The myth of banned books

The pop star Dua Lipa is opening a library “dedicated to books that challenge power, resist censorship and amplify the voices that others seek to silence”. What kind of obscure samizdat could be there? Er — 1984 and The Handmaid’s Tale.

Before I sneer my face off, I want to say that Mrs Lipa does deserve credit for being a genuine reader who has quietly pursued her literary interests for years. She has also included some books that people have genuinely sought to suppress — like The Satanic Verses, the publication of which led to the deaths of many people as Islamic radicals waged war on the “blasphemous” book.

But what makes the project a bit comical — like various other lists and exhibitions of “banned” books — is how truly controversial works of literature are being combined with almost universally available books which have been removed from the occasional school library when parents kvetched about their sexual content.

Apparently, This Book is Gay, which contains illustrations depicting the mechanics of sex acts, has been removed from school libraries. Well, I can understand this seeming naive in a world where many young people learn about sex from hardcore pornography. But if we’re talking about “bans”, this hardly seems comparable to Ryan T. Anderson’s When Harry Became Sally being removed from Amazon.

The thing is that people who love “banned books” tend to want their controversial works to also be aesthetically and politically agreeable. They want the transgressive thrill, in other words, without being challenged or disturbed. They want to read a book that has sold ten million copies and inspired an Emmy-winning TV adaptation while also feeling kind of edgy.

To be fair, I know there are right-wingers who love the counter-cultural vibes of reading The Camp of Saints but would happily ban Gender Queer if they were given the chance. You can take pride in being a dangerous outsider and you can seek to be an authoritarian moralist but there is something hypocritical about doing both.

Books that have been truly, thoroughly suppressed in first world societies — and not just the sort of terminally backwards theocracies in which books are pretty much banned across the board — are a difficult category because there is a reason why some of them are banned. Even the author of The Anarchist Cookbook, which contains instructions on how to build explosives, tried to have it removed from circulation.

I’m interested in the sort of controversial books which are only produced by eccentric marginal publishers — the little-known output of Feral House, Loompanics and others. They can be insightful and entertaining — or at least can pose a useful challenge to one’s preconceptions. Sometimes, though, I can’t get through them. Some people have argued that the work of Peter Sotos — who was arrested on child pornography charges over his notorious 1980s zine Pure — skewers media hypocrisy and offers powerful insights into the realities of criminal minds. It took a couple of pages in his authorial company before I wanted to go for a long walk. If there are deep philosophical insights in The 120 Days of Sodom, meanwhile, to use a classic example, I must have missed them amid all of the torture and coprophilia.

That’s where liberalism gets really interesting

I’m using extreme examples. But the point is that books which have really, truly, energetically been suppressed usually are extreme. The thing about transgression is that it can be dangerous. It does not just refer to that which transgresses against the laws and norms that you happen to disagree with. I think I’m almost always on the side of freedom when it comes to books being suppressed but you wouldn’t find me defending The Pedophile’s Guide to Love and Pleasure, which Amazon removed in 2010 and which led to the arrest and conviction of its author. Nor will you find his book, I suspect, in Dua Lipa’s library.

It’s easy to be a liberal when parents are protesting about one too many kisses in a young adult fiction book — or even when Islamists are losing their minds over Salman Rushdie. (Well, it should be easy anyway.) It’s more difficult if authors are being arrested for telling their readers too much about how to make drugs, or for denying historical events. That’s where liberalism gets really interesting. I can more than understand people not wanting to read Opium for the Masses or Hitler’s War. I doubt I’d read them myself. But if we wouldn’t, we probably shouldn’t make too much noise about our fondness for “banned books”.