Are there any books in Palimpsest’s Field Notes series that aren’t worth reading? Some of these short books, their titles all beginning with the preposition On, and all addressing some issue of public interest (or at least interest to me) for a general audience, must be dull or poorly researched or otherwise lacklustre, but I haven’t run across one yet. To be fair, I’ve read a half dozen at most, but they’ve all repaid my attention, and I’ve enjoyed their lively, thoughtful discussions of subjects I know little about.

Case in point: Ira Wells’s On Book Banning. My thoughts about censorship were relatively unformed before I read this little book. On one hand, I’ve seen how some of my students have been influenced—negatively, in my opinion—by reading Ayn Rand or Jordan Peterson, or the Bible, for that matter, and I’ve seen how hard it can be to encourage people to think outside perspectives that limit their thinking once they’ve pledged allegiance to an author or a text. On the other, I’m not comfortable with calls to ban (or not teach) books like Huckleberry Finn because its characters use the N-word. Yes, that’s a sign of my privilege, as someone who’s not racialized and therefore not directly harmed by that word. At the same time, though, the novel is set in Missouri and parts south in the 1840s: what word would we expect those southern whites to use? What’s more important to me, perhaps foolishly, is the way Huck decides to help Jim escape enslavement, even though he’s been taught that by doing so he’s committing both a crime and a sin and will burn in hell. Huck’s moral or ethical growth, his ability to become something other than a white southern racist who believes in the institution of slavery simply by being open to the Other (and to another), by getting to know Jim and thereby seeing him as a human being, strikes me as the book’s point. Maybe that doesn’t seem like much, but I’ll wager it was when Huckleberry Finn was published in 1884, because given the rising tide of overt, toxic racism we see now, it’s probably pretty radical still. I would never teach it, though, partly because I’m not tenured and therefore my academic freedom is limited (the same reason I haven’t taught Raja Shehadeh’s Palestinian Walks since the fall of 2023), and also because I genuinely don’t want to hurt anyone by teaching something in which that word is so salient.

So I’m all over the place on the issue of censoring or banning books: I value the canon, I’m interested in both the politics and the aesthetics of literature, I’m unwilling to cause offence, I’m afraid of losing my job. Maybe that’s why I enjoyed Wells’s clear thinking on the subject, even though I’m still left with many questions.

The introduction of On Banning Books summarizes Wells’s position, which is then expanded upon in the following four chapters. It (and parts of the rest of the book) is framed around a library audit at the school his children attend in Toronto. Most of the library’s holdings, the principal told a group of parents, didn’t represent the students (or what she imagined them to be): “too Eurocentric, too male, too heteronormative.” In fact, anything more than 15 years old risked being removed from school libraries; in Peel Region, Anne Frank’s Diary was removed from school libraries for that reason, along with books about the Japanese internment in Canada during the Second World War. The goal is to make sure school libraries represent the diversity of students in the school. Wells understood the principal’s point, but he didn’t like the idea of throwing books away–and they must be thrown away, because they are deemed too potentially dangerous to allow anyone else to read. At the same time, he struggled to frame a counter argument in defence of the books that would be tossed. The book is an attempt to do just that.

Wells contends that book bans are increasing, although they’re also as old as books themselves, and that in school libraries, the contemporary battleground over access to books, such bans are motivated by a range of concerns: the ones that motivated his children’s principal, and those of parents’ rights groups (mostly in the US), who tend to be evangelicals who abhor anything that hints at the existence of LGBTQ2S+ people. Both sides, Wells argues, are motivated by arguments about keeping children safe from harm: either from the pain of reading racist language, or the possibility of becoming queer by reading something featuring queer characters. (To evangelical parents, that’s a terrifying possibility, which is both sad and, for LGBTQ2S+ children, dangerous.) Both sides want school libraries purged of titles they find offensive:

Contemporary progressive educators from Ontario bear little in common with parents’ rights activists from Florida, and their aims are not equivalent. But both treat books as sources of contagion and libraries as fields of indoctrination, and both invoke the vulnerability of children as a warrant for censorship. Both abide by the new censorship consensus, where the school library is a microcosm of the ideal society, and books are levers of social engineering. In my ideal society, their thinking goes, there will be more of this, and less of that: more diversity, less racism. Or: More Socrates and Shakespeare, less wokeness. Both ignore the cyclical nature of censorship, presuming that the new censorship apparatus won’t eventually come for them. They deceive themselves.

