I'm a big fan of banning books. If it was up to me, smash hits like Prozac for Cats,Scenic Tours of Newark, New Jersey, and The Fatback Cookbook wouldn't be ennobling Barnes' shelves anywhere. But the sad truth is, books don't get banned because they fail to live up to my aesthetic criteria. They get banned because they might, somehow and somewhere, potentially cause a scandal. So the logic goes, why not guarantee a scandal by banning the fucker! Now don't get me wrong; I'm still completely in favor of book-banning. In this case, however, the reason's a bit counterintuitive: because banning books calls attention to their power.
Since the days of Plato and Aristotle the word everybody has used to talk about literature is "imitation." Books are supposed to hold mirrors up to reality. But, as it turns out, this is not as easy as it sounds. There aren't too many books that manage to get under your skin, make you feel or think; there aren't too many books that, in a word, convince you. So what does it mean when a book gets banned? What do we really know about it? We know that someone somewhere got a bee in his bonnet about a work of (most typically) fiction; it means the book offended, scared, repulsed (but probably titillated) some unsuspecting reader in some backalley of the Bible belt. We know that book successfully held up a mirror to a part of life someone just didn't want to see. So, to put it briefly, we know it worked. It did exactly what literature sets out to do.
The one thing, then, that all banned books have in common is power. They have the power to be considered harmful or dangerous enough to be suppressed. So let's take a little "banned book week" tour of salacious scenes from a few of the great banned books of history. And remember, don't be surprised when you find yourself moved. You knew it was coming.
