When British author and academic Anthony Burgess chose to settle in Malta in the late 1960s to concentrate on his writing, and also to avoid the exceptionally high tax rates introduced in Britain at the time, he was invited by the Jesuits to deliver a lecture on art, censorship, and pornography which was held at the Science Lecture Theatre at the University of Malta.
The subject was then, and is still today, a contentious one, and the aim of the event was to openly debate the very fine lines which separate all three categories. Burgess' experience of living in Malta may be described as bureaucratic purgatory. The uncertainty of administrative decisions over censorship laws led him to pose the following opening question during his talk; 'What exactly is the standard prevailing on this island which decides that one book is dirty and another is not?'
He proceeded to show that there existed no objective standards. One may find obscenity in Shakespeare and Dante yet their writings were widely available on the island. However, certain inoffensive books were categorised as a threat to public morality.
There are other cases of such double standards in the sanctioning or banning of works of art in Malta, be they visual, literary or theatrical.
Prof. Joe Friggieri, in an article on theatre in Malta written in the late 1970s, noted that a local theatre ensemble, 5-Arts Drama Group, were prohibited by the censor from showing Arthur Miller's urban tragic play 'A View from the Bridge'. Just a few years earlier, the uncensored film adaptation of the play was shown in local cinemas, including the controversial homosexual kiss (a first even for American audiences).
When reading about the Film Censorship Board in Malta and its policies of moral cleansing, I immediately visualised the priest in Giuseppe Tornatore's Cinema Paradiso who, with the ring of an altar bell, instructed the projectionist to cut out on-screen kissing and any other scenes which suggested inappropriate behaviour. Too often was I able to recall close similarities with Maltese culture whilst watching the film.
Burgess, in his second volume of memoirs You've Had Your Time, proverbially referred to Maltese fireworks as icons of vendetta. And, according to him, vendetta informed the plotlines of the most popular films screened in Malta. Violence was permitted to be shown, whilst acts of a sexual nature had to be hidden from public view. There are several examples of acts of censorship which concern the human body and sexuality. One of these is that of Dr. Giuseppe Schembri Bonaci's long poem on sexual intimacy, Ma Gdibtlekx, which, in order to be published, had to be cleverly reworded by the editor.
Although the Vatican's Index Librorum Prohibitorum (List of Forbidden Books) was abolished in 1966 by Pope Paul VI, it seemingly continued to be enforced here in Malta as it was the duty of the faithful 'not to read literature that may be harmful to faith and morals' (stated in a circular issued by the Curia in June 1966). Authors included in this list were St. Augustine, Sigmund Freud, Oscar Wilde, Charles Dickens, William Thackeray, and Voltaire. Furthermore, certain medical textbooks were also proscribed, assumedly due to containing anatomical diagrams of those areas worthy of lesser medical knowledge.
In 2010, news circulated on particular books which were locked up in a cabinet at the University of Malta library, including Irvine Welsh's Porno. This book has now assumed its rightful place on the open access shelves. It is very strange that the revised version of Burgess' lecture, which was published by the Malta Library Association in 1973 under the name Obscenity and the Arts, is nowhere to be found when searching the University's online library catalogue.
When one notes the maintained stringency of the Index in the late 1960S, the case of Antonio Sciortino's Les Gavroches sculpture at the Upper Barrakka is another perplexing case of subjective interpretation of the law. In his analysis of Sciortino's art, Dr. Schembri Bonaci noted that Sciortino's direct visual quotation of Victor Hugo's Les Misérables was, in the year of its installation - 1907, a very dangerous and courageous act. Hugo's anti-authoritarian realist tale of social redemption was in 1864 added to the Vatican's list of banned books. The subversive nature of the Sciortino's visual interpretation of the novel was recognised by a certain S. Gauci in an article on Sciortino which appeared in Malta Letteraria, the journal of the Maltese Italianate intelligentsia, in 1904.
Over time this was cleverly downplayed to conveniently repress the memory of political turbulence late nineteenth-century France. The work was de-politicised until the word 'revolutionary' lost all its radical political significance, despite being continually celebrated as a masterpiece. Today we may easily refer to the portrayed scene as alluding to the French revolution as its contemporary meaning differs to that of the time of the sculpture's conception. In more recent years, the likewise anti-authoritarian production Mistero Buffo by Dario Fo, translated by Schembri Bonaci, was not shown by PBS despite the signing of a preliminary agreement. Another instance of selective censorship.
Whilst violence has been generally accepted, subversive politics and sexual visibility have been subjected to perpetual scrutiny. The case of the infamous Luqa roundabout Colonna Mediterranea by Paul Vella Critien is the probably the most bizarre accusation of artistic indecency in Maltese history. Burgess' talk reminded me of this sculpture as he made reference to the accepted representation of human genitalia once these have been stylised and transformed into decorative forms.
Although Vella Critien's intention was not to produce an ornamental phallus, his sculpture was rather suggestive. However, political and public reactions to the piece couldn't allow anyone to understand it otherwise. People were conditioned into seeing the real thing, a reversal of Burgess' postulate: a stylised sculpture turned into male genitalia, and considered as an insult to moral order.
Malta is not isolated in its exercising of double standards. In a previous article called 'The human body in Maltese art' (Malta Independent on Sunday, 17th July, 2016), I spoke of the current legal debate over the censorship of Gustave Courbet's L'Origine du Monde on Facebook, the site which hypocritically allows violence and abjection to be indiscriminately disseminated yet treats nudity and representations of nudity as offensive content.
As Burgess said, 'It is a great shame when works of literature [and all other art forms] are confused with works of pornography.' It is true that pornography which does not possess any implicit artistic value has become commonplace in contemporary art. On the other hand, it is misleading and denigrating to impose the status of pornography onto a work in order to incite public disfavour because it does not please the status quo (which may essentially be blamed for polemicising the allusion).
Burgess' attempt to openly debate the delicate interrelationship between art, censorship and pornography was greeted with a scornful silence, except for a 'throat-cutting gesture' made by 'a fat Franciscan'. Likewise, descriptions of artworks such as Sciortino's Les Gavroches tendentiously mitigate inherent political meanings, and such is a form of censorship nonetheless.