Freedom of Expression: Banned books

When I was asked recently if I would like to take part in a readathon to support a campaign for press freedom, I thought it was a great idea. A free press is a vital part of a free society, arguably more important than the right to vote an MP or local councillor into office every few years. During the readathon, excerpts from banned books, censored texts and great tracts on freedom will be read out continuously.

However, this presented me with a dilemma. What passage should I choose? I am ashamed to admit that initially I couldn’t think of a single book or pamphlet I liked that fitted into the category. Except Nineteen Eighty-Four, but that seemed too obvious. The Communist Manifesto? Perhaps a touch too overtly political. That can be plan B.

And so I turned to the leather-bound copy of Wikipedia I keep on my bookcase for just such emergencies, and was astonished by what I found. Firstly: Alice in Wonderland? Not, as you might suppose, because the censor detected references to hard drugs in a children’s bedtime book, but because the Chinese General Ho Chien thought the idea of talking animals would have a pernicious effect on the youth of Hunan province. It turns out that censorship has been even more prevalent than I suspected.

As it happened, two Penguin classics I picked up last week in a charity shop, Nabokov’s Lolita (1955) and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857) were also both on the list, on account of their obscenity. Is Oxfam aware that its shops are peddling filth?

And what are we to make of late mediaeval tomes The Canterbury Tales, by the well-known eroticist Geoffrey Chaucer, and The Decameron, by the deviant 14^th century Italian porn-scribbler Giovanni Boccaccio, both of which fell foul of 19^th century U.S. obscenity laws? Well, the Middle Ages are renowned for their loose morals and ‘anything goes’ mentality.

Giovanni Boccaccio clutching his thesaurus in this paparazzi engraving by Raffaele Sanzio Morghen 

Another unusual choice for suppression was a dictionary of modern Serbo-Croatian issued in 1966. It was offensive to Croatians because it included entries for Srbin (Serb) and related terms, but not for Hrvat (Croat)¹. This was not the last time a dictionary was banned either: United States school libraries have form in purging dictionaries containing explicit entries like ‘oral sex’ from their shelves.

Books are occasionally banned for reasons other than their containing sex or talking animals (or, God forbid, both). Other popular categories of books to outlaw are religious books (The Bible), anti-religious books (The Satanic Verses), Communist books (the aforementioned Manifesto), anti-Communist books (Nineteen Eighty-Four), pacifist books (All Quiet on the Western Front) and Nazi books (Mein Kampf).

Animal Farm was doubly unlucky, being both an anti-Soviet book and therefore unacceptable in the USSR (and still, correct me if I’m wrong, prohibited in China), and also featuring talking pigs, which is ostensibly the reason why it is considered unsuitable for the schoolchildren of the Islamic UAE. If it had also had a few raunchy sex scenes, it’s unlikely it would ever have seen the light of day anywhere.

With Brian Leveson’s report on press ethics still being pored over by the powers that be, and many supposed liberals baying for tighter press regulation, I think it’s important for everyone to consider this list of banned writing and its implications. When people are looking back at us in history in five hundred years’ time, do you want to have been on the side of General Ho Chien, or George Orwell?

On Saturday I’ll be reading from Nabokov’s Lolita for as long as they’ll let me, and any other subversive material I can lay my hands on (but probably not the Sun). The readathon is organised by and raising funds for Worldwrite, to fund a series of films about freedom of expression and the press and against censorship, for its online citizen TV station, Worldbytes. To support the readathon or just find out more about it, click here.

WORLDwrite is an education charity with a long track record of developing creative programmes with young people. The charity set up the online Citizen TV channel WORLDbytes and provides free film training to young people, ensuring they can produce programmes and reports which question the way the world is and champion the best for all. The charity also assists partner groups in developing countries with annual global appeals. WORLDwrite is volunteer led and run, has an open door policy and encourages all-comers to get involved and recognise there are no limits to what's possible.

¹Sabrina P. Ramet, The Three Yugoslavias: State-Building And Legitimation, 1918-2005, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2006,  p.231.