Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship

by J.M. Coetzee

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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Essays, Philosophy, Politics, South Africa, Africa, Banned Books

301 pages, Paperback

First published April 15, 1996

About the author

J. M. Coetzee is a South African writer, essayist, and translator, widely regarded as one of the most influential authors of contemporary literature. His works, often characterized by their austere prose and profound moral and philosophical depth, explore themes of colonialism, identity, power, and human suffering. Born and raised in South Africa, he later became an Australian citizen and has lived in Adelaide since 2002.
Coetzee’s breakthrough novel, Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), established him as a major literary voice, while Life & Times of Michael K (1983) won him the first of his two Booker Prizes. His best-known work, Disgrace (1999), a stark and unsettling examination of post-apartheid South Africa, secured his second Booker Prize, making him the first author to win the award twice. His other notable novels include Foe, Age of Iron, The Master of Petersburg, Elizabeth Costello, and The Childhood of Jesus, many of which incorporate allegorical and metafictional elements.
Beyond fiction, Coetzee has written numerous essays and literary critiques, contributing significantly to discussions on literature, ethics, and history. His autobiographical trilogy—Boyhood, Youth, and Summertime—blends memoir with fiction, offering a fragmented yet insightful reflection on his own life. His literary achievements were recognized with the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003.
A deeply private individual, Coetzee avoids public life and rarely gives interviews, preferring to let his work speak for itself.

Reviews

[notgettingenough · Rating 4 out of 5]

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...




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.

[Şafak Akyazıcı · Rating 4 out of 5]

Soru ve sorunlarından ziyade totaliter rejimlerde yazara uygulanan baskının, aşağılamanın ve hapsetmeye kadar giden sansüre karşı yazarların geliştirdiği davranış modelleri üzerine yazılmış denemeler.
Coetzee’nin dediği gibi “bir sansür kuramı bulamayacaksınız burada.”
 
İlk bölümde sansürcünün sözde devletin çıkarını, toplumun haklarını koruduğunu anlattığı sansüre sebep olan nedenleri genel anlamıyla değerlendiriyor J. M. Coetzee.Sağlam argümanlarla bağlamından kopmadan yazılmış iyi bir giriş bölümü.  
 
Takip eden bölümlerde, ülkeler (Rusya, İtalya, Güney Amerika),  dönemin mevcut iktidarları (Mussolini, Stalin) ve uygulanan sansür yine o dönemin bir yazarı ve kitapları ile inceliyor Coetzee. Bahsi geçen çoğu kitabı okumamışım, baktığımda da henüz Türkçeye çevrilmemiş olan kitaplar bunlar. Bu durum okumamı olumsuz anlamda etkilemedi, yukarıda da belirttiğim gibi inceleme konusu olan yazarların sansür karşısındaki davranış şekillerine odaklandım.
 
İçerikte Erasmus’un Deliliğe Övgü’sünün değerlendirildiği beşinci bölüm hem çok sevdiğim hem de kafamın en çok karıştığı bölüm oldu.  Erasmus’un yapıtıyla “…her şeyi her şekilde eleştirme hakkına sahip olmak istemesi…” ve  “Benim müdahalemle yeni bir karışıklık yaşanmasındansa her şeyin olduğu gibi kalmasına katlanabilirim.” söyleminin(syf. 134) kafamda yarattığı çelişkide gidip geliyorum, kitabı bitirdim ama halen. Deliliğe Övgü’yü okuduğum yıllarda, çok uzun bir zaman önce, kitabın benim için içtenlikle yazılmış bir içerleme ve başkaldırı anlamı vardı. Bu kitapta Erasmus’un farklı bir tavrı ile karşılancı kafam biraz karıştı, çözememiş olsam da bu zihin pratiğini sevdim.
 
