Novels and other literary fictions are dangerous objects.
They take over our imagination. They are fooling us. They use narrative to better place us in front of who we are. They capture all of our attention and then take us back to our daily lives, charged with new ideas, like a hallucinogenic drug whose effect fades, but which leaves afterimages imprinted in us.
I just read Stunningby Richard Powers (after devouring The world tree, for which he had collected the Pulitzer), and throughout this perfectly conducted novel, I had the impression of walking through a sort of scintillating corridor of anguish. I emerged with stars in my eyes, chest tight, amazed by the correctness of his proposal, terrified by the near future it implies. All this at the same time. I didn’t know if I was grateful or resentful of the author.
So I understand why we want to ban books. Or burn them. If we want to protect people – and especially young people – from suffering, but even more, to prevent them from questioning their culture, their past, their surroundings, their future, it is better to effectively exclude all forms of literature. This is too effective a way of planting ideas in our heads.
I look like I’m messing around? Not even. What I am explaining here is simply a matter of mechanics that leads us to prefer ignorance to complex truths requiring judgment, hindsight, or education and support in order to be properly digested.
After the saga of the purging of the libraries of a Catholic school board in Ontario, various states and establishments in the United States are engaged in the same kind of book cleaning. This time, no delirium from the well-meaning left in order to « bury the ashes of racism ». It is the guilty past that we especially try to make people forget. Slavery, for example. Even better, a school board in Tennessee has just put Maus, the brilliant graphic novel by Art Spiegelman, out of harm’s way. He will no longer be part of the study program for 14-year-old teenagers who were to be taught the horrors of the Holocaust. The subject would be too… violent.
What is amazing is that, most often, this revisionism through books takes place in schools. Be the place par excellence to put these stories into context, to accompany children and adolescents in these sometimes disturbing stories.
In an excellent letter to New York Times, author Viet Thanh Nguyen (also a Pulitzer winner) explains how he transmitted his passion for Tintin to his son while pointing out to him the colonialist atrocities of Hergé. (And yes, he could also have pointed out the absence of any female characters other than a hysterical opera singer.)
The author also recounts how a novel he had misunderstood, when he was younger, about the Vietnam War, had traumatized him. Until he read it again, years later, to better understand that its author was denouncing the racism and horror he was telling. Not the opposite.
In both cases, he explains how the problem is one of education. It is necessary to give tools to envisage the world, to embrace it in all its beauty, its horror, as well as the thousand shades of gray which separate them.
I can understand that people who wish to « cancel » works deemed racist to prevent racialized people from being offended feel invested with a noble mission. Basically, unlike the revisionists who try to make people forget the horrors committed by their ancestors, they are probably right.
But there is no moral arbiter to decide that banishing a Tintin is more acceptable than banishing Maus.
And it’s when the same erasure ploy is employed by another camp that all its absurdity comes to light.
The idea of saving anyone from shock because they identify with the victim or the executioner of a work of fiction is a fast, lazy and dangerous path. It is, however, enlightening.
See: parents are terrified of their children being exposed to disturbing ideas or facts, hence their attempts to bleach libraries and the school curriculum.
This desire to make the discomfort disappear testifies to an inability to live with it.
It also says the way we have of perceiving the world outside of the authority we exercise as parents. A world full of perils. A world where these children will above all cease to belong to us to think, to live, to be afraid. Without us.
Novels are universes beyond the control of parents. They foreshadow a frightening future, because unknown.
#horror #stories
