The bann’d book is ideology
To celebrate the spring equinox, 1957, United States customs agent Chester MacPhee took to San Francisco and snatched up every single printed copy - 520 total - of Allen Ginsberg’s epic provocateur poem Howl.
On the grounds of obscenity, this act of censorship was scenery bordering on the morbidly picturesque. Such a clear profession of hysteria cushioned the poem’s defensive army. When rebels at City Lights Bookstore who continued to distribute the poem were jailed, a staunch legal defense cleared them and set lengthy artistic precedent. They knew the score: the best books, the ones that survive, are the ones that trigger shock, rage and disgust.
Creativity raged and washed up its beachcombings routinely over the following decades. The same outrage, however, controlled the government and its subsidiaries, who lashed out in vicious restriction. This is, I humbly decree, the underground plague of our era.
The Howl incident achieving legendary status is an outlier. Without that visceral flair of dramatique that beats and freaks can regard with scoffing pride, the culture of book banning has lingered like a pest, cropping up now like chigoe bites. A book’s pulled off the shelves here and there. Slaughterhouse 5 is stricken for treason, The Bluest Eye for explicitries. These events are too isolated and subtle to attract sufficient resistance. They jar in a headline, then fade into the ether. Meanwhile, Project Gutenberg, a massive database for cultural archives in the public domain, is quietly sued for copyright, overrun by hackers, and devoured from the inside.
A larger problem is explained by this dichotomy. The banned book as a concept has recently soared in newsability. These events are in magnetic alignment with the larger devourer, but the latter event occurs unnoticed.
Even with no intimations of a loving hand or a prick in the arm, books risk the Ginsberg hurt. Restrictions are at the drop of a hat, thin, and springing from little to nothing. Often the criticisms are so basic and regurgitated they imply faulty unresearch. Santa Monica College (SMC) English professor and author Kenneth Winkler found dull repetition in bookbanning fixations.
“Oh, somebody’s a gay writer, somebody’s a queer writer, somebody’s a black nationalist, somebody’s a commie,” he panned, coldly. “They give them the label and basically they’ll pull a book off the shelves in the library.”
It appears their claims are exceedingly based on rumors. Are they verifiable?
“No, they heard from somebody else who heard from somebody else. Very few people I’ve ever met who had ideas about the evil books have read them.”
“They” - an omnipotent authority, consisting of religious organizations, hellbent school boards, and family coalitions - cannot be bothered to salvage a lemma from the wreckage. Everyone’s a snowflake - a drop of controversy is a drop of blood, instant chemical warfare. Once identified, the issues explode into headlines.
Where is the relevance at home? The American Library Association holds Banned Books Week every year in September. SMC is often barren on this measure.
Sensing an unfilled niche, history professor Dr. Marisol Moreno recruited SMC librarians and fashioned a tasteful display of the nation’s leading literary contraband, mostly books for children.
“Censorship and book bans undermine academic freedom,” said Dr. Moreno. “It became clear to me that the featured topics largely centered on humanizing LGBTQ+ and youths of color. …It moved me to know that these powerful books exist and could mean a world of difference to some readers.”
This is a noble cause. And these are inspiring ideals. Consequently, though, the display melts into the arras. Unaffronted students pass by without processing the literary jailyard. It’s easy to agree with, and far more difficult to enact.
Book bans are happily reduced into the weeklong celebration once a year, buoyed by library displays, some heartfelt retweets, an upscale rack for a fortnight at Barnes and Noble… and nil. Who’s excited to reclaim their stolen artifacts? Nah. Left to artifice.
What’s that got to do with love, our love? The information is stripped somewhere else, some dusty cavern. This shouldn’t affect the land of Laissez Faire, our idylla where the sunlight neuters the bitters and a computer-science yuppie in red might slink into the shadows every four years in November. But the reality is that California’s freedom “aesthetic” isn’t sufficiently conducive to a healthy literate society.
And Books are, culturally, banned - there’s no sense in them.
In the absence of legal restrictions, we follow them all by ourselves. In the era of culture wars, aesthetic enthuse, and cordial passions that can be spun from nothing, no one takes the time to acknowledge their brothers’ residual incantate: the moonHowlers in silver tassel, burrowing into Naked Lunch; an innocent story of an Eye, battering hearts over the Jesuve; discovering their timshel; repentant prayer over the mountain; rolled, rolling hills of Big Sur, or scratching periodic like Primo. The cultural gaps are heartache. And on a friendlier level, no one feels the extra spring of poetic reverberation when they order a beer or lemonade. Their serios long outlasts their seventeen.
Nobody seems to shoulder these firebombs they’re straight-up served. Shani Perez, student and poet, is frustrated by this contrast. “We have access right now to so many books that in the past you just couldn’t have,” she said. “But nobody’s taking advantage of it. It’s sad.
“You would have gotten a death sentence or something before, and you have it in your hands, and you’re not reading it? Like, what are you doing?”
Nobody reads, and nobody needs to be told that nobody reads.
Our economic system is anchored against leisure and leisurely intellectualism. The job is hell, and sentences are a drag - nobody wishes for something so menial after a day of metal crunch. What we want is anything to assuage risk and revive our humanity - a heart stimulant, some sprig of digitalis. Immediate carnal relief. Why bother unlocking a trove of scriptured whines and drones that only mirror our reality without offering escape? Even the brains who offer solutions are locked, the words preserved in amber. It’s a futile exchange and it must occur alone.
