EZANTHUS AND THE NATION

Gordon Collins

IF IT IS NOT QUITE THE CASE that the publication of Ezanthus’s novel Thezie at Work instigated the founding of The Department of Cultural Refinement, it is true that its censorship was our group’s first task. The novel introduces us to Thezie, an elite student turned miscreant whose sexual misdemeanours boost rather than hamper his career. Violence and bribery see him through the Academy and into the Service where charm, promiscuity and extortion assist him in a sequence of promotions. His youthful appetites appear untamed as he goes about the capital manically intoxicated, seducing and assaulting judges, ambassadors, spinsters and vagrants. But Thezie’s ill-doings serve his plan. The novel is a handbook for the use of deviance for self-promotion. Ezanthus attacks the motto of that time: ‘To think clearly is to act dearly’. The book ends with Thezie degrading, blackmailing and usurping the Paramount’s Chief Action. Will such responsibility change Thezie or is the nation set for the dark times that are forebode throughout the novel? Or is his rise nothing remarkable and, in fact, our nation has been built by a hundred Thezies? Ezanthus leaves us wondering.

It is a book of wrong thinking that, in retrospect at least, was meant to confound the Academy and the Service. The notion that an elite scholar might descend to depravity and yet still rise to the top of our society was indigestible to them. The Paramount himself charged us with the removal of the novel in all its forms. At that time, we were no more than seven scholars who spent our time reading and discussing new literary forms. We had some idea that we were meant to advise the academy on the direction of literature but we expected to be disbanded at any moment on the whim of a professor. The publication of Thezie at Work defined our true purpose as censors. We were charged with the raiding of bookshops, libraries and homes. We were to instruct the local deacons to charge anyone found with a copy. The presses were fined into bankruptcy. Ezanthus was held prisoner in his own home. Those found in possession of the book were held overnight and sent home in the morning with bruised ribs.

Those few books that were left in circulation were handed around the offices after hours. Its type was reset and it was copied using chopper presses – these were the early days of such technologies. These brown-streaked pages were copied to the point of illegibility and clipped into binders to look like reports. They were passed on in the cellar clubs and the college libraries. It was read out quietly at the back of workgroup meetings when the audience should have been listening to their organisers. Then it spread like disease. Ezanthus’ writing always had this ‘must-read’ quality; his language traps the reader. By the time we realised what had happened, it was too late. Thezie at Work had become the most widely read of Ezanthus’ work.

Such a failure would have been the end of our Department of Cultural Refinement if it were not for the subsequent publication of many lesser books which entertained themes similar to those in Thezie at Work. The Paramount believed that more censorship was required but was persuaded to back an alternative approach. We had learnt from Thezie that prohibition only adds to a work’s esteem. We had come to realise that the quickest route to incitement was to lock up the national writer. (The very notion of a national writer depends upon him, at some stage in his career, having suffered persecution.) We would no longer ban works but instead we would promote them. For each inciting book, we made sure that ten more were published with the same or even less secure message. These works would appear in anthologies and be serialised in the newspapers. We would hand them out at stalls around the city. They would be stacked up at the back of the stationery shops on Fetok Avenue where they would be next to out-of-date travel books and jigsaw puzzles in faded boxes, unsold year after year. Then they would be dumped on the thrift stores, who would take only seven copies and dispose of the rest. Those dissident writers who were still read were praised with awards and grants. What good is a writer with a grant! He will surely instigate no discord when he is fed by the state. They sat in cafés arguing with each other until their money ran out.

In this way we protected our nation from the sharp edges of literary thrust. The most vehement diatribes were utterly diluted. Nobody bothered to copy their work on chopper presses. For the most part, nobody read them. Those who still sold had their works added to the school curriculum which condemned them to that section of our canon which, while it is read and understood, can never act against us.

Throughout the two years that it took us to perfect our methods, Ezanthus was writing Potent in which he exhibits the lives of five nameless citizens: nurse, factory worker, gardener, teacher and clerk. Researched in extremum, the book could be read as an ethnography of the nation if it were not for the warmth of Ezanthus’ prose which lures the reader into friendship with these characters. At first reading, we believed that nothing in it would trouble us. Potent appeared to reinforce the notion that duty may overcome adversity, which was precisely the notion that our superiors wished us to promote. However, as each character overcomes their difficulties, they become mired in a subplot, which starts as a misunderstanding between friends, grows into a feud and then stagnates into a malaise which burdens the last few chapters. The five characters ought to have found peace but it is such an uneasy resolution that it is really no resolution at all. The nurse is inattentive and a patient suffers an infection. The gardener, for no other reason than general dissatisfaction, assaults the factory worker who is crippled and laid off. The teacher succumbs to his lusts. The clerk inevitably becomes corrupted. By the end, there can only be one conclusion: these citizens, the reader’s friends, are destroyed by society, which is the reader’s society. At least this is a consistent reading and one that is hard to forget. I have read “Potent” seven times, each time I hope I will not be betrayed by these good people but each time I finish, I am dismayed.

