Dealing with Controversial Texts, Part 2

Okay, no book is every going to please everyone. (And if it does manage to please everyone, or at least a whole lot of someones, critics will claim that it can't possibly be any good. Witness the Harry Potter backlash.) But there seem to be an awful lot of folks who are afraid of books--they'll spread subversion, create anarchy, destroy our values, and confuse our children.

I'm the last person in the world to deny the power of the written word. It drives me up the wall when well-meaning defenders of literature say soothingly, "Don't be so upset. It's just fiction, after all." As if we don't express our highest truths, our darkest fears, our deepest desires, and our most profound convictions about the human experience in story. Or have these people forgotten about Uncle Tom's Cabin and To Kill a Mockingbird and The Grapes of Wrath and A Christmas Carol and Pride and Prejudice (never out of print for a single day in almost two hundred years) and Frankenstein and Don Quixote and, dare I say, the parables of Jesus?

But the problem lies in exaggerating the power of the book and diminishing the power of the reader. People who fear books appear to regard texts as authorities whose pronouncements are law, or as teachers who irrevocably shape (or deform) the student-reader's mind, or as stealthy viruses that infect the reader's thinking and cannot be purged.

But readers have their own power--to resist, to question, to critique, and to interpret. They're free to argue in the margins, to air their views in classrooms and coffeeshops, to write their own review, to send a letter to the author, even to write their own book and assert their own "authority." They're even free to stop reading. But they're not free to stop others.