Friday
The above photograph freezes my blood. It is of men carting away books from a Texas school library that have been deemed dangerous. I wrote recently about a Texas legislator that who compiled a list of 850 books he found objectionable, and then men appear to be going after them. One wonders whether, in these particular boxes, are to be found
the Pulitzer Prize-winning William Styron novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner and best-sellers that were turned into movies or television series, such as John Irving’s The Cider House Rules, Alan Moore’s dystopian V For Vendetta, and the graphic novel version of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.
In another book banning story, the Nashville Tennessean reports that the McMinn County School Board has voted 10-0 to remove Maus, a graphic novel about the Holocaust that won the Pulitzer Prize, from the eighth-grade English language arts curriculum. According to the article, they cited “concerns over ‘rough’ language and a nude drawing of a woman.”
As I noted in Tuesday’s post, this is just the beginning. Just as voter suppression measures spread like wildfire in red states after Trump’s defeat, so we can expect such book bans to become universal throughout the south and parts of the midwest. Which means it’s time to pull out Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.
Bradbury may have become a Tea Party conservative in his later years, but his novel about book burning was a response to Joseph McCarthy attacks on books. Early in the novel, book-burning fireman Guy Montag, who later will have a change of heart, boasts, “It’s fine work. Monday burn Millay, Wednesday Whitman, Friday Faulkner, burn ’em to ashes, then burn the ashes. That’s our official slogan.”
Later, when he has become enthralled with books, Montag seeks out an old literature professor, who explains, “Those who don’t build must burn. It’s as old as history and juvenile delinquents.” I think of how the Trumpian GOP isn’t interested in building, just in tearing down. Burning, as it were.
At one point in the novel, Montag’s boss points out why books are dangerous. He’s not wrong:
What traitors books can be! You think they’re backing you up, and they turn on you. Others can use them, too, and there you are, lost in the middle of the moor, in a great welter of nouns and verbs and adjectives….
Bradbury also has words—this time delivered by the old professor—for those who stand by and let censorship happen. After waxing nostalgic for books, the former teacher laments that he did not do more to defend them. The two are looking at a Bible that Montag has saved from the flames:
“Do you know that books smell like nutmeg or some spice from a foreign land? I loved to smell them when I was a boy. Lord, there were a lot of lovely books once, before we let them go.” Faber turned the pages. “Mr. Montag, you are looking at a coward. I saw the way things were going, a long time back. I said nothing. I’m one of the innocents who could have spoken up and out when no one would listen to the `guilty,’ but I did not speak and thus became guilty myself. And when finally they set the structure to burn the books, using the, firemen, I grunted a few times and subsided, for there were no others grunting or yelling with me, by then. Now, it’s too late.”
Montag explains to Faber why books have become a necessity for him:
Nobody listens any more. I can’t talk to the walls [television screens] because they’re yelling at me. I can’t talk to my wife; she listens to the walls. I just want someone to hear what I have to say. And maybe if I talk long enough, it’ll make sense. And I want you to teach me to understand what I read.
In response, the professor tells Montag about a three step process that is very similar to the one I share with my students. The first step is appreciating the quality of what books offer:
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.
And then there are steps two and three:
Number one, as I said, quality of information. Number two: leisure to digest it. And number three: the right to carry out actions based on what we learn from the interaction of the first two.
Or as I put it, Immerse, Reflect, Act. In fact, just yesterday I told my Sewanee Composition and Literature class that the end point of literature is not interpretation but application. What’s important is how it impacts your life and how it impacts the world.
Rightwing legislators and parents are terrified of young people applying what they read to their lives. Therefore they seek to confine their reading only to literature they think they themselves can control. That the result may be vapid and shallow citizens like those in Fahrenheit 451 is not a problem but the goal.