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Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship

par J. M. Coetzee

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Winner of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature. J. M. Coetzee presents a coherent, unorthodox analysis of censorship from the perspective of one who has lived and worked under its shadow. The essays collected here attempt to understand the passion that plays itself out in acts of silencing and censoring. He argues that a destructive dynamic of belligerence and escalation tends to overtake the rivals in any field ruled by censorship. From Osip Mandelstam commanded to compose an ode in praise of Stalin, to Breyten Breytenbach writing poems under and for the eyes of his prison guards, to Aleksander Solzhenitsyn engaging in a trial of wits with the organs of the Soviet state, Giving Offense focuses on the ways authors have historically responded to censorship. It also analyzes the arguments of Catharine MacKinnon for the suppression of pornography and traces the operations of the old South African censorship system. "The most impressive feature of Coetzee's essays, besides his ear for language, is his coolheadedness. He can dissect repugnant notions and analyze volatile emotions with enviable poise."--Kenneth Baker, San Francisco Chronicle Book Review "Those looking for simple, ringing denunciations of censorship's evils will be disappointed. Coetzee explicitly rejects such noble tritenesses. Instead . . . he pursues censorship's deeper, more fickle meanings and unmeanings."--Kirkus Reviews "These erudite essays form a powerful, bracing criticism of censorship in its many guises."--Publishers Weekly "Giving Offense gets its incisive message across clearly, even when Coetzee is dealing with such murky theorists as Bakhtin, Lacan, Foucault, and René; Girard. Coetzee has a light, wry sense of humor."--Bill Marx, Hungry Mind Review "An extraordinary collection of essays."--Martha Bayles, New York Times Book Review "A disturbing and illuminating moral expedition."--Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times Book Review… (plus d'informations)
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2 sur 2
Dear GR management (GRM in this review). I assert my right as the author of this book to write what I consider to be relevant by way of a review. Please don’t delete it!

Dear GRM, occasionally I write reviews for a shelf called ‘pairs’. I copy the same review to the two different books I discuss. Please don’t delete either – or both (how would you decide?) – though I appreciate it breaks your new rules. Reviewed as a pair with Fair Play or Foul? https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/105828784




In the early nineties I wrote a book—this book—which examined various high profile cheating scandals in bridge. In a nutshell I suggested that maybe the people accused of cheating hadn’t been, that the chiefly American accusers might be wrong as a consequence of strong cultural differences between their understanding of bridge and those of other nationalities. I also suggested that Ely Culbertson might have deliberately destroyed a competitor for the big money at stake in the 1930s by creating the idea that he was cheating. I sent this book to several publishers and was prepared for polite declinations. I was not expecting what actually happened which was that I received vitriolic angry rejections. My book was being censored by mainstream publishers; their problem wasn’t whether it would sell, but they hated the ideas in it. What could I do? I thought I’d produced a good book that would sell, but I put it in a drawer and moved on. One day, however, I mentioned it to a top Australian player who asked if he could look at it. He took it home and brought it back first thing in the morning. Damn, I thought. It wasn’t any good after all, if he hasn’t even bothered reading it. But in fact what had happened was that he sat up all night with it and we now spent some hours talking about how wonderful he thought it was. He thought I should keep trying to get it published. I sent it to the editor of a UK magazine who serialised it. Then I self-published it.

Although it received nice reviews, soon after its release, the editor of the influential magazine Bridge World wrote a hostile editorial about it. A reader sent in a meek attempt to defend the book and that attracted more editorial anger. Wow, two hostile editorials. I could rest assured that I really had written something that was worthwhile at that point. Nobody else wrote to Bridge World to support me after that. Meanwhile the edition quickly sold out and I started getting feedback from people which was unexpected and completely the opposite from the tone of criticism that appeared in Bridge World. More than one person said it had been life-changing for them and they really meant it. It let them be more tolerant to others, to be less paranoid and angry about other people. Many people read it in a night. Somebody wrote to say he’d stayed up all night reading it and went down to a shop to buy three more copies to give people the next day. A bridge partnership stayed up all night reading it aloud to each other. Non-bridge players read it. I was invited to present a talk to a magicians’ convention in Vegas. Ten years or more later I still occasionally received these mails.

