Monday
Washington Post satirist Alexandra Petri has a brilliant essay—one of her very best—about why books are disturbing. She pretends to agree with those conservative school boards and politicians but, in the process, actually makes their case for them: books really are dangerous. In other words, rather than being defensive about books, Petri goes on the offense.
As her article makes clear, if you are disturbed by literary power, you’ll want to ban pretty much all fiction. Or all fiction except for those works that are (to use her adjectives) stale and bland.
I could imagine the authorities in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 using her article to make their book burning case:
This is no good. Such books are bad. Maybe all books are bad, not just the challenged ones. Books follow you home and pry open your head and rearrange the things inside. They make you feel things, sometimes, hope and grief and shame and confusion; they tell you that you’re not alone, or that you are, that you shouldn’t feel ashamed, or that you should; replace your answers with questions or questions with answers. This feels dangerous to do, a strange operation to perform on yourself, especially late at night when everyone else in the house is sleeping.
They are an insidious and deadly poison. Years after you read them, they come back and bother you late at night. They clang around inside your skull. They make strange things familiar to you and familiar things strange again. They have no respect for the boundaries of your dreams. They put turns of phrase into your gut where you digest them slowly and regurgitate them where they are least expected.
They make you cry, show you despair in a handful of dust, counterfeit life in strange ways and cheat you with shadows. Nothing happens in them at all, or they take you to hell and take you back out of it. They teach you how to fold a paper airplane or what is the wrong dress to wear. When people in them do things that are wrong, you are just as upset as you would be if you knew them.
Petri gives a pass to a few books, those which are “less threatening” because they lack integrity.
Some of them, of course, pose less of a risk. They take you nowhere; they contain only stale, bland, erroneous facts; they are full of people you dislike, and you understand them less when you put them down than when you started. These are less threatening. Their illusions are less complete.
These are books that don’t sink as deep. If we dislike the characters, it’s not because they’re bad like Uriah Heep or Inspector Javert but because they’re—well, stale and bland. We’re not as invested in them and, as a result, “the illusions are less complete.”
Petri fully acknowledges all the mixed feelings that come with reading:
Let me tell you about something that a book did: It convinced me that the things inside it were true; it told me so many lies that I started to believe it. I loved it; it infuriated me; I broke its spine in half. Books have taken me into dark woods and the bellies of whales and spat me out dazed and blinking into my own living room and knocked me around backward and forward through time and delivered me gossip from the distant past and facts from the recent present.
I heartily agree with her summation:
Books give you recipes for living, and some of the recipes are good and others taste foul the first time you try them. You read them with friends and come away with entirely different ideas of what has happened. They are uncontainable, uncontrollable, except if you never open them.
So yes, books are dangerous. Come to think of it, so are relationships. Avoiding either could well lead to quieter lives. Or as Thoreau puts it, lives of quiet desperation. As Petri, referring to the Virginia school board that reversed its ban, puts it,
You are right to be frightened of them, and it is very bad they are being brought back. You will realize they are much too dangerous when you think of all they can do.