1
PASCO
I am – and have always been – a reader.
Throughout my most socially-awkward years, otherwise known as middle school, I clung
to my books and threw myself into them with the gusto that other kids threw into their
friendships. While my sixth grade compatriots were pining after eighth graders, I was riding on
broomsticks after Harry, or training my daemon with Lyra and Will. My life was a lyric from a
song by one of my favorite bands, The Bravery: “I am so homesick now for someone that I never
knew, I am so homesick now for someplace I will never be.”
So imagine my surprise when, upon researching the concept of intellectual freedom, I
saw one of my favorite series, His Dark Materials by Phillip Pullman, listed on the American
Library Association’s list of the most challenged books of 2008. A little more research showed
that the third book in the series, The Amber Spyglass, actually had censored passages throughout
it to curb “incipient sexuality” in Lyra, the young protagonist.
I felt as though I’d just found out that Bella, my white German Sheppard and my constant
(sometimes rather annoyingly so) companion, had always had a glass eye my family had
neglected to tell me. It was the sudden and unpleasant feeling of not knowing fully something
that I had always loved.
So I continued researching intellectual freedom – specifically, violations of it. The more I
read, the more I realized that censorship seemed to be the main aggressor. Since the inception of
written word, there seemingly has always been two things: a critic, and a protestor. But
regardless of all the novels I saw targeted – To Kill a Mockingbird, really!? – I kept coming back
to His Dark Materials. I couldn’t wrap my mind around the idea that novels I’d read in middle
2
school, probably around the age of twelve, were racy enough to ignite a large enough faction of
our adult American population to contest the series’ existence.
Slowly, I understood. His Dark Materials is a sort of modern retelling of Milton’s
Paradise Lost (although, these days, what isn’t?), with everything a Milton retelling would
entail. As I ruminated, I was struck by memories with force akin to the Whomping Willow. In
The Amber Spyglass, I remembered reading about a frail and imprisoned God. Weak and dying
angels. Demons drifting through interdimensional holes in our universe, and Heaven so corporeal
as to be reduced to a floating castle in the sky.
So perhaps reducing God, or essentially what half of the modern world, myself included,
believes to be the Creator of All Things, to a shriveling, fallible, elderly man in a dog cage might
be a smidge racy.
Yet as controversial as the notion might be, did it truly warrant banning the novels?
Should an idea be robbed of its existence simply because it offends the sensibilities of the
masses?
My answer was immediate: no, of course not!
That wasn’t to say that I opposed the notion of banning novels entirely. I imagined that if
any novel explicitly incited violence against any persons or particular groups of people, then it
would be within the rights of publishers, bookstores, and, most importantly, libraries, to refuse
their business. Yet, then again, what if incitation was part of a novel’s artistry? The more I
thought about it, the more I realized that banning was not only a crime against the written word,
but a can of worms, as well – one that should only ever be opened under the most necessary
conditions.
3
Conditions that were not present in His Dark Materials, nor any of the other most
challenged books I’d researched, for that matter.
The only evidence I could ever present with full and total certainty is this: as a child
reading a book contested for religious slander, what stuck with me most was its magic. The
protagonists, Will and Lyra, with their daemons – which were, despite the connotations of their
names, just form-changing animal companions that contained extensions of their owner’s souls.
In novels that many feared would have me call my religion into question, I was struck singularly
by the idea of perpetual companionship (and isn’t that a Christian notion, if you’ve ever heard
one?).
I would like to think that this isn’t due to a lack of reading comprehension. My voracious
literary appetite and my higher-level lexile score both would argue against that. Nor would I say
that my penchant for the magic versus the controversial was due to blind Christian faith (I’m
nothing if not inquisitive).
Instead, I would argue that perhaps Pullman’s intention wasn’t indoctrination, as those in
favor of banning feared. Or, both more likely and more simply, I would say that every book is
dependent on its reader. No novel can have a definitive message because there will always be
that margin of communication that’s dependent upon the perception of the reader.
Say an entire novel was comprised of the following sentence: “You are not a human. You
are a robot.” It could never be universally agreed that the message of the novel was about that the
reader of his or her robotic existence, because there will always be the few who say that perhaps
the entire piece is making a statement about receptiveness and cyclical existence and the art of
punctuation.
4
In this is the beauty of the written word – interpretation and creative autonomy. In other
words, intellectual freedom. Thus, to ban or to censor books is to compromise what exactly it is
that books stand for. And as a kid for whom life’s greatest offense was not being sent an
invitation to Hogwarts, I say that this is entirely unacceptable.
After all, without intellectual freedom, how many of my best friends would be robbed of
the opportunity to exist?
WC: 964