Roland Emmerich’s eminent climate-disaster film, The Day After Tomorrow (2004), contains a sequence of scenes in which, having taken shelter in the New York Public Library from extreme cold and a tsunami that has flooded the streets of Manhattan, a group of refugees find an office with an old fireplace and start burning books from the library’s shelves to keep warm and stay alive. The group includes two of the film’s major characters, Sam Hall (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Laura Chapman (Emmy Rossum), high school students and the film’s main love interest. Sam is son of the film’s dominant character, Jack Hall (Dennis Quaid). He is a paleo-climatologist who in the beginning of the film warns politicians and government officials at a world climate conference held in India of an impending climate catastrophe – to considerable scepticism and little avail, until it is almost too late, which jeopardizes his own life, the life of his son… as a matter of fact, all life in the Western hemisphere. In terms of the overall thematic statement made by the film, the sequence of scenes which I mean to analyse here may be insignificant; for the purpose of the present essay, which is to take a critical look at the history, theory and practice of book burning (as an important species of what has been called ‘cultural destruction’), it is all-important.
On finding a stack of books in the office, Sam starts to throw them into the fireplace to light a fire. Judith (Sheila McCarthy), a librarian, says to him with indignation and alarm: “You can’t burn books”, and is backed up by Jeremy (Tom Rooney), a colleague of hers: “No, absolutely not.” Sam retorts, disarmingly: “You wanna freeze to death?”, which cuts short the conversation and leaves room only for action in the form of Elsa (Amy Sloan) walking off to find books to burn, followed by Jeremy, who seems to cast himself in the dual role as finder of suitable books to burn and watchdog ensuring that certain other books will be spared. Accordingly in the next scene [1:11.35-1:12:00], we find Jeremy and Elsa arguing over a trolley whether to burn books by Friedrich Nietzsche. As expected, Jeremy is there as much to protect books and the ideas they contain as to find fuel:
Jeremy: Friedrich Nietzsche! We cannot burn Friedrich Nietzsche; he was the most important thinker of the 19th Century!
Elsa: Oh, please! Nietzsche was a chauvinist pig, who was in love with his sister.
Jeremy: He was not a chauvinist pig Elsa: But he was in love with his sister.
Brian Parks: Uh... 'scuse me? You guys? Yeah... there's a whole section on tax law down here that we can burn.
Brian Parks’ (Arjay Smith) remark about the combustible tax law section ends the scene on a note of comic relief.
A few scenes further on, we have a new encounter between Jeremy and Elsa [1:20:45-1:21.34], this time in the roomy office, with the fire burning in the background:
Elsa: What've you got there?
Jeremy: The Gutenberg Bible... it was in the Rare Books Room.
Elsa: Think God's gonna' save you?
Jeremy: No... I don't believe in God.
Elsa: You're holding on to that Bible pretty tight.
Jeremy: I'm protecting it.
[pause as Elsa glances at J.D. throwing books on the fire]
Jeremy: This Bible... is the first book ever printed. It represents... the dawn of the Age of Reason. As far as I'm concerned, the written word is mankind's greatest achievement.
[Elsa gives a light snort]
Jeremy: You can laugh... but if Western Civilization is finished... I'm gonna' save at least one little piece of it.
A seemingly indulgent and interpretatively open smile on Elsa’s face closes the scene. She appears to accept his strong feelings about and devotion to books, but as a slightly nerdy minority view (supported by the obsessive tone in which he speaks the lines quoted above), as if to say: ‘O.K., let him have his Bible and his irrational obsession with books’. The view represented and defended by Jeremy (and Judith) could be paraphrased thus: as a liberal humanist you must uphold in principle, as a moral axiom, the sanctity of the book as chief object and carrier of humane culture, an object which must under no circumstances be burnt or otherwise destroyed.