Lots of people wrote to say that they agreed with what I’d said.

But not one person wrote in public that they agreed with it.

Who could blame them when they saw what had happened to the first poor devil who made a stab at it in Bridge World? Some years later came another development. One of the ex-world champion US players who was a prominent accuser of others being cheats, published an autobiography in which he presented various evidence to support his case. Trouble is, some of his evidence was factually incorrect. Whether by mistake or not, he had materially changed the stories of played hands in ways that made it look worse for those accused. I collected together both his stories and, from official records, what actually happened in each case, wrote it up and sent it to Bridge World. It may not surprise you to hear that it declined to publish my article, but it surprised me. Now, this was surely an intrinsically interesting story—‘world champ lies in book, were the Italians REALLY cheating?’ — and yet he claimed that people weren’t interested.

Please consider this. If all those people who wrote privately to me to support me had done it in public, the editor would most certainly not have been able to use this as his excuse. Meanwhile it has gone into history, this false evidence used to accuse some truly great players of cheating. Silence has consequences.

This was brought back to my mind recently, reading of a small business called booklocker.com. It filed a class action lawsuit against Amazon which was attempting to force POD publishers to agree that they had to pay Amazon to print their books. Her brave story is available online. She fought on her own. It could have been a victory for many. Instead nobody else joined her. They were too scared to speak up. “We were basically thrown to the wolves, and had to publicly fight on our own, with many publishers whispering to us in the background, but not publicly joining us on the front lines.”

Silence has consequences. It is not neutral. And speaking where nobody can hear you — or where the people who need to hear you won’t — that might as well be silence. So this review is addressed more than anything to people who may be in doubt about what is going on here at Goodreads, but are scared to speak, nervous to speak, or perhaps simply don’t understand why it might be important. SPEAK!!! Don’t be bullied. Not by GR management. Not by the protesters. Say what you think. If you disagree with GR management they will be unfailingly polite, whereas the free speech advocates can say what they like, how they like, where they like. And some of them do! Okay. Still speak! They are maybe a bit sharper with a pen than you are? So what. Still speak. Does free speech have any worth, does it really exist, without interaction? Here you can still do that. I have no idea if speaking up is ever a right, but it is surely sometimes a duty and I really think this is a case where it is a duty. How you are treated when you do, doesn’t really matter. Those who disagree with you might tell you to fuck off, call you toxic — that’s their definition of free speech. But live by yours. In the end that is all free speech can be: what YOU think it is. Not what GR managment thinks. Not what Manny thinks. What YOU think. That is, it is what we all think, which makes it, of course, a right dog’s breakfast.

But if you are doing that, exercising your right to free speech in a closed room on your own with the lights off, either through fear, or because other people have told you that you can say what you like but NOT where it counts, I assure you that this is not free speech, even if the free speechers tell you so. If that was free speech, well, Soviet Russia was its most loyal supporter. There, after all, you weren’t stopped from saying what you thought, only from saying it where anybody was listening. There is no difference between a bureaucracy telling you where you can say something and a bunch of people on GR telling you that. The effect is the same.

I am reminded of what happened recently in the much publicised situation of Colin McGinn. A group of academics stated in a public letter that “We recognize Dr. McGinn’s right to free speech” but then went on to describe the ways in which it should be circumscribed. He was at perfect liberty to talk about anything that didn’t actually matter to him. At the moment, you have more rights to free speech than this, and a great duty to use them. This ad appears on Amazon at the moment:

Forum Moderator
We like to think of our forums as a Free-Speech Zone.
And freedom works best at the point of a bayonet —
or a “Delete Post” button. As Forum Moderator, it’ll
be your job to keep the forums safe and sanitary, while
highlighting the posts that actually have something valuable
to say. You’ll slap the bad guys’ hands and the good guys’ backs.

If you are tired of Hydra, if you are thinking it doesn’t really matter if such and such is deleted, keep in mind that this is really what you are fighting about. ‘Safe and sanitary’ scares the bejesus out of me. I can’t distinguish it from something you’d see in a Soviet Russia or Communist China re-education camp. But that’s just my opinion. PLEASE HAVE YOURS. And please remember that it doesn’t really count if nobody can hear it.






