A Modest Proposal to Put a Warning Label on Every Novel Before It Hurts Someone

This is satire. It is a thought experiment, and nothing in the next several sections is a news report, a quotation from a real committee or a description of a real policy. Nobody has proposed what follows. We are taking an idea one step further than its fans would, to see whether it falls over, and the librarians in your life may relax.

Now, the proposal. Let us imagine a body called the Committee for the Protection of Readers From Their Own Reading, or CPRFTOR, which is easy to pronounce if you have no teeth. Its charter is a single, kindly sentence: no reader should ever be surprised by a book. The Committee proposes that every novel carry, on its first page, a Warning Label listing everything in the book that might upset anyone. It is a modest proposal. It is the sort of thing no right-thinking person could oppose, which is how you know it is about to get out of hand.

Why the Committee must begin with the Bible

The Committee knows that a rule applied only to modern books would be arbitrary, so it begins with the oldest bestseller in the world. The Bible, by the Committee's first draft, would carry a warning approximately the size of a sermon. It includes a murder in the fourth chapter of the first book, which is rather early. It includes a flood, a plague of frogs, a famine, a few wars, some betrayals, a prophet swallowed by a fish, and the execution of an innocent man. It also includes a number of passages that a modern reader might find challenging on every subject you can think of.

The warning, in draft, reads:

This work contains: fratricide, flooding, famine, locusts, frogs (excessive), betrayal by friends, betrayal by family, betrayal by a kiss, an unjust trial, a public execution, and an ending that some readers may find unresolved or may find overwhelmingly resolved, depending on their prior beliefs.

The Committee's chairman proposes an additional line that says, "Reader discretion is advised, and also repentance." The legal team removes it on grounds that it is a recommendation, and the Committee does not make recommendations. It only notes hazards.

You will notice a problem already. The warning is almost longer than the chapter it is warning about. The Committee considers this a feature.

Then Charlotte's Web

Next on the list, because the Committee has a sense of mischief it does not know it has, is Charlotte's Web, published in 1952, a children's book by E. B. White about a pig, a spider and a barn. A warning label is drafted at once.

This work contains: the threat of slaughter of a farm animal (Chapter 1, and recurrent); the death of a beloved character in Chapter 21; gratitude, which may provoke tears; and a title character who is a predator of insects.

The Committee holds a long meeting about the spider. It finds that the story normalizes the consumption of flies, which is a concern for readers sensitive to flies. A subcommittee on barnyard welfare is formed. It meets for a very long time and produces a document longer than the novel, which the Committee proudly attaches as an appendix. The appendix itself requires a warning label, since it contains the phrase "the pig."

By the end of the quarter the warning for Charlotte's Web runs to eleven pages, in a type size designed for the reading of contracts. It includes a trigger notice for anyone who has ever had a pet, a notice for anyone who has ever lost one, and a notice for anyone who has not yet had the chance to lose one and may feel left out. A child picking up the book to read about a pig finds that the first thing she has to read is a medical consent form.

The classics, in rapid sequence

The Committee grows ambitious. A short tour of the draft labels follows. All of this is invented, and I mean that most sincerely.

• Hamlet carries a warning for a ghost, a poisoning, a sword fight, a mother who remarries quickly, and a protagonist who thinks a great deal and acts rarely. Its label notes that nearly every named character is dead by the end, and that readers who dislike spoilers should skip the label.
• Moby-Dick is described as containing the hunting of a large marine mammal, ninety-odd chapters that are not about the plot, and a captain whose obsession ends badly for his crew. The label lists, as a special hazard, the chapter on the whiteness of the whale, which the Committee believes may cause existential dread, or boredom, depending on the reader.
• Little Women is flagged for illness, poverty, the loss of a sibling, and the pressures of a society that expected certain things of young women, though the Committee admits it is not sure which of these the label should warn against and which it should warn on behalf of.
• Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is cautioned for unsupervised tea parties, a queen who is too quick with a verdict, and a rabbit who is late. The label adds that the book may cause readers to ask whether the rules of the world are as sensible as advertised.
• The Odyssey receives a label of such length that the Committee is forced to hire a reader to read it out loud. It contains a cyclops, a witch, a sea monster, a sorceress, a hero who is away from home for twenty years and a suitor problem. The label concludes that nobody should be allowed to be this late.
• Huckleberry Finn, a novel that has long been the subject of real arguments, is handled by the Committee with the same machine: a warning that the book contains the language of its time and place, including words that are now rightly regarded as offensive, and that its author used them to portray a society he was satirizing. The Committee insists on a longer note about the history of the book, which, in satire's single act of mercy, turns out to be the only label that is useful.

