The Alibi

There is an old idea about the fable: that it was invented by people who were not allowed to speak. The Roman fabulist Phaedrus, himself a freed slave, said as much in the preface to his third book. The slave, he wrote, "dared not say outright what he wished to say," and so "projected his personal sentiments into fables and eluded censure under the guise of jesting with made-up stories." You cannot easily be flogged for insulting your master when you have only told a story about a fox and a lion — provided the master is the sort who needs a reason. Against raw arbitrary power the trick is worthless; a man who will beat you for a look does not require you to have said anything. But wherever the punisher must justify himself, must be able to point to an offense, the fable slips between his fingers. The master may know exactly whom the fox is meant to be. To act on it, he has to be the one who says so.

The technique is older than any name for it, and older, probably, than any real Aesop; the slave-fabulist of legend is almost certainly a figure the Greeks invented to hang the fables on. But the mode is real, and in the nineteenth century it got its lasting name. The Russian satirist Saltykov-Shchedrin, writing his way around the tsar's censors, was the first to call it Aesopian language — a slave's language, he said, the art of speaking between the lines while literature is in bondage. It has been standard equipment for writers under every censorship since, from partitioned Poland to Soviet Russia; Lenin called it the thing "tsarism compelled all revolutionaries to have recourse to." It is not a Russian invention, or a modern one. It is what you do with language when you are watched.

It is tempting to call it a code, and it is worth being exact about why it is not. A cipher hides the message: without the key the words are gibberish, and the whole point is that an outsider cannot read them at all. Steganography goes further and hides that there is a message — a letter that looks like a laundry list. Aesopian language does neither. The fable sits in plain grammatical sentences that anyone can read, the censor first of all, and it does not even pretend there is nothing beneath the surface; the good practitioners plant what the scholar Lev Loseff called markers, small signals that tell the initiated reader to look under the animals, to keep going. The message is public. Its doubleness is advertised. What is concealed is not the meaning but the writer's accountability for it — the one thing the censor needs and cannot lift off the page: a sentence he can hold up and say, this is what you will answer for.

Loseff, who wrote the standard study of the form, defined it as a system that "allows interaction between the author and reader at the same time that it conceals inadmissible content from the censor" — though what it conceals from the censor is not the content, which he can see as plainly as anyone, but the chargeable version of it, the pretext. The censor is not a fool; he reads the fox as the tsar. Yet the innocent surface leaves him nothing to charge, because the page, taken literally, is only a page about a fox.

This does not make the writer safe. It makes censoring him expensive, in a particular and quiet way. To suppress the fable, someone in the apparatus must first write down what it means — must state, in an official report, that the play about the dragon is a play about the state. When Yevgeny Schwartz staged The Dragon in 1943, a fairy tale about a town's servile love for the monster that rules it, the Soviet authorities understood it perfectly and banned it; they were not deceived by the dragon. But to ban it, an official had to name it — to commit to paper the very reading the play had declined to commit to, and to be the one who saw, in a fairy tale, an attack on the state. The alibi cannot stop a determined censor. It can only make him manufacture the accusation the writer withheld, sign his name to it, and carry the forbidden reading into the machine himself.

How deniable the fable stays, and how clearly it speaks, are not fixed; they are a dial the writer sets. At one end is the bare fictional frame — it is only a story about a fox — which costs nothing in sharpness: you can write a razor-edged allegory, as Schwartz did, and still meet the censor's eye and call it a children's tale. But the frame alone is thin cover, as Schwartz found; a determined apparatus reads straight through it. So writers buy more safety the only way the form allows, by blurring the target — softening the fox until it could be several men, or none. And blur does not choose its audience. The vagueness that lets you deny the meaning to the censor is the same vagueness that dims it for the friend. Turn the dial toward safety and the fox recedes from everyone at once; turn it toward sharpness and the alibi wears thin. Anatoly Kuznetsov, who knew the mode from inside, marked its far end: by reading between the lines, he wrote, the reader "is able to discover things that the author never meant to say, while even the experienced reader can miss the point." Past a certain blur the message fails in both directions — read into, and read past.

There is a strange compensation, which Loseff folded into his title: On the Beneficence of Censorship. The pressure that pushed writers toward the safe, blurred end of the dial also drove them to an allusiveness, a density of implication, that a free literature has less reason to develop. The censor, wanting less said, got more art made. But this is a gift to the craft, not to the message. The fables grew richer as the sentences grew safer, and the reader who simply wanted to know what the writer thought was left, as ever, to guess.

There was always another way to answer a censor, and it made the opposite trade. Instead of publishing openly and dimming the meaning, you could keep the meaning at full brightness and hide the publishing. That was samizdat — self-published, the word a joke on the state's Gosizdat — plain uncensored text typed onto carbon paper a few sheets at a time, passed hand to hand through people you trusted, each of them expected to type more. Vladimir Bukovsky gave its definition: "I write it myself, edit it myself, censor it myself, publish it myself, distribute it myself, and spend jail time for it myself." Two ways past the same guard: dull the knife and carry it in the open, or keep it sharp and carry it hidden. Aesopian language chose the first and paid in clarity; samizdat chose the second and paid in prison.

The form did not die with the censorships that bred it. Its descendant lives in the open society and is called the dog whistle — language pitched so that one audience hears an ordinary sentence and another hears a signal, and the speaker, challenged, can deny the second meaning was ever there. Same machine, same deniable doubleness, same alibi. Only the wiring of power has reversed. The fable was the weapon of the watched, a way for the powerless to say a dangerous thing and survive; the dog whistle is more often the weapon of the watcher, a way for the powerful to say a dangerous thing and disown it. The powerless still have the fable, wherever there are still censors; the powerful have borrowed its engine to a gentler end, deniability without a gun to the head. What both keep is the bargain at the bottom of the machine — that meaning and alibi are drawn from one account, and every measure spent on the one is gone from the other. The alibi always works. It only costs you the thing you built it to protect.