Anglia 2016; 134(4): 739–744
Johanna Hartmann and Hubert Zapf (eds.). Censorship and Exile. Internationale
Schriften des Jakob-Fugger-Zentrums 1. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht,
2015, 285 pp., 11 illustr., € 45.00.
Reviewed by Patrick O’Donnell, Michigan State University
E ˗ Mail: [email protected]
 
 
DOI 10.1515/anglia-2016-0085
The complex set of relationships that exists between censorship and exile is not
immediately transparent: the former is often considered a vehicle of state or
religious repression, while the latter is viewed as the voluntary or forced displacement of identities from familial, communal, or national confines. The seventeen
essays collected in this volume, however, untangle this complexity from a number
of perspectives and show how censorship and exile can be thought of together for
their effects on the production of art, the transmission of language, and the
intertwined fates of the individual and the multitude. As the editors make clear in
the “Preface” to this collection, the relationship between censorship and exile can
be viewed as one of cause and effect: censorship, which “has the function of
exerting power by suppressing potentially destabilizing ideas”, can force authors
“to seek refuge in other countries” where they may experience the “traumatizing
experiences of exile, political, religious or racist persecution, alienation, loss, the
deterioration of living standard as well as restricted possibilities of publication” (6,
7). Yet the consequences of censorship, they suggest, may prove totally contrary to
the intentions of those agencies that attempted to silence “destabilizing” voices or
remove them from the body politic in the first place: “forms of censorship paradoxically reveal the self-consciousness and weakness of the censoring institutions”
(6), while many of the works considered in Censorship and Exile reveal the power of
literature to “transform the culturally suppressed into a source of [...] creative
energy” (9). Moreover, as the range of essays gathered here attest, censorship can
take many forms other than that generated through state authority, and the meanings of “exile” can run the gamut from literal displacement to forms of internal exile
and compartmentalization or the occupation of liminal imaginary spaces that both
reveal and cross boundaries of all kinds. With its historical and theoretical reach,
Censorship and Exile is a particularly timely contribution to our understanding of
how literature is created, published, and distributed under the threat of erasure.
The collection is divided into four sections, each focusing on censorship and
exile successively from comparative, historical, political, and creative perspectives. The lead essay in the section on comparative perspectives, Heide Ziegler’s
“Exile and Self-Censorship: Thomas Mann and Vladimir Nabokov”, offers the first
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and one of the most insightful analyses in the volume of the relationship between
authors in exile and forms of self-censorship in a revealing discussion of two
authors who are rarely compared save under the most generalized categories of
modernism. Through sustained, close readings of Nabokov’s Pale Fire and Mann’s
Doktor Faustus, Ziegler introduces the suggestion that the pairings of John Shade
and Charles Kinbote in the former, and that of Adrian Leverkühn and Serenus
Zeitblom in the latter, can be identified with their respective authors as complex
censoring and enabling mechanisms. This gives rise “to the thesis that both
authors, feeling insecure in their adopted countries because of their position as
exiles, create an artist who calls up his own ‘internalized’ censor, thus producing
a form of – positive or negative – self-censorship” (21). Ziegler shows how exploring the intricacies of this question in terms of the intersubjective relationships
between author and reader generated by both Nabokov’s and Mann’s portraits of
the artist enable “new ways of reading” (35) the authors comparatively across
time, space, and geography; her analysis, as well, convinces us that these novels
transcend the limitations of self-censorship as works of “art that will go ahead of
the artist” (34–35).
Three additional essays in this section show how a comparative approach to
censorship and exile can produce new perspectives on authors who have endured
both, but who have not often been considered together. In “The Jealousy of
Displacement: James Joyce’s Exiles and Edward Said’s ‘Reflections on Exile’”,
Christoph Henke applies Said’s notion of “extraterritoriality” to Joyce’s littlediscussed play, and shows how both Joyce and Said experienced and manifested
in their work “the exile’s jealousy of the non-exile’s sense of belonging” (44). Said
is again brought into play in Katja Sarkowsky’s comparison of two memoirs: André
Aciman’s Out of Egypt and Said’s Out of Place. While Sarkowsky points out sharp
distinctions between the agendas of the two writers in remembering lost homelands, she finds that both insist on “‘out-of-placeness’ as a place, and ‘home’ as a
place that can only be re-membered, a process of ongoing integration of what is
lost into a sense of maybe not being in place but being in the world” (63). In a
comparative study of Jamaican music, language, and literature that concludes this
section, Lars Hinrichs shows how tropes of exile find their way into Caribbean
languages and dialects via the seemingly opposed and differentiated routes of
religious belief and popular discourse; in so doing, he demonstrates the decontextualizing and recontextualizing energies of language in diasporic cultures.
