A Companion to the History of the Book (90 page)

Lewis, Roy Harley (1984)
Fine Bookbinding in the Twentieth Century.
London: David & Charles.

Viscomi, Joseph (1993)
Blake and the Idea of the Book.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Whalley, Joyce Irene and Chester, Tessa Rose (1988)
A History of Children’s Book Illustration.
London: John Murray.

37

Obscenity, Censorship, and Modernity

Deana Heath

This anonymous cove at the Customs,
This storehouse for horrible stuff
Is as venal, I’ll bet
As the rest of us, yet
Does he whine that his job is too tough?
No. He keeps his identity secret,
His knowledge safe under his hat;
And he lurks all alone
Unsuspected, unknown
Such as hangmen and heroes like that.

(“Den,” 1935)

Much like this Australian poet, we tend to regard censors (if we view censorship as more than a disembodied and anonymous process) in a derogatory light – as, at the very least, hacks who snuff out human creativity. The censor is generally typed as, first and foremost, ignorant, such as the police sergeant in charge of the 1948 New South Wales prosecution for obscenity against Lawson Glassop’s
We Were the Rats
(1944), who claimed that “he didn’t read very much, he hadn’t heard of Byron” (nor, for that matter, of Chaucer,
Donjuán,
or
Lady Chatterley’s Lover),
and who believed that the term “pornographic” meant “poor class or poor quality”
(The Sun
1948). Given that Australia’s wartime censors included individuals who had previously held such unliterary positions as grazer, pearl diver, and chemist, it should come as little surprise that they were not greatly respected (Pulían 1984: 147). Australians had, in fact, coined a term, “wowsers,” to describe such regulators, or indeed any individual who seeks to “devote himself zealously to reforming the morals of his neighbours, and, in particular, to throwing obstacles in the way of their enjoyment of what they choose to regard as pleasures” (Dunstan 1972: 2). “Wowsers,” according to Keith Dunstan, first appeared
en masse
in the 1880s (a product of the nonconformist, particularly Methodist, churches), and were thereafter behind the regulation of practically every form of public (and often private) behavior in Australia until the 1960s.

Every society undoubtedly has its version of the “wowser,” but to make censorship the provenance of puritanical prudes is to mitigate the nature, meaning, and effects of censorship. It is, in fact, to fall prey to what Michel Foucault has termed the “repressive hypothesis,” in which censorship is generally defined as “the repressive intervention of authority,” and is traced most notably through the operations of law (Foucault 1990: 5). Thus, to take the example of the censorship of obscenity in Britain, according to proponents of the repressive hypothesis this emerged in conjunction with the suppression of sexuality beginning in the seventeenth century. Although the explanations for the origins of such repression vary (from socio-religious factors, such as the decline of medieval ecclesiastical jurisdiction over moral offences and the state inheritance of such jurisdiction, to economic shifts, such as the development of capitalism and the perceived incompatibility of sexuality with an intensive work imperative), most advocates of the repressive hypothesis concur that censorship remained relatively “liberal” until the passage of the portentous Obscene Publications Act of 1857. Following this, the dark days of prudery, hysteria, and repression purportedly set in, as exemplified by a series of censorship trials, such as the landmark
Queen
v.
Hicklin
in 1868, and the initiation of prosecutions against “serious” scientific and literary works with the trial of Henry Bradlaugh and Annie Besant in 1877 for republishing Henry Knowleton’s
The Fruits of Philosophy,
and Henry Vizetelly in 1888 for publishing translations of Emile Zola’s novels.

The late nineteenth century is a crucial period for advocates of the repressive hypothesis, for, as Norman St. John-Stevas claims, this was the period “when the Victorian synthesis was breaking down and when Forster’s Education Act had created a vast new reading public” (1956: xix), a factor that instituted what many commentators on British censorship regard as a “moral panic.” Once the stable door had opened on the prosecution of types of literature that had never been censored before, the horse supposedly bolted, particularly following the “banning” of D. H. Lawrence’s
The Rainbow
in 1915, and the censorship of a spate of “literary” works in the 1920s such as
Ulysses
in 1923,
The Well of Loneliness
in 1928, and
Pansies, Lady Chatterley’s Lover,
and
The Sleeveless Errand
in I929. The dark days of prudery continued, the theory concludes, until the “age of enlightenment” in the 1960s, following which (barring some minor aberrations) freedom of speech reigned (see, for example, Siebert 1965; Thomas 1969; Tribe 1973; Sutherland 1982; Davenport-Hines 1990).

