Category: literature

A wonderful bit of prose

March 23, 2024 • 11:00 am

I’ve described in these pages what I consider to be the finest prose written in English; it includes the beginning of The Raj Quartet, by Paul Scott; the ending of The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald (but there’s also great stuff in Tender is the Night); much of Thomas Wolfe (especially “The Child by Tiger“, an excerpt from one of his novels); and James Joyce’s long story The Dead, which, especially in its ending, stands above them all.

But there’s one more, and I’ll put down a specimen here. I know I’ve put up a video of this scene from Karen Blixen’s Out of Africa (1937) before, but I just reread much of the book and marveled at how wonderful it is—and sad, too.  It is of course an autobiography of Blixen’s stint in Kenya, where she owned a coffee farm, and includes a hedged description of her life with her lover Denys Finch Hatton, a guide and big-game hunter who died in a plane crash while she still lived in Kenya.

She and Denys had picked out their graves, up in the Ngong Hills with a fantastic view of the plains as well as Mt. Kenya and Mt. Kilamanjaro.  But she had to leave Africa when she lost her farm, and so buried Finch Hatton up in the hills before she left.  This description of what happened to his grave always brings me to tears, no matter how often I read it. I just realized I put this up in a longer extract seven years ago, and you might want to read that part, too.

After I had left Africa, Gustav Mohr wrote to me of a strange thing that had happened by Denys’ grave, the like of which I have never heard. “The Masai,” he wrote, “have reported to the District Commissioner at Ngong, that many times, at sunrise and sunset, they have seen lions on Finch-Hatton’s grave in the Hills. A lion and a lioness have come there, and stood, or lain, on the grave for a long time. Some of the Indians who have passed the place in their lorries on the way to Kajado have also seen them. After you went away, the ground round the grave was levelled out, into a sort of big terrace, I suppose that the level place makes a good site for the lions, from there they can have a view over the plain, and the cattle and game on it.”

It was fit and decorous that the lions should come to Denys’s grave and make him an African monument. “And renowned be thy grave.” Lord Nelson himself, I have reflected, in Trafalgar Square, has his lions made only out of stone.

The last paragraph is one of the best I know in English, and the whole scenario is ineffably moving. It’s even more amazing when you realize that Blixen’s native language wasn’t English but Danish, and she wrote the book in English. (In this way she’s like Joseph Conrad.)

I know I’ve forgotten some of my favorite prose, but I’ll note more here if I remember. In the meantime, weigh in with your favorites below. Remember, this is not a selection of “best books” or “best stories” but simply “the best prose written in English”.

The lion clip is no longer on the Internet, but below a clip from the movie showing Blixen (played by Meryl Streep) giving a few words at Finch Hatton’s burial (he was played by Robert Redford).  Just these few moments show what a great actor Meryl Streep is.

The film was shot on location in Kenya, and I do recommend it, even if the critics give it only a 63% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. It did win the Best Picture Oscar.

The Nobel Prize in Literature: we have a winner!

October 5, 2023 • 8:06 am

Yesterday we had a “Guess the Nobel Laureate” for the Literature Prize alone. And although there were 61 guesses, only a single person guessed the winner (see below). Norwegian writer Jon Fosse nabbed the Prize, along with nearly a million bucks. The Nobel Prize announcement is here, and includes this:

Jon Fosse was born 1959 in Haugesund on the Norwegian west coast. His immense œuvre written in Nynorsk and spanning a variety of genres consists of a wealth of plays, novels, poetry collections, essays, children’s books and translations. While he is today one of the most widely performed playwrights in the world, he has also become increasingly recognized for his prose. His debut novel Raudt, svart 1983, as rebellious as it was emotionally raw, broached the theme of suicide and, in many ways, set the tone for his later work.

The NYT implies that DIVERSITY had a role in this choice, though it’s not evident how that worked (bolding is mine):

The Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded on Thursday to the Norwegian novelist and playwright Jon Fosse “for his innovative plays and prose which give voice to the unsayable.”

Fosse’s work has long been lauded throughout continental Europe, but he has recently found a growing audience in the English-speaking world. By receiving what is widely seen as the most prestigious prize in literature, the author (whose name is pronounced Yune FOSS-eh, according to his translator) joins a list of laureates including Toni Morrison, Kazuo Ishiguro and Annie Ernaux.

Critics have long compared Fosse’s sparse plays to the work of two previous Nobel laureates: Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett. And he had long been tipped to win. In 2013, British bookmakers temporarily suspended betting on the prize after a flurry of bets on Fosse’s winning. In the end, the action proved unnecessary, as Alice Munro, the Canadian short story writer, took the award.

Along the prestige and a huge boost in book sales, Fosse receives 11 million Swedish krona, about $991,000.

In recent years, the Swedish Academy, which organizes the prize, has tried to increase the diversity of considered authors after facing criticism that only 17 Nobel laureates had been women, and that the vast majority were from Europe or North America. The choice of Fosse is likely to be interpreted as step back from those efforts.

*********

UPDATE:  Read the first comment below. I may have read this bit wrong; what it might be saying is that the Academy is not giving in to wokeness, which is good. Thus the bit below about them choosing an old white male becomes irrelevant. But Rushdie is still the author who deserves the Prize on merit alone.  Of course taste in literature is somewhat subjective, and I haven’t read Fosse, but Rusdie deserved the Prize a long time ago, and for Midnight’s Children alone.

*********

But Fosse is not only European and an old white male, but a very white male:

So what’s all the palaver of choosing him as winner given that he represents what the Academy has criticized?