Ezanthus found an independent press to publish Potent. He required no book launch and would give no interview. After his experience with Thezie, he eschewed publicity. Perhaps he even thought that we would not notice the sedition inherent in the book. We visited the press, poured vinegar in its inks and offset its frames so that publication was delayed. Meanwhile we commissioned and published twenty novels, all with single word titles, all following five characters, all with evolving subplots. The works were rushed and crude (although I did enjoy Pastor and its reckless title character) but they served our purposes. By the time Potent was published, it seemed derivative. Ezanthus’ talent was declared dead. 

At this time our department was renamed The National Centre for Literature. We gained independence from the Academy and our remit was expanded so that we would assume the roles of literary producers as well as consumers. We employed fifty writers who came to work in our building and were paid by the day. Some of them insisted on being published but others were happy just to produce a few hundred words a week which we happily accepted and filed. Meanwhile our controllers’ attitudes to censorship grew more lenient when compared to the rigorous administrative procedures of their predecessors. These controllers had read Thezie a decade before and had read it as a warning and not a despairing picture of the nation as it had become. They believed in a national literature. They thought that Ezanthus had made such a dream possible although he had fallen short himself of writing it. They tasked us with creating the environment for the works that would define our nation. 

How were we meant to achieve this goal? Through conferences? Cultural advancement programmes? We had produced the perfect environment for a literature of failure. A clapped-out anti-literature. Our writers were incapable of producing anything of resonance unless they were threatened. There was not one sentence that came from the National Centre that did not sound like the writers had been tied to their desks and whipped.

We had, however, cultivated a lively scholarly discourse between the permanent staff (the censors, I still use this word). Where our writers fell short, our readers, critics and scholars excelled. We came to realise that If we were to be successful in creating a canon, then we would have to redefine the relationship between writer and censor. Previously, whenever a book was required that none of our writers were willing or capable of producing it, then we had written it ourselves. The results had been no more than functional but, when the controllers requested a more developed literature from us, then it was natural that we took on the work ourselves. Our authors, who, although they had grown feckless and who lacked any literary authority, had established a school of writing of sorts. We, the censors, supplied the vision and impetus to this school and so we came to the practice of the censor writing under the guidance of the author.

Our first work was a collection of essays on early history which leant towards the neo-nationalist thesis and which pleased the controllers. An anthology of poems in a similar vein was also in production. This was the state of the project when Ezanthus agreed to join us with the understanding that he would not be required to participate in any collaborative projects. He had grown old and we were offering him a room, food and acceptance in his last decade. I believe that the idea of a national literature appealed to him too. So it was that he wrote his masterpiece of ‘captured’ writing, Thezie Discharged, under our supervision.

In this sequel, complacency has overcome the nation and Thezie can hardly bear the slow decline that mirrors his own. His vigour is blunted by age and yet he remains a contrarian. He is declared the father of the nation and nothing saddens him more. His acts of rebellion are reported as comic whims. He betrays the Paramount who is imprisoned but it is a relief to him as he too is tired of power. The book fizzles out as Ezanthus seeks to dramatise the dread in decay but he must admit his failure. But the novel, once fully digested, is certainly a success. The work overflows with sprachgefühl. Ezanthus exhibits the language like no other. High and low are united and this redeems the plot. The closing chapters swagger and crescendo just as the story dies. He is telling us that beauty survives corruption, defeat and even death. Thezie Discharged is thought to be Ezanthus’ most important work. More importance, if it is to be judged by the greatest literary endeavour read by the most people, should certainly be given to Thezie at Work but which book will take its place in the history of our literature is less clear. Thezie Discharged has established itself in our canon, our curriculum and, I believe, is working its way into our hearts.

But this was not the work that was required of us. The controllers saw its merit but thought of it, perhaps rightly, as a dead end. It is still not certain whether our project will be successful in producing a national literature. If it is, it will have to accommodate all three of Ezanthus’ novels and there is no prospect of this. Despite all our efforts, these books block the road that would lead to that place where we can truly celebrate our people and their ideas. There is hope. Our younger writers don’t come to Ezanthus with the awe that he is due but make their own clearings around him in their works of radical science, madness cured and explorations of music.

I read all these as I must. I have the honour of chairing the New Board of Arts which oversees the work of the National Centre. If I am still a censor, then I am a kindly one. Nothing has been banned in my time. Barely anything has been edited. I receive one or two works a month, which leaves me free to enjoy the greatest privilege of supervising Ezanthus in his last years.

It has been reported that he has stopped writing but I can tell you that this is untrue. He produces a page a day. It is often identical or near enough identical to the previous day’s. I receive it from him before lunch. I thank him and we sit together on the bench outside his chalet. I read it while he sits with his head bowed. I may comment on a phrase. I do not take issue with his syntax which has become increasingly erratic. He thanks me. I have always found him courteous in contrast to the public’s view of him. ‘I find it helps to act kindly,’ he once told me. I ask him if he requires any books. He may ask for some older titles that I have no difficulty providing for him. I ask him if he has any other needs, if he requires the doctor for example but he always says he is fine.

What I can never bring myself to ask him is: does he feel restricted in his art or do the confines free him? He is writing for the state. Make no mistake that, if he were to seek publication elsewhere, we would be forced to act. There are scores of writers we can call upon to drown his works with the false flattery of imitation. We can make him irrelevant within one literary cycle. He knows this but does it matter? We are all confined in our expression. Perhaps it is easier for him to know with certainty the nature of his bounds.

I leave him reading in his chair. I take his page and add it to his archive.