Tyree's Tuppence

by Tyree Campbell

Storm Cellar

In the cellar of my house I maintain a small library of about, at last count, 3500 books--mostly paperbacks, some hardbacks--and several stacks of magazines, mostly science fiction and fantasy. Many I've read, or used as reference, or at least browsed. I've even returned to quite a few tomes, the way some moviegoers attend repeated showings of Star Wars I: The Phantom Menace [I confess to this transgression myself].

I also maintain on certain nameless shelves a very special collection. I suppose I should call it something, just to give it an identity. Among the works in this collection are De Revolutionibus, by Nicholas Copernicus; Karl Marx's Das Kapital; excerpts of some of Thomas Payne's broadsides; Lysistrata, by Aristophanes; Starship Troopers, by Robert A. Heinlein; Ovid's Metamorphoses; Anthem, by Ayn Rand; two different editions of Mein Kampf, by Adolf Hitler; Orlando, by Virginia Woolf; and J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone.

Among the volumes that should be included here but which I as yet do not possess are Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn; Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov; The Satanic Verses, by Salman Rushdie; Candy, by Terry Southern; and Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin.

Here I also shelve a copy of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 as a sort of exclamation point.

Are you beginning to detect a common thread yet?

All of these are books that are or have been banned and/or burned.

Book-burning, for the incredulous and otherwise aghast, is an activity explicitly sanctioned by the Bible. Acts 19:19 recounts the burning of superstitious books at Ephesus by new converts of St. Paul [he wasn't referred to as a "saint" at the time--for good reason]. In 496, a list of banned books was included in a decree of Pope Gelasius [who was posthumously canonized, albeit not for banning books but for asserting Papal primacy]. This decree is generally regarded as the first Roman proscription of books--a list commonly referred to as an "Index," although that formal term was not applied until the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, published in 1559 by the Sacred Congregation of the Roman Inquisition, an Index which included the aforementioned work by Copernicus.

Now, one can understand why the self-appointed upholders of public morals might have looked askance upon Metamorphoses, with its blatantly sensual poetry. And surely passages such as the following from Lysistrata were apt to make many a fair and sheltered maiden swoon:

[In Lysistrata, Aristophanes suggested that women might withhold their sexual favors from men until men sought peace, not war. It could work...]

And Tropic of Cancer is replete with language such as might be bellowed by a stevedore who'd gotten his wedding tackle caught in an oarlock [good book, though].

So what the smeg was the problem with Copernicus's On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres?

Seems that up until 1543, the Ptolemaic theory of the nature of the Solar System obtained. Simply put, this theory held that the Earth was the center of the Solar System and of the Universe. Everything revolved around Earth. So stated Ptolemy, a II Century Egyptian astronomer and mathematician. It was theologically expedient for religious hierarchs of the Roman Catholic Church, which at that time was the only game in town, to support this geocentric theory. Earth was the center of the Universe. Man was the center of Earth. This made the salvation of Man paramount, and enhanced the importance and the power of those whose mission it was to oversee the salvation of Man.

If, on the other hand, it could be shown that the center of the Universe was someplace other than Earth, such a demonstration would serve to diminish the importance of Man, and therefore of his salvation, and therefore of the power of those whose mission it was to oversee that salvation.

The works of Copernicus constituted a step in that direction. Although Copernicus's math was incorrect--the planets do not orbit in circles, but in ellipses--he proposed a consistent heliocentric theory of the Solar System, in which the planets revolved, not around Earth, but around the Sun.

Dude!

De Revolutionibus failed to make the New York Times Best Seller list. But in 1616 it did find itself on the Index of Forbidden Books [until 1757--the Church is a slow learner], which meant that anyone who read any part of this work during its prohibition now resides in Hell.

This would include Galileo.

Galileo, indulging his curiosity like da Vinci, delved into many topics, and was one of the first to turn the newly-invented telescope toward the heavens. There he found, among other things, four objects which clearly did not revolve around the Earth, but around the planet Jupiter, namely the so-called Galilean satellites: Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto. The existence of these moons did not prove Copernicus right...but they did prove Ptolemy, and by implication the Church, wrong.

