understand the troubled relations between writers and the state in all their long history, we need to reflect not on single cases but on authorship as an institution, with a history going back to the beginnings of the modern age, and on the ambitions opened up to individuals by a career in authorship.

The notion that, by dint of writing, a person could aspire to and attain fame, was neither invented nor fostered by scribal culture, the culture of the West before the invention of printing. Such ambitions belong to print culture. We begin to see evidence soon after the invention of printing, as printers make it their practice to attach authors' names to the books they put out. Certainly this signing of the book had its commercial and legal side: the originator of the book laid claim to a share of the profits from its sale while accepting a share of the legal responsibility for its publication.⁶ Since copyright law would not arrive until the eighteenth century, what forced the writer to accept definition as a legal entity—to become an author with all the legal responsibilities thereby entailed—was the institution and the power of censorship.⁷

But signing a book also has a symbolic meaning. A book can be seen as a vehicle used by an author to project his signature—and indeed sometimes his portrait—into the world, in a multiplied form. It is this potentially endless multiplication of traces of himself that gives to the author in the early modern age intimations of a power to cross all spatial and temporal boundaries. In visions of fame and immortality authorship and the mystique of the author as we know it today is born.⁸

The word of the author echoes in the ear of the reading public. Without his public, the author is nothing. This reading public is a creation less of authors themselves than of the early printer-publishers. It is also a model of the people as imagined in the philosophy of the early modern state: literate, integrated (as a body is integrated), receptive to direction. Thus it is no accident that, as habits of reading spread, state censorship takes on a more systematic, pervasive, and rigorous character, as though in printers and their authors the state had identified not so much an enemy (though in fact that is what they were often labeled) as a rival for power. From the sixteenth century onward we begin to detect in the language of the state, when it turns to authors and their powers, a note of distinctly modern paranoia, a paranoia that, as Tony Tanner reminds us, is predictable in and, indeed, necessary to a regime of censorship.⁹ Here, for instance, is Sir Nicholas Bacon, England's Lord Keeper in 1567:

These books … [make] men's minds to be at variance one with another, and diversity of minds maketh seditions, seditions bring in tumults, tumults make insurrections and rebellions, insurrections make depopulations and bring in utter ruin and destruction of men's bodies, goods and lands.¹⁰

Repressive censorship is usually thought of as part of the apparatus of absolutist or totalitarian states: the Russia of Nicholas I, Stalin's Soviet Union. But the rulers of early modern Europe, civil and clerical, viewed the book as a vehicle for sedition and heresy at least as seriously, and operated systems of censorship that were sweeping, draconian, and surprisingly sophisticated in their mechanisms.¹¹ As early as the sixteenth century, authors and printer-publishers were viewed from above as not only an interest group with a strong (and self-justifying) sense of historical mission but an elite with an ability to create a following among the influential literate sector of society in a way that was unsettlingly similar to the ambitions of the state itself.

The history of censorship and the history of authorship—even of literature itself, as a set of practices¹²—are thus intimately bound together. With the advent of printing and the rapid multiplication of copies, the fortunes of the author rose; he grew in power, but also became the object of suspicion and even envy on the part of the state. It is only in the late twentieth century, with the rise to dominance of new, electronic media and the decline of the book, that the state has lost interest in the author and his waning powers.

II

There is nothing that raises the hackles of writers like the threat of censorship, no topic that calls forth a more pugnacious instinctive response. I have suggested why the threat of censorship is felt so intimately; I turn to the rhetoric in which that response is typically framed.

“Is he a master?” asked Stalin. Whether Mandelstam was a master writer or not, what had Stalin to fear from him? I raise this question again in the framework of a contest between state and author to spread their respective words of authority by their respective powers.

In this framework, the object of the state's envy is not so much the rival content of the author's word, or even specifically the power he gets from the press to spread that word, as a certain disseminative power of which the power to publish and have read is only the most marked manifestation. While the power of authors in general is slight without the multiplier effect of the press, the word of the master author has a disseminative power that goes beyond purely mechanical means of dissemination. The master's word, particularly in cultures where an oral base survives, can spread by word of mouth, or from hand to hand in carbon copies (samizdat', literally, “self-publication”); even when the word itself is not spread, it can be replaced by rumors of itself, rumors that spread like copies (in the case of Mandelstam, the rumor that someone had written a poem about which the Leader was furious).

Furthermore, a logic seems to spring into operation that works to the state's disadvantage. “A tyrant cannot take notice of a Fable without putting on the cap that fits,” remarked a nineteenth-century editor of Aesop.¹³ The more draconically the state comes down on writing, the more seriously it is seen to be taking writing; the more seriously it is seen to be taking writing, the more attention is paid to writing; the more attention is paid to writing, the more the disseminative potential of writing grows. The book that is suppressed gets more attention as a ghost than it would have had alive; the writer who is gagged today is famous tomorrow for having been gagged. Even silence, in an environment of censorship, can be eloquent, as Montesquieu observes.¹⁴

No matter what the state does, writers always seem to get the last word. The craft-solidarity of men and women of letters—the intellectual community, the academic community, even the journalistic community—can be surprisingly strong. And those who write the books, in an important sense, make history.

