34 The New York Reviewthat preclude genuine debate?^11 How
to counter those who have been the ben-
eficiaries of the vicious suppression of
the right to speak of the enslaved, Native
Americans, immigrants, and gay people
and who now weaponize free speech to
safeguard odious prejudices about gen-
der and race, privilege and history? Who
will be the judges of what can be dissem-
inated without themselves becoming
censors?
Berkowitz wades into these issues
armed with the perspective that comes
from having just explored the ways
in which humanity managed, over
thousands of years, to forge a certain
agreement that debate on public issues
“should be uninhibited, robust, and
wide-open.” Though he acknowledges
that “there is no consensus in the West”
about how to resolve the thicket of di-
lemmas he examines, he comes down
strongly on the side of allowing more
freedom rather than less,^12 clinging to
the certainty that we should not treat our
fellows as if they were children unable
to distinguish truth from deception. He
makes this choice in the full knowledge
of democracy’s precariousness, mindfulof how easily a system that tolerated free
inquiry—as Athens did—can turn into
a repressive society when its identity is
threatened. After all, thirty years before
Protagoras’s books were burned, he was
allowed to freely speak his mind. A cau-
tionary tale: disasters breed censorship;
yesterday’s champions of liberty can be-
come the repressors of tomorrow; our
freedoms can be reversed and intellec-
tual autonomy sacrificed on the altar of
security.
As we navigate the uncertain waters
that await us, we do not lack inspiring
stories to give us a cautious optimism.
In 1974, a year after the coup in Chile,
the actor and playwright Óscar Cas-
tro was arrested for performing a play
that obliquely criticized the dictator-
ship, and he spent the next two years in
concentration camps. Despite having
been tortured, despite his mother and
brother- in- law being “disappeared,” he
expressed his creativity by staging a se-
ries of works with his fellow inmates. On
one occasion, he managed to convince
the commander of the Melinka deten-
tion center to approve a subversive text,
adducing that it had been written by
the “famous” (and fictitious) Austrian
playwright Emil Kan (an anagram for
Melinka). Under the very nose of those
who could harm him, Óscar Castro
did not cease to defy the censors.^13 If
he could nurse freedom behind barbed
wire, if Margaret Sanger could persist
despite indictments and proscriptions,
if Giordano Bruno never recanted
as his body burned, how can we be-
lieve that censorship will have the lastword? (^) Q
(^11) For two differing views on the se-
riousness of this problem, see Anne
Applebaum, “The New Puritans,” The
Atlantic, August 31, 2021; Michelle
Goldberg, “The Middle-Aged Sadness
Behind the Cancel Culture Panic,” The
New York Times, September 21, 2021;
and Goldberg’s response on October 2,
2021, in the same paper to mostly crit-
ical reactions from readers. A valuable
perspective on the unintended conse-
quences of “deplatforming” on campus
is Dax D’Orazio, “Deplatforming in
Theory and Practice: The Ann Coulter
Debacle,” in Dilemmas of Free Expres-
sion, edited by Emmet MacFarlane
(University of Toronto Press, 2021).
(^12) For a forceful and nuanced defense
of the same position, see Susan Nossel,
Dare to Speak: Defending Free Speech
for All (Dey Street, 2020). Nossel is the
CEO of PEN America.
(^13) Óscar Castro died last year of Covid
in Paris. For more on his exceptional
life and works, see my homage to
him, “How Theater Can Help Us Sur-
vive,” The Nation, May 6, 2021; and
“El Teatro en los campos de concen-
tración,” Araucaria, No. 6 (1979), the
result of several days and nights of re-
cordings carried out by my wife and me
in our Amsterdam exile.
A new translation of the work of Józef
Czapski, painter, writer, and an eyewitness
to the turbulent history of the 20th century
Interned with thousands of Polish officers in the
Soviet prisoner-of-war camp at Starobielsk in Sep-
tember 1939, Józef Czapski was one of a very
small number to survive.
Memories of Starobielsk portrays these doomed
men, some with the detail of a finished portrait,
others in vivid sketches that mingle intimacy with
respect, as Czapski describes their struggle to
remain human under hopeless circumstances.
Essays on art, history, and literature complement
the memoir, showing Czapski’s lifelong engage-
ment with Russian culture. The short pieces on
painting that he wrote while on a train traveling
from Moscow to the Second Polish Army’s
strategic base in Central Asia stand among his
most lyrical and insightful reflections on art.
“What distinguishes Memories of Starobielsk and
deepens our understanding of the events Czapski
lived through is the vision he imparts of a Europe
that the Soviets (and the Nazis) had attempted
to destroy.... Memories of Starobielsk shows
the victims not as soldiers but as doctors, pro-
fessors, engineers, writers, translators—people
of education and character, products of a civili-
zation that Stalinism could not accommodate.”
—Philip Ó Ceallaigh, Los Angeles Review of Books
ALSO AVAILABLE
INHUMAN LAND: SEARCHING
FOR THE TRUTH IN SOVIET
RUSSIA, 1941-1942
by Józef Czapski
LOST TIME: LECTURES ON
PROUST IN A SOVIET PRISON
CAMP by Józef Czapski
ALMOST NOTHING: THE 20TH-
CENTURY ART AND LIFE OF
JÓZEF CZAPSKI by Eric Karpeles
MEMORIES OF
STAROBIELSK
ESSAYS BETWEEN
ART AND HISTORY
Józef Czapski
Introduction by
Irena Grudzin ́ska Gross
Edited and translated from the
Polish by Alissa Valles
Paperback • $17.95
Available from booksellers and nyrb.com
Available from booksellers and
http://www.nyrb.com
THE
PROJECTOR
AND
ELEPHANT
Martin Vaughn-James
Designed by Seth
Introduction by Jeet Heer
Hardcover • 9 " x 11¾"
212 pages • $49.95
On sale April 12th
“This handsome repackaging of two classic titles by proto–graphic novelist
Vaughn-James deserves to be considered essential reading by fans of the form...
a lovingly produced introduction to the greatest anarcho-comic-surrealist
readers likely have never heard of (yet).” —Publishers Weekly
In 1968, the British artist and writer Martin Vaughn-James
emigrated to Canada. Over the next eight years, he
proceeded to produce some of the most mesmerizing
and inventive works in comics, light-years ahead of his
contemporaries.
Among them were Elephant and The Projector, linked
graphic novels that guide the reader (and a bespectacled
Everyman) through landscapes built out of both the every-
day and the nightmarish. Jam-packed superhighways,
plummeting horses, vast urban wastelands, colossal
businessmen, demented cartoon animals, and inter-
stellar oranges are just a small part of Vaughn-James’s
prophetic vision of society’s turn away from the natural
world to the artificial.
Together for the first time in a single volume, Elephant
and The Projector stand as a reminder that we have yet
to catch up to Vaughn-James.
NEW YORK REVIEW COMICS
NO CONSOLATION
“Imagine being me,” I don’t say to the friend who has lost, over
the past seven years, both parents, her only brother, a cous-
in, an uncle, a childhood crush, a newly discovered half sister
and beloved family dog to a cruel array of accidents, crimes of
passion, and unpronounceable afflictions too ghastly and pro-
tracted to fathom, “with all that ahead of me.”
SUCCESSION
The cactus thrived until they brought home the goldfish, which
thrived until they brought home the dog. When they brought
home the baby they sent the dog to live with her mother, who
sent him to “live” on a “farm.” Now the baby, too, has been
replaced, this time by a toddler, who casts aside her dolls one
by one, each time a new one is placed in her lap.
—Suzanne Buffam
Dorfman 32 34 .indd 34 3 / 9 / 22 4 : 15 PM