Why We Don’t Burn Books Anymore
By Luca Cavallo, Arts & Lit Editor
Take a moment to think of a controversial writer.
Are they currently writing? Are they currently living?
I didn’t think so (but if you thought of Salman Rushdie, you’re cool).
In the western world, it appears that there are no writers today who break the boundaries of social and cultural beliefs, and I am convinced that this because every boundary has been broken.
Writers were once banned for doing something as simple as telling the truth, or sharing their personal, religious or political beliefs. Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) was regarded for his entire career as ‘wicked and obscene,’ because he said that girls use the bathroom. This was a classic example of realist literature getting a little too ‘real’ for the Enlightened Brits.
Realism was intended as a down-to-earth, honest portrayal of life through literature and art. In many ways, it was successful, but the ‘controversial’ truths of life were almost always glossed over. Things were ‘as God intended’. The emergence of the Modernist movement at the end of the 19th century (and seriously escalated by the First World War) pushed the demand for ‘absolute truths’ in life. We can see this in the reality of mental illness and homosexuality such as in Virginia Woolfe’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925). James Joyce’s Ulysses, as well as Mrs. Dalloway, employs the use of a stream-of-consciousness narrative style. This revealed the truth of Leopold Bloom’s sexual thoughts. Of course, Ulysses was banned for utter obscenity.
Nowadays, we can read all of these once-banned books and think, ‘what’s the big deal?’ More recent banned literature is usually restricted for offensive or disturbing content, something far beyond simple truths.
The excessive violence of A Clockwork Orange and American Psycho was met with severe controversy, which is quite understandable. These books do not expose truths about society or culture. They are controversial within reason.
Controversy without reason is a highly ironic symptom of pre-modern society. The books are banned, even burned, because they show the reader a truth they can’t deny. Alice Walker’s The Color Purple has been banned for several of its themes, two of these being the representations of homosexuality and African history. Today, representation is considered a cornerstone of contemporary writing. It has become so significant, in fact, that any misconceptions or laziness present in representative literature becomes controversial. Both critics and readers now highly praise accurate portrayals and truthful realities: we have gracefully come full circle.
There are, unfortunately, quite a few examples of misrepresentation in contemporary literature. Popular author Colleen Hoover has been criticised for her multiple portrayals of meek women under the thumbs of brutal men, saying that she goes so far as to ‘romanticise abuse’. The representation of a distressing societal truth such as abuse, in any form, is of great importance, but must be handled with care and caution. Hoover, however, might not recognise this fault in her writing, as she has openly stated that she doesn’t read her criticism. So it goes.