Sadece Erasmus değil, sansür altındaki yazarlar “delilik” simgesini o kadar kullanmışlar ki “Delidir ne yapsa yeridir.” manevrası ile kurtulabilecekleri sanmışlar ancak olaylar hiç öyle gelişmemiş tabii. İktidarın ve yöneticinin eksiliklerini kaleme alan her yazar denetim altında tutulmuş. Syf. 52’de, 1960’ların Sovyetler’inde 7 bin yazar ve özellikle bu yazarların her davranışını yakından takip eden 70 bin bürokrat ve sansür görevlisi olduğu yazıyor. Baskının gücü eşitlik dengesini alt üst ediyor anlaşılacağa üzere, hal böyle olunca bazı yazarlar kendi yazdıklarına sansür uygulamaya bile başlamış, olanca dikkat ve temkinle yazmışlar metinlerini. Sonra dayatmalara katlanamayan ve yazdıklarının aptalca olduğunu deklere edip sansürcüsüne övgü şiirleri yazanları da anlatmış J.M.Coetzee.
 
Kitabın en çok sevdiğim bölümü ise “Sansür ve Polemik:Soljenitsin” başlıklı yedinci bölümüydü. Detaylı, derin bir inceleme ile Coetzee, hiç okumadığım Soljenitsin’in kitaplarını listeye eklettirdi bana.
 
Coetzee daha birçok yazarı konu ettiği gibi o yazarların kitaplarından pasajlarla, kendi yazdıklarını desteklemiş. Bunu sadece kendi için yaptığını düşünmüyorum, bu bölümler henüz okumadığım yazarların üslubu ve sansüre uğrama nedenleri hakkından fikir vermesi bakımından kıymetli bulduğum bölümler.
Hakaret-Sansür Üzerine Denemeler, edindiğim bilgiler bakımından faydacılıkta zirve yaptığım kitaplardan biri oldu.

Son olarak, çeviri de editorial çalışma da sorunsuz. Teorik, bilgi akışı olan bir kitabın anlaşılır ve akıcı olması, kurgu bir kitaptakinden çok daha önemli çünkü. Benim için :)

[Leif · Rating 5 out of 5]

Coetzee's prose is clinical, incisive, scintillating with the hard edges and clear gleams common to his narrative work also, but here he allows himself a direct access to political questions and theoretical discourse. With characteristic patience he traces censorship's relation to pornography, madness, apartheid, South Africa, and in the work of a select few writers: D.H. Lawrence, Catharine MacKinnon, Erasmus, Osip Mandelstam, Zbigniew Herbert, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Geoffrey Cronje, andre brink, and Breyten Breytenbach. Across these essays Coetzee's reach is capacious, his mind keen.

The most law-abiding countries are not those with the highest prison populations but those with the lowest offender rates. The law, including the law of censorship, has a dream. In this dream, the daily round of identifying and punishing malefactors will wither away; the law and its constraints will be so deeply engraved on the citizenry that individuals will police themselves. Censorship looks forward to the day when writers will censor themselves and the censor himself can retire. It is for this reason that the physical expulsion of the censor, vomited forth as a demon is, has a certain symbolic value for the writer of Romantic geneology: it stands for a rejection of the dream of reason, the dream of a society of laws founded on reason and obeyed because reasonable.

With such demonstrable echoes of Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, and Michel Foucault, Coetzee's theoretical filiations are clear. However so too is his embattled position as a writer in a politically and ethically hostile climate, which lends additional heft to aesthetic and political asides, such as the following:

Writing does not flourish under censorship. This does not mean that the censor's edict, or the internalized figure of the censor, is the sole or even the principle pressure on the writer: there are forms of repression, inherited, acquired, or self-imposed, that can be more grievously felt. There may even be cases where external censorship challenges the writer in interesting ways or spurs creativity. But the Aesopian ruses that censorship provokes are usually no more than ingenious; while the obstacles the writers are capable of visiting upon themselves are surely sufficient in number and variety for them not to invite more.

In that last line, perhaps, might even be heard the echoes of a mocking laugh. Coetzee's book is not just well-researched and persuasively argued, after all. It also bears the sense of mild amusement which any writer might bear the earnest or repressive censor who, as Coetzee argues, misjudges the very nature of writing and representation itself. Giving Offense is notable for a number of reasons but for none as good as this last, the laughing celebration of creativity itself in the face of censorship and its cultures.

[Daniel Taylor · Rating 3 out of 5]

For those of us who live in countries like Australia, which has never been hidden behind the razor wire of censorship like Coetzee is writing about, will find it difficult to see this book as anything but an academic adventure into the dark side.

