The Soul of the Censor
Not only did censors perceive nuances of hidden meaning, but they also understood the way published texts reverberated in the public. Their sophistication should not be surprising in the case of the GDR, because they included authors, scholars, and critics. Eminent authors also functioned as censors in eighteenth-century France, and the surveillance of vernacular literatures in India was carried out by learned librarians as well as district officers with a keen eye for the folkways of the “natives.” To dismiss censorship as crude repression by ignorant bureaucrats is to get it wrong. Although it varied enormously, it usually was a complex process that required talent and training and that extended deep into the social order.
.. he denounced censorship, after quoting Voltaire, in the language of natural rights:
For the truth can only be reached by a dialogue of free opinions enjoying equal rights. Any interference with freedom of thought and word, however discreet the mechanics and terminology of such censorship, is a scandal in this century, a chain entangling the limbs of our national literature as it tries to bound forward.
.. He could not simply refuse to negotiate, because the writers wanted their manifesto to be published and to reinforce the public’s resistance to Stalinism. He won some points and lost others, insisting all the while on “the absurdity of censoring a text that protested against all censorship.” In the end, he managed to save nearly everything that he had written. But when he left the meeting, he was miserable. “Why did I knuckle under?” he complained to Hamsik. “I let them make a complete idiot of me….Every compromise is a dirty compromise.” Soon afterward, the Party Central Committee phoned to say that it could not accept the compromise after all. The proceedings were never published. And Kundera was enormously relieved.