Book banning

[Belacqua]

I don't consider literature as carrying TRUTH, but rather as providing *insight*. It has you look at things in a different way. And, hopefully, that different way of thinking produces value.

Yes, I think this is a great way to put it. Insight, as I imagine it, will be something true, but also personal to the reader. It may or may not result directly from a declarative sentence in the text. 

And I think this points us to a number of issues with literature, and why it can't operate as journalism or science writing does. For one thing, we know that people will do just about anything to resist having insights, if they involve hurt to one's pride, or a challenge to one's metaphysical or ideological commitments. So saying something straight out, like "you are X when you should be Y" is likely to result only in a doubling-down on the X. In some cases, deeper insights probably come about more indirectly. So fictional presentations, strong and memorable imagery, etc., are more likely to have an effect. 

It's difficult to analyze because I think insight and how we get it can't be quantified, forced, or guaranteed. Obviously you can't say "read this book and you'll see why you're wrong" if you're not dealing with simple facts but with more subtle issues. And we know that insight can result from personal experiences that would seem trivial to anyone else -- as described by Proust's narrator stepping on uneven paving stones. 

That said, I do think that some books are absolutely more likely to provide insights than others, and that this is one big criterion for judging that a book is high-quality. It can't be demonstrated scientifically, but I think we could construct some strong arguments for some of the classic books. And conversely, there are certainly books that work against insight -- any of those which flatters the reader, deals only in received ideas and cliches, reinforces the common assumptions of the herd. Most best-sellers and all TV works in this way. It's a kind of psychoanalysis in reverse -- personal insight is pushed down deeper, defense mechanisms are reinforced. 

On a side note: I have never really understood the difference between metaphor and simile. Sure, there is a *grammatical* difference in whether you are using 'like' or 'as', but so what? Both are saying essentially the same thing, making an analogy between things, right?

This is an interesting question, and very tricky to answer. I suppose it depends on the subtlety of the work in question. 

I absolutely think that "Nature is a temple," is different from "Nature is like a temple," in the poem I mentioned earlier. 

La Nature est un temple où de vivants piliers
Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles;
L’homme y passe à travers des forêts de symboles
Qui l’observent avec des regards familiers.

All English translations are cringe-making, but this one at least has the benefit of being literally accurate:

Correspondences

Nature is a temple in which living pillars 
Sometimes give voice to confused words; 
Man passes there through forests of symbols 
Which look at him with understanding eyes.

Like prolonged echoes mingling in the distance 
In a deep and tenebrous unity, 
Vast as the dark of night and as the light of day, 
Perfumes, sounds, and colors correspond.

There are perfumes as cool as the flesh of children,
Sweet as oboes, green as meadows
— And others are corrupt, and rich, triumphant,

With power to expand into infinity,
Like amber and incense, musk, benzoin, 
That sing the ecstasy of the soul and senses.

— William Aggeler, The Flowers of Evil (Fresno, CA: Academy Library Guild, 1954)

Granted, because we know in the case of both the simile and the metaphor that nature isn't really a temple, the mathematical (as it were) meaning is the same. But to me the sense is significantly different. But I can't prove it.

This leads me to another thing about the importance of subtlety in language. In some cases, I think, we can say that an insight is a discovery or uncovering of some fact which had been lying fully-formed but hidden. A truth about the past which we'd been denying, or something like that. 

But in many cases I think the benefit gained from the text is a kind of construction, an ability to think clearly about something in ourselves which previously was not adequately formed. The phrase or image "gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name," which allows us to realize something through making it concrete that had been diffuse and confused. 

Imagine that we had only two words for our emotions: happy and sad. We would not only be unable to describe more subtle emotions to other people, but we would be unable to understand them for ourselves. Because anything we can think clearly about demands language, whether verbal or visual or something. Advertising encourages the simplest possible expression: happy when you have the product, sad when you don't. When in fact we all know the mix of emotions that can be attached to an object. Literature gives insight by providing the language and imagery to conceptualize at increasingly sophisticated levels. 

This is why I think that the richer and more subtle our language is, the richer and more deeply felt our interior lives will be. (And of course you don't have to be a Freudian to hold that our interior lives may consist of wildly contradictory elements, which means that any book about the heart must not be held to logical standards.)

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understand that the context of this action in California was regarding the use of this book as a tool to discuss racism and it didn't involve removing the books so much as replacing them with something better suited to the task.  When you ask the question, which classics should a student read, the context is completely different.  There have been schools that have banned TKAM outright from the school due to its graphic nature and I'm passionately opposed to that.  I think in some cases this can be easily explained by lazy educators who make a hasty decision based on a few poorly considered complaints about language in a book.  They just don't like getting calls from angry parents, so they do the easiest thing possible.

Yes, this is a good point, and tricky. 

There is a lot to consider when we want our literature to teach a moral lesson. A lot of people deny that literature can or should do this at all. All the "art for art's sake" people, from Oscar Wilde to Nabokov, denied that the arts can teach morality. If it tries to do so, it is propaganda, even if we agree with it. Or we could argue that the moral aspect comes only from whether the work increases or decreases the subtlety of one's thought, and that even the most obvious moral teaching (like "racism is bad") works against the morality of literature if it is expressed in a way which decreases the reader's personal experience.

This is why I'm skeptical about using books like this in a classroom, for a specific political purpose. It is very very easy for a student to read the lesson and agree, for the duration of the class, that racism is bad without gaining any increased insight into his or her own racism. I'm NOT saying this is true of To Kill a Mockingbird (I don't know that book well enough, and it would depend on how it was taught), but I think it is true of nearly all the easy moral lessons that appear in TV shows. In Star Trek, for example, we are repeatedly taught about the superior values of the brave and noble Earth people, who all share the values of liberal Californians. But I seriously doubt that these "lessons" do anything more than flatter the audience, making them proud to agree with the attractive actors, and comfortable in the notion that in the far future their own values will win the day. But no serious challenge is ever posed, and then most problems are solved in the end with a fist fight or phaser blast -- which in fact reinforces the common American idea that the Good Guy is always the one who makes the most successful use of violence. 

I'm tutoring a high school girl now, who's in the International Baccalaureate program here in my city. (I normally have a rule against teaching kids, but she's a bright girl.) The reading list for her English Lit class is like a list of socially woke propaganda, and virtually no discussion is made of any other literary quality. It's frustrating, because I agree with every single text that patriarchy is bad and micro-aggressions are evil, but since that is the only message included in the class I wonder about its quality. Like if the goal is really "teach them how to think, not what to think," then this class is a failure. 

But again, I don't know enough about what happens in most classrooms these days, so I'm not arguing on the subject of Harper Lee or use of her book at all.