Back in those days, the Church had scant tolerance for anyone who dared prove any of its beliefs or tenets wrong. Having bestowed Scriptural approval upon Ptolemy's model, it had no choice but to uphold the theory that all of the celestial bodies in the Universe revolved around the Earth. Galileo was compelled to disabuse himself of his heresies and was placed under house arrest for the rest of his life, and Copernicus's book made the Index, condemning to fire and brimstone thousands of curious and otherwise innocent souls.

Over the years Santayana's aphorism about the consequences of failure to remember the past has been pounded into a cliche...but over the centuries the burnings at Ephesus and the bannings in the Index have been revisited countless times--from the incineration of Alexandria to the pyres of Hitler's Germany. The burning and banning of literature--the destruction of the fruits of vision and of the imagination--is something that, like war, the human species continues to find itself unable to rise above. As a species, humans are terrified of ideas they disagree with.

These holocausts are of particular concern to us as writers and artists because the states of vision and imagination are our home states, our home towns...we live there. A sanctimonious goon who burns a book does more than incinerate paper...he/she drives a spike right into our eyes, our brains, our visions, our ideas.

And the history of burning and banning repeats. Not long ago in Maine a minister incited his flock to burn copies of the Harry Potter books, lest "our children" be exposed to magic. Elsewhere, this series of books is removed from shelves, excoriated, shunned. It has gotten so bad that the books' defenders have taken to citing various passages as being derived from or related in some way to Scripture...as if to demonstrate that the books are safe for children because they possess a kind of imprimatur by proxy, by extension.

You'd think such a defense unnecessary, given the protection supposedly afforded the books by the First Amendment. "Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press..." But Congress isn't abridging anything. It's the individual communities, and small groups such as school boards, that determine what goes on the school and library shelves, and what does not. And they are making these determinations, even as I write this.

In a certain southern state, for instance, John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men is about to be removed from the public school library bookshelves. It seems the book contains "bad language." Admittedly many years have passed since I read that book, but as far as I can recall, the most serious breach of public linguistic decency in it revolves around the word "damn." I can only surmise that J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye is nowhere in the state.

Well, I can see how a school board might not want to expose the tender of age--say, grades one through maybe four--to such crude language. On the other hand, the second-grader who checks Of Mice and Men out of the school library is a rare genius indeed. And I suspect that the ninth- through twelfth-graders who check the book out have heard somewhat more questionable language.

But the burning and banning of books is not based on rational arguments. Nor is it confined to the extreme right of the political spectrum--the religious zealots and fundamentalists, and the nazis and their brethern. Censorship is practiced by the left wing as well. But where the Right bans or burns entire books, the Left compels the replacement of "offensive" words with "inoffensive" words...with socially acceptable euphemisms.

But that doesn't affect you, you say?

Do you write fantasy? Some horror, perhaps?

Books in public schools in certain areas of the eastern United States may no longer use the word "fairy." The word "fairy" is to be replaced by the inoffensive word "elf."

Elf Godmother? Poor Cinderella.

And mushrooms will grow in Elf Rings. And whatever shall be done with the fairy shrimp and the fairy terns...?

Sigh...

At the beginning of this Tuppence I cited a number of books that have been, at one time or another, banned or burned. There are others, of course, many others. Maybe there should be an Endangered Publications List, promulgated by some kind of Literature Protection Agency. In the meantime, there's always my cellar. You all are welcome to visit, and to read in peace.

Because they can have my copy of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone when they pry it from my cold, dead fingers...

Past Tuppence:
December 2002
October 2002
August 2002
June 2002
April 2002
February 2002
December 2001
October 2001
August 2001

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Read more from Tyree Campbell in any of the following:

Sex and the Single Alien
An anthology

Nyx
A novel by Tyree Campbell

Wondrous Web Worlds Vol. 2

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Non-fiction article-October's Tuppence