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Books — a list of books that the Church considered dangerous to the faith and morals of Roman Catholics.
The Index, which included books censored in advance of publication as well as immoral books already
published, was never intended as a complete catalogue of all the books banned by the Church. When it
was abandoned in June 1966, however, it contained — among hundreds of theological works — hundreds
of others by secular writers from Voltaire and Diderot to Colette and Graham Greene. No doubt Comstock
would have found such a list useful.
“Art is not above morals. Morals stand first,” Comstock wrote. “Law ranks next as the defender of public
morals. Art only comes in conflict with the law when its tendency is obscene, lewd or indecent.” This led
the New York World to ask, in an editorial, “Has it really been determined that there is nothing
wholesome in art unless it has clothes on?” Comstock’s definition of immoral art, like that of all censors,
begs the question. Comstock died in 1915. Two years later, the American essayist H.L. Mencken defined
Comstock’s crusade as “the new Puritanism”,… “not ascetic but militant. Its aim is not to lift up saints but
to knock down sinners.”
Comstock’s conviction was that what he called “immoral literature” perverted the minds of the young,
who should busy themselves with higher spiritual matters. This concern is ancient, and not exclusive to
the West. In fifteenth-century China, a collection of tales from the Ming Dynasty known as Stories Old and
New was so successful that it had to be placed in the Chinese index so as not to distract young scholars
from the study of Confucius. In the Western world, a milder form of this obsession has expressed itself in
a general fear of fiction — at least since the days of Plato, who banned poets from his ideal republic.
Madame Bovary’s mother-in-law argued that novels were poisoning Emma’s soul, and convinced her son
to stop Emma’s subscription to a book-lender, plunging her further into the swamps of boredom. The
mother of the English writer Edmund Gosse would allow no novels of any kind, religious or secular, to
enter the house. As a very small child, in the early 1800s, she had amused herself and her brothers by
reading and making up stories, until her Calvinist governess found out and lectured her severely, telling
her that her pleasures were wicked. “From that time forth,” wrote Mrs. Gosse in her diary, “I considered
that to invent a story of any kind was a sin.” But “the longing to invent stories grew with violence;
everything I heard or read became food for my distemper. The simplicity of truth was not sufficient for
me; I must needs embroider imagination upon it, and the folly, vanity and wickedness which disgraced my
heart are more than I am able to express. Even now, tho’ watched, prayed and striven against, this is still
the sin that most easily besets me. It has hindered my prayers and prevented my improvement, and
therefore has humbled me very much.” This she wrote at the age of twenty-nine.
Title-page of the Catholic Index, revised for the last time in 1948 and not reprinted after 1966. (photo
credit 20.5)
In this belief she brought up her son. “Never in all my early childhood, did anyone address to me the
affecting preamble, ‘Once upon a time!’ I was told about missionaries, but never about pirates; I was
familiar with humming-birds, but I had never heard of fairies,” Gosse remembered. “They desired to make
me truthful; the tendency was to make me positive and sceptical. Had they wrapped me in the soft folds
of supernatural fancy, my mind might have been longer content to follow their traditions in an
unquestioning spirit.” The parents who took the Hawkins County Public Schools to court in Tennessee in
1980 had obviously not read Gosse’s claim. They argued that an entire elementary school series, which
included Cinderella, Goldilocks and The Wizard of Oz, violated their fundamentalist religious beliefs.
Authoritarian readers who prevent others from learning to read, fanatical readers who decide what can
and what cannot be read, stoical readers who refuse to read for pleasure and demand only the retelling of
facts that they themselves hold to be true: all these attempt to limit the reader’s vast and diverse powers.
But censors can also work in different ways, without need of fire or courts of law. They can reinterpret
books to render them serviceable only to themselves, for the sake of justifying their autocratic rights.
In 1967, when I was in my fifth year of high school, a military coup took place in Argentina, led by
General Jorge Rafael Videla. What followed was a wave of human-rights abuses such as the country had
never seen before. The army’s excuse was that it was fighting a war against terrorists; as General Videla
defined it, “a terrorist is not just someone with a gun or bomb, but also someone who spreads ideas that
are contrary to Western and Christian civilization.” Among the thousands kidnapped and tortured was a
priest, Father Orlando Virgilio Yorio. One day, Father Yorio’s interrogator told him that his reading of the
Gospel was false. “You interpreted Christ’s doctrine in too literal a way,” said the man. “Christ spoke of
the poor, but when he spoke of the poor he spoke of the poor in spirit and you interpreted this in a literal
way and went to live, literally, with poor people. In Argentina those who are poor in spirit are the rich and
in the future you must spend your time helping the rich, who are those who really need spiritual help.”
Thus, not all the reader’s powers are enlightening. The same act that can bring a text into being, draw
out its revelations, multiply its meanings, mirror in it the past, the present and the possibilities of the
future, can also destroy or attempt to destroy the living page. Every reader makes up readings, which is
not the same as lying; but every reader can also lie, wilfully declaring the text subservient to a doctrine,
to an arbitrary law, to a private advantage, to the rights of slave-owners or the authority of tyrants.
Sebastian Brant, author of The Ship of Fools. (photo credit 20.6)
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