Prizewinning Novel Challenged: The Giver is Important Reading
Popping pills? Suicide? Lethal injections? These are reasons given [CC Times, 11/6/2007, A1] for two mothers’ request for removal of Lois Lowry’s prizewinning novel The Giver from all Mount Diablo Schools reading lists and libraries. Not so fast. Before we “burn” this book, readers should take these out-of-context conclusions, and place the pieces right back in context where they belong, inside the whole story.
Too Literal Reading Fuels Censorship Request
That behaviors and rituals practiced in The Giver’s society eerily recall our own is no accident, given the daily news and our country’s intensifying debate about abuse of the Bill of Rights, rule of law, and secrecy. Readers will discover that The Giver’s portrait of a superficially utopian, artificially cheerful, and “chemically” engineered totalitarian society, run by a committee obsessed with language control, is highly ironic. How nice, how pleasant the inhabitants seem. So efficient. Yet their ability to see different colors has been drained. Anything but shades of gray might trigger memories. Disobedience is met with death. Obeying rules, banal conformity, and role-playing is prized above humanity, feeling, memory, and love. No rainbows there. Strikes a chord in collective memory, doesn’t it? That we can and do hear those echoes, makes this novel an effective discussion starter for talking about democracy.
Ironic Novel Portrays Utopian Tyranny
Don’t be fooled: the novel is no downer. It is a vehicle for hope and courage. Lowry’s writing is timeless. Her Giver reads like a prose meditation on Ecclesiastes, “To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven,” unless, the poetry of joy gets removed line by line by some committee. Readers can be trusted to understand Lowry’s irony. She is, after all, author of the acclaimed Holocaust novel, Number the Stars, whose young protagonist shares identity issues with The Giver’s Jonas. The Giver itself is in excellent company: Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451; Orwell’s 1984, and Levitin’s The Cure come to mind—all portraits of totalitarian societies.
Going Beyond Parental Control Into Censoring ALL Children
By requesting removal of a prizewinner like The Giver from Mount Diablo Schools, these mothers would censor not just their own children, but the right of us all–teachers, parents, students, and citizens—to discuss together, ethics and morality as depicted in a fictional totalitarian society. They would silence questioning, and by enforcing silence on our reading, commit the ultimate irony, of community language control, just like the society in The Giver. I urge everyone to read the book. Protect the right to learn, read, and reason. Tell our School Board, “Keep The Giver!”
Keywords: Censorship challenges, Book censorship, Lois Lowry, Giver, Literary prizes, Newbery Award, Utopian societies, Totalitarian societies, Mind control, Mood control, Young adult novels, Individuality, Technology and Society, Euthanasia, Eugenics, Community, Civilization–History, Memory, Irony in fiction, Mount Diablo Public School District, Contra Costa County, California.
© Val Morehouse,Val Morehouse, Nov. 18, 2007.