Historically speaking, Jeremy has not been alone in representing this view, on the contrary. His seems in fact to have been the majority view of (the status and value of) books and book learning in Western culture and civilization – at least inside the historical period which has come increasingly to be defined and referred to by cultural historians as the Gutenberg Parenthesis, the period roughly between 1500 and 2000 (cf. Pettitt; Sauerberg). Among many others, Jeremy’s view is supported by Thomas Moore (b. 1940), American writer of popular spiritual books and columnist for Huffington post, for whom all books are sacred: “I love everything to do with books.” For Moore, a library is a kind of chapel, which “honors a book and easily turns it into a sacred place” (Moore). Jeremy’s may be a slightly less religiously tinged affection for books than Moore’s, but the net result is the same: as carrier of the written word, “mankind’s greatest achievement”, the book (any book) must be protected from harm, desecration and ultimately destruction, especially from our culture’s symbolically most potent – and by the same token most humiliating – mode of destruction: fire. For as journalist Jon Henley said in The Guardian for September
10, 2010, in response to pastor Terry Jones’ plan to burn 200 copies of the Qur’an in Florida: “There is something uniquely symbolic about the burning of books. A book, plainly, is something more than ink and paper, and burning one (or many) means something more than destroying it by any other means” (Henley).
All the same, the last two millennia and more of human civilization can boast an impressive record of large-scale, public book burnings and library destructions, and several scholars have recapitulated the chapters of this tragic story, in short academic articles or book-length monographs. In the former category belongs Hans Hillerbrand’s 2005-presidential address to the American Academy of Religion: “On Book Burnings and Book Burners: Reflections on the Power (and Powerlessness) of Ideas”. In the latter category we find Rebecca Knuth’s companion volumes, Libricide: The Regime-Sponsored Destruction of Books and Libraries in the Twentieth Century (2003) and Burning Books and Leveling Libraries: Extremist Violence and Cultural Destruction (2006), Haig Bosmajian’s Burning Books (2006), Lucien Polastron’s Books on Fire: The Destruction of Libraries Throughout History (2007), and Fernando Baez’ A Universal History of the Destruction of Books: From Ancient Sumer to Modern-day Iraq (2008).
Haig Bosmajian provides the best brief historical overview of his subject.
Having in his introduction noted the paucity of “works devoted exclusively to the subject of book burning” and surveyed what little there is of complete or tangential scholarly treatments, Bosmajian promises his reader a work “devoted exclusively to book burnings”. As he explains,
“Book burning” is to be taken literally here, not figuratively. Often, “book burning” is used figuratively by authors to mean book banning. There have appeared articles that are headlined with “book burnings,” but a close reading of the articles reveals that they are about book bannings, not book burnings.
Further, I have omitted inclusion of books that were said to be “destroyed” or
“confiscated” because such terms did not directly indicate they were actually
burned.
Hence, the purpose of this work is to identify the book burners and the works they purposely set afire over the centuries and to examine the persistent use of metaphoric language “justifying” the fiery destruction of the heretical, seditious, and obscene books and sometimes their authors. (5-6)
Thematically organized around three centrally different motivations for burning books, religious (Burning Blasphemous-Heretical Books), political (Burning Seditious-Subversive Books), and (sexual-)moral (Burning Obscene-Immoral Books), Bosmajian recounts in detail the history of each from antiquity into the twentieth century, with the significant variation that while religiously motivated book-burnings decrease in number the closer we approach our own time,
book-burnings increase in number and mass of books burned as far as the other two stories are concerned.
Bosmajian’s is an erudite overview of the history of book burning, fuelled by equal measures of scholarly curiosity and a moral indignation shared by fellow-scholars. Indeed, lines from all the works mentioned above could be quoted in support of Bosmajian’s closing statement in his Preface:
There is something frightful, dismaying and tragic when crowds of human beings stand in awe, celebrating a bonfire of condemned books going up in smoke and reduced to ashes. I hope the following pages contribute to an awareness of the magnitude of that historical and universal tragedy and inhumanity. (1-2)
Rebecca Knuth’s books are markedly different from the other works mentioned, for at least three reasons: 1) confined to the 20th century though it may be, her focus on libricide or biblioclasm1 is thematically broader than that of her fellow-scholars and includes cases of lootings of libraries and museums during the power vacuum and anarchy following an armed conflict (fx Iraq 2003); bombings, including fire bombings, which ‘incidentally’ hit libraries (Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo 1943-45) – indeed, the inclusion of any biblioclastic incident of a certain magnitude that could be classified as a case of ‘cultural destruction’, broadens her scope considerably more than fx Bosmajian’s; 2) she works, not exclusively historically, but from an interdisciplinary platform which places her book “in the realm of international studies and comparative sociology, particularly the scholarship of genocide” (Knuth, 2006:
xii); 3) far from lashing out in moral terms against the barbarity, irrationality and inhumanity of book burners, in terms, that is, which would demonize and stigmatize them as ‘others’, Knuth makes an effort to understand their mindset and motivation.
