Absolution by Patrick Flanery Page A

wife syndrome. Worse, even, because as a writer living under the old government, I – and doubtless many other writers in the same or similar positions – found that the censor infected my consciousness, like a worm. It lived in the brain, and ate around in the skull, living side by side with me, inside me, occupying the same mental space. I was always aware of the worm. It exerted a kind of psychic pressure that I experienced physiologically, right here in the sinuses, between and behind the eyes, and in the frontal lobe, pressing against the brow. It was toxic, excreting hallucinatory chemicals that twisted my thoughts. I became obsessed by its very presence: the heart raced, the brain erupted, trying to purge itself of the worm; I have often thought it was like a brain storm – but not in the sense you Americans mean, not a storm of ideas, but a literal electrical storm, raging inside the skull, trying to strike down the worm with a fatal bolt. When I went outside, out in public, I was embarrassed, horrified and disgusted lest anyone should guess that the worm had infected me – as if such infection could be seen on the face and betray the fact that I had become host to the terrors of the censor. The terror suggests – or the afflicted writer fears it suggests – a kind of guilty conscience that betrays guilty acts, and this makes the infection all the worse. One begins to scrutinize every word written, every phrase, trying todetect meanings hidden even to the mind of the writer, and this is the source of real madness. A friend of mine, a fellow writer, has described his own mental relationship with the censor as that of a tree (he, the writer) being embraced by a strangle-vine. One thinks of the love-vine, Cassytha filiformis , leafless and tangled, overtaking an entire tree, smothering but not killing it. For me the love-vine is too external a metaphor. In my case, the censor was a bodily invader, always with me, entirely with in me, internally bloodsucking. I knew what the censor would look for in my words, and the kind of mind that would undertake the looking; it would see suggestion where there might only be document, though my work could never be accused of being documentary, perhaps because I knew what attitude the censor would take to the documentary form, to journalistic writing. My own evasion of social documentary is itself a symptom of the illness that is the relationship with the censor. If one looks at the writers who were banned and the books found “undesirable”, a great many fall into the social realist school, representing in fairly unmediated terms the state of this country in the period of its emergency. And while our censorship was often arbitrary and inconsistent and changed its targets over the decades, it was no less malign and wide-reaching for all that. I spent decades writing in such a way as to avoid having my books banned. I wrote books, effectively, which the censors could not understand, because they lacked the intelligence to read beyond the surface, and the surface itself was almost opaque to them, darkness etched in darkness. Is that the confession you were hoping to extract – that I consciously wrote evasively, to remain in print? I did. I don’t consider it a crime. I consider it a means of survival, a coping mechanism, in the language of pop psychology, and one at which I seem to have excelled.’
‘And if one reads the censor’s reports on your books, they’re all judged too “literary” to pose any risk of fomenting unrest among “average” readers.’
‘By this they mean the majority. I have read the reports. Books and pamphlets in simple, polemical language, books that outlined in undisguised terms the realities of this country under the old government – those were the books the censors were most inclined to ban, not mine. They could have condemned my books, found them “undesirable” in that peculiar erotics of the language of their censorship, on any number