"A wall between the writer and the reader": Jana Fischerová on censorship in Czechoslovakia and Ireland
At the Gratias Agit awards on October 17th, Dr Jana Fischerová was among those honoured for spreading the good name of the Czech Republic abroad. After the ceremony at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, she spoke to Danny Bate about her career and her comparative work on Irish and Czech literature, especially the topic of censorship.
I'd like to start with a biography of your life and your career as an academic. How did you get from the Czech Republic to Ireland, where you now live and work?
“I should probably start by saying that after doing my Maturita, after finishing secondary school, I went to England. It was the early 90s, so it was a very interesting time. It was suddenly possible to do something like that and it was very exciting. I wanted to learn English and very soon I realised that I really wanted to study literature as well. So, I got my first bit of experience of that when I was in London as an au pair. I started to study an evening course in literature and then when I returned, I went to study Czech and English philology in Olomouc.
“Towards the end of that, I was deciding what to do for a PhD and as part of the English studies programme, we were doing a little bit of Irish literature and I realised that there was going to be my subject. Where else should you go if you want to study Irish literature but Dublin? It wasn't very straightforward; I went via London first, but the programme there was discontinued after about a term. It was a bit unlucky, but then later when I looked back on it, it was probably meant to be because, as I said, if you want to do Irish literature the best place to do it is Ireland so I ended up doing a PhD in Anglo-Irish literature and drama in Dublin, at University College Dublin. That took me a few years because I went there before the Czech Republic was a member of the EU, so I wasn't entitled to any of the Irish government grants. So I started to work straight away as well. It took a few years, but I did it.
“Then I started to teach, and because I kept both my subjects I had a comparative element in my dissertation. I am now teaching both Irish literature and Czech studies.”
Literature has shaped your life and your career, specifically Irish literature. What was it about Irish literature that attracted you to the field?
“So in Olomouc I was studying literatures of the Anglophone world. Of course the main focus was on English literature, we did American literature, and then a small part was Irish literature. After studying a lot of the other big literary traditions, I realised that there was something very different about Ireland. It was the Catholicism, and it was the defiant humour most of all. I just thought ‘I have to go and check this out’.
“I think it's not a surprise that the first writer I really became interested in was James Joyce. That was kind of my point of departure, but then I started to discover some of the less well-known writers who were also very interesting. So I focused on the on the mid-twentieth century, and there were some great short story writers and novelists. Somehow it happened that I wrote about the subject of censorship. It developed organically that I compared Irish censorship with Czechoslovak censorship, something I partly knew as sort of my background, and I would I would compare that with the Irish context.”
With censorship in this country, the history is quite well known, up until the Velvet Revolution. Irish censorship may come as something unfamiliar. Could you tell us a bit more about the similarities and the differences? Because the contexts of this censorship must be completely different?
“Irish censorship was introduced in the 1920s, just a few years after Ireland gained its independence. It was a democratic country, so that's where the first difference lies, because in post-war Czechoslovakia, as we know, the censorship was part and parcel of the repressive communist regime. So for that reason partly, I think that until fairly recently, because we now know more about Irish censorship, people used to trivialise it. They would say that it wasn’t like how it was in the Soviet Union or other countries like that. It wasn’t, but that doesn’t mean that it did not also do a lot of harm.
“It lasted about four decades, and that in itself has a very negative impact on the reading culture, if a censorship system lasts this long, because it creates a gap. This one of the main similarities between the two contexts; even though the two censorships came in a different form, and there was a different historical background, the literature that was banned was unavailable to the readers, and that basically put up a wall between the writer and the reader for a long time. So that was the main discovery for me when I was comparing the two contexts: that there are all these differences, but you can say censorship is censorship. It doesn't matter where you introduce it, what exact form you give it, as long as you're keeping books away from readers, you're doing harm. It has a huge impact on the on the reading culture.
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“In Ireland it's an interesting similarity that the censorship system lasted about four decades, same as the communist system in Czechoslovakia. Otherwise the interesting differences were, first of all, that Czech is a small language, so the writers who were banned in Czechoslovakia were silenced completely. There was no other market, whereas the Irish writers, virtually all of them, wrote in English. So if they were banned in Ireland, they still had markets in England and in the States. That's a big practical difference.
“Also there was a difference between the two systems: in Ireland the censorship was post-publication, so the books were out and then some of them were banned. They were mostly being published in Britain, and then when they came to Ireland they were assessed and some were banned. But by that time, those who wanted to get to them often could. Whereas in Czechoslovakia, the Soviet-type censorship was pre-emptive, so if your manuscript didn't get the seal of approval, the book was never written and never published. So again, a complete silencing.
“Those are the big differences between the two systems, but the actual impact of state censorship operating in the country is quite similar. There is that wall between the writer and the reader. We don't have the dialogue being created between contemporary writers and their readership. Even in Ireland, the writers who could publish in Britain or had a readership in the United States, a lot of them would say their main readership was in their home country, yet that's where they could not be read, and where their books couldn't be circulated. So, it had a huge negative impact.”
