You can tell your University’s standards have plummeted – and plummeted to an alarming degree – when its rector decides to put up a long overdue defence of his decision to ban a campus newspaper... and in so doing, unwittingly reveals that:
a) he didn’t even understand the offending story before banning it;
b) he has no background whatsoever in academia (despite occupying Malta’s top academic position), and;
d) he is clearly unaware of this thing called the Universal Declaration of Human Rights... and that these rights are entrenched in the same laws he now claims to have ‘upheld’.
Last Friday, Dr Juanito Camilleri attempted to justify his decision to ban Ir-Realta’ with an article in The Times. It made for excruciating reading. Consider the following excerpt, which reminded me of one of those awful movie moments, when you can’t help but look away from the screen, as the lead protagonist makes a complete and utter jackass of himself. Honestly, it made me cringe so much I actually got stomach cramps while reading it:
“Though opinions in the media refer to it as a ‘story’ or ‘fictitious text’, the article can reasonably be interpreted, by readers who, like me, do not know the author, as describing the sexual experience and fantasies of the author himself. The author writes in the first person singular, makes no attempt at creating a fictitious character distinct from himself and makes no disclaimer that the article is in fact fictitious.”
Oh... my... God. Did I really read that? Or was it just a bad dream, in which the University found itself briefly hijacked by someone without even an O-level to his name?
OK, let’s ignore the fact that there are at least two extra commas in that paragraph – these could just as easily have been put there by an eager-beaver copy editor – and that ‘opinions’ tend to exist only in people’s minds (as opposed to opinion articles, which can usually be found in the media). But this sort of nit-picking aside... are we seriously to believe that the rector of the University of Malta doesn’t even know how to recognise a literary device? How to tell the difference between fact and fiction? Is it possible that Dr Camilleri is entirely unaware of a long and illustrious satirical tradition (going all the way back to Juvenal and Horace, if not earlier) which achieves its effect precisely by blurring the above distinction, so that the reader is seduced into believing that fiction is fact, and fact fiction?
And if all this is true: can anyone explain what on earth Dr Juanito Camilleri is doing as (for crying out loud)... rector of the University of Malta??!
But wait: let me give a little credit where it is due, and concede that there are plenty of subjects under the sun in which I myself can take instruction from Dr Juanito Camilleri. These include computer science, information technology, and... well, pretty much anything of a vaguely scientific or technical nature, being somewhat lacking in those departments myself.
But having lectured creative writing part-time at the same University – in the days before it became an institution inimical to free speech, I hasten to add – there is at least one area where I feel entitled to reciprocate: and that is literary technique.
Among the very first things I tried to explain to my students was precisely the difference between an author’s narrative voice – first or third person, at this stage it doesn’t really matter – and the voice of the author himself.
Quick example: is there any difference at all between J.D. Salinger and Holden Caulfield? If not, why did Salinger feel the need create a fictitious narrator for his novel ‘The Catcher In The Rye’... instead of just narrating the damn thing himself? And if so, why choose the first person singular, and not ‘create a fictitious character distinct from himself’ (as Juanito suggests) to hammer home the point that “I am not Holden Caulfield”?
The answer is fairly simple to anyone with even a basic understanding of how literature works – a category which evidently excludes the University rector. Salinger wasn’t interested in writing an autobiography... otherwise he would no doubt have done just that, as he was obviously capable of doing. No, he was writing fiction; and as such, he didn’t necessarily identify 100% with his lead protagonist at all. Salinger used Holden Caulfield for his own purposes, just as Dickens had earlier used Pip (in that other first-person narrative, ‘Great Expectations’)... and the beautiful thing about it all is that the converse is equally true: Caulfield used Salinger, and Pip Dickens, whether the authors themselves were aware of this or not.
