Robert Darnton. Censors at Work: How States Shaped Literature.

Abstract

As Robert Darnton comments in the conclusion to this passionate and provocative book, which should become required reading for all students of censorship, the censorship debate all too often descends into a crude trading of contraries: “the normative versus the relative, the empirical versus the theoretical, the liberal versus the poststructural.” Rejecting these “either/or alternatives” and the sterility they foster, he prefers “to shift the ground of the debate” (p. 243) by promising “a history of censorship in a new key, one that is both comparative and ethnographic” (p. 15), and one that re-engages with “the complexities of experience” (p. 243). The results are transformative, but they also raise an unavoidable question. The book's “ethnographic” quality is its most Darntonesque (he has now surely earned the honor of the adjective). In this mode, we find him emerging from the archives not so much as an anthropologist with a wealth of field observations, but as an investigative journalist with a fund of eye-opening, human interest stories. Because they put pay to “the great-men, great-books version of literary history” (p. 69), they of course make some serious historiographical points as well. Consequently, we hear less about Voltaire in the chapter on mid-eighteenth-century France, and more about Marie-Madeleine Bonafon, the chambermaid author of the seditiously salacious Tanastés: Conte allégorique (1745); less about Thomas Babington Macaulay and his minute-men in nineteenth-century India, and more about James Long, the Irish missionary and dedicated liberal who catalogued books as an exercise in surveillance on behalf of the imperial state; less about Christa Wolf's compromising negotiations with the censors in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), and more about Hans-Jürgen Wesener and Christina Horn, the once-shadowy censors who found themselves in a no less-tangled set of relationships than the regime's most famous author.