Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
Tell me about your general interest in censorship.
I’m interested in literature. I’m interested specifically in English literature. You can’t really understand English literature without understanding the various pressures and restraints on English writers at one time or another, which have combined to inhibit or direct the writing of plays, poems and novels away from the immediate commitment and interest of the writers themselves. That’s the first reason that is internal to my interest in literature. The second reason is that, because I am a lawyer as well as a literary scholar, I’m interested in the connection between the two and, of course, mostly the way in which law engages with literature is by means of restraints and inhibitions – via the laws of defamation, blasphemy, pornography, and so on; copyright, plagiarism actions and so on. So, if you confront the law and literature nexus as I do all the time, then plainly the issue of censorship is constantly being thrown up (even though there is another, enabling aspect of law in its relation to literature).
In what sense?
Well, take copyright. Why is it that the big advocates of copyright protection are authors? In one sense, copyright is a restraint, and could be assimilated to the category of censor-type restraints; on the other hand, it’s actually protective of literature and enabling of authors, allowing them to earn a living and to carry on producing works that are protected from piracy and so on. So, once you recognise the complexity of the engagement between law and literature, you get drawn into reflecting on it. If I look back at all the stuff I’ve written from my first book to my most recent, all the books are about the collision between creativity on the one hand and norms and rules on the other. My first book, on T S Eliot, was a study of Eliot’s anti-Semitic poetry, principally. What is anti-Semitic poetry, but a tremendous affirmation by the poet of the independence of literature and the freedom of the poet to write poetry, notwithstanding that it violates utterly basic norms of human decency and civility? Then my next book, Idolising Pictures, was about whether it’s possible to have an aesthetic that comes out of a prohibition. The Second Commandment says that you shouldn’t make graven images, which is more generally taken to be a prohibition on representational art-making, but nevertheless there is a Jewish art. How can a Jewish art exist with the Second Commandment? There are various solutions – non-representational art, iconoclastic art and so on. My third book, Transgression, was an attempt to write a history of art from Manet to the present by reference to this principle of transgression. The aesthetic from the 1860s to the 1990s has conceived of art as essentially violating norms – political norms, social and moral norms or the norms of art-making itself. My last book, Trials of the Diaspora (and especially Chapter Four, which is about English literary anti-Semitism), returns in part to the themes I explored in Eliot and raises questions like, ‘Should hate speech, which is also literary speech, be banned?’
And?
And my view is no, absolutely not. The book I’m writing now is about censorship and the English novel.
Tell me what your first choice is.
My first three books are each about censorship, as well as being the objects of censorship themselves: Jude the Obscure, Lady Chatterley’s Lover and The Satanic Verses.
Jude the Obscure is about a poor young man, a country boy, who is inspired by the example of his village teacher to commit himself to studying so that he can go to Christminster (which is transparently Oxford). For various reasons, he fails, and makes a series of disastrous decisions, and he is rejected in any event for reasons beyond his control and he dies. The epigraph is all about Christianity and the divorce laws and about the self-destructive possibilities in literary ambition itself. Jude wants to study, and he immerses himself in the Classics and so on, and, in the end, it’s that ambition that does for him. So it’s a curiously self-cancelling work in that way. There is a point at which, when he decides he’s going to live with his cousin, Sue, he thinks it’s no longer possible for him to study to be a lay preacher because of the incompatibility of the two aspects of his life. So he decides he has to destroy all his Christian works and he burns them all. Now, when Hardy published the book there was a tremendous outcry, because it was considered to be anti-religious and sexually very frank. A bishop wrote to him and inside the envelope there were a few ashes; the Bishop explained that that was all that was left of the book, which he had burnt. It’s interesting because there’s no reference in the letter to the scene in which Jude burns the Christian books – but it’s as if Hardy got his retaliation in first. The relationship between literature and its censors feels like a kind of agon, in which two contradictory principles are articulated in the moment of their collision.
On to Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
Of course, this book was also the object of censoring attention, culminating in a couple of trials (one in the States and one in Britain). But it’s also itself about the violation of norms – in this case, the violation of the marriage contract and the norm of monogamous living.
Anthony Julius is a litigation lawyer and legal expert on defamation. As Mishcon de Reya’s senior solicitor-advocate, he has appeared in both the High Court and the Court of Appeal and acted for many high profile clients, including Princess Diana. He is Visiting Professor at Birkbeck College, University of London, and is a noted author who writes extensively on law, literature, art, culture and anti-Semitism. Julius is Chairman of the Jewish Chronicle newspaper, Chairman of the London Consortium and a Board member of Advancing Human Rights, a New York-based NGO dedicated to individual liberty and good governance. He is Vice-President of the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund, and was one of the charity's founders and its first Chairman.
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