As she explains in her introductory chapter, “Understanding Modern Biblioclasm”:
Condemnations imply that the destruction has no other meaning than to signify the presence of irrational forces. They effectively dismiss the destroyers of books as barbaric, ignorant, evil - as outside the bounds of morality, reason, even understanding. If instead we acknowledge the perpetrators as human
1 ”Book and library destruction shares many elements with iconoclasm, the destruction of images that a perpetrator associates with corrupt establishments (“Iconoclasm” 1989, 609). I have chosen to use the term biblioclasm in this book because of its linguistic relation to iconoclasm and because, by association, it suggests that there is a moral judgment, on the part of the perpetrator, concerning what the target represents. In the Oxford English Dictionary, biblioclasm is defined as “the breaking of books” and cited as first appearing in print in 1864 in a text on religious theory. Twenty years later, a passionate scholar used the term to denounce the Catholic priests who had burned Maya and Aztec manuscripts after the Spanish conquest: “May these bishops expiate their crimes in the purgatory of biblioclasts!”
(“Biblioclasm” 1989, 169). In this book the term is used not to levy judgment, but to denote purposeful action that is rooted in moral repugnance or judgment” (Knuth, 2006: 3). The term autodafé (Portuguese, from Latin actus fidei, ‘act of faith’) is generally understood as signifying book-burning. However, the term has only in the course of time come to acquire that meaning by association with its original meaning of the ‘act of faith’ pledged by secular authorities as part of the ceremonious burning of heretics in the Spanish Inquisition.
beings with concerns and a goal – albeit misguided – of effecting social change, a number of questions emerge that usher us into the subject with clearer meaning and purpose. (Knuth, 2006: 2)
One may wonder about the very recent upsurge of interest in this rather scorching subject, as documented by the publication of five scholarly treatments in as many years. The reason is not far to seek, though, and the title of Baez’ book lifts a corner of the veil on it: Ancient Sumer (Iraqi) incidents of book burning may not be able to stir us to action or even reflection, but taking books, libraries and other cultural objects hostage or destroying them in present-day wars and conflicts alerts us to the dogged persistence of destructive practices and rites into our own time and at the very heart of what we consider civilization. Indeed, for the biblioclastic imperative has continued to gather force and momentum even in very recent years. Any complete history of the subject would need to record, from among the number of instances which are too recent even to have been listed in any of the above, recently-published works: the burning of hundreds of copies of the New Testament by orthodox Jewish students in a suburb of Tel Aviv in 2008, organized by the deputy mayor of the town;
the announcement in July 2010 by pastor Terry Jones of plans to burn 200 copies of the Qur’an on September 11, 2010, in his Gainesville church in Florida, to commemorate the 9th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Heeding a storm of protests against his plan, Jones refrained from carrying it out, but he had become enough of an inspiration for others to go through with burnings of the Qur’an elsewhere in the USA. On March 20, 2011, Jones did, however, burn a copy of the Qur’an in his church, though inconspicuously, without any media attention.