Coetzee has lived in South Africa and the apartheid-inspired censorship there shows up as the topic in many of these essays.

As a writer myself, I'm left wondering what I would do under the oppressive gaze of a censor. The wannabe-hero in me says that I would be fearless. But I know me better, I'd write to conform, and then rationalize my choice.

This read is an academic one, so unless you either a) are an academic (or have been trained in critical thinking), or b) have an interested in censorship, or c) are a writer or other creative whose work comes under the domain of the censors, then this book could make for a more challenging read than warrants your time.

[Sps · Rating 3 out of 5]

Keen and conscientious thought and prose. More stodgy than his fiction, true to academic form, and definitely a collection of essays rather than chapters of a unified book. Both the ideas and the language are alive, though: "It is tempting to suggest that the logic of provocative name-calling, when used as a tactic of the weak against the strong, is that if the strong can be made to take offense, they thereby put themselves at least momentarily on the same footing as the weak." (3)


"Desire is mimetic--that is to say, it seeks models for itself." (92)

"The censor is the figure of the absolutist reader: he reads the poem in order to know what it really means, to know its truth." (161)

[Ricardo Munguia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Compilación de ensayos que tienen como eje central el tema de la censura, en particular la censura de libros y publicaciones. De carácter técnico y lectura árida pero una vez que le tomas el hilo es muy interesante. En el libro se trata de dar una revisión comprensiva pero no justificada de la censura en regímenes totalitarios, lo que me parece notable pues sin ponerse del lado del censor trata de explicar la postura que tiene sin juzgarlo.

En los ensayos habla principalmente de la censura en la época del apartheid de Sudáfrica, lugar de nacimiento del autor, pero también aborda la censura en el régimen comunista ruso y polaco. Pero además tiene unos capítulos que hablan sobre la represión de sectores de la sociedad y sobre el papel de la ofensa en la censura, estos a mi parecer, fueron los artículos más interesantes debido al contexto actual de la cultura de la cancelación presente hoy en día.

Los artículos aquí presentes son de corte académico y me parece que han sido en publicados originalmente en revistas especializadas. Por ese motivo creo que este libro es demandante para un lector común pues habla de corrientes filosóficas y contextos sociales específicos, además de tener una argumentación que me pareció intrincada y por momentos poco clara. Si esperas un libro con opiniones personales, este no es. El libro cuenta con unos anexos con la bibliografía citada y clarificación sobre las citas y lo que parecen pies de página, pero se encuentra al final del libro lo que dificulta la lectura y seguimiento.

Sin embargo, creo que la lectura es interesante y para las personas interesadas en el tema proporciona un montón de referencias que pueden ser interesantes para revisar y profundizar en el tema. Algo que noto de las compilaciones de este autor es que sus artículos son bastante rigurosos y escritas en un lenguaje técnico formal que no esperaba encontrar pero no me disgusta, solo que se tiene que leer con particular atención.

[Héctor Méndez Gómez · Rating 3 out of 5]

J. M. Coetzee fue nobel de literatura en 2003 por ser «quien en innumerables disfraces retrata la sorprendente implicación del forastero».

Quizás no es el mejor libro para iniciarse con Coetzee, como fue mi caso. Tal vez debí comenzar con uno que se llama Desgracia, o alguna otra novela.

Coetzee hace una excelente investigación para hablar sobre la censura en la literatura, y otros ámbitos. El libro es algo técnico se podría decir, con muchas fuentes consultadas, y muchas notas en cada capítulo, por lo que hay que estar muy familiarizado con el tema; sin ambargo, el libro se deja leer muy bien a pesar de los tecnicismos que se presentan. Fue escrito en 1996, pero muchas de las ideas expuestas se pueden poner en analogía con muchas de las cosas que suceden en la actualidad.