Notice what happens. The labels get longer than the books. The Committee, to deal with this, proposes a Summary Label of the Warning Labels, which is itself a book. The Summary Label requires a warning. The warning requires a label. The Committee has by now written more than any author it set out to protect readers from, which is the first time in history a committee has been mistaken for a literary movement.

The Committee reviews its own work

At this point the Committee, in a burst of consistency it has not shown before, reviews the Warning Labels themselves. It finds that they contain descriptions of violence, death, betrayal and theft, since that is what the books contain, and therefore the labels are, strictly speaking, more upsetting than the books, because they present only the unpleasant parts, with no plot to cushion them. A label that says "contains a pig's death" without the three hundred pages of friendship around it is a harsher piece of writing than the novel it summarizes.

The Committee decides to put a warning label on the warning labels. The new label reads, "This label contains the contents of labels." The Committee then discovers that it has produced a loop. A librarian, observing from a safe distance, proposes that the simplest solution is to remove the books from the shelves, since then the labels would have nothing to describe. The Committee considers this and, in a flash of rare clarity, notes that it would be the logical endpoint of the policy, and then votes to table the matter until a quorum can be found.

The final stage of the proposal is the Universal Waiver. Before opening any book, the reader signs a page certifying that he has been informed, has understood the contents, has consulted a professional if necessary and agrees not to be surprised. At that point the reader has spent forty minutes on paperwork and has not read a single line of literature. The Committee declares victory. Nobody has been hurt. Nobody has read anything either.

That is the satire. I will now step out of it.

What the joke is about

Satire works by taking something small and real and following it to its end. The Swift of the original A Modest Proposal, written in 1729, took a real policy attitude toward the Irish poor, treating them as an economic problem, and followed it to the horrifying conclusion that the poor should sell their children as food. The point was never that Swift wanted anyone eaten. It was that the logic of the people he was addressing led somewhere monstrous, and that they did not see it.

Our target is smaller and gentler. There is a real practice, increasingly common in classrooms and in some corners of publishing and entertainment, of attaching content warnings to works of literature. I should be fair about it. A voluntary note that a film or a book contains graphic violence, so that a reader can decide whether to pick it up, is a courtesy. Publishers, theaters and teachers have long told audiences what to expect, and nobody sensible objects to that. A teacher who tells a class that a novel contains scenes of war and then goes on to teach it well is doing something useful. A parent reading the back of a book before handing it to a ten-year-old is exercising judgment, which is the whole point of having parents.

The question is what happens when the warning stops being information and becomes a gatekeeper, an obligation, or a way of signalling that students cannot be trusted to meet a hard book unprepared. And there I think the argument is serious.

The real argument

One: a literature that must be preceded by a cautionary notice has stopped being literature. The purpose of a great book is to take a reader somewhere he has not been, including places that frighten him. The Odyssey is about a man's suffering. Hamlet is about grief and murder. Tragedy does not work if the audience has been told the ending will be sad and that it should brace. The function of the old stories is to prepare people for real life by letting them rehearse it. A reader who has been told in advance to be afraid of a book has been taught to be afraid of the world it describes.

