In all the fuss in Britain over youth crime, Ben Myers wonders why books are never cited as a bad influence:
You never see the tabloid headline PECKHAM KILLER HID KNIFE IN PAPERBACK OF BROTHERS KARAMAZOV, or JACQUELINE WILSON NOVELS WARP BRAIN.
In the US, where even children’s literature regularly incurs the wrath of the Christian right, it’s slightly different. Yet when teenagers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed twelve of their Columbine High classmates, the media were quick to consider their record collection, but not their reading tastes.
Now I’m not saying literature should be added to the media’s list of easy targets - not at all. I just wonder why Marilyn Manson is vilified but not the similarly hilarious American Psycho.
Of course, books are occasionally blamed for causing trouble. Think of the hullabaloo over Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. But getting up the nose of a major religion is an entirely different matter. Nobody was suggesting for a moment that reading Rushdie was leading the kids astray.
Maybe it’s just the physical act of reading that keeps it out of the conservative media’s glare. Maybe it just makes sense that something that involves sitting perfectly still in a quiet room and flexing the imagination could never seriously be blamed for the rise of knife crime. Because that would be utterly absurd.
But I think the real reason literature stands outside of youth culture occurs at a deeper, more insidious level: because the media simply no longer consider literature to be a part of youth culture - that books are for the good, clean, knifeless middle class children. If it’s not part of the culture then it can’t be part of the problem. In which case is literature now confined - not for the first time - by class whereas the edgier, more visceral video games, movies and music span all the echelons of society?
First posted: Monday, July 21st, 2008.
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Erm, John Lennon’s killer, Mark David Chapman, was just a bit obsessed with “Catcher in the Rye” …
/ Posted by Mark Thwaite on July 22nd, 2008 at 1:30 pm / Permalink /Hmm. I’ve never thought about books this way. Books have really lost the edge. But then whoever reads books for pleasure are less prone to crimes. Am I right?
/ Posted by Mrinal Bose on July 22nd, 2008 at 5:18 pm / Permalink />> Erm, John Lennon’s killer, Mark David Chapman, was just a bit obsessed with “Catcher in the Rye” …
True - though that was actually a US reader, reading a US book and then killing a man in the US, whereas this piece was about the current UK ‘crimewave’. Thanks for the comments though.
/ Posted by Ben Myers on July 23rd, 2008 at 8:33 am / Permalink /True of an earlier time as well. As far as I know it was the film rather than the book ‘A Clockwork Orange’ that influenced copy-cat crimes.
/ Posted by Kester Aspden on July 25th, 2008 at 5:28 pm / Permalink /Though, broadening the lens somewhat, there seems the strangest blind spot regarding the influence of thought on events in history across all boards. Dostoevsky’s Demons treats ideas, particularly nihilist ones & those that lead to that destination, as malign, almost independent spiritual entities, which take possession of humans, whose agents they become. As is said in Brothers Karamazov, “It was not you who ate the idea, but the idea that ate you.”
/ Posted by Andrew Kenneally on August 6th, 2008 at 12:52 pm / Permalink /