Let me conclude this review of the state of the art in research on book burning by mentioning a topic touched upon by almost all of the scholars mentioned above, and made very explicit by Polastron in his Preface: “The book is the double of the man, and burning it is the equivalent of killing him. And sometimes one does not occur without the other” (x). Short of killing artists, writers, political/religious dissenters, to burn books ranks in the general consciousness as the worst imaginable onslaught on humanity and civilization, a suppression of democratic principles and denial of fundamental human rights. But inside the Gutenberg parenthesis, you hardly distinguish between ‘killing’ books and killing their authors. For Bosmajian, “Both homicide and bibliocide are reprehensible” (3). The German Romantic writer Henrich Heine (1797-1856) is quoted time and again in the literature on book-burning from his play, Almansor: Eine Tragödie (1823), on the contiguity of these atrocities: “dort, wo man Bücher/Verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen” (wherever they burn books they will also in the end burn human beings). The English poet John Milton (1608-74), quoted by Bosmajian, provided the intellectual background for the near-identification of book and author in Areopagitica (1644), his polemic against censorship and advocacy of the fundamental right to freedom of speech and writing:
“Books are not absolutely dead things, but doe contain a potencie of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are” (5).
The question begs itself: does The Day After Tomorrow condone the burning of books, or does it challenge us to condone it? It would be wrong simply to answer yes, the more so because in the scene which ends the book-burning sequence [1:25:55-1:27:05], we see a re-vindication of the value of books. Laura’s condition has deteriorated overnight due to a serious-looking wound on her leg, she is all pale and feverish, and people are gathering around her, deeply concerned. Suddenly Judith returns from the stacks with a book in her hand, claiming that “it’s hypothermia.”
Asked how she knows and whether it could not simply be the flu, Judith, who was one of the book-defenders to begin with, replies triumphantly: “Books can be good for things other than burning. What are her symptoms?” She proceeds to enumerate, with much conviction, the symptoms of Laura’s condition. Still, this is only a half-victory for books and their inherent value, for the book Judith has recovered is a strictly useful one (a sort of encyclopedia of medicine, it seems), not just any book – and least of all the kind of useless book that many normally associate with books, namely literature (fiction). In other words: we are faced, at the end of The Day After Tomorrow, with a clash between two conceptions of the value of the book: the Gutenberg-parenthetical, according to which you would prefer to die of cold hugging a Bible, and the post-parenthetical, according to which burning a Bible to keep warm and survive would be a legitimate act, under the circumstances – and the film/its maker does not seem to endorse either view or position.
The Day after Tomorrow is fiction. However, burning books for fuel is no longer pure fiction or a wholly theoretical issue. In an article in The Guardian for January 6, 2010, journalist Leo Hickman asked “Why are they burning books in South Wales?” in response to news of
pensioners in Swansea […] reportedly buying books from charity shops for just a few pence each and taking them home for fuel. With temperatures plummeting and energy costs on the rise, thick books such as encyclopaedias are said to be particularly sought after.
Leo Hickman, who is an environmental journalist and chief adviser on climate change for WWF-UK, had been appalled by allegations of this practice, which he denounces in the strongest terms as “an act of wanton barbarism”, there being “little to rival the symbolism of setting fire to a book”. Hickman’s gut-reaction outrage at the practice of South Welsh pensioners burning encyclopaedias to keep warm is perfectly in line with that of the historiographers of book-burning practices listed above. It is also, however, cultural hypocrisy, ventilated in spite or in ignorance of the ‘life’ that most books live, and not least of the way they end their lives. For to what we could call the ‘literary cycle’, the cycle comprising the conception, production, distribution and consumption of books, we need to add: the
death/destruction of books. It is a fact that books are as mortal as we are, even though some books have a life expectancy far exceeding that of the average human being.
Some special and very rare books (like the Gutenberg Bible) are kept alive artificially, so to say, in ideal circumstances (which include digitization) by private collectors or by the institutions that typically store and preserve books, namely libraries. Still, most books have a relatively short life expectancy, not only in terms of popularity and actually being read, but even in the most material terms, as physical objects, typically because they are so poorly produced (and therefore cheap) that after a few readings they are in a condition suitable only for being disposed of, either immediately as waste or via the roller-coaster ride of donation to a charity shop and being sold second-hand (which anyway typically just postpones the inevitable).
However, many books never make it beyond the storage rooms in publishing houses. Such ‘remaindered’ book stocks are often offered at a discount (the price usually corresponding to the production costs), to their authors, who may be able and willing to buy a certain amount of books, while the remaining copies are destroyed.
The mode of destruction of books is not by fire, but by maculation, that is, by
The mode of destruction of books is not by fire, but by maculation, that is, by