Meanwhile, the political struggle over book banning rages on. The left insists that it is virtuous to “cancel” content and
authors it deems offensive, while the right counters that it is imperative to restrict from schools
content it deems age-inappropriate.
For many who cherish classic literature, sanitizing books like Dahl’s (which, for all their iconic prickliness, could hardly be called offensive by any rational person) and Fleming’s (which do reflect racist attitudes that were sadly common at the time when the novels were published) is almost as bad as banning them.
But sanitizing a book is not almost as bad as banning it. It’s worse.
When a book is banned, at least people know whether or not they read it. In fact, banned books often become forbidden fruit, and people have always had an Edenic compulsion to possess whatever is off limits. Banning a book has always served in part as a way to advertise it.
The sanitization process, by contrast, leaves people believing that they’ve read a given work, when in fact they have read an imposter. Whereas banning a book asserts authority over what language and ideas people are allowed to consume, sanitizing literature is an attempt to erase that language and those ideas altogether, as though they never existed. The insidious lie that effectively erases a given work from history is far more sinister than simply hiding that work from view. What is hidden will eventually be found. What is erased is lost forever.