A school, however benevolently conceived and humanely administered, is a place of authority, where the energies of the young are regulated, their imaginations pruned and trained into conformity. As such, it will inevitably provoke resistance, rebellion and outright refusal on the part of its wards. Schools exist to stifle freedom, and also to inculcate it, a dialectic that is the essence of true education. Reading, more than any other discipline, is the engine of this process, precisely because it escapes the control of those in charge.
The Utah Bible ban (which is now being appealed) proves as much: It testifies both to the relentless, nihilistic logic of censorship, which can find subversion anywhere, and also to the subversive power of reading, which is what sets the censors off in the first place. The Old and New Testaments are full of sex, violence, magic, ethnic hatred and radical egalitarianism. Their history is an object lesson in the power and danger of reading itself. Literal wars have been fought over how they should be interpreted. Their most famous English translator was executed for heresy.
There is no way to limit a student’s reading to just-right books, or to ensure that she reads them in just the right way. The right way might be the wrong way: the way of terror, discontent. Apostles of reading like to quote Franz Kafka’s aphorism that “a book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us.” By itself, the violence of the metaphor is tempered by its therapeutic implication. Less frequently quoted is Kafka’s previous sentence: “What we need are books that hit us like the most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like a suicide.”
Are those the books you want in your child’s classroom? To read in this way is to go against the grain, to feel oneself at odds, alienated, alone. Schools exist to suppress those feelings, to blunt the ax and gently thaw the sea. That is important work, but it’s equally critical for that work to be subverted, for the full destructive potential of reading to lie in reach of innocent hands.
Reading, like democracy or sexual desire, is an unmanageable, inherently destabilizing force in human life.
In his short, strange book “The Pleasure of the Text,” the French critic and philosopher Roland Barthes distinguished between two kinds of literary work:
Text of pleasure: the text that contents, fills, grants euphoria: the text that comes from culture and does not break with it, is linked to a comfortable practice of reading. Text of bliss: the text that imposes a state of loss, the text that discomforts (perhaps to the point of a certain boredom), unsettles the reader’s historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories, brings to a crisis his relation with language.
This is not far from Kafka, though the language leans toward eroticism rather than angst. Jouissance, the French word translated as “bliss,” also means orgasm, and Barthes’s understanding of the term leans heavily on an understanding of sex as a destructive, disruptive force. Like Kafka’s ax, the text of bliss may not be something that belongs in school libraries. But even though Barthes, writing in the wake of modernism and in the grip of structuralist theories of language, has in mind particular books and authors — Marcel Proust and the Marquis de Sade are among his touchstones — he is really describing modalities of reading. To a member of the slaveholding Southern gentry, “The Columbian Orator” is a text of pleasure, a book that may challenge and surprise him in places, but that does not undermine his sense of the world or his place in it. For Frederick Douglass, it is a text of bliss, “bringing to crisis” (as Barthes would put it) his relation not only to language but to himself.
