I didn’t understand the real purpose of footnotes until I was shamefully deep into graduate school. Those little superscript numbers at the ends of sentences had previously seemed annoying to me – signifiers of apple polishing, a way of showing fidelity to the “rules” of citation, perhaps even the author’s paranoia about a teacher-bully who could emerge from the shadows to whack them with a ruler for daring to have a thought on their own without humbly crediting it to someone else.
Now I understand them differently. No book rises from primal soup on its own, without being touched by what has been discovered or thought before. Every book is a new stitching of thread in a garment being constantly woven. Just as human beings are unique individual lights in a general radiance of humanity, books are tiny parts of the whole. Some get more attention and consideration than others. But none are islands apart from the continent.
“When we try to pick out anything by itself,” said John Muir, “we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” Footnotes lead to other books with footnotes, just as the ruttiest ranch road in the middle of the boondocks leads to a paved street, which feeds to a county highway, which goes to the freeways that connect major cities.
This is why it remains important to let every book have its say, even if it goes to places that seem disagreeable. Knocking out an impolitic title is shutting down a part of the conversation, burning out a square on the quilt of language that covers the Earth, and we are all poorer for it.
Censorious tendencies are on the rise, even as access to information has never been easier. I’m a member of PEN, the international literary collective, which holds a “Banned Books” week each autumn to highlight attempts to remove or suppress portions of the world dialogue. It used to be a sleepy affair, calling attention only to a few scattered school districts or libraries responding to a cluster of parents upset about racially charged language in “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” or the inclusive content of “Heather Has Two Mommies.” But the ascendancy of paranoia about “indoctrination” made it more important than ever this year: PEN found more than 2,500 examples of book removal across the country, estimating that about 40 percent of those cases were the result of applied political pressure.
Right-wing groups upset about positive portrayals of LGBTQ people and highlighting instances of racism were responsible for much of this. But lest anyone think that “banned books” is a story about heroic liberals standing up to benighted conservatives, the free speech question cuts both ways on the partisan axis. It is more difficult to navigate than a simple surface reading might imply.
Some on TikTok made a display of burning Harry Potter books as a response to the alleged transphobia of the author J.K. Rowling. English professors nationwide have wondered if they should continue to assign work by authors accused of racism or misogyny. Positive portrayals of police officers in literature were disparaged by some as “copaganda” in the wake of the George Floyd uprising. The Burbank Unified School District removed a requirement for “To Kill a Mockingbird” after complaints that the classic novel about Southern racism by a white author taught some students the N-word.
How do we evaluate what messages get airtime? What constitutes a legitimate disagreement with polite orthodoxy and what crosses the line into dangerous speech? Should libraries not make available for study historically influential racist works like “Mein Kampf,” “The Clansman” or “The Turner Diaries,” the fantasy dystopian novel that helped inspire Timothy McVeigh to blow up the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1994?
The desire to keep certain books out of circulation has no discernable political label; it may be a universal impulse, even if we’re not proud of it. Or as Nat Hentoff, the legendary Village Voice columnist used to put it, we all, on some level, want “free speech for me but not for thee.”
The conversation becomes even more difficult when considering the poisonous atmosphere created by online political disinformation. The old absolutist argument against restrictions used to hinge on the idea that the public was smart enough to filter good ideas from bad ones. But Americans have recently been going to the voting booth believing all manner of ludicrous things about the opposition. Endless debunkings and fact checks, no matter how rigorous or frequent, don’t seem to break through the tough outer membrane of confirmation bias. Several instances of violence – mailed pipe bombs, armed standoffs atop dams, a really bad day in January 2021 – have been directly traced to the fever-pitched anger emanating from partisan media, which includes a cottage industry of books that prop up a whole worldview. We can shake our heads at these spectacles, but we’re also guilty of selective reading habits and letting our amygdalas run the show. We enjoy sources of information that flatter our pre-existing beliefs and recoil from those that contradict it.
“I think history has always proved that books are the first claim on which certain kinds of battles are fought,” said Toni Morrison, Nobel Prize Laureate and author of “The Bluest Eye” and “Beloved,” and many other distinguished books that found a wide audience and others of which found themselves on the wrong side of somebody’s ire. The reading requirement of “Beloved” in some school districts in Virginia became a major issue in the 2020 governor’s race. And the Colton, California, school board briefly banned “The Bluest Eye” that same year.
“Parents have a right to restrict books in the home,” Morrison went on to say. “They have a right to tell their own children what to read. They don’t have the right to tell my children what to read, which is what happens when you ban a book publicly.”
Perhaps it has something to do with the physical object of a book that makes it a target of those who want to deep-six certain ideas. Tangibility carries authority. It is heftier than the tissue stock of newspapers. While its Kindle version exists in the electronic cloud, its print version is a solid presence in the material world, a little Lego brick in the grand structure of knowledge.
Some context is important here, too. Books are almost never “banned” outright by school boards or libraries; they are merely de-emphasized or taken off the list of required reading. It would be almost impossible to efface a book forever from the memory of the planet; it will always exist somewhere in the cortex of the information cloud for those determined enough to find it among all the other sad books that haven’t been read or loved in years. The fight is over what gets placed in the roster of “what we think you ought to know”; the best of that which had been thought and said, in the words of British educator Matthew Arnold.
Even if uncited, no book is truly an island. It cannot be understood without the support of many other books that came before it, whose substance it draws upon. When we have more of those books to help us, even those that frustrate us, we become better citizens and better readers.
