Cancel culture is thriving in the analogue world. Complainants lodged more than 330 calls to curb or ban books — often about people of colour or with LGBT+ themes — with the American Library Association in the three months to the end of November alone.
That was before Art Spiegelman’s Maus fell foul of Tennessee educators. The graphic novel, depicting Jews as mice and Nazis as cats, bears eloquent witness to the impact of the Holocaust on one family. But some teachers and parents struggled to see why the education system would “promote this kind of stuff”. They winced at the use of profanities such as “b-i-t-c-h” in a book available to 13-year-olds.
Book bans are as old as publishing. Bishops in the Restoration era halted reprints of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan. Three centuries later Lady Chatterley’s Lover was in the dock for romps between an aristocrat and a gamekeeper. The sex scenes, infinitely more egregious from a literary than moral standpoint, prompted the prosecutor’s notorious litmus test: “Would you let your wives or servants read it?”
Wives and servants duly did — like everyone else. Bans are excellent publicity. Second-hand copies of Leviathan went for 10 times the original price. Maus shot to the top of the bestseller charts after the Tennessee school board’s ban last month. It is still number 22 on Amazon.com
Both pale beside The Satanic Verses, a work of magical realism deemed blasphemous by some. Author Salman Rushdie went under cover when Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa in 1989. Sales surged: at the time it was reportedly outselling the second-ranked schmaltzfest Star by five to one.
Banned books also tend to have longer shelf lives. George Orwell’s dystopian 1984, which has been challenged or banned in the US and USSR, has staged multiple comebacks. The fable of post-truth, newspeak and Big Brother has found fertile ground in the 21st century. It topped charts in the US during Donald Trump’s presidency. In a Hong Kong increasingly under Beijing’s authoritarian grasp, it was the ninth most borrowed adult book in 2020.
Its message continues to resonate, as will that of Maus.
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Publishing: bans boost shelf life of books such as ‘Maus’
Pinoy Variant