These chunks of writing are drawn from Andrei Codrescu's wonderful memoir, The Disappearance of the Outside: A Manifesto For Escape in which he details his experience under Romanian communism and his life in exile. In the excerpt below, Codrescu describes the role and confusion of communist censors:
The Janus-faced censors in the towers had to look both outside and inside their domain for unauthorized books. In addition they had to define and maintain the official ideology they were sworn to defend. It was not an easy job, particularly since no one, at least in Romania, was doing it with any particular zeal. After Stalin had written all the books, only exegetes and enforcers were left. Our schoolteachers, forced to parrot the line of the textbooks, were bored out of their minds, as were we. The immense boredom into which I was born was an ideal conductor for the forbidden and the transcendent. The (real) penalties meted for breaching this boredom made it all worthwhile: my world was made to order for adolescent rebellion. I viewed my teachers and the countless Party small-fry who ran everything as insects (particularly since I'd read Kafka). These bugs were trying to confine my world with their unconvincing edicts because they were not well. They were ill.
The censor was a flawed person because he could not be entirely loyal. To be so, he'd have to have an exact idea of what he was being asked to forbid, and the State could not provide one. Consequently, he embarked upon his enterprise of interdiction with only the vaguest of guidelines, and found that he had to invent the enemy. The use of imagination, even under such minimal conditions, was self-defeating because imagination, once kindled, could not be extinguished. The censor, at the mercy of his blazing imagination, began to see enemies everywhere while beset simultaneously by the suspicion that they did not exist at all. This sort of paranoia followed by radical doubt eventually became self-paranoia and self-doubt: the censor questioned his own existence. He became invisible to himself at certain times and in varying degrees, states for which he compensated by making himself extremely visible and dangerous at other times. These moods determined the weather and depth of censorship.
A few pages later, Codrescu turns to the self-censorship practiced by so many under communist regimes. In return for icing Ceausescu's birthday cakes, the self-censored were ensured vacations to Mamaia. But no vacation can take a man far enough from the treacherous self.
The self-censored, who pursued a life without intellectual minefields, suffered from tameness. They were timid academics who kept their jobs through endless kowtowing and mandarin reasoning. Their conservative forms were quite well crafted, hiding the empty insides. Content had vacated them, leaving in its wake a sterile virtuousity that was the subject of endless, equally sterile reviews.
The self-censored kept the literary machine grinding on to no one's surprise, pleasure or delight. They turned up dutifully at congresses, readings, conferences, and rallies, their puffed-up, gray faces with large, dark circles under heavy, horn-rimmed glasses. Their air of weariness was a signal to the world to leave them alone so that they could start drinking. The self-censored drank themselves to death at the red-clothed tables of the Writer's Union, in dives, and at home. When they traveled abroad, their first order of business was getting expensive booze to drink. It was their payoff for years of restraint, deliberate suppression of talent, thought, and life....
The self-censored lied, but they were so unconvincing that every word they wrote was the opposite of what they would have liked everyone to believe. They served as weather vanes. Their only hope, and one that was, alas, being realized, was that eventually everyone would exhibit the same ambiguous, ironic disposition. At that point, the lie moved on to a new level, where it was authenticated by ubiquity. Foreign journals and books were confiscated at the border, not because of their content but because they conferred status to the censor who could display them on his coffee table. Too amorphous to hurt, too ambiguous to catch, too faceless to love, the self-censored flowed heavily, as a sort of intellectual molasses, into the life of the country, gumming up the works.
