Aesopian Language, from Stalin to Florida
The literary critic George Steiner often mused, almost perversely, on the fact that some of the most wondrous works of twentieth-century literature were produced under conditions of extreme censorship. He especially liked to remark upon the Soviet experience and the literature that came out of it, suggesting that great literature emerged not from societies of freedom but from those of domination.
Reading the below list of topics that cannot be discussed in Florida classrooms, I wonder if we might not be in for some decades of intense intellectual ferment and creativity. Imagine all the possibilities for scholars and writers and teachers and students, as they struggle to work their way around the censor. Remember the old theory about the Bukharin trial during the Great Purge, how Bukharin deployed “Aesopian language” to tell the truth about Stalin without the censors’ realizing it? Maybe we’re in for whole new era of Aesopian language, Florida-style.
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2 Comments
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Edo
Wow, the reference to the Aesopian language of third show trial and Florida really resonates. By coincide, yesterday I reread Orwell’s Politics and the English Language for the first time in many years. I’m struck by the contrast of Aesop and Bukharin speaking in terms that always have a double meaning and Orwellian doublespeak, where the intolerable acts of power are masked behind euphemism and the signified is melted into abstraction. Orwell’s prescription is to write simply; to say what you mean. His phrase, to “let the meaning choose the word,” is firmly lodged in my mind.
I’m a professor in Florida. Right now, it still feels like Orwell’s call to clarity, to tie the thing you are talking about as tightly as possible to the word that evokes it, without embellishment, is more important and powerful. At least for now, the reason I still feel this way is that the law is preposterous in many ways. On the one hand, it prohibits things which nobody taught, like the notion that entire racial groups are biased. Another law prohibits professors from “compelling students to believe…” in this or that. Most people think the law is unenforceable. And for now, it doesn’t seem like it is being enforced. For now.
So of course, the main effect of the law is self-censorship. It is obviously chilling speech. Nobody wants to be the one who tests whether the law is enforceable. In this moment, Orwell’s dictum still stands. But of course Orwell’s most famous work is an Aesopian fable… I hope the time does not come when we are encoding our thoughts in metaphors and myths. It would mean truly desperate times.
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F. Foundling
‘This course does not violate discrimination against students.’
So the course diligently upholds and practices discrimination against students. Is it obligatory to have below-average educational attainment and intellectual skills in order to qualify for writing these documents?
‘The following should not be included in any course content: discussions that state/argue/describe…’
Since it is already stated that discussions should not endorse specific ideas, this listing of specific ideas whose endorsement is banned is easy to interpret as meaning that it is not OK to even debate, consider or mention these ideas – which happen to be maintained, in many cases, by large parts of the experts in the field. I suspect that this might have the opposite effect to the one desired, giving what used to come across as rather bland ‘woke’ dogma a veneer of subversive radicalism.
Re the Steiner’s (and others’) claim that especially great literature was created under Soviet censorship, the reason of that impression is mostly that Western literary critics were especially inclined to recognise works directed against the Soviet system as being valuable and worthwhile and hence to proclaim them to be great literature. Writing work directed against adversaries of the capitalist West attracted benevolent attention and greatly increased one’s chances of getting a Nobel Prize of literature or other forms of acclaim – it was like that with Bunin, Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn and the tendency has continued with more recent Nobel Prize winners. The notion that the Soviet system was one of total domination, while the Western one was and is one of freedom is preposterous.