from _The Language of the Night_ by Ursula K LeGuin
NY: GP Putnam, 1979
ISBN-13 : 978-0399123252
(page 213) The only way to defeat suppression, depression, and censorship – and where there is institutionalized power, there is censorship – is to refuse it. Not to reply to it in kind – if you try to silence me, I'll try to silence you – but to refuse both its means, and its ends. To bypass it entirely. To be larger than it is. That is precisely what [Yevgeny Ivanovich] Zamyatin [author of the Soviet censored sf novel We] was. He was larger in spirit than his enemies, and consciously refused to let their smallness infect him, and decrease his stature. He would not play the dirty little games. He would not admit Stalin into his soul.
… What affects every writer, every book published in the United States, is censorship by the market.
(214) Where the market reigns, fashion reigns. The fine arts, like the arts of costume, cooking, furnishing, etc., become subject to a constant pressure to change, since novelty, regardless of quality, is a marketable value, a publicizable value. It is, of course, a very limited kind of novelty. The skirt up or down 2 inches; the lapel, half an inch wider; the novel’s dead this year, but fictionalized journalism is big; in science fiction, Holocaust is out, but Environment is in. Pop art, so called, was the pure essence of art as commodity: soup cans. Genuine, newness, genuine originality, is suspect. Unless it's something familiar, rewarmed, or something experimental in form but clearly trivial or cynical in content, it is unsafe. And it must be safe. It mustn't hurt the consumer. It mustn't change the consumer. Shock him, epater le bourgeois, certainly; that's been done for 150 years now, that's the oldest game going. Shock him, jolt him, titillate him, make him writhe and squeal – but do not make him think. If he thinks, he may not come back to buy the next can of soup.
(216-217) Recently, I read in Giovanni Grazzini's fascinating book on Solzhenitsyn [ISBN 10: 0718110684 ISBN 13: 9780718110680], the following passage:
"The cultural industry, vanity, the resentment felt by intellectuals at seeing power slipping from their hands, have so obscured the vision of Western writers as to make them believe that not being persecuted by the police is a privilege."
I am very slow indeed. I puzzled over that sentence for three days before I understood what Grazzini meant. He meant, of course, that it is not a privilege, but a right. The Constitution, which is a revolutionary document, is absolutely clear on that point. It does not grant us, permit us, allow us freedom of speech. It gives the government no such authority. It recognizes freedom of speech as a right – as a fact. A government cannot grant that right. It can only accept it or deny it, and withhold it by force.
(217-218) When there are no formal rules, no, thou shalts and thou shalt nots, it is difficult to notice, even, that one is being censored. It is also painless. It is still more difficult to understand that one may be censoring oneself, extensively, ruthlessly – because that act of self-censorship is called, with full social approval,"writing for a market"; it is even used by some writers as the test and shibboleth for that most admired state of being, “professionalism.”
Indeed, to distinguish free enterprise from self-censorship takes a most uncomfortable degree of vigilance. And that so easily becomes paranoia.
(219) Once you stop asking questions, once you let Stalin into your soul, you can only smile, and smile, and smile.
...When art shows, only how and what, it is, trivial entertainment, whether optimistic or despairing. When it asks why, it rises from mere emotional response to real statement, and to intelligent ethical choice. It becomes not a passive reflection, but an act.
And that is when all the censors, of the governments out of the marketplace, become afraid of it.
(220) We are mere "viewers" and "consumers," not readers at all. Reading is not a passive reaction, but an action, involving the mind, the emotions, and the will. To accept trashy books because they are "best sellers" is the same thing as accepting adulterated food, ill-made machines, corrupt government, and military and corporative tyranny, and praising them, and calling them the American Way of Life, or the American Dream. It is a betrayal of reality, every lie accepted, leads to the next betrayal, and the next lie.