Underlying the confidence among intellectuals in the inevitability of a reversal of power in their favor lies the Judaeo-Christian teaching of the vindication of the truth in the fullness of time. There are many instances of this confidence in our own age. In the old South Africa, writers, no matter how much marginalized and repressed, knew that in the long run the censors would lose—not only because the regime of which censorship was an arm was doomed to collapse, not only because puritanical moral standards were on the wane in a worldwide economy of consumption, but because, as a community, writers would outlast their foes and even write their epitaph.

It is the very vitality of this myth of the inevitability of the emergence of the truth—a myth that intellectuals as a class have annexed and made their own—that leads me to ask whether writers under censorship are wholly disinterested in presenting themselves as embattled and outnumbered, confronting a gigantic foe. Since South Africa, where durable ties had long existed between writers—at least those to whom writing in English was an option—and foreign (principally British) publishers, may have been a special case, let me seek from farther abroad instances of how the conflict between writer and censor has been represented as a battle between David and Goliath.

In 1988, Seamus Heaney published an essay on the poets of Eastern Europe, particularly the Russian poets who suffered under Stalin, and on the effect upon the West of their exemplary lives. Tsvetaeva, Akhmatova, the Mandelstams, Pasternak, Gumilev, Esenin, Mayakovsky, says Heaney, have become “heroic names [in] … a modern martyrology, a record of courage and sacrifice which elicits … unstinted admiration.” Even though they were silenced, the quality of their silence held an exemplary force. Their refusal to compromise their art “expose[d] to the majority [of Soviet citizens] the abjectness of their [own] collapse, as they [fled] for security into whatever self-deceptions the party line require[d] of them.”¹⁵

To Heaney, these great persecuted writers were heroes and martyrs despite themselves. Neither seeking glory nor aspiring to bring about the downfall of the state, they merely remained true to their calling. In the process, however, they drew upon themselves the guilty resentment of those many who had given in to the menaces of the state, and so were left in vulnerable and ultimately tragic isolation.

There can be no question about the power of these life-stories to evoke our pity and terror. What I draw attention to, however, is the language of Heaney's account: to metaphors of battle, to the radical opposing of victory and defeat, suffering and triumph, courage and cowardice. Is the staging of the opposition between Russian writers and the Soviet state in terms of a metaphorics of battle not in itself a declaration of war that strangely betrays what Heaney admires in these writers: their unshakeable (but not wholly unshakeable—they were human, after all) fidelity to their art?

The idea that the poet at his desk could be a hero seems to have been invented by Thomas Carlyle. Carlyle singles out poetry as the path that religious energies must follow in the modern age, and the poet as the world-historical figure who, taking over the roles played earlier in human history by the god-man and the prophet, must define the patterns by which ordinary mortals will live. Though Carlyle evokes Dante and “Shakspeare” as precursors of the poet-hero, his conception remains essentially Shelleyan.¹⁶

To modern ears, the notion of poet as superman sounds quaint—quaint enough to have had to go underground.¹⁷ Lionel Trilling certainly took up the challenge of keeping Carlyle's flame alive, but did so only at the cost of redefining and internalizing the heroic as a “moral energy” (which he glosses as a “mature masculinity”) of a kind exhibited most clearly in Keats.¹⁸ In his conception of the poet-hero as a figure of stubborn, principled resistance rather than as a prophet-pioneer, Heaney is closer to Trilling than to Carlyle. Yet his tribute to the poets who suffered under Stalin calls upon a particularly intransigent metaphorics of black and white without shades of gray. It describes a historical dynamic in which there are finally only two positions left open: for or against, good or bad, the self-censored cowardice of the herd or the uncensored heroism of the few. As a reading of life under Stalin, it seems, in its firm grasp on the handle of rhetorical power, to issue a challenge to all gray, toned-down readings of those times, perhaps even to nuanced readings. It constructs the relationship between writer and tyrant (or writer and censor) as that of a power-rivalry that can only grow more and more naked. It dooms the state to the same no-win dilemma that Ben Jonson triumphantly identified:

Nor do they aught, that use this cruelty
Of interdiction, and this rage of burning;
But purchase to themselves rebuke, and shame,
And to the writers an eternal name.(19)

If the state in extremis suffers from paranoia, then does the writer as hero of resistance, implacably attending to the voice of his daimon, not run an analogous psychic risk? Consider the following boast by Mario Vargas Llosa:

The congenital unsubmissiveness of literature is much broader than is believed by those who consider it a mere instrument for opposing governments and dominant social structures: it strikes equally at everything [that] stands for dogma and logical exclusivism in the interpretation of life, that is, both ideological orthodoxies and heterodoxies. In other words, it is a living, systematic, inevitable contradiction of all that exists.²⁰

I take the liberty of reading this claim, nominally on behalf of literature, as in fact on behalf of writers as a professional and even vocational group, against both the bureaucrat-censor in the hire of the tyrant, and the tyrant's foe, the revolutionary scheming to enroll the writer in the grand army of the revolution. In their attitude to the writer, says Vargas Llosa, tyrant and revolutionary are more alike than they are different. Their opposition is, from the point of view of the writer, spurious or illusory or both. The writer's opposition, true opposition, means “systematic … contradiction” of them and their totalizing claims.

