Content area
Full Text
The subject of the interview is Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship, to be published in early 1996 by the University of Chicago Press.
WORLD LITERATURE TODAY: Your new book has chapters on a wide range of writers--D. H. Lawrence, Desiderius Erasmus, Osip Mandelstam, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Zbigniew Herbert, Andre Brink, Breyten Breytenbach--as well as on people who aren't usually thought of as writers--the apartheid theorist Geoffrey Cronje--and on a variety of topics in the field of censorship: the feminist critique of pornography, the history of so-called publications control in South Africa, your personal experience of working under censorship. Obviously there is a certain South African bias to the book, and secondarily perhaps a bias toward the Russian or East European experience; but beyond expressing your general opposition to censorship (which won't be news to anyone, I am sure), I wonder whether you can say what the general thesis of the book is.
J. M. COETZEE: This is not a book with a general thesis. Its substance lies in the chapters on individual writers, rather than in the chapters that deal--unavoidably--with generalities. In fact, I am even dubious about accepting your comment that the book expresses a general opposition to censorship. I don't dispute your statement that a distaste for censorship--even a strong distaste--emerges from the book. What I am reluctant to endorse is the statement that the book is written to express an opposition to censorship. I would rather say that the book explores, in theory and in practice, opposition to censorship--explores that opposition not only in studies of several writers working under censorship, but also in my own case: what does it mean for a person of my kind, a rather disaffiliated intellectual whose heritage is largely European, or European-in-Africa, to be in opposition?
WLT: A certain ambivalence toward your own position certainly does emerge in the first chapter. I think, for example, of a passage in which you seem to be favoring a stance of liberal tolerance, but then say that, "depending on how you look at it," this tolerance is "either deeply civilized or complacent, hypocritical, and patronizing." Which is it? Is liberal tolerance deeply civilized or is it in fact the expression of a rather myopic point of view, in certain of...