Journalist for Life
Every time the issue of removing or qualifying public funding of the arts is discussed in Canada, the liberal classes throw up a smoke-screen of confusion. It is the imposition of values, they argue, and a form of censorship that will stifle creativity. Let’s be bold and honest here. Most contemporary writers and especially artists and television directors are about as creative as a soiled puddle. What they most certainly are, however, is dependent on the financial generosity of the public they so obviously despise.
There may be a place for funding both artistic excellence and artistic need. A group of inner-city kids producing a classic, for example, as a way to distract their peers from crime and chaos is probably deserving of help. But this is rare. Having seen the arts-funding business first-hand, I know how the corruption works and how friends fund friends. But funding is only part of the issue. Why are we so terrified of discussing the concept of censorship?
Take, for example, the case of Dennis Cooper, a writer highly regarded in many Canadian circles. He is championed as just the sort of author the state has no right to regulate. Let us take one of his stories, a work entitled Frisk, and be warned that the rest of this column contains some profoundly disturbing material; but the case cannot be made unless such material is repeated.
Here a man is murdered for sexual kicks, he is humiliated and hit, he is tortured and his rectum is used for gruesome and grotesque purposes. “He opened his eyes very wide,” writes Cooper. “Otherwise, he didn’t fight me at all. It takes a lot longer to strangle someone than you’d think.” The victim is just 15.
Or, from the same piece, an account of the rape, sexual beating and murder of a boy whose excrement the author has just eaten. The victim’s penis is cut in two and he is decapitated. The narrator masturbates over this. Friends arrive. “They kicked the corpse around for a while. This created a pretty hilarious fireworks display of blood.” Or how about a repugnantly graphic story by one Ann Wertheim about incestuous rape. In this elaborately constructed lesbian fantasy, the victim is shown as enjoying herself as she welcomes agonizing penetration, oral sex and physical violence from her father.
Both of these stories appeared in a book entitled Forbidden Passages, a collection of banned writings that, paradoxically, has been available in Canada for some years. Of the last piece, one of the compilers of the anthology wrote that when it came into her office, “several of us nearly fainted from intense levels of sexual heat.” Now imagine if we read of a group of Klansmen describing the beating, torture and murder of a black teenager, with graphic detail and description, and then read in an introduction to a collection of banned writings that one of the editorial staff almost fainted over this particular story because of the racist passion in the office. Both involve an innocent, bewildered victim, both involve breaking both the moral and the civil law and both should be anathema to societal standards.
With hate literature, Holocaust denial and the like, we can at least defeat these rancid ideas with simple fact. But the literary depiction of sadistic pedophilia and the sexual torture of children is not about fact, but about a basic immoral stance. This is much harder to control, but none of us, surely, still believes that there is no link between pornography and crime.
The questions often asked are: where do we draw the line and who is to do the drawing? The answers are not as complex as some would have us believe and need not be extreme or even noticeable to the overwhelming majority of people. We draw lines of limitation every day and give MPs, judges, police officers and teachers the authority to use ethical pencils. Individual customs officers, overworked and under-qualified, are not the most suitable guardians of our literary borders, but there is no reason why a panel of judges should not decide on what is allowed to enter the country. We allow, after all, such a system to control the flow of people into Canada and it is surely axiomatic that one book is capable of much more harm than a single man or woman.
It has become fashionable to mock anybody who mentions censorship and to refer to authors such as James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence being victims of the censors: irrelevant and a distraction. And remember, the same sort of people who scream their protest at the idea of censorship tend to be the first to support human rights commissions when they limit our fundamental freedom of speech to criticize areas of social policy that involve life and sexuality.
Then again, hypocrisy is achingly common among our opponents and should never be censored. Mind you, it does receive huge amounts of public funding.