The college library suffers the same fate. Those who “read” must be possessed by fulsome, inexplicable, almost ravenously religious fervor for the task, or else they must have the incentive of some silk-stocking ice cream. These people are English majors. Another descriptor is the selection of the population mistaken for the only beneficiaries of aulden literature.
“People in my classroom are very well-read, cause I’m an English major,” said Perez. “They definitely know what they’re doing. But in my gen-eds, it’s more rare to find them.”
The math-nimbled, physic-laden nerds have no need for literature, lest it can match the beauty of a fractal or a Julia set or row-echelon form. I, for instance, work neurologically and out of fear. Though dulled, disheartened and math-majored, I’m too much of a hypochondriac to let my reading slip. But it’s not exactly an accomplishment.
These revelations are investigations, not a dirge on the youths. This isn’t a buck-eyed lament over kids these days. How could it be? Culture erupts, strengthened over digital airways without the risk of papercuts. Books are lived without being consumed. If anything, the mutiny of scrutiny encourages insecure youths to hyper-individualize, widening the margins of creative output. Besides, nobody cares. The dirge gets you nowhere. Every generation has claimed theirs is the illiterate one, breaking over their knuckles.
Winkler believes a shift occurred within the last decade. He noticed in “the last 10 years, there’s been a great dumbing down of education to the extent that people are willing to take sound-bite reading… or a social media post or a celebrity view of things, rather than look for information themselves.” I’d rather assert that shallowness has existed forever… perhaps it has.
As established, the bans are built on little to nothing. The banned book might appear a dead issue, only used for puppetting by traditionalists and short-term activists as a symbol. And books are irrelevant. So why is it resurfacing in the press? It’s because the banned book is an ideology, the governing ideology. It is a gruesome ideology. It is the idea that ideas die when deprived of a little oxygen.
Winkler concurs: “bookbanning is only part of it.”
One mode of exertion is through a culture of censure. This is doubled by the religiously fanatical perfectionism that controls the literal bookbans, but it roots deeply, even contorting writers by the psyche. “There’s always that second thought you give your writing,” said Perez. “You always feel you have to satisfy an audience, no matter how individualistic you wanna be.”
The only way around it is covertness, maybe even eloquence. As rued by Perez, “You can’t really be direct. Like what Mark Twain did. I’ll give them a message, but I’m gonna mettle it down so they can consume it. Make it above their grasp.” As a result of “Banned Book Ideology,” writers are individually forced to shroud their ideas in allegory, cloak, allusion. Like the nail-on-chalkboard bureaucracy of the government, Western grammar itself functions to meddle the reader, muddy the waters, delay publication, and delay interchange of ideas.
Maybe the ghost writing to you now is one shiny instrument.
That’s right, I, measly copyeditor, am some dullbrained imperialist swine. Pitying fierce copyeditor, I am a profound employee of the banning system, and an illustration of its dumb. I goddamn colonize every work laid upon me with badly-lit lacerations - comma, zing, verb tense! I leave gleeful red burn marks, anything to impede the process. Pathetic. You think a pithy little spellcheck would’ve tread a noticeable threat on Thompson’s gonzo, Riis’s muckrake, or Lispector’s cronicas, who shot through your consciousness so fast you’re lucky in a pint of daggers? They would have laughed in my face; it would have wafted right over them and dissolved. The ideas live, they don’t die with petty censors. And in the fire of resistance they swell, incense, and implode violently as the sea comes.
I’m an agent of the system, but my imperialist cloture is insignificant. Censure is not the end. Radical ideas fuel under the fire of laceration. They transgress illictly and effortlessly.
With some lyricists, even the bendier truths deserve christening, gold emblazoning - or at the very least, the public’s indulgence, their right of review. These are spiders that light up. Resistance presses against the skin.
Even without visible caustic, we know a content appearance is little indication of interior dissent. And these tensions will turgor.
Perhaps ideas fester better without clothbound trappings.
Many authors have deprecatingly trashed the merit of their lifeblood. In a guidebook manifesto intended for writing students, George Orwell once helpfully proclaimed “every book is a failure.” He was referring to the inadequacy of language, a universal plight unassailed by sheer coolio or gravitas. But most books suffer additionally. They are smothered from conception, largely unread, and pillaged by those who do read them. And books are constantly rewritten and reprogrammed to fill the market void, so whatever goal the author intended that would zip up humanity in peace for good is, evidently, failed. The stumblings of books prick into other spheres of influence and disrupt the current, and have for a long time. We’re all very mortal - how do we continually decide to reaffirm a culture that repeatedly fails? The future appears bleak and dismal.
But that’s where overthinking gets you - look at me in shambles, a straightlaced math major cut up by the process of deliberation. Maybe there is a danger here. I feel the contra-urge to lock them up, crux that babbling brook. With this kind of impact on me, imagine literary exposure on someone who offers even a crumb of insight upon their surrounding jurisdiction. Of course, it could be utterly fantastic.
That’s what trips nonreaders. It’s not discovering a new form of speak, it’s not acquiring elegance. It’s the process of seeking words that align with you that changes you, clarifies your earthly intention, better ensures your linguistic confidence when asserting something. It’s the same as immersing oneself in any cultural subsidiary, or for that matter, any enclave of a speciality. For the journey to occur, there must be selections available. The library is not closed and it is not skinny.
This voyage, discovery-based, may be spurred by the illicit nature of banned literature. Dr. Moreno affirms, “My hope is that the curious student would ask ‘Why are books documenting the human experience of POC and LGBTQ+ peoples considered so dangerous by the dominant society that it needs to be banned?’ Should that student want to act on their curiosity, the freedom to learn is just a book away.”