Two: adult readers are adults. The premise of liberal education, in the original sense of the word, is that students are capable of encountering hard ideas and judging them. The college that treats its freshmen as too fragile for Huckleberry Finn has decided, in effect, that the freshmen are not adults. That is a poor message to send to eighteen-year-olds, who are old enough to vote, to marry and to be sent to war. John Milton made the argument in Areopagitica in 1644, in a speech to Parliament against licensing books before publication. He wrote that a good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, and that to kill a book is almost the same as to kill a man. He also said that virtue untested, a "fugitive and cloistered virtue," is not worth much. The reader who has met the worst and chosen the good is stronger than the reader who was never allowed to see it. That is a paraphrase of a long and splendid passage, and the passage is worth reading in the original.

Three: resilience is a skill, and a skill is built by practice. An argument can be made that some warnings genuinely help readers who have been through real trauma. That is a fair point for professionals to weigh, and I am not qualified to give clinical advice and will not. But as a cultural matter, a society that tells young people that difficult material is a hazard to be managed will produce adults who manage it by avoidance. A society that teaches them to read hard books, argue about them and survive them will produce citizens.

Four: the label is not neutral. Someone writes it, and the person who decides what goes on the label decides what the reader should be worried about. That is power, and it is power over interpretation. A warning that a novel contains a "problematic" view tells a student what to conclude before reading a word. Once labelling begins, the pressure to expand it never ends, as the satire above shows, because there is always another reader who might be offended and another committee eager to protect him.

Five: this is a free-speech question in the old sense. The right to read, like the right to write, is the right of a free people. In Board of Education v. Pico (1982), a case about books removed from a school library, a plurality of three justices said that students' access to ideas has constitutional dimensions, but the Court produced no majority opinion, so the case settled less than people often assume. The principle that the government shall not prescribe what is orthodox in matters of opinion, from West Virginia v. Barnette (1943), applies to the question of which books citizens may read.

The steelman

The fairest objection is that a warning is just information. Nobody is forced to heed it, and some readers, those who have lived through something terrible, are glad of it. A teacher who adds a line to the syllabus is not censoring anyone. And the people who object to content warnings often overstate the case, as if students were falling apart on the sight of a footnote. There is real debate in the research literature about whether warnings help or hurt, and the honest answer is that it is unsettled.

All of that is fair. A voluntary note is a different thing from a mandatory label, and a courtesy is a different thing from a requirement. My objection is to the mandate and the mission creep, not to the polite sentence. If a school tells its students what a book contains and then trusts them to read it, I have no quarrel. If it makes them sign a form first, I would like to hear about the quarrel the form is meant to settle.

Where to go next

If this satire amused you, there is more on how institutions manage words in Language Policing Turns Ordinary Words Into Offences, and It Never Ends, on the larger culture of caution in Cancel Culture Has No Judge, No Jury and No Statute of Limitations, and on the history of laughing at power in Satire From Aristophanes to Swift Has Always Been the Weapon of the Underdog. The constitutional case for protecting what the public reads is in Barnette's Fixed Star, Reading the 1943 Opinion on the Pledge Passage by Passage, and the right to parody is defended in Hustler v. Falwell Protected Parody, and Conservatives Benefit From It Now.

The case in brief

1. A mandatory warning label on every novel, followed to its logical end, produces labels longer than the books and a reader who has filled out forms but not read a line.
2. A voluntary note about content is a courtesy; a mandate that decides in advance what a reader should fear is a form of gatekeeping.
3. Literature exists to take readers into hard places, and a reader told to brace for every book never learns what the book was for.
4. Adult readers can judge hard ideas, as Milton argued in 1644 and as the Court's school-speech cases assume, and resilience is built by practice, not avoidance.
5. Whoever writes the label controls the interpretation, which makes the warning a quiet form of power.

What you can do: ask your local school board or library how it handles warnings, ratings and challenges, and read the policy before the next meeting.