Public libraries tend to operate differently, and they experience less pressure to limit the kinds of materials they hold, Wells suggests. If the public wants to read a particular title, librarians will make sure it’s available. And, of course, if a book gets published, anyone can buy a copy–if they can afford to.

Part of the problem, Wells argues, is that in recent years we’ve come to focus exclusively on the political content of books and other art forms, which is narrowly defined, at the expense of other qualities. The Canada Council, for instance, has made funding art that eliminates every form of racism and discrimination a priority. “Let me be clear,” Wells writes. “The politicization of art over this period was the product of real, intractable problems, and the calling out of these problems–systemic racism, sexism, cultural genocide, environmental despoliation–is essential to the promise of perfectibility that underlies the legitimacy of liberal democracies.” Compared to those problems, the aesthetics of a book or film or painting are secondary, even, he suggests, “trivial.” Political questions have replaced aesthetic ones, in other words. Moreover, those questions don’t address the implicit or unconscious political aspects of a text; instead, they “praise or call out what was already on the surface,” and the distinctions between the artist and the art collapse, and literature is asked to justify itself in terms of its “real-world utility” to social-justice struggles. Once art becomes politics, we begin distinguishing what’s politically suspect from what’s politically appropriate. The problem, though, is that books, especially novels, “are internally conflicted, containing multiple voices and viewpoints, arguments and counter-arguments, conflicting messages, a surplus that exceeds the author’s own design.” They open up conversations, provoke questions; censorship, in contrast, closes down discussion and demands answers: “Where literature unsettles us with ambiguity, the realization that the ‘meaning’ of a text is never final, censorship seeks to comfort us with moral absolutes.” That’s the argument Wells wanted to make to his children’s principal, and its where the introduction of this book ends.

Subsequent chapters look more closely at the battle over school libraries in the U.S. and Canada, amplifying and extending Wells’s introduction, partly by recounting his experience on a panel examining books in the library at the school his children attend. The checklist he’s given turns out to be difficult to answer, particularly the questions about the intentions of the author of the book he’s been asked to evaluate, Chieri Uegaki’s Suki’s Kimono. Since the 1946 publication of “The Intentional Fallacy,” an essay by W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley, literary scholars (Wells is one of those) have been trained to think that the author’s intentions are neither available nor valuable as criteria for evaluating “a work of literary art.” That’s the problem, Wells argues: school boards don’t consider children’s books to be art. They are either good or bad, moral or immoral. They either affirm the identities of students by reflecting their experiences back to them, or they don’t. However, many texts don’t affirm anything; instead, they leave their readers unsettled. What then? “Sometimes, students should be confronted with unfamiliar experiences, along with familiar ones, and engage in liberating flights of imaginative fancy that leave their earthbound identities far behind,” he writes. “And they should be taught the art and artifice of narrative strategy, the ways in which the portrayal of any ‘self’ or ‘identity’ in literature is the product of identifiable formal conventions and techniques, the ways in which older and even ancient archetypes underlie our most contemporary stories, and so on.” That’s not what happens with the books in some school libraries, though. In 2023, Peel Region threw away thousands of books, leaving school libraries half-empty, based on the criteria Wells finds troublesome, including Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar, which was “insufficiently identity-affirming.”

“Book banning is a form of coercion,” Wells writes, “an attempt to control not only what children read, but also what they think.” It poses two dangers. One is that students, accustomed to censorship, will grow up to be “uninformed and passive, easier targets for propaganda and (actual) indoctrination, primed for authoritarian rule.” The other is that “they will internalize the methods of their censorious parents and educators and organize their own lives around a will to power,” becoming authoritarians themselves.

