A book can't be banned for stray sentences

[kpjayan]

An interesting judgment, by none less than the Supreme court.


The effect of the words used in the offending material must be judged from the standards of reasonable, strong minded, firm and courageous men, and not those of weak and vacillating minds, nor of those who scent danger in every hostile point of view. The class of readers for whom the book is primarily meant would also be relevant for judging the probable consequences of the writing

http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/article514199.ece

[Amoxcalli]

The class of readers for whom the book is primarily meant would also be relevant for judging the probable consequences of the writing

Doesn't that strike anyone as odd? Wouldn't it also contradict the first clause when a book targets a cowardly audience?

[lenz]

Originally Posted by kpjayan http://www.worldliteratureforum.com/forum/images/buttons/viewpost.gif (http://www.worldliteratureforum.com/forum/news-discussion/33973-book-cant-banned-stray-sentences.html#post67825)
The class of readers for whom the book is primarily meant would also be relevant for judging the probable consequences of the writing



Doesn't that strike anyone as odd? Wouldn't it also contradict the first clause when a book targets a cowardly audience?

Yes. If a book contains apparent incitement to hatred and violence and the class of readers "for whom the book is primarily meant", i.e. "weak and vacillating minds" ,who consider themselves to be "reasonable, strong minded, firm and courageous men," consider it to be rational and worthy of respect then the judgment of the book by the courts must also be a judgment of those readers. So, the question is, which class of reader is the book intended for? I don't think banning the book is of any help, since that implies that no one can be trusted to read it correctly.

[Eric]

The "incitement to hatred" argument is a tricky one. It is often used by the media as a way of avoiding identifying ethnic groups from which serial offenders come, for fear of stoking up hatred against that ethnic group as a whole. So if 100% of offenders in a particular instance (e.g. drunken British yobboes running riot in a foreign city) were British and white-skinned you could argue that pointing out that they were British would demonstrate prejudice against Whites. Just like if 100% of rioters in another incident were, say, Moroccan, then you could argue that mentioning their ethnic origin constituted prejudice against that particular nation, or people from the Maghreb as a whole.

If a sentence in a novel says "Kill the Boers" this might be regarded as a threat against Afrikaners. But when a South African rap artist sang this publicly, the ANC government did nothing. And then the White supremacist Afrikaner troublemaker Terre'Blanche was hacked to death. And we will perhaps never know whether his being chopped up with a panga was, however indirectly, the result of that song. Or whether there was a whiff of a gay sex crime there too. (Did Terre'Blanche want to rape some young Black man or was this a spurious defence?)

These cases are never black & white (no pun intended). But if you start cherry-picking sentences from a book and stringing them together, there is a risk that you will create an impression of something that would not be there were you to read the book as a whole with everything in its proper context.