Disjecta by Samuel Beckett

Author:Samuel Beckett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
Published: 1984-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

9. Censorship in the Saorstat

An act to make provision for the prohibition of the sale and distribution of unwholesome literature and for that purpose to provide for the establishment of a censorship of books and periodical publications, and to restrict the publication of reports of certain classes of judicial proceedings and for other purposes incidental to the aforesaid. (16th July, 1929)

The Act has four parts.

Part 1 emits the definitions, as the cuttle squirts ooze from its cod. E.g., ‘the word “indecent” shall be construed as including suggestive of, or inciting to sexual immorality or unnatural vice or likely in any other similar way to corrupt or deprave.’ Deputies and Senators can seldom have been so excited as by the problem of how to make the definitive form of this litany orduretight. Tate and Brady would not slip through it now if the Minister for Justice deemed they ought not. A plea for distinction between indecency obiter and ex professo did not detain a caucus that has bigger and better things to split than hairs, the pubic not excepted. ‘It is the author’s expressed purpose, it is the effect which his thought will have as expressed in the particular words into which he has flung (eyetalics mine) his thought that the censor has to consider.’ (Minister for Justice)

Part 2 deals with the constitution of and procedure to be adopted by the Censorship of Publications Board, the genesis of prohibition orders, the preparation of a register of prohibited publications and the issuing of search warrants in respect of prohibited publications.

The Board shall consist of five fit and proper persons. This figure was arrived at only after the most animated discussion. Twelve was proposed as likely to form a more representative body. But the representative principle was rejected, notably by Deputy Professor Tierney, who could not bear the thought of any committee with only half a Jew upon it. This is a great pity, as the jury convention would have ensured the sale of at least a dozen copies in this country, assuming, as in reverence bound, that the censors would have gone to bed simultaneously and independently with the text, and not passed a single copy of the work from hand to hand, nor engaged a fit and proper person to read it to them in assembly. Tit and proper’ would seem to denote nothing less than highly qualified in common sense, ‘specialists in common sense’ (Dep. Prof. Alton). Dep. J. J. Byrne burst all his buttons in this connexion: ‘Give me the man broad-minded and fair who can look at the thing from a common sense point of view. If you want to come to a proper conclusion upon what is for the good of the people in a question of this kind, I unhesitatingly plump for the common sense man.’ This is getting dangerously close to the opinion of Miss Robey, that for the artist as for the restaurateur the customer is always right. Imagine if you are able, and being able care to, Dep.

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