It is not to be hoped that the book will become as controversial as a cultural expression in the Netherlands as it has recently been in America. There the political left and the political right hit each other with books by the other that would be no good. Ban it! There seems to be nothing more delicious.
The New York Times published one disturbing article about. Protests against books on sexual and racial identity are not new, the paper writes, but the tactics and politicization are. Libraries in particular are having a hard time.
The American Library Association recorded 330 attempts at book bans in the fall alone. In Wyoming, libraries must fear prosecution for owning books if Sex Is a Funny Word and This Book Is Gay. In Oklahoma, the Senate is considering a law that would prohibit school libraries from offering books about sexual activity and gender identity. Often the complainants are white, conservative parents. Suzanne Nossel, director of PEN America, calls it “a rather alarming phenomenon.”
A director of a textbook publishing house points to the influence of the legislation by politicians “both from one side and the other”: “And eventually the librarian, teacher or educator gets caught in the middle.” A group calling itself ‘No Left Turn in Education’ maintains lists of banned books, such as The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, because they would spread radical ideas among students.
Also Fidelity dedicated one well article and discussed in detail the case of Maus, a classic book by artist Art Spiegelman, who described the family history of his parents – survivors of Auschwitz. The conservative school board of a Tennessee district banned it because it contained some curses and a picture of a naked woman. “Orwellian”, the 73-year-old artist has called it.
This comes from the corner of white conservatism, but the ‘woke-left’ also leaves its mark in the policy of publishers. That turned out to be the case with Random House, the regular publisher of the late Norman Mailer. A collection of Mailer essays was to be published, but suddenly the publisher left the book to a small publisher.
A typical case of cancellation? Random House denies it and promises to continue publishing Mailer’s other books. Yet it is suspicious that Random House does not want to publish this book. It will no doubt contain controversial lyrics, as Mailer sometimes had questionable ideas, which you could interpret as sexist or racist.
This is what Mailer claims in The Presidential Papers that “the Negro is closer to sex than we are.” He adds: “Why do you think they react so violently in the south when their daughters and sons have to go to the same school as Negro children, if it were not a fear of the Negro’s sexuality?”
Such statements infuriated Mailer’s black colleague James Baldwin, but there were also black activists who agreed. Be that as it may, a publisher like Random House should not shy away from such texts, however debatable they may be, by such a prominent author for literary-historical reasons alone.
A version of this article also appeared in NRC on the morning of February 4, 2022
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