Book banning: the cost of denying people access to literature

I recently read an article about two parents who complained that Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved was of no value in the curriculum, and they wanted it – along with Waterland by Grahame Smith – banned. Their complaints centre around the sex, violence and crude language in Beloved,  and that the novel has a Lexile score of 870 (apparently, if a book is simple to read, it must not be very educational or mature – I have no doubt that the authors of  Brave New World, The Hunt For Red October,  To Kill a Mockingbird, and The Sound and the Fury – to name a few – would agree. They all have the same Lexile score as Beloved).

Protests like this never fail to sadden me. I cannot wrap my head around the idea of banning books for the supposed audacity of showing all facets of human life and behaviour – as though not reading about the bad parts of ourselves will somehow insulate us from those bad parts in real life. It astonishes me that we are so eager to ensure that kids, even the college bound ones, never encounter anything bad or upsetting.

I was thinking (and fuming) over this whole book banning nonsense last night as I was getting ready to sleep. I loaded up my toothbrush with some Colgate and grabbed the copy of Fahrenheit 451 ( amusingly, this Bradbury classic has a Lexile rating of 451), from the toilet tank, and opened it to a random page (though now, it hardly feels random at all).

This is what I read (Faber to Guy Montag):

“Do you know why books such as this are so important? Because they have quality. And what does the word quality mean? To me it means texture. This book has pores. It has features. This book can go under the microscope. You’d find life under the glass, streaming past in infinite profusion. The more pores, the more truthfully recorded details of life per square inch you can get on a sheet of paper, the more ‘literary’ you are. That’s my definition anyway. Telling detail. Fresh detail. The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.

“So now do you see why books are hated and feared? They show the pores in the face of life. The comfortable people want only wax moon faces, poreless, hairless, expressionless…”

A little further on, Guy and Faber have the following exchange:

 “That’s the good part of dying; when you’ve nothing to lose, you run any risk you want.”
“There, you’ve said an interesting thing,” laughed Faber, “without having read it!”
“Are things like that in books? But it came off the top of my mind!”
“All the better. You didn’t fancy it up for me or anyone, even yourself.”

Faber hits it right on the head.

I think this is why people hate and fear books like Beloved, and all the other books they ban; these books show us as we really are. A good book doesn’t “fancy up” human behaviour or thought, it shows it, warts and all. As humans, we are capable of acts of great kindness, empathy, sympathy, bravery and outright heroism. But, we are also capable of being miserable, selfish, petty, murderous and cowardly – and these traits, these bad things about ourselves, about us a species, are mixed in with the good and finer things about us, and they cannot, and should not, be separated.

It is my belief that when we ban books, we are trying to cast out the worst parts of ourselves, and it’s a strange and wasted effort. I don’t suggest we fully embrace the darker aspects of ourselves by murdering and stealing with wild abandon, but I do think that when we try to deny these parts of our human nature via book banning, we’re just giving into another bad thing within ourselves: we’re refusing to learn anything about what it means to be human, we’re being stubborn and denying that the bad things depicted in books often come from the good lives we endeavour to lead.

Beloved, for example, is based on a true story, and I feel that whatever embellishments or liberties Tony Morrison might have made or taken with the actual story, her telling is a window into that first story, a piece of our history – actual, emotional, and spiritual – demanding to be seen and heard. I’ll never have to go through the things that Sethe goes through. I’ll never flee slavery with my children, and I’ll never be driven by despair and fear to kill my own child rather than see her taken back into slavery. But through Tony Morrison’s words, I can read about it. And because she writes so well, because her writing is so accessible, I can feel it – the anger and fear that might drive a mother to keep her child out of the hands of slave owners, anger toward the very foundations of thought that allowed slavery to happen in the first place, the way in which such a life and desperate act must alter the mind and degrade the soul; how open it leaves a person to being haunted – actually or mentally – by their deeds.

When I read the book for the first time in university, these were some of the thoughts I had: the character of Sethe was driven to terrible things by her circumstances. I believe that she is essentially a good person, an innocent person who was stripped of her rights and freedom as a human being, and in being denied the same rights as her “masters”, she gave her child the only freedom she could provide, in the only way she could think of in that moment. Do I agree with her actions? Hard to say from the safety and freedom of the 21st century. But whether I agree with her actions or not isn’t the only point of the story. Do I feel for her? Do I sympathize and empathize, and wish that I could reach through the pages and rescue her? Did the story make me think about the darker moments of our history? Did it make me examine my own beliefs, and poke around in the deep and dusty corners of myself rather than ignoring them? Yes. Very much so; and that is the point of reading any good book.

Books should not be banned on the basis of being difficult, or because of the awful and uncomfortable truths they may contain. Books are about us, about our lives, about our history, about how high we can rise, and how far we can fall. We need to read these things, we need the experience of being human in all circumstances – and especially those which we are unlikely to encounter. We need to think critically while we imagine ourselves in the character’s shoes. Books are a safe way to experience everything, they are a great way to learn about ourselves and others. The experiences we read about may even better prepare us for having to go through them ourselves.

We must all be allowed to read without restrictions so that we can develop emotionally, morally and creatively. These are worthy goals that reading can help us accomplish.

This is what books are for. This is why we cannot ban them.