( )
  bringbackbooks | Jun 16, 2020 |
Dear GR management (GRM in this review). I assert my right as the author of this book to write what I consider to be relevant by way of a review. Please don’t delete it!

Dear GRM, occasionally I write reviews for a shelf called ‘pairs’. I copy the same review to the two different books I discuss. Please don’t delete either – or both (how would you decide?) – though I appreciate it breaks your new rules. Reviewed as a pair with Fair Play or Foul? https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/105828784




In the early nineties I wrote a book—this book—which examined various high profile cheating scandals in bridge. In a nutshell I suggested that maybe the people accused of cheating hadn’t been, that the chiefly American accusers might be wrong as a consequence of strong cultural differences between their understanding of bridge and those of other nationalities. I also suggested that Ely Culbertson might have deliberately destroyed a competitor for the big money at stake in the 1930s by creating the idea that he was cheating. I sent this book to several publishers and was prepared for polite declinations. I was not expecting what actually happened which was that I received vitriolic angry rejections. My book was being censored by mainstream publishers; their problem wasn’t whether it would sell, but they hated the ideas in it. What could I do? I thought I’d produced a good book that would sell, but I put it in a drawer and moved on. One day, however, I mentioned it to a top Australian player who asked if he could look at it. He took it home and brought it back first thing in the morning. Damn, I thought. It wasn’t any good after all, if he hasn’t even bothered reading it. But in fact what had happened was that he sat up all night with it and we now spent some hours talking about how wonderful he thought it was. He thought I should keep trying to get it published. I sent it to the editor of a UK magazine who serialised it. Then I self-published it.

Although it received nice reviews, soon after its release, the editor of the influential magazine Bridge World wrote a hostile editorial about it. A reader sent in a meek attempt to defend the book and that attracted more editorial anger. Wow, two hostile editorials. I could rest assured that I really had written something that was worthwhile at that point. Nobody else wrote to Bridge World to support me after that. Meanwhile the edition quickly sold out and I started getting feedback from people which was unexpected and completely the opposite from the tone of criticism that appeared in Bridge World. More than one person said it had been life-changing for them and they really meant it. It let them be more tolerant to others, to be less paranoid and angry about other people. Many people read it in a night. Somebody wrote to say he’d stayed up all night reading it and went down to a shop to buy three more copies to give people the next day. A bridge partnership stayed up all night reading it aloud to each other. Non-bridge players read it. I was invited to present a talk to a magicians’ convention in Vegas. Ten years or more later I still occasionally received these mails.

Lots of people wrote to say that they agreed with what I’d said.

But not one person wrote in public that they agreed with it.

Who could blame them when they saw what had happened to the first poor devil who made a stab at it in Bridge World? Some years later came another development. One of the ex-world champion US players who was a prominent accuser of others being cheats, published an autobiography in which he presented various evidence to support his case. Trouble is, some of his evidence was factually incorrect. Whether by mistake or not, he had materially changed the stories of played hands in ways that made it look worse for those accused. I collected together both his stories and, from official records, what actually happened in each case, wrote it up and sent it to Bridge World. It may not surprise you to hear that it declined to publish my article, but it surprised me. Now, this was surely an intrinsically interesting story—‘world champ lies in book, were the Italians REALLY cheating?’ — and yet he claimed that people weren’t interested.

Please consider this. If all those people who wrote privately to me to support me had done it in public, the editor would most certainly not have been able to use this as his excuse. Meanwhile it has gone into history, this false evidence used to accuse some truly great players of cheating. Silence has consequences.

This was brought back to my mind recently, reading of a small business called booklocker.com. It filed a class action lawsuit against Amazon which was attempting to force POD publishers to agree that they had to pay Amazon to print their books. Her brave story is available online. She fought on her own. It could have been a victory for many. Instead nobody else joined her. They were too scared to speak up. “We were basically thrown to the wolves, and had to publicly fight on our own, with many publishers whispering to us in the background, but not publicly joining us on the front lines.”