Could you give us some examples of authors in Ireland who were on the receiving end of this censorship, and the reasons why? This would be a matter of morals, and of being against church teachings?
“Well, the censorship was state censorship, but you are right in assuming that it had to do with morality. Ireland was a very strongly Catholic country at the time, and there was a church-state alliance. That was very strong in the first few decades after independence. So, on the one hand, the censorship was introduced to guard a specific notion of Irish identity, after about 700 years of British rule. So the motivation was partly political, but the guise that it got was focused on morality, because of the strong position of the Catholic Church in the country, and the fact that because the Irish language had almost completely been lost, it couldn't function as the main pillar of Irish identity at the moment of gaining independence. So, Catholicism became the main badge of Irish national identity.
“Catholic ethos was very strongly imprinted in the censorship legislation, and the central term was ‘indecent’. On the one hand, everybody knew what that meant; on the other hand, it was quite an open term. It didn't only apply always to sexual immorality, but it could include things like blasphemy, or even social criticism.
“And you were asking about specific writers: almost every writer of note had at least one book banned, including Samuel Beckett, the Nobel Prize laureate, G.B. Shaw, another Nobel Prize laureate, and other names: Frank O'Connor, John McGahern, Edna O'Brien – some Czech readers might know her and her book, The Country Girls, for example. So, the list was long, and by the end of the four decades, there were about ten thousand titles on the register.”
Could you tell me a little bit more about the relationship between the two countries today, especially as it is expressed in literature? Is there a big readership in Ireland of Czech literature?
“Well, I wouldn't say there's a big readership, but there is one, and I'm glad to say that this is part of my work. It's a very pleasant part of my work to be introducing interesting contemporary Czech writers to Irish readers. When they are introduced to them, they are very interested. So, writers like Miloš Urban, Petra Hůlová, and Magdalena Platzová – there are several names that Irish readers like exploring. The Irish contemporary literary scene is very rich, so it's nice to be able to draw some comparisons, and for Irish people to see what's happening on the Czech scene.
“But they are also constantly interested in the Czech classics, whether it's the actual classics of the nineteenth century, and that includes Erben’s Kytice, Němcová’s Babička, because there are some fresh, new, very good translations of these works. I should mention Hašek as well, and his Good Soldier Švejk. But some of the twentieth century works that we can now refer to as classics, including Milan Kundera, Bohumil Hrabal, and Václav Havel. People are still very much interested in those, and they like learning about the context of these works.”
Do you see similarities between the two countries, in terms of their literature? Do you see similar themes crop up, or do they feel very disconnected to you?
“Well, the cultural historical context of the two countries is different mostly, I would say, but at the same time, there are some interesting overlaps. We are two small countries, very comparable in size. We have two small languages, even though in Ireland English took off for obvious reasons under British rule. Yet Irish is the original language, and there is actually quite a vibrant literature in Irish being written, especially for young readers. The experience with oppression is something that we share, and how we deal with it and how that's reflected in literature. It often comes through humour. That's one thing that I find we have in common; we have a good sense of humour. There is this defiance in us. Sometimes the humour is black, but the humour is definitely there. That's where we connect.
“Otherwise it's interesting to compare the national revivals of the nineteenth century, and the language question. Czech was being revived around the same time that Irish was being lost, because the historical situations were different.”
Your work with the Czech School Dublin takes you away from academia, away from teaching university students to a broader sample of people within Ireland. Could you tell me a little bit about your work with that institution?
“Česká škola Dublin is basically a primary school away from the Czech Republic. The pupils in the school are children of immigrants, so their parents would either both be Czech or one of their parents is Czech and the other is Irish or another nationality. These families want to keep Czech alive and that's what the school is for. So the children mainly learn the Czech language, but it can't be done in isolation, so they learn geography, history, and so on. Also they are reading; if you want to if you want to speak the language well, you have to read. That's how you absorb the correct forms and expand your vocabulary.
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“Where I come into this project is that we are now offering courses to secondary school students, who actually can do Czech as one of their subjects for the leaving Cert as their mother tongue. It's their choice; it's their right to do it, but secondary schools in Ireland do not offer tuition in Czech. So, the students have to prepare themselves. If they want, they can come to me at the Czech school Dublin. We practice the language, but we also do a lot of reading.
“For me it's really interesting to see these young people who are about to enter university, which is where I normally teach, and to see what their expectations and skills are. It's a joy. I've had many talented seventeen or eighteen-year-olds who were so interested in reading Čapek, Hrabal, all these big authors, and really getting a lot out of it. It's basically a pre-level before the age group that I would normally teach. It's so rewarding to see that these young people are then ready to use Czech, and that they have some awareness of Czech culture and cultural history.”
