Sen. David Richards: Amid Book-Banning Trend, the English Language Itself Is Now the Culprit

School library books in a file photo. John Moore/Getty Images

Commentary

Ontario’s Peel District School Board, those wonders who are systematically removing treasured books from library shelves, might watch the movie “Storm Center,” starring Bette Davis as the middle-aged librarian who is destroyed because she refused to take a single controversial book off her library shelf.

One can only wish there were more like her. But as we have already seen, this courage costs careers and lives. Professors are silent, regrettably, and perhaps the public doesn’t know. So, there will come a time when the anti-fascists will become fascists. Worst of all, they will crowd together and gloat at the transition. And celebrate killing the person who reminds them that two plus two equals four.

So then, to my book “Notes on a Writer’s Life.”

From the time I heard from certain New Brunswickers in 1977 that my novels should be banned, until I fought against the banning of “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” in 1992, I sensed that the fight was never over, and never would be. I don’t care about my books, but it is the callous certainty against other very grand books that I challenge.

In “Fahrenheit 451,” books are burned because they cause emotion—sometimes deep emotion. The euphemism of today about offensive books is that they don’t reflect the truth in identity, especially though not always, if it is a white man writing the book. Identity becomes the great leveller against so many books, by people who say they are determined to level the playing field. What they are doing of course is trying to change the rules of the playing field so they can somehow have the power to exclude.

They forget what Terence said about all peoples: “I am human and therefore nothing human is alien to me.” Dostoyevsky would know this to be true. And that is why beyond all his maudlin, poor passages, he is still one of the greatest of all writers.

There is a remake of the movie version of “Fahrenheit 451,” starring Michael Shannon. The opening scene shows books being lit afire and destroyed. Of course, books such as “Wise Blood” by Flannery O’Connor, “Huckleberry Finn,” and so many others, if you support these books, they will be careful not to call you a racist—but they will say you are exhibiting traits of white privilege that one should be ashamed of and are an enabler of racism. They, of course, would never use such a word against themselves, and their in-vogue acceptable and narrow bias is known to everyone but themselves.

I was to give the keynote address at the worldwide symposium on Flannery O’Connor’s work. In 2020, they scratched her name off a building. This has become the new misapprehension of the age. And the misapprehension of the age is something Robert Browning said a true artist must fight.

And the best of us will fight against it—though the worst of us, as Yeats said, lack all conviction. He was certainly right about that.

I remember the movie “This Land Is Mine” where during World War II, the Germans list certain books that must be banned or altered in a certain occupied town. In altering them, pages and pages have to be torn out. Charles Laughton’s character tells his students to tear them out and burn them, knowing the pages are profoundly important, but is too frightened not to do so. (He becomes the hero of the story in the end.) Maureen O’Hara’s character, his love interest, tells her students to tear out the said pages, and give them to her—she will hide them until such time as she can staple them back in their proper place.

They were facing the tyranny and insult of callous authority. Most of them were accepting the unacceptable, still able to call it freedom by re-evaluating the meaning of the books they destroyed, and being silent in the face of facts, which told them they were cowards. (But it would be very difficult to be brave.)

Those professors, or at least many of them, who helped burn James Joyce’s “Dubliners” near Trinity College in 1904 would, if alive today, teach it with gusto. Until such time it is once again deemed a book to be burned. Stanford University has 1,000 words they say should be banned—the English language itself is now the culprit.

This is a desperate part of our modern life—a horrid new authority. Believe me or not, I am not speaking of my own books. I couldn’t care less if they are ever taught. All of this calling for retribution against the traces of evil colonialism is evident in my 2017 novel “Mary Cyr.”

Mary Cyr becomes the terrible settler in the new lexicon of the woke mobs’ damnation of the past. Mary Cyr, when she is still a child, not much more than a little girl, becomes very much aware of this other power, the power of the mob. This coercive power, Mary Cyr discovers, has little to do with money, for she is abnormally rich, and has to fight against this kind of intellectual selective outrage and tiresome theoretical bigotry all her life. For it is bigotry generated by principle.

Mary Cyr finds the damnation of her ancestry in books, in plays, in dozens of movies, and in lessons taught at school.

From the Irish potato famine, to the Acadian expulsion, to the decimation of the First Nations, she is the target. The one who is culpable. Not only is she English (though she is half Acadian) and Catholic, she is both white and rich—all things the woke have now joined in unison to abhor. Of course. they do not abhor their own sense of privilege, just hers. The mimetic desire to hate has filled them. The very thing their championing of equality should forbid.

Mary Cyr is doomed at 11 years of age and she knows it. By 11, she is an outcast within her wider French Acadian family and within the wider concept of what Canada should become by people promoting equality who would have taken over her position in a second. She knows her heritage is one of an outmoded class system. But there were so many against her, and because of it she refuses to accept her sentence without fighting back. And that is what makes her a great woman. I think one of the greatest women I managed to create, at any rate.

Her nemesis, Vanderfluttin, is a champion of a pedestrian egalitarian equality. He champions First Nations in the way Rousseau did, unknowing and in fact lessening them as human beings, thinking of them as river nymphs and wood Gods who lived in a world of peace before the English came, and believed in Mary Cyr’s family’s racism because it is convenient to his system of belief.

He seeks manhood in adopting First Nation values, like Grey Owl, never knowing smarter people, including smarter First Nations people, have caught on. In his own way, it is he not Mary Cyr who is the sublime racist. In fact, one might say she cares far more for the First Nations people than he does.

Mary Cyr is simply assumed to be a bigot by others with less honour, and that is a horrid, horrid penalty to carry through life. That she carries it bravely is what should be classified as one of the grand human triumphs. To make the point of Mary Cyr clearer: when Orwell wrote of Burma, of killing an elephant, of being a representative of British oppression, and believing that, as a small-time colonial policeman, he was part of a callous government organism, he began his essay with the image of the Buddhist monks spitting betel juice at him as they passed him by.

Mary Cyr, in how she was treated, would know all about it too. Mary Cyr watches this world most of her life without comment. She lives a solitary and lonely existence, fights the world’s unfairness with great bravery, has a son she cannot save, and dies because of the very mob who pretends to be seeking justice, but a mob which falls into the trap of horrendous retribution in the name of goodness.

Which is exactly, believe it or not, and no matter how woke or progressive you might think you are, what the devil wishes us to do.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.