Silence has consequences. It is not neutral. And speaking where nobody can hear you — or where the people who need to hear you won’t — that might as well be silence. So this review is addressed more than anything to people who may be in doubt about what is going on here at Goodreads, but are scared to speak, nervous to speak, or perhaps simply don’t understand why it might be important. SPEAK!!! Don’t be bullied. Not by GR management. Not by the protesters. Say what you think. If you disagree with GR management they will be unfailingly polite, whereas the free speech advocates can say what they like, how they like, where they like. And some of them do! Okay. Still speak! They are maybe a bit sharper with a pen than you are? So what. Still speak. Does free speech have any worth, does it really exist, without interaction? Here you can still do that. I have no idea if speaking up is ever a right, but it is surely sometimes a duty and I really think this is a case where it is a duty. How you are treated when you do, doesn’t really matter. Those who disagree with you might tell you to fuck off, call you toxic — that’s their definition of free speech. But live by yours. In the end that is all free speech can be: what YOU think it is. Not what GR managment thinks. Not what Manny thinks. What YOU think. That is, it is what we all think, which makes it, of course, a right dog’s breakfast.

But if you are doing that, exercising your right to free speech in a closed room on your own with the lights off, either through fear, or because other people have told you that you can say what you like but NOT where it counts, I assure you that this is not free speech, even if the free speechers tell you so. If that was free speech, well, Soviet Russia was its most loyal supporter. There, after all, you weren’t stopped from saying what you thought, only from saying it where anybody was listening. There is no difference between a bureaucracy telling you where you can say something and a bunch of people on GR telling you that. The effect is the same.

I am reminded of what happened recently in the much publicised situation of Colin McGinn. A group of academics stated in a public letter that “We recognize Dr. McGinn’s right to free speech” but then went on to describe the ways in which it should be circumscribed. He was at perfect liberty to talk about anything that didn’t actually matter to him. At the moment, you have more rights to free speech than this, and a great duty to use them. This ad appears on Amazon at the moment:

Forum Moderator
We like to think of our forums as a Free-Speech Zone.
And freedom works best at the point of a bayonet —
or a “Delete Post” button. As Forum Moderator, it’ll
be your job to keep the forums safe and sanitary, while
highlighting the posts that actually have something valuable
to say. You’ll slap the bad guys’ hands and the good guys’ backs.

If you are tired of Hydra, if you are thinking it doesn’t really matter if such and such is deleted, keep in mind that this is really what you are fighting about. ‘Safe and sanitary’ scares the bejesus out of me. I can’t distinguish it from something you’d see in a Soviet Russia or Communist China re-education camp. But that’s just my opinion. PLEASE HAVE YOURS. And please remember that it doesn’t really count if nobody can hear it.






( )
  bringbackbooks | Jun 16, 2020 |
2 sur 2
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Winner of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature. J. M. Coetzee presents a coherent, unorthodox analysis of censorship from the perspective of one who has lived and worked under its shadow. The essays collected here attempt to understand the passion that plays itself out in acts of silencing and censoring. He argues that a destructive dynamic of belligerence and escalation tends to overtake the rivals in any field ruled by censorship. From Osip Mandelstam commanded to compose an ode in praise of Stalin, to Breyten Breytenbach writing poems under and for the eyes of his prison guards, to Aleksander Solzhenitsyn engaging in a trial of wits with the organs of the Soviet state, Giving Offense focuses on the ways authors have historically responded to censorship. It also analyzes the arguments of Catharine MacKinnon for the suppression of pornography and traces the operations of the old South African censorship system. "The most impressive feature of Coetzee's essays, besides his ear for language, is his coolheadedness. He can dissect repugnant notions and analyze volatile emotions with enviable poise."--Kenneth Baker, San Francisco Chronicle Book Review "Those looking for simple, ringing denunciations of censorship's evils will be disappointed. Coetzee explicitly rejects such noble tritenesses. Instead . . . he pursues censorship's deeper, more fickle meanings and unmeanings."--Kirkus Reviews "These erudite essays form a powerful, bracing criticism of censorship in its many guises."--Publishers Weekly "Giving Offense gets its incisive message across clearly, even when Coetzee is dealing with such murky theorists as Bakhtin, Lacan, Foucault, and René; Girard. Coetzee has a light, wry sense of humor."--Bill Marx, Hungry Mind Review "An extraordinary collection of essays."--Martha Bayles, New York Times Book Review "A disturbing and illuminating moral expedition."--Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times Book Review

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