Anyone who has ever tried his hand at writing fiction – and God knows I have, without ever quite reaching those all-important words: ‘The End’ – will know this from personal experience. Fictitious characters have a wonderful tendency to suddenly take on a life of their own, and at times can be remarkably uncooperative with their own authors. For instance, there is a character in my unfinished novel who stolidly refuses to fall in love with the person I ‘created’ specifically for this purpose. It’s terribly unreasonable of him, I know, but what can I do? He’s got his own quirks, and besides: the character I created as his love interest has meanwhile gone off and eloped with someone else, in a plot twist expected by nobody... not even myself.
But back to the rector’s defence of his human rights violation. I mentioned Salinger’s ‘Catcher in the Rye’ earlier because it belongs to much the same literary ‘family’ as Vella Gera’s own piece... which, by the way, I think has been grossly undervalued by local media commentators, some of whom are to literature what I am to professional Sumo wrestling.
But there is another example more cogent still. American Psycho, by Brett Easton Ellis, is an intensely compelling read – though of course very disturbing – and its power resides precisely in the choice of first-person singular narrative. Without this technique it would have been hard, if not impossible, for Ellis to create the effect for which American Psycho is today so rightly acclaimed: its overwhelming sense of verisimilitude, which draws the reader directly into the thought processes of a homicidal psychopath (sometimes, while he is busy doing the sort of thing that homicidal psychopaths are notorious for doing, and which of course make for very unpleasant details).
I haven’t spoken to Alex Vella Gera about his own literary influences – and I imagine Juanito Camilleri hasn’t, either– but it wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if he modelled a couple of his stylistic devices on Ellis’ work. Incidentally, the same book can be found on sale in at least one bookshop in Valletta (I happened to see it there last week) despite the fact that it contains graphic descriptions of violence to such an alarming and upsetting degree, that even I – who have a stronger than average stomach for literary violence, if I may say so myself – found certain parts almost vomit-inducing.
This brings me to a secondary observation, which believe it or not has been entirely overlooked in all the hullabaloo surrounding the Realta’ ban. We seem to be forgetting that Alex Vella Gera’s fictitious text – for yes, Juanito, it was indeed a work of fiction – is ultimately about misogyny. And in case no one’s yet noticed, misogyny in Malta is very much a real phenomenon, which poses a clear and present threat to literally thousands of lives.
Think of it this way: our University bans a newspaper for graphically depicting brutish male chauvinism of the kind we all know exists... and at the same time, nobody bats an eyelid when one horrific crime after another is perpetrated against a real woman, by a real male chauvinist brute, practically every other week.
I don’t know about you, but personally it gets me down when I read about girlfriends bludgeoned to death by jealous boyfriends. Or when a mother of three is stabbed 50 times by her irascible husband (who invariably thinks of his ‘wife’ as a personal possession, much like a car or an electric heater, which can therefore be disposed of at will). Or when a woman is disfigured with sulphuric acid by her estranged partner, or whose corpse is retrieved in an advanced state of decomposition from the bottom of a well in Gozo... or – as in the terrible, terrible case of Silvia King – when a woman is clubbed almost to death, then doused in paraffin and set alight, still alive... all because she dared to advise her best friend to leave her abusive (and ultimately homicidal) husband.
These are all events which have really taken place (some quite recently); and as such I find them far, far more upsetting to read than any number of fictitious stories peppered with obscenities like ‘pipi’ and ‘koko’.
And guess what? Underlying all this horrific violence against women, without exception, is precisely the same attitude that Alex Vella Gera tries to expose – with considerable success, I personally think – in ‘Li Tkisser Sewwi’: a short story which should really be discussed at academic level – as opposed to banned outright – by any self-respecting University.
From this perspective, Dr Camilleri’s blunder assumes a double significance. Under normal circumstances, I would argue that banning a campus newspaper is unjust regardless of the quality of the story being banned. In this case, however – when the aim of the literature was precisely to illustrate a cold reality that desperately needs to be addressed, and which few other authors have ever had the guts to write about – it is little short of criminal.
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