In this approach, censorship is inseparable from law and, as such, its “severity” or “pervasiveness” is charted through a series of “show trials” that are made to stand in for all forms of censorship activity. Such show trials were, however, few and far between in Britain, the types of work they sought to censor shifted over time, and the trials were grounded in particular historical circumstances that render it problematic to throw them all together to form a coherent history of censorship (Saunders 1992). The regulation of obscenity in Britain has not, in short, been a unified historical project: not only did the objectives and the specific targets of censorship change over time, but so did the means of censoring and the particular agents involved in carrying these out. Censorship cannot, therefore, be reduced purely to prohibition or equated simply with silencing.

What, then, is censorship, and how does it work? During the past two decades a substantial body of scholarship has emerged, inspired in part by Foucault, that challenges the “repressive hypothesis.” According to Foucault:

What sustains our eagerness to speak of sex in terms of repression is doubtless this opportunity to speak out against the powers that be, to utter truths and promise bliss, to link together enlightenment, liberation, and manifold pleasures; to pronounce a discourse that combines the fervor of knowledge, the determination to change the laws, and the longing for the garden of earthly delights. (Foucault 1990: 7).

Instead of repression, Foucault argues that what occurred in Western European culture at the end of the sixteenth century was a discursive explosion (deriving from the confessional during the course of the Counter-Reformation) about sex. By the eighteenth century, sex had become a “police matter,” part of the emergence of “population” as an economic and political problem, and with it the need to monitor sexual behavior, birth rates, legitimate versus illegitimate births, and the physical and psychological effects of contraception. While an expurgation of the authorized vocabulary did occur, and new relations of discretion were formed between such social groups as parents and children and teachers and students (what Foucault refers to as a “restrictive economy”), at the level of discourse there was an incitement to speak about sex. Instead of one discourse about sex, however, what instead emerged were multiple discourses, both “institutional” (through disciplines such as medicine, psychiatry, criminal justice, and demography) and social (through a variety of social controls that emerged in the later nineteenth century). Thus, “[r]ather than a massive censorship, beginning with the verbal proprieties imported by the Age of Reason, what was involved [in the regulation of sexuality] was a regulated and polymorphous incitement to discourse” (Foucault 1990: 34).

For Foucault and his followers, censorship is therefore productive rather than (or rather than purely) repressive. It is also
“distributive
rather than repressive,” since acts of restriction are not uniform in their application; they instead hinge upon access (Hunter et al. 1993: 52). Thus, terms like
obscenity
and
indecency
are socially determined concepts that, as far as those responsible for regulating them are concerned, change according to who is reading or viewing the work in question, and when and where they are doing so. We can see such thinking at work in the first British case to criminalize obscenity (and thus remove it from the purview of the church courts), the 1757 trial of Edmund Curll for publishing an obscene libel in the form of
Venus in the Cloister; or, The Nun in her Smock.
But, as Colin Manchester reveals, “the court was not concerned with penalizing obscenity in literature as
obscenity”
but with “obscenity’s relationship with two other factors, religion and breach of the peace” (1991: 41). The obscenity in question threatened to breach the peace because of the widely disseminable format in which it was purveyed, namely in a printed work (Saunders 1990: 437). Obscenity law thus first emerged “in a complex technical environment formed by the overlap of a new governmental distinction between public and private spheres and the spread of a specific cultural technology and competence” (Hunter et al. 1993: 51).

Determining the “competence” of particular individuals or social groups to partake of the “cultural technology” of the printed word was a question not simply of gender, class, or age but also of practices of reading. That is, different groups were conceived of as being endangered by a variety of texts at different times based on notions of how the group in question was perceived to read or “utilize” such texts – what Ian Hunter, David Saunders, and Dugald Williamson refer to as the notion of “variable obscenity” (1993: 10). Such a notion was laid down in Britain in what became the “classic” test of obscenity, Lord Chief Justice Cockburn’s 1868 ruling in
Queen
v.
Hicklin
that the obscenity of a given work was to be determined by “whether the tendency of the matter charged with as obscenity is to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences”
(The Law Reports: Court of Queen’s Bench,
1868) – namely, those deemed incapable of self-control, such as children, women, the working classes, and (since the judgment became the standard “test” of obscenity throughout the British empire) Britain’s colonial subjects (Heath 2003). Hence it was common for inexpensive or translated editions of works to be censored but not expensive ones or those in their original languages.

