The fear of fiction waxes and wanes, spiking every couple of decades like some kind of hysterical cicada. The current wave of book bans may be the worst since the 1980s, but we’ve seen this sort of thing before, and we’ll see it again.
The ’80s bans were driven by religious conservatives, dovetailing with the “satanic panic” over books and games involving magic, such as Dungeons & Dragons. Before that, in the 1950s, anxiety centered on trashy paperback novels and comics, which were said to cause “moral damage” and a “loss of ideals” in young people that would invariably lead to a life of crime. In the 1920s and early 1930s, the culprits were sexy Hollywood movies and modernist novels such as “Ulysses,” which — lest people engage in too much sex and modernism — resulted in the Hays Code and more book bans.
Earlier still, at the turn of the 20th century, people blamed America’s problems on dirty books and images that could be ordered through the mail. In the centuries before that, there were bouts of concern over penny dreadfuls, women’s novels, chivalric romances and comedic plays, going back through the ages to the fourth century B.C., when Plato declared in “The Republic” that all stories and other artistic “imitations” of reality — including poetry, music and painting — were unacceptable in an ideal society unless they could be proved to impart rational, wholesome values.
While the context changes, fear of fiction seems always to boil down to fear of one’s society and the people who live in it. Other people’s minds are frightening because they are inaccessible to us; one way we can know them is through their representations in fiction. We know that fiction affects us profoundly and mysteriously, and that other people are affected just as strongly and unpredictably as we are. Which means it’s at least theoretically possible that art could seduce our fellow citizens into wicked beliefs.
Moral panics over fiction are common in democracies, because the inner lives and motives of others matter a great deal in a democracy, arguably more so than in other political systems where people have less direct control over their social experience — and less freedom of expression. In a democracy, your fellow citizens can organize for social progress or encourage the passage of draconian laws that terrorize minorities. Fear of other people, and how they might work together to shift reality, is the reason the contest over written language so often extends to the realm of make-believe — of fiction. Fiction is the story of other people; this is what makes it dangerous.
Most histories of dangerous fiction begin with Plato, though anxiety about the pernicious effect of stories can be found in fragments of work by earlier Greek philosophers, who criticized the epic poetry of their day for portraying the gods as murderous, adulterous jerks. In “The Republic,” Plato expands on these early concerns: When people encounter stories about gods and heroes behaving badly, what stops them from imitating what they hear? When the poets sing about Achilles mourning Patroclus, won’t the audience think it’s OK to cry over dead loved ones, like a woman? When Achilles looks Agamemnon in the face and calls him a “winebibber, with the eyes of a dog and the heart of a deer” — I mean, what if you said that to your dad? A cop? The president?
To Plato, depiction is always an endorsement and license for bad behavior. “We must put a stop to such stories,” his version of Socrates declares, “lest they produce in the youth a strong inclination to do bad things.” The Greek word for imitative behavior is “mimesis,” and most of the time, when we get anxious about the effects of fiction, we’re worried about mimetic responses — not so much from ourselves but from other people. Plato specifies that the wise among us are mostly safe from the temptations of poetry, but “children and foolish people” are in danger, because they can’t tell the difference between images and reality.
The wise are supposedly an elite few, while children and the foolish are everywhere. Plato worries about the negative effect of art on this vulnerable population because he’s concerned about shaping people into good and useful citizens. He’s not a fan of democracy: It’s the second-worst system he can imagine; only tyranny holds greater horrors for him. He does allow that a person who lives in a democracy might be a happy and interesting person — “a complex man, full of all sorts of characters, fine and multicolored, just like the democratic city.”
In other words, the democratic city is a lot like a good story: multihued, lively, full of characters. But including spirited characters means including wicked characters, too, and as such, democracy inevitably gives way to tyranny. To be fair to Plato, the transition from democracy to tyranny and back again happened in his lifetime, and “The Republic” is partly an attempt to envision a society so perfectly designed that the political turmoil he witnessed could never happen again.
There are many other examples of democracies, up to and including the United States, where a portion of the population has managed to tyrannize the rest — and has done so, in part, through storytelling.
There are documented instances of stories that have caused harm, where mimesis has had some awful effect. The continued existence of racist extremism in the South can be traced in part to Lost Cause novels and films, such as “Gone With the Wind” and the infamous “Birth of a Nation.” Goethe’s hugely popular 1774 novel “The Sorrows of Young Werther” was blamed for a rash of suicides across Europe; at least one young woman drowned herself with a copy of “Werther” in her pocket. More recently, a study associated the hit Netflix show “13 Reasons Why” with a spike in teen suicides, though another study disagreed with the findings.
On the other hand, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” is credited with rallying previously ignorant Northerners to the abolitionist cause, though critics such as James Baldwin noted that it did so on the back of racist stereotypes. Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” led to outrage and activism against industrial food production (and was harmful if you were a meatpacking baron, I guess). Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s novel “What Is to Be Done?” made such an impression on Lenin that he borrowed the title for his famous pamphlet.
So there may be reason for concern, a reason to lock up the poets and tear down their works. But once censorship of art begins, it’s hard to find an end, hard to reach a place of perfect safety, where other people — whom we always imagine to be foolish, unlike ourselves — can no longer be exposed to the wrong ideas. Obviously you and I are safe from the influence of bad stories full of wrong ideas, but what about other people?
The danger of fiction isn’t so much that it changes us (though it does); the danger is that it reveals the limitations of our reality. Fiction, even the most realistic kind, represents what never happened, what isn’t but what maybe yet could be, in a different world than this one. A powerful story shows us something that we were unable, previously, to see.
Could this be dangerous? Sure. But life is dangerous. The opposite — death, stagnation, stasis — is very boring. If American culture seems to be stagnant right now, it’s partly because at this supposed end of history, it’s more profitable to pretend there’s nothing more to be said, and all that remains, culturally, is to jostle for different ideological positions: to look at art not just as a form of expression that invariably has politics but as a form of expression that’s supposed to do politics for us, so we don’t have to.
But we don’t have to conceive of art this way. Fiction writers can insist on having their work judged on its merits and not on whether it provides moral instruction or inculcates the right social value. This isn’t an anti-political stance but, rather, a highly political one. It tells readers to go get their values elsewhere, to stop demanding that fiction provide the difficult labor of soul-making — to do that work themselves.
This view has been derided as decadent, as a belief in “art for art’s sake.” But I think that phrase has often been misunderstood. It’s not necessarily a demand to see art (particularly art by white men) as falsely “neutral” or “apolitical”; it can be a demand to treat all art, by everyone, with the aesthetic seriousness it deserves. The phrase is often associated with Oscar Wilde — a white European, to be sure, but also a gay man who was persecuted for his sexuality and wrote fairy tales, comedies of manners and a novel of sublimated gay desire. In the preface to “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” Wilde declared that “there is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.”