[Lukasz Pruski · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The punitive gesture of censoring finds its origin in the reaction of being offended. The strength of being-offended, as a state of mind, lies in not doubting itself; its weakness lies in not being able to afford to doubt itself. "

J.M. Coetzee's Giving Offense (1996) is a collection of 12 essays about the nature and essence of censorship, its various aspects and manifestations, and its effects on the society and on the artists (the subtitle of the book says it simply: Essays on Censorship). While a profound and highly scholarly work, meticulously researched and referenced on over 50 pages, this set of philosophical and literary criticism analyses is not at all impenetrable thanks to Mr. Coetzee's unsurpassed lucidity of writing. The depth and elegance of the author's analyses are so much above my ability to explain them that I am embarrassed writing this review, feeling like an elementary school kid tasked with annotating Finnegans Wake. I will thus limit my highly unqualified comments to a few selected essays, although each of the 12 fascinating studies deserves detailed analyses by scholarly-inclined readers.

Chapter Four, entitled "The Harms of Pornography: Catharine MacKinnon", is a devastatingly sharp critical analysis of Ms. MacKinnon's writings. Mr. Coetzee points out the parochialism and limitedness of some of her central ideas, as evidenced by her sole focus on the Western world, and her lack of interest in the widespread objectification and denigration of women in the world of advertising. Coetzee is at his most forceful when he criticizes what I would call a severe intellectual fraud perpetrated by Ms. MacKinnon who relativizes truth to gender and interprets female sexuality as a "construction of male power".

Allow me a personal aside here: Coetzee's writing resonates with me so strongly because he observes the social phenomena not from the perspective of what is "right" and what is "wrong" (which, of course, depends on who defines the rightness or wrongness and when and where the definition is constructed), but purely from the perspective of logic - through examining whether the arguments are valid. Coetzee's reasoning is so resoundingly refreshing because it goes strongly against today's prevalent mode of social discourse, driven by the so-called Political Correctness movement, the mode that eschews calm, logical analysis and instead focuses on attempting to right past wrongs, thus - incidentally - introducing new wrongs.

In Chapter Six, entitled "Osip Mandelstam and the Stalin Ode", the author offers an analysis of censorship and - more importantly - of self-censorship in 1930s, the darkest, Stalinist period of the Soviet history. In the next essay, "Censorship and Polemic: Solzhenitsyn", Mr. Coetzee, among many fascinating threads of analysis, mentions both proscriptive and prescriptive aspects of Soviet censorship and - most interestingly - describes "the dynamic of spiraling mimetic violence precipitated by a collapsing of distinctions", referring to a dialectic embrace between the enemies (Solzhenitsyn vs. the regime).

Out of the remaining chapters I would like to mention one on the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert, which is a little outside the main thrust of the collection. While it indeed deals with issues of censorship, it focuses more on the universal and humanistic values of Mr. Herbert's poetry and on his use of allusiveness as a "mode of humanistic affirmation", and his recognition of irony as an ethical value. In Chapter Eleven which deals with relationship between the philosophy of apartheid and the system of censorship in South Africa, Mr. Coetzee - who is a mathematician by education - introduces the "algebra of mixing blood" - a sharply ironic device to illustrate the madness of apartheid philosophy.

Giving Offense is one of the most profound books I have ever read. It took me almost 20 hours to get through the 240 pages - the effort was totally worthwhile and I am happy that the onset of my senility has so far been slow enough to allow me the enjoyment of the read.

Four and three quarter stars.

[Salvatore · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've spent way too much time with the Erasmus essay here for me, ten years later, to see it with fresh eyes. Otherwise the essays collected here look at questions in the censorship game that might evade readers. From the more obvious 'how was Lady Chatterley's Lover defended and maybe it would have been best if DH Lawrence shut up?' and 'aren't South African censors really ridiculous?' to the estranged 'does the Stalin ode, written in duress, still "count" as something Mandelstam wrote?' and 'does [heterosexual] pornography harm women, leading to sexual/physical abuse and a degrading image?' The findings here are sometimes shocking, not always obvious.

[Bettie]

I wish to read this book as to aid my comprehension of why censorship is put in place. It seems to me that the people who censor must be wibbly-wobbly if not outright paranoid over their authority. I base these views on Stalin, Hitler, Mao etc etc.

This book was recommended by many good friends.

[Amy · Rating 3 out of 5]

dry and dense.

[Valentina Calvache · Rating 5 out of 5]

A non-victimistic point of view of censorship. Great essays.