Where's the Edge?

Page 3 November–December 2007 Dangerous Books Introduction to Focus: Eric Miles Williamson, Focus Editor About two years ago, at a pediatrician’s office in Warrensburg, Missouri, I picked up a magazine to pass the time. The magazine, The Trumpet, featured an article entitled, “Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries.” Including the also-rans, the article reads like a list of texts that should head up a fineliberaleducation—JohnDewey’sDemocracyand Education (1916), Auguste Comte’s The Course of Positive Philosophy (1830–42), Friedrich Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil (1886), John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (1859), Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859), Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed (1965), Sigmund Freud’s A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis (1910), and, of course, Karl Marx’s and Friedrich Engels’s Communist Manifesto (1848). Each listed book is annotated with a justification for its inclusion. The justifications typically explain that the books are either anti-free trade capitalism, or that they are grounded in a philosophy that works against morality. Books are “harmful,” then, based upon the ideologies they espouse, presuming that these ideologies , were they to be known and admired, would be the causes of harmful effects.Adangerous or “harmful ” book is one that can persuasively lead the unwitting or morally ambivalent reader astray, a kind of perfect-bound Mephistopheles. This argument has as an implicit premise that books are causes, not effects, instigators rather than reactions, indices to possible (if not probable) future human behaviors rather than products of the times in which they are written and therefore de facto expressions of current conditions and dangers rather than blueprints for future rebellion and revolution. Mephistopheles, however, did not lead Faustus astray. If Faustus hadn’t called for Mephistopheles, he’d not have made his bargain with the Devil: Doctor Faustus found only and precisely what he was looking for. Likewise, books don’t cause revolutions: books, at their best, are expressions of revolutions already beginning. Great books don’t change the way people think, either. Great books merely deliver what people already think but haven’t necessarily themselves expressed. This special “Focus Issue” of American Book Review differs from other Focus Issues in rather substantive ways. First, the essays we’re using are between 2,000 and 3,500 words in length, two-tothree times our usual maximum word count. We’ve let our essayists—Steve Davenport, Larry Fondation, Rob Johnson, and Mark Shechner—stretch out so that the essays don’t just have the quip-like hit-andrun quality of the aforementioned “Harmful Books” piece and so many other list-projects that proliferate the mass media and even book publishing today. If we’re going to ascribe qualitative assessments to things—especially to aesthetic productions—then we should defend our assessments with more than a few one-liners and grunts. But more unusual in the “Focus” context for ABR is this: we’ve not restricted our essayists to current books, or even recent books for that matter. Our essayists were encouraged to write about whatever books they chose fit, and, therefore, they had the full run of literary history at their disposal. The reasoning behind this departure from protocol is that it seemed naïve, at least to this editor, to ascribe the moniker “dangerous” to a book that has just arrived at the bookstores. The likelihood of a book—any book—in a given era or even epoch being “dangerous” is slim at best, and in all likelihood unknowable, at least until tomorrow or perhaps the day after that. Most books just politely go away. A dangerous or “harmful” book is one that can lead the unwitting or morally ambivalent reader astray. Initially for this introduction, I’d thought to write an essay which argued that pulp fiction, genre novels, and mainstream bestsellers posed a pressing threat to the Western world. I intended to argue that like delusional Don Quixotes, we’ve heard so many fantastical and tidy stories of hope and redemption, of everything working out for a Panglossian good, that by and large as a culture we have come to believe them without question. We purchase on credit because we...