Breathe
By Daniella Blejer
You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture.
Just get people to stop reading them.
Ray Bradbury
Faced with the monstrous supply of content offered by the algorithm, and the capacity of mass media to entertain in an ephemeral way, reading has become a form of resistance. Literature makes us think, questions, confronts and, therefore, reading it is not always easy.
The potential of books to turn their readers into critical and imaginative beings makes them dangerous within societies of control. Throughout history they have suffered prohibition, censorship and burning. A concern and subject of fictions such as Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, whose plot centers on the control that a copyist monk in the Middle Ages seeks to exercise over the second part of Aristotle's Poetics , a text in which the Greek philosopher analyzes the art of comedy. The monk, convinced that laughter contravenes the fear of God, hides the book and covers its pages with poison in order to annihilate those who try to read it.
In Fahrenheit 451 Ray Bradbury imagines American society in a dystopian future in which books are banned. To repress attempts to preserve books, there are squads of "firemen" charged with burning them. The title refers to the temperature at which paper begins to burn. To counteract the censorship of knowledge, a resistance group memorizes and orally shares the best literary works.
Book burning is a manifestation of the most extreme religious and ideological fanaticism: from the Inquisition's acts of faith, to Hitler's burnings, to the incineration of books during the Argentine dictatorship.
The book resists because it occupies a singular place in the history of humanity. It is the artifact capable of preserving the memory of a people, its myths, traditions, principles and beliefs. Thanks to Homer's writing, part of the oral tradition of the peoples of Ancient Greece was preserved. Over time, the heroic characters of The Iliad and The Odyssey became role models, their epic plots were read to train the population in civic duties. On the other hand, the three monotheistic religions - Judaism, Christianity and Islam - are known as "religions of the book" for having in common the Abrahamic spiritual tradition, as well as the centrality they give to a sacred book inspired by the word of God.
Where there is intolerance, the book is affected; currently in the United States there are two polarized forces that repress it. At one extreme are conservatives, whose fanaticism, among other examples, has led a Tennessee county to ban the distribution of Art Spiegelman's Maus on the grounds that it uses high-flown language and female nudity (apparently female mice scandalize them). In turn, the children's story The Lorax by Dr. Seuss was banned for showing the ravages of capitalism on the environment. Perhaps the most ironic case is the banning of a book by a Florida school district that talks about banning books by author Alan Gratz entitled: Ban this Book.
On the other side of the ideological spectrum a different phenomenon occurs, the claim of progressives is not to ban books, but to transform their language so as not to offend any ethnic, gender or minority group. While the motives are laudable, overcorrection affects the book more than banning it. In this sense, editions of Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Fin have been published in which they substitute offensive words (such as the n-word for the word slave). The problem with political correctness is that you cannot correct history backwards, the preservation of violence in language used in a certain context matters because it shows the extent of the exclusion of the past.
The different ways in which people try to ban, burn, censor and forget the book are frightening. There is less and less room for literary culture, however, all is not lost. There is a community of young people reading and writing fanfiction on Wattpad, an online social reading platform that blurs the barriers between readers and writers. Wattpad encourages its users to create and share their own stories in all genres. Writers often take as a starting point other fiction they have read and of which they are fans, to imagine plots and characters that represent them, as in the case of the LGBTQ community. In the same vein, there are digital communities such as BookTok and BookTubers, digital influencers dedicated to promoting reading.
The stories of humanity and their support, an extension of our imagination, will never disappear. The ability to tell ourselves who we are in a symbolic way is what makes us human, the true purpose of the book.
The opinions expressed are the responsibility of the authors and are absolutely independent of the position and editorial line of the company. Opinion 51.
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