The five essays in the historical perspective section include a suite of essays
on Medieval censorship (Iris Zimmermann on censorship in Medieval love lyrics,
Freimut Löser on censorship in the fourteenth century, and Klaus Wolf on censorship and exile in Medieval and Early Modern universities), Kirsten Belgum on
censorship and piracy in early nineteenth century Germany, and Katherine Arens
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on self-censorship in modern academic cultures. All of these provide valuable
contexts for understanding the relationship between censorship and exile from
the twentieth century to the present: Zimmermann’s structural analysis of textual
transmission, Lösers’s case study of censored religious writers such as Marguerite
Porete, William of Ockham, and Meister Eckhardt, and Wolf’s discussion of
scholars censored by their own academies in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and
sixteenth centuries provide complex insights into the destructive and (occasionally) productive results of censorship and exile. Belgum’s “Censorship and Piracy:
Publishing and State Control in Early Nineteenth Century Germany” takes us into
the modern age with a detailed, revealing discussion of the ways in which
publishing piracy covertly assisted state censorship in Prussia as well as the
personal agenda of Adolf Müllner, a lawyer, dramatist, and pamphleteer. The
most impressive essay of this group is Arens’s “Self-Censorship, Self-Immolation:
Intellectual Exiles and Violence in Academic Cultures”. An important contribution to the intellectual history of modernity, Arens carefully considers the ways in
which two major developments in German and Austrian intellectual history – the
work of Freud’s disciples and that of the “Vienna Circle” of logical empiricism –
when imported to the United States by leading European intellectuals in exile,
became subject to various forms of institutional control that dramatically affected
the distribution and radicality of psychoanalytic and philosophical thought in the
U. S. Arens concludes with the provocative thesis that she has located the “historical source for a new kind of self-censorship in the era around the Second World
War” evident “in the growing anti-Germanism of the US academy and the increasing number of attempts to establish US scholarship, especially in the humanities
and social sciences, as indigenous and coeval with Europe’s” (153).
The essays on censorship and exile in political perspective include Hannah
Chapelle Wojciehowski on ‘archaeological censorship’ in Foucault, Christiane
Fäcke on censorship related to the Holocaust, Elżbieta Baraniecka on Polish
playwright’s Sławomir Mrożek’s theater of the absurd, and John Morán González
on linguistic difference, censorship, and exile in Julia Alvarez’s How the García
Girls Lost Their Accent. Wojciehowski provides an illuminating discussion of the
ways in which Foucault’s L’archéologie du savoir was affected by his temporary
self-exile in Tunisia, and the forms of censorship exercised on student revolutionaries that he witnessed and experienced while there. Her consideration of transitions in Foucault’s thought to a more activist mode of discursive intervention
post-1968, while necessarily brief, provides directions for new explorations of the
trajectory of his philosophy in the context of the 1960s and its aftermath. Focusing
on the town of Homberg in Northern Hesse, Fäcke provides a narrative of the
experiences of a Jewish family during the Third Reich and the ways those
experiences were either tabooed, or much later, remembered in the complex
 
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process of repression, disavowal, and reconstruction that attends Holocaust
memorization. The result is a question about how willing all involved may be to
confront the many difficult and contradictory truths of the Holocaust in a way that
“truly respect[s] the victims” (191).
Baraniecka’s essay on Sławomir Mrożek offers a study of how modernist
techniques (those relevant to the theater of the absurd) can serve to resist state
and social censorship – in this case, that of the USSR as exercised upon Poland
from 1945 to 1989. Developing the category of “the socialist absurd”, Baraniecka
shows how Mrożek’s work differs from its “existentialist counterpart” undergirded by “the human desire for a rational explanation of human existence and
the silence of an indifferent universe” (196), and instead focuses on the bizarre
discrepancies between an official, state-mandated ‘reality’ and the reality actually
experienced in the ordinary lives of Polish citizens. Making use of transnational
theory and discourse, González brings us to a contemporary setting in North
America in his incisive discussion of the way that Julia Alvarez’s landmark novel
is representative of a “literature [that] foregrounds the contradictions and discontinuities of nationalist narration thematically and structurally in ways that highlight the censorship by, and exile stemming from, nationalist constructions of
linguistic difference” (207). Advocating for a new perspective on Alvarez’s novel
and others that manifest “reciprocal translations between Hispanophone postcolonial spaces and Anglophone U. S. spaces” (209), González convincingly demonstrates that linguistic difference and its effects can only be fully understood
through scholarly methodologies that go well beyond those of “U. S. paradigms of
immigrant or ethnic literature” (210). One of the strongest essays in the collection,
González’s “‘Trying to get the accents right’” reveals in its citational title the
intricate relation between grammar and nation, and linguistic censorship and
linguistic difference, that demand serious revision in a transnational context.