The maneuver executed by Vargas Llosa here—namely, shifting his own opposition to a logical level one floor higher than the ground-level political battle—implies that the writer occupies a position that simultaneously stands outside politics, rivals politics, and dominates politics. In its pride, this claim is quite Marlovian; however unwittingly, it suggests that the risk run by the writer-as-hero is the risk of megalomania.

Notes

1. Though by no means as extreme, the South African system showed odd parallels with the Soviet system. Andrei Sinyavsky recollects finding no entry for tsenzura, “censorship,” in a 1955 dictionary of foreign-derived words in Russian: “The word ‘censorship’ was itself censored.” Quoted in Marianna Tax Choldin and Maurice Friedberg, eds., The Red Pencil (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989), p. 94.

2. Quoted in Carlos Ripoll, The Heresy of Words in Cuba (New York: Freedom House, 1985), p. 36.

3. Leonard W. Levy, Treason against God (New York: Schocken, 1981), pp. 25-26.

4. George Mangakis, “Letter to Europeans” (1972), in George Theiner, ed., They Shoot Writers, Don't They? (London: Faber, 1984), p. 33.

5. Kis, Danilo. “Censorship/Self-Censorship.” Index on Censorship 15/1 (January 1986): 45.

6. Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book, trans. David Gerard (London: New Left Books, 1976), pp. 160, 84, 261; Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (2 vols.; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), vol. 1, p. 230; Alain Viala, Naissance de l'écrivain (Paris: Editions de minuit, 1985), p. 85.

7. Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?” trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, in Robert Con Davis and Ronald Schleifer, eds., Contemporary Literary Criticism, 2d ed. (New York: Longman, 1989), p. 268.

8. As regards this mystique, we may note that even well-educated people misunderstood the etymology of the word author, believing that it went back not only to Latin augere, to add something to something else—which it does—but also to Greek autos, self—which it does not. Thus there grew up around the word a field of connotations: the author was a man of authority, and his authority was backed by a certain parthenogenic power to create out of himself. See Viala, Naissance de l'écrivain, p. 276.

9. Tony Tanner, “Licence and Licencing,” Journal of the History of Ideas 38/1 (1977): 10.

10. Quoted in D. M. Loades, “The Theory and Practice of Censorship in Sixteenth-Century England,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, vol. 24 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1974), p. 142.

11. In the sixteenth century, suggests Annabel Patterson, authors began to use “the indeterminacy inveterate in language” to evade censorship. Authors built ambiguity into their texts, while censors concentrated their attention on the ambiguous word or phrase. “Functional ambiguity,” in both writing and interpretation, thus became a distinguishing practice of literature. Censorship and Interpretation (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), p. 18. A succinct account of mechanisms of control used in Europe between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries—of which institutional censorship is only the most blatant—is give in Robert J. Goldstein, Political Censorship of the Arts and the Press in Nineteenth-Century Europe (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989), pp. 34-54.

12. Patterson outlines the tacit conventions signaled by the authorities in early modern England to allow authors to address contentious issues without making it necessary for the authorities to take steps against them. Censorship and Interpretation, pp. 10-11.

13. Joseph Jacobs, quoted in Annabel Patterson, Fables of Power (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), p. 17.

14. “Sometimes silence expresses more than whole discourses.” The Spirit of the Laws, quoted in Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation, p. 9. Similarly, writing about films made under censorship in Poland, Jeffrey C. Goldfarb points out that silence on a particular live issue could be so complete that it called attention to itself as a political critique. On Cultural Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 93.

15. Seamus Heaney, The Government of the Tongue (London: Faber, 1988), p. 39.

16. Thomas Carlyle, “The Hero as Poet. Dante. Shakspeare,” in On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (1841) (London: Chapman and Hall, n.d.), pp. 78-114.

17. Thus Terrence Des Pres suggests that, while many people may still “harbor heroic sentiments about what poetry is or ought to be,” they do so nowadays only “quietly, in secret.” “Poetry and Politics,” TriQuarterly, no. 65 (1986): 20, 23.

18. Trilling defines “mature masculinity” as “a direct relationship to the world of external reality, which, by activity, it seeks to understand, or to master, or come to honorable terms with; and it implies fortitude, and responsibility for both one's duty and one's fate, and intention, and an insistence upon one's personal value and honor.” “The Poet as Hero: Keats in His Letters,” in The Opposing Self (London: Secker and Warburg, 1955), pp. 22, 24.

19. Ben Jonson, Sejanus, act 4; quoted in Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation, p. 52.

20. Mario Vargas Llosa, “The Writer in Latin America” (1978), in George Theiner, ed., They Shoot Writers, Don't They? p. 166.