While Foucauldian approaches to censorship have vastly enhanced our understanding of what censorship is and how it works, they have also complicated and problematized it in new ways. The chief difficulty lies in the way in which power has been conceptualized, for Foucauldian scholars have largely abandoned the focus on the legal constraints upon speech to focus on power itself as an object of study: how it is constituted, the intersections of resistance and domination through which it is exercised, and how discursive and disciplinary practices are enacted. Censorship has thus become viewed as a technique through which discursive practices are maintained; as Pierre Bourdieu argues, censorship is “constituted by the very structure of the field in which the discourse is produced and circulates” (1991: 137). In this reading, all discourse is a product of censorship, and hence censorship is the norm rather than the exception, since it is, quite literally, everywhere.

While such approaches to understanding censorship have offered important insights into its productive nature, its omnipresence poses a problem. As Frederick Schauer argues, “Once we acknowledge that our abilities to express and to communicate are so dependent on the actions of others ... to continue to speak of some of those actions as censorship appears odd” (1998: 149). For Schauer, censorship is, in fact, “a conclusion masquerading as an analytic device,” for why, he asks, do we characterize the words of Salman Rushdie as the target of censorship and the words of the Ayatollah Khomeini calling for a
fatwa
against Rushdie as censorship, even though words were the only things that he employed? Or why do we regard it as censorship when library boards seek to keep certain books out of libraries but not when librarians do (Schauer 1998: 160)? Seeing censorship as everywhere thus makes it impossible, Schauer implies, to distinguish between different types, means, and degrees of censorship: between, for example, the suppression of speech caused by state legal action, market forces, and dominant discourses, or between what we might refer to as “soft” forms of censorship (such as literary criticism or the ways in which pornography serves to “silence” women) and “hard” forms (such as imprisonment or death). These represent different mechanisms of silencing and different kinds of power, as well as different methods of constructing subjects. As Judith Butler has illustrated, “implicit” forms of censorship (namely “operations of power that rule out in unspoken ways what will remain unspeakable”) may not only be more effective than “explicit” forms, such as state policy, in making certain kinds of speech unspeakable (particularly since the latter tend to proliferate the very terms that they seek to suppress), they also “make certain kinds of citizens possible and others impossible” (Butler 1998: 250, 257).

It is thus necessary to mediate between “juridical” regulation (in which power limits and constrains the object on which it operates) and “productive” regulation (in which power contributes to making the object that it also constrains), between “liberal” approaches to the study of censorship (in which censorship is viewed as the suppression of individual liberty by the state) and what Debora Shuger (1998: 89) refers to as “multicultural” approaches (in which censorship is regarded as the intimidation of marginalized groups by the dominant culture). We should preserve, in other words, the analytic force of the new scholarship without sacrificing the values and concerns of more traditional accounts. It is also necessary to broaden our historical understanding of how censorship works: to explore, for example, what particular criteria rendered certain works in need of censorship; how terms such as “blasphemy” and “obscenity” were constituted over time and in different places, and why such concepts were deemed to be such a problem in the first place and to whom; and how ideas of the “blasphemous” or “obscene” were disseminated and transformed to become part of different regulatory projects. Dozens of nations, for example, signed the 1923 International Treaty for the Suppression of the Circulation of and the Traffic in Obscene Publications, but this does not mean that they all shared the same conceptions of what constituted an obscene publication, or why such publications needed to be regulated, and how to accomplish this. While by the early twentieth century Western conceptions of obscenity would certainly have been familiar in countries as diverse as Japan, Iran, and India (all of which signed the treaty), and while similar regulatory projects were undertaken in each, not only did such projects draw upon indigenous aesthetic traditions that intersected with Western ones, but the rationales behind them were undoubtedly distinct. To understand how such regulations worked, we will briefly examine the conception of “obscenity” in Western aesthetics and explore why obscenity was deemed to be a social danger, and then consider how such conceptions of the obscene were translated, transformed, and subverted in colonial India.