Another Soliloquoy About Banned Books

John Mark Ockerbloom defines Banned Book Week as being about twin freedoms: the freedom to write about what matters to you, and the freedom to read about what matters to you. How do these lofty and abstract goals really affect what we read though?

To some conservative Christians, Banned Book Week is a smokescreen for systemically purging libraries of any conservative or serious Christian viewpoints and instead, loading the shelves with left-wing propaganda and pornography. For the sake of this post I will not waste time arguing about the definition of pornography. In my opinion it seems more likely that librarians are fighting to retain books that may contain graphic or controversial material more than they are “purging conservative viewpoints”. Perhaps it would make more sense to assert that librarians are simply not actively selecting books with conservative themes in the first place.

Ockerbloom goes on to defend librarians he writes “Librarians and teachers necessarily select certain books, and not others, for their collections and classes, and decide where they will best work. And its right for patrons of the schools to have some say in these selections (even if the professionals should generally be allowed to do their jobs)...But there’s a world of difference between saying ‘isn’t this more appropriate for YA shelves than for the early readers section?’ and insisting ‘None of our kids should be reading about this kind of thing!’ when ‘this kind of thing’ is already on the minds of those kids, or something they should be thinking about.”

One problem with offering an equal number of conservative Christian texts on a controversial subject as the kind of standard non-fiction publications that we are used to seeing is that the conservative book is likely to be used a platform for convincing rather simply offering facts. For example, a book explaining standard human sexuality should not strive to convince teenagers that having sex before marriage is a crime but should instead offer facts.

How does that information help a young person decide what to use for birth control if they are already about to have sex anyway? It is doubtful that a book will stop them. Taking the argument a step further, would including the conservative viewpoint also indicate that other religious and cultural viewpoints be included in the collection as well. What about books on Muslim theories about sex before marriage? Hare Krishnas? Jewish people? Unless, we are discussing a pricate religious School Library it is unfair to assume that every reader in the library (or even a majority) of them consider themselves actively Christian.

Fiction on the other hand is a different story altogether. A work of fiction should theoretically be able to express any fantastic idea at all with no interception on the part of the government or general library readership. Ockerbloom writes “By the time kids reach double-digit ages (which is the young end of the audience for most of the controversial books) they have lots of questions about life, death, sexuality, unfairness, hatred, violence, drugs, and religion. They deserve the chance to explore answers to these questions in their reading and in their conversations.”

Using children as the example of whether or not to allow certain material in the library is really the only leg that conservatives have to stand on since it is very difficult to argue that an adult should not be allowed to read explicit accounts of violence and sexuality. Why should be subjected to universal standards of decency created for children?

On a personal note, I am very glad that I was allowed to read whatever I wished when I was young. My mother, a lifelong library worker and former English major from UC Berkeley, kept her collection Henry Miller, John Updike and Nabokov in plain view in the living room. It wasn’t exactly encouraged for me to read “Lolita” as an eleven year old and I certainly did not understand the ingenious craftsmanship in full but I still loved the beautiful prose. I have since revisited the text several times and have found each time that the book yields something new and exciting. It is like revisiting an old friend and observing how much I have changed by measuring my reactions over time.

Admittedly, I may have picked the book up and read it out of plain sight to ease my embarrassment because I knew the book was not for me. For the same reason that people are fascinated with morbid celebrity news (guilty as charged) they will gravitate to books that focus on titillating subjects. Even though Lolita was initially rejected on the basis of its scandalous plot, it eventually went to become one of the top selling books of the twentieth century. After the book was published in 1955 by French Press Olympia it was banned for two years before being exported to America and selling 100,000 copies in the first three weeks of publication. Everyone knows the best way to sell something is tell people they can’t have it.