Dangerous Books and Observation

When is a book dangerous? When is it safe? 

Both We by Evgeny Zamyatin and Pornografia by Witold Gombrowich have been proscribed, banned, censored.  We, written in 1920, was banned by the Soviets. No surprise there: it is a polemic against totalitarianism. Pornografia, oddly, has only in recent years been withdrawn from Polish schools on the grounds that it was corrupting children.

So, two dangerous books, then.  I read both over the last week and, in so far as I can tell, I am still in one piece. But then again, I am not a dictator and, to be honest, I am probably already corrupted beyond redemption.

Both of these novels are about observation.

We describes a world where everything is visible, clear, open;  a world where people live in glass houses with glass walls, ceilings and doors; a world where there is no privacy of any kind. The ‘One-State’ wants to abolish imagination, love, individuality. The narrator discovers at one point in the novel that he has a soul and this is understood as an illness.

Pornografia is a novel of shadows and darkness. Much of the dialogue is fractured, the syntax hesitant, repetitive and deliberately inadequate. Even though it’s a novel about voyeurism the plot mostly unfolds outside the narrator’s direct view.  Usually description serves to obfuscate. The scene where the murder of an old woman is recounted is typical. The action is mediated through the muddled recollection and non-standard Polish of two peasants, the violence occurs in darkness, lit up only by a match on the ground that fails to illuminate anything of note. The murder is not investigated and the murderer is not given a narrative send off: he just disappears from the story.

If the characters of We live in a glass house, those in Pornografia  live in a cave.

We eventually describes an attempted revolution to overthrow the One State. The narrator is lobotomised and the heroine is executed but for all that it is a more hopeful text than its most obvious literary descendant: Nineteen-Eighty Four.

Pornografia is not an optimistic novel. It is set during the early days of World War Two. Poland is being overrun by the Nazis. Meanwhile the Polish Intelligentsia embodied by Witold and Fryderyk do nothing to stop this. Even Nero played the fiddle while Rome burned: what these two get up to is try to induce two 16-year old children to engage in sex acts! A natural response in a time of war?

Their explicit aim is to corrupt the boy and the girl; to encourage their sexual amorality. They don’t quite achieve this, though. What they do succeed in doing is to get them to take part in a cowardly, pointless double murder.

We is a novel about the horror that ensues in a world where thinking, feeling and imagination are forbidden.

In Ireland we have often tried to export people who do too much thinking, feeling and imagining.

Pornografia  is a novel about the horror that ensues in a world where thinking, feeling and imagination are deracinated,  perverted, and used to abuse and repress children.

Oh, if only we had been prepared to export those engaged in the abuse and repression of children!