How great literature can change your life

Monday – Banned Book Week

As this is Banned Books Week, I’m sharing some of what I say about banning books in Better Living through Literature: How Books Change Lives and (Sometimes) History. There I contend that censorship can work as an indirect compliment, an acknowledgement of literature’s power. (This is how Toni Morrison, whose books are amongst the most banned, regards the issue.) Indeed, book banners are sometimes more attuned to how books can unsettle assumptions and alter perspectives than some of literature’s defenders.

One of the earliest proponents of book bans was Plato, who would not allow Hesiod and Homer into his utopian republic because he feared they would inflame the passions of young men and soldiers. Surprisingly, Plato loved both authors, especially Homer, whom he could quote at length. My theory is that Plato was so affected by Homer—the visit to Hades scared the living daylights out of him—that he worried that the author’s works would prompt readers to act irrationally. Perhaps warriors, seeing death depicted so graphically, would turn tail and run when confronted with the prospect.

Plato himself had been a soldier so maybe he’s talking about himself. If I’m right, the following conversation between Odysseus and the dead Achilles so haunted his imagination that he himself quailed about the prospect of entering battle. Odysseus is attempting to console Achilles by talking about his earthly fame, but Achilles will have done of it:

Let me hear no smooth talk
of death from you, Odysseus, light of councils.
Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.

Better alive and unknown than famous and dead. So much for risking your life for glory.

Jump ahead 2500 years to one of the most frequently banned books in America. In my book I mention how Toni Morrison’s Beloved was featured in a gubernatorial race and explain why:

The closing Republican ad in a 2021 Virginia gubernatorial race…featured a mother complaining how her high school senior had been traumatized by Toni Morrison’s Beloved—and that therefore voters should choose anti-woke candidate Glenn Youngkin, who went on to win the election and to set up a hotline to report teachers teaching supposedly nefarious content.

…Morrison’s [rightwing] critics…have reason to fear her novel, which touches on two of the most volatile issues in American politics, race and a woman’s autonomy over her body. In the work, which earned Morrison the Nobel Prize, the pregnant slave Sethe is first sexually assaulted (White men suck milk from her breasts), then beaten savagely, and then, after she escapes and they come to reclaim her and her children, driven to kill the baby to save it from slavery. The novel is meant to be unsettling, and it can indeed challenge the worldview of those parents who don’t want their children facing up to the ugly history of racism and sexism. For Morrison as for William Faulkner, one of the authors on which she models herself, the past is not dead nor even past, and we see it return in the form of the ghost baby that haunts Sethe.

While Shakespeare usually escapes modern censors, in my book I wonder how a work like Twelfth Night has escaped. Little did I know, as I learned last week, that the comedy has in fact been banned in a New Hampshire school district, which concluded that its “jolly cross-dressing and fake-same-sex romance” violated the district’s ‘prohibition of alternative lifestyle instruction.’”

That’s putting it mildly. As I note in my book,

Imagine Twelfth Night: or What You Will (1601-02) being taught in such a way as to foreground its strong gender identity themes, which fascinate young people struggling to make sense of who they are. In the comedy, we encounter a man who discovers he has an inner woman, a woman who discovers she has an inner man, two men who are attracted to other men, and a woman who is attracted to another woman. Count Orsino gets to marry someone he once thought was a man; Lady Olivia makes overtures to another woman (although technically she thinks he’s a man); Viola, under the flimsiest of pretexts, passes herself off as a man; and Orsino for a time mimics behavior that he regards as feminine. Understanding humans as well as anyone ever has, Shakespeare knew that we are more complex than the gender labels foisted upon us by tradition, and he found an artistic vehicle to explore our complexity.

To which I add,

If teachers did more to advertise the play as a chance to explore gender identity, inviting their classes to explore their feelings about each of these characters, they could well generate new excitement amongst students, including some who would otherwise groan over a Shakespeare reading assignment.

I go on to say that I can understand why teachers and librarians might shy away from playing up these aspects of the play. To continue from the book,

Who needs to add angry parents and (in Florida) the threat of lawsuits to an already long and overwhelming list of responsibilities? Why detonate a literary bomb in the classroom? It’s a version of the choice African American poet Langston Hughes once described when his poetry became more political. “I have never known the police of any country to show an interest in lyric poetry as such,” Hughes writes in “My Adventures as a Social Poet.” “But when poems stop talking about the moon and begin to mention poverty, trade unions, color lines, and colonies, somebody tells the police.”

So for understandable reasons, teachers and librarians often play it safe, sidestepping literature’s disruptive potential. But as I note in the book,

Unfortunately, when English teachers play it safe, they risk underplaying literature’s fierce urgency and its ability to speak directly to our life struggles. Taming literature down to a boring irrelevancy leaves its potential untapped. Students go unchallenged in ways that could lead to real and exhilarating growth.

I often say of literature what is said of Aslan in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. When Lucy asks, “Is he safe,” Mr. Beaver replies, “Safe? Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.”

The books that Moms for Liberty and other organizations are banning are not always safe. They may indeed help transform children in ways that ideologically rigid parents won’t approve. But if these students are to thrive in a complex and often bewildering multicultural democracy, not to mention global village, they need the life tools offered them by good books.

Allowing children to read freely is like allowing women to have bodily autonomy. Trump, J.D. Vance, and the U.S. Supreme Court may not want women making their own decisions, but that’s because they are more interested in control than in women taking charge of their own needs and desires. For their part, children and teens often recognize, in a deep way, the fiction they need in order to thrive, and their teachers and librarians—who pay close attention to them—also recognize what they need.

So yes, literature classrooms and libraries offer students the prospect of radical transformation. As they do so, they terrify certain parents.