Next, Wells considers the 2,000 year history of censorship in the West, beginning with the Romans, then moving to the destruction of libraries (including the Great Library of Alexandria), the Roman Catholic Church’s Index of Prohibited Books, the nineteenth-century campaign of Anthony Comstock to suppress obscenity in literature, and the destruction of Iraq’s libraries and museums after the American military deposed Saddam Hussein (which the Americans tacitly condoned). Against that history he juxtaposes philosophical arguments in favour of free expression: John Milton’s Areopagitica and John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty. He acknowledges that both of those writers (but especially Milton) assert that there are limits to free expression; neither is a free-speech absolutist. Their arguments led to a reduction in censorship in some places during the 20th century. Among the communities targeted by censorship campaigns then was the LGBTQ2S+ community, whose bookstores were the subject of customs laws that claimed the material for sale in them was obscene. For Wells, “the history of ‘obscenity’ reveals how laws are always shaped by arguments and interpretations of individual people at specific moments in time.” There’s no immutable standard of either vice or virtue, just people with opinions, arguments, and prejudices.

One of the things that motivates those who would remove books from school libraries is the idea that language can be a form of violence. I thought that idea was just a metaphor that had come to be taken literally, but Wells points out that it has its roots in Critical Race Theory, and in the argument that oppression causes physiological and psychological harm to people. I had never considered that point, but it makes sense: African-Americans have higher rates of hypertension, for instance, that white Americans. Racist language in books isn’t the only cause of that “weathering”–exposures to environmental toxins (highways, factories, and incinerators tend to be located in poor neighbourhoods) and the indignities of other forms of racism also play a role–but it doesn’t help, either. Wells notes that Critical Race Theory has made important contributions to our understanding of racial oppression, particularly the notion that racism is systemic, but he also notes that as progressive educators broadened the assumptions of CRT, they came to see banning books as a moral necessity. Thus Huckleberry Finn cannot be taught, or even included in a school library: Huck’s moral journey is less important than the harm caused by Twain’s language. Librarians and school boards set out to make sure that all fo the books on the shelves affirm the identities of students, but that becomes difficult: how can one affirm the identities of LGBTQ2S+ students and religious fundamentalists (of varying kinds) at the same time? “Educators must either admit that certain lived experiences count for more than others or divest from identity affirmation as the sole rationale for reading and literacy,” Wells writes. And many Black and racialized readers have discovered that literary classics do speak to them, despite the differences between themselves and the characters in those books: Ta-Nehisi Coates, for instance, saw “the same wounded striving” in Macbeth that he witnessed in his Baltimore neighbourhood. I’m reminded of the famous quotation from an interview with James Baldwin about seeing his experience reflected in the work of Dickens and Dostoyevsky. Eurocentric literary classics might not be as toxic as some people assume.

Finally, Wells considers the future of books in an era of censorship. “If there is anything salutary to be gleaned from the attacks on libraries,” he writes, “it is a renewed appreciation for why they matter.” Teachers and librarians need to be supported, and the institutions where they work adequately funded. Education needs to focus on developing the critical-thinking skills of students. And the old books, imperfect as they are, might help us identify our own flaws and biases: “Their failings become part of the story, but not the end of the story, which we inherit, revise, and humbly resubmit to the readers who succeed us.”

I’m left more or less where I was before I read Wells’s book, except that my sense of why I’m both uncomfortable with censorship and also with material I find objectionable is clearer. And, to be honest, books in school libraries are unlikely to have much of an affect on children or adolescents, since they have so many other sources of information (and misinformation) available to them. Some of the students I teach–not all of them, but a few–have never read a book at all. It’s not just the university where I work where this phenomenon exists, as Rose Horowitch pointed out in an article in The Atlantic last year. Those who worry about the malign effects of books might be fooling themselves, perhaps, given their decreasing importance. But it’s easier to censor books than ban TikTok or Grok. In the face of those technologies, Wells’s call for critical thinking and reading don’t seem like much. As a writer, that worries me more than censorship.