Censorship and Exile concludes with four essays that develop creative perspectives on the topic. Censorship and creativity, and exile and inspiration, are
not pairings that come immediately to mind in thinking about this topic. First,
Matt Cohen considers Walt Whitman’s “Eidolons” as a form of self-representation
that instantiates Whitman’s response to the censoring of his poetry: in Cohen’s
view, Whitman succeeds in manufacturing a “depiction of himself as a national
poetic orphan” aligned with the “international distribution efforts” that resulted
from prohibitions placed upon his work in America (223). Cohen argues that, in
Whitman’s case, censorship at home had, for the censors, the unintended effect
of enhancing his celebrity abroad, and served to inspire the poet to consider
himself an imaginary exile and his “Eidolons” (in Greek, meaning ‘phantoms’ or
‘idealized images’) the embodiment of a “fantasy of the already distributed, the
emissive and transformative qualities imminent in all endeavors, all of the moods
 
 
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of the poet, even before they hit the page” (237). Elizabeth Richmond-Garza next
considers an equally notorious case of censorship – that of Oscar Wilde. For
Richmond-Garza, Wilde’s performative, queer body of work, which necessitated
an artistic life led under censorship, social exclusion, and censorship, drove
Wilde to manufacture an image of ‘place’ as, in Marc Auge’s notion, a non-place,
or a liminal, transitory space that he would come to occupy in exile from the
social order. She argues that Wilde’s “contextual presentation of a mobile, multiple and always queer exilic self is not simply a function of trauma” (244), but also
a form of self-invention as not-self, or as a spontaneous collage of multiple selves.
Though neither cite Deleuze and Guattari, both Cohen and Richmond-Garza
appear to approach their subjects from a Deleuzian perspective that endorses the
rhizome (which could easily be substituted for the “[e]idolon” in Cohen’s analysis), deterritorialization, and the immersion of the self into the multitude as the
creative ‘effects’ of censorship and exile.
Ulrich Hohoff’s “Literary Creativity and Censorship: Authors in the German
Democratic Republic and Their Readers 1949–1989” offers a detailed catalogue of
creative responses to censorship imposed upon both authors and readers during
the four decades of Soviet rule in former East Germany. Under the rubric of “selfcensorship”, Hohoff discusses how authors such as Christa Wolf, Fritz Rudolph
Fries, Bertolt Brecht, and Stefan Heym deployed strategies like the modernization
of narrative technique, taking the outsider’s perspective, insisting on socialist
principles (while covertly exposing their limitations), or publishing in samizdat
formats in order to preserve creative dissidence within the system. In the final,
brief concluding essay of the collection, Rotraud von Kulessa considers how
Haitian-Canadian writer Dany Laferrière represents exile and censorship as inducing forms of trauma, and how his writing becomes a strategy for transgressing
exile. Von Kulessa shows that various strategies in Laferrière’s work – the use of
irony, the elision past and present, or the metaphorization of spatial displacement – allow him to overcome a traumatic past: “[l]iterature”, she writes, under
these circumstances, “gains a therapeutic function” (280). This section on creativity thus ends, appropriately, on a hopeful, generative note.
The editors of Censorship and Exile inform us that the collection came about
as the result of intensive collaboration between the faculties of the Universität
Augsburg and the University of Texas at Austin, and more specifically, between
the English and American Studies departments of those institutions. The collection is, thus, international in scope, but as the summaries of approaches described above clearly indicate, also avowedly interdisciplinary. As with any
collection as capacious as this one, there are essays that stand out as exemplary:
those by Ziegler, Arens, Baraniecka, González, and Cohen strike me as especially
worthy of note, but every entry in this volume offers valuable insights on the
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many-faceted topic of censorship and exile. There is a rich assortment of leads for
future research, and the editors are to be congratulated for bringing together this
considerable group of scholars in literary studies, theory, history, linguistics,
translation, and cultural studies, all well-focused on the multiple correspondences between censorship and exile. In a time when the massive movements of
populations across the earth occur alongside, and as the consequence of, the
proliferation of censorious regimes, this volume is especially welcome.
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