THE TWICE UNEARTHED: THE TROPE OF CENSORSHIP AND THE SENSE OF HISTORY

Review of Crimes against History, by Antoon De Baets (New York: Routledge, 2019).

Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft

In this review essay occasioned by Antoon De Baets’s short book Crimes against History, I argue that the censorship of a historical work can produce narrative effects. Drawing on Hayden White’s method of examining the literary tropes that shape historical narratives and determine much of their meaning, I suggest that the reception of works (including their censorship and even the murder or repression of history workers) can act like a second layer of tropes. When we tell stories about formerly repressed historians or formerly censored interpretations of the past, we add layers of meaning so that an original work of history that has been “rescued” comes to mean something new. The result is what I call the trope of the twice unearthed, and I suggest that one of its primary effects is to yield a particular moral sense of the meaning of the past. However, any serious consideration of the problem of censorship will show us something troubling: as Leo Strauss once argued, censorship of a less dramatic kind affects us even in liberal democracies because the political, social, and cultural systems in which we live and work act with censorious effect. Censorship is not a “crime against history” but rather one of the forces that creates history in the first place.