Literary controversy: The good, the bad, and the unnecessary

It’s becoming a more recognized truth that banning a book may very well be the best thing one can do to ensure its long and fruitful lifetime.

For the first time in their usually small lifetimes, books have the opportunity to move from book clubs and onto front-page news. Publishers seize the opportunity to market for all they’re worth, brandishing controversial ‘unabridged’ and ‘un-annotated’ editions of the text. Authors achieve high profiles and their agents are suddenly working with celebrities.

Unknown politicians and small-time leaders who institute a ban achieve notable statuses and the opportunity to flaunt agendas unrelated to anything literary. The bigger institutions that commit the banning regain a beloved spotlight. Through it all, the public swarms and its heated gossip is fueled indefinitely. Because the subject is touchy, everyone’s opinion suddenly becomes important.

This can be both a very good thing and a very bad thing.

Given that the banning of one’s work is generally synonymous with filthy content, religious aspersion and a blatant disregard for a decorous opinion, it is difficult to see how the banning of a work can be a good thing other than for the inflation of public ego. Nevertheless, being on the public radar, even if it flies under the flagship of obscenity or anathema, is preferable to melting into obscurity. The average reader is much more likely to pay attention to opinions concerning the book provided that she has a prior knowledge of the subject, no matter how small.

Your average citizen of the early 20th century had most likely never read Joyce’s “Ulysses.” Yet a knowledge, albeit skewed knowledge, of the novel entered into his vocabulary by virtue of the book’s lengthy and publicized trial: United States vs. One Book Called “Ulysses.”

Controversy can also give the book a valuable historical climate through which one may obtain a better sense of the book’s context. Students now laugh at the fact that “The Catcher in the Rye” was considered immoral in 1951. They laugh even harder at the idea of Holden Caulfield being the universal symbol of rebellion, forgetting that he was the first when icons such as James Dean or Sid Vicious were still years away.

For the scholar or the teacher, this is all well and good, but there’s a tendency to forget that the names on the covers of those controversial works have lives of their own. They are often not nearly as glamorous as the work’s public attention. In modern day history, the most infamous of the banned books has probably been Salman Rushdie’s 1989 book “The Satanic Verses,”. Rushdie’s recent biography “Joseph Anton” chronicles the events following the institution of the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa, a sort of death sentence on the author.

The Ayatollah, declaring “The Satanic Verses” to have been published against Islam, had never owned much less seen a copy of the book. While the fatwa represented another example of the dangers of ignorance from a person in power, the lessons from the fatwa cost innocent lives and ruined much of Rushdie’s own. 

Most controversies don’t achieve as much as Rushdie’s, though. Nor are they always indicative of high literary endeavor in the manner of “Ulysses”’s defense of obscenity for artistic fulfillment or “The Satanic Verses”’s defense of religious criticism.

“50 Shades of Grey” represents pornography with little to no artistic affect: sheer shock value. Nevertheless, the book’s subsequent bans in libraries in Baltimore and Wisconsin have elevated author E.L. James from her status as a fan fiction writer to a kind of free speech advocate.

It goes without saying that we must be prudent in how we regard our banned literature. Controversy is good for engendering closer reading of a work that otherwise might have been met with meek disregard or no regard at all. This is not to say that the work wouldn’t have been read had there been no controversy, only that the work’s global significance may not have been realized.

On the other hand, a ban can cause readers to dig too deep into a piece’s significance and force out a meaning that likely never existed. What was pulp has now been dubbed cultural iconography.