If You Get Sick, or Bored, or It Is Raining
Here's a Gruesome Challenge
Whenever anyone tells me that my story Guts goes too far, I point their way to Herman M. Yes, the legendary author of Moby Dick, Herman Melville. Here’s his monstrous tale of building dread, and dark comedy. Fantastic cruelty and absurd pretentiousness. It’s from the novel White-Jacket by Melville, a book banned in the U.S. Navy until 1982. This excerpt is often printed as a stand-alone short story called The Operation.
Know someone with a strong stomach…?
If you can stomach the full audio book, it’s in two parts. They can be found here and here. And the book’s detailed depiction of flogging got flogging outlawed in the military.
My own story collection Make Something Up is among the books recently banned1 by schools, libraries and prisons.2 Wherever dead writers go, I hope I can lift a drink with Herman M.
On lists of banned books, it’s the only book intended for adults. All its fellow banned books are written for children. To me this feels pervy and weird, like when you go to Toys R Us and have to use the bathroom. Those toilets are tiny.
Yes, prisons. A recently retired head of the Texas prison library system once brought me her own collection of my books, for signatures. But while she enjoyed them, the system she’d overseen had banned them for being too subversive.
Was it a blanket ban on all your books? Or a select few? I often think of your explanation that with all the content competing for a consumer’s attention that books (because consumed privately, able to be shut) should go to the places that tv / films / video games cannot… like there’s a moral imperative for the author to take the reader places that can only be accessed through text
When my brother was stationed in Kuwait, he signed up to get mail from a variety of charities/ministries. (He was lonely and getting a letter, even from a stranger was something he looked forward to). One church that was writing him asked if he had a book request. He asked for your most recent release. The church mailed him your entire catalogue up to that point! (Sometime 2003/2004). He said there were a bunch of guys there that wouldn’t read at all - except for your books! Your books they passed around and recommended.
So, it saddens me that there’s a Palahniuk ban in Texas prisons. I suspect there’d be a similar appreciation.
The real challenge would be creating a world where they stop banning books and literature. "Too sexual, stimulating, and violent" as if pornography with much more controversial content isn't a billion dollar industry, ha.