In my view, it was Rusdie’s turn to win, purely on the grounds of merit (I admit I haven’t read Fosse). And if you’re a diversity mongerer, Rushdie is, after all, is a Writer of Color, having been born in Mumbai, India.  But I can’t get over the feeling that the Swedish Academy is resisting giving Rushdie the prize because it will cause extremist Muslims to riot. Remember, there was a fatwa on his book The Satanic Verses.

Regardless, the ethnicity or gender of a writer shouldn’t matter when considering who should win. The Prize should be based on merit (literary quality), and merit alone

The lucky winner of our contest is Douglas Swartzendruber.  If you’re Douglas, email me so I can get details about sending you the free book.

Guess the Nobel Prize for Literature

October 4, 2023 • 2:48 pm

The readers here have proven really bad at guessing who will win Nobel Prizes, with my contests involving several fields never having a winner. So I’ll make it easy for you.  Just make a SINGLE GUESS about who’s going to get the Nobel Prize for Literature this year, and put it in the comments below. You get only one try and can name only one person.

The Prize itself will be announced at noon BST tomorrow (6 a.m. Chicago time), so I’m closing the contest as of 4 a.m. Chicago time (5 a.m. US Eastern time) tomorrow, and no entries will be valid after that.

There’s got to be a winner for this one, as there are several obvious candidates. But often the Swedish Academy gives the prize to a dark horse, so don’t be so sure.

THE FIRST PERSON TO GUESS CORRECTLY WINS. This means that before you put down your guess, see if anybody else has it before you. If so, choose someone else, because you can’t win

The prize. . . . well, it’s not like winning Powerball. You can have a mint paperback copy of either Why Evolution is True or Faith Versus Fact sent to you (your choice), autographed if you wish (and to whomever you want), and with a cat drawn in it (suggestions for cats considered).

Good luck, and if nobody wins I’m going to be very disappointed.

PEN America highlights attacks from the Left on books

August 30, 2023 • 10:00 am

The recent “cancellation” of my children’s book about an Indian man and his cats—with the sole reason given that I couldn’t write about India because I was white—has made me extra sensitive to the absurdity of a lot of cancellations based on such claims of “cultural appropropriation.”  Now of course it’s possible to write an ignorant and demeaning book about another culture, and publishers don’t have to put out every book they get; but I plead not guilty to cultural appropriation, and, indeed, most of the examples given by Cathy Young below are cultural appropriation of the right type: the enrichment of cultures by incorporating material from other cultures.

The “sin” of cultural appropriation goes only one way, of course: you are not allowed to “write down.” That is, members of nonminority groups (read: white people, especially men) are not allowed to write about minority groups, even if those groups are not oppressed or the subject isn’t oppression.  But the reverse action—members of minority groups writing about dominant groups—seems perfectly fine. This I don’t understand. If members of one culture supposedly can’t understand members of another, or treat their issues with sensitivity, then the ban should go both ways.  Why is it okay if someone from India writes about an American man who owns sweet shops and takes in stray cats?

Thus the new post by the estimable Cathy Young (click the screenshot below to read, but subscribe if you read regularly)—about a new PEN America report on freedom to write and publish—struck home. The theme, according to Young (I haven’t read the PEN report) is the suppression of literature deemed harmful (often because of “cultural appropriation”), an action taken mostly by the Left. The Right gets rid of books they find offensive by simply banning them from libraries or removing them, but what the Left does, preventing publication of books in the first place, can be seen as more harmful. For in the latter case, the book simply isn’t available to anyone.

Many of these campaigns are fueled by social-media pile-ons, often by people who haven’t read the book they damn. But I’m getting ahead of myself. I’ll give quotes from Young about the tactics of the Left and some chilling examples of how they’ve worked.

First, what’s going on (Young’s text is indented).

WHETHER THERE EXISTS in American culture a left-wing illiberalism that threatens freedom of thought and expression under the cover of social justice has been a subject of heated debate in the past decade. At a time when right-wing authoritarian populism is on the rise, many people have viewed warnings about illiberal progressivism as a distraction. Liberal and centrist critiques of leftist intolerance, from the Harper’s magazine “Letter on Justice and Open Debate” in the summer of 2020 to prize-winning historian Anne Applebaum’s Atlantic essay on “the new Puritans” the following year, have been met with purported debunkings and derided as moral panic or whining from people who don’t like to be criticized.

Now, a major liberal institution that has championed freedom of expression for over a century—PEN America, formerly PEN American Center and part of PEN International, the writers’ association whose notable figures have included John Steinbeck, Arthur Miller, James Baldwin, Philip Roth, Toni Morrison, and Margaret Atwood—has issued a lengthy report that strongly comes down on the side of taking illiberal progressivism seriously.

Booklash: Literary Freedom, Online Outrage, and the Language of Harm, written by the PEN America research team with a trenchant introduction by playwright Ayad Akhtar titled “In Defense of the Literary Imagination,” is a thorough examination of the chilly climate in publishing and the issues and controversies that have created it. Booklash is particularly valuable because PEN America really cannot be accused of having a right-leaning or even centrist bias: the organization enthusiastically champions racial and gender diversity and has strongly denounced censorship moves from the right, such as red-state policies facilitating school library book removals.

Indeed, the report acknowledges the context of rising right-wing authoritarianism but unabashedly, and correctly, stresses that this context makes it more important to acknowledge troubling illiberal trends on the left. . .

Booklash isn’t too long, and should be read, as should its appendix or companion piece, the famous and short “Freedom to Read” statement adopted in 1953 by the American Library Association and the Association of American Publishers. (It’s been amended in the version Young gives, but I’ve linked to the original.) It’s a passionate endorsement of the duty of publishers to put out books espousing all viewpoints, even if many people find them offensive, and the duty of organizations to avoid censoring or banning as taboo those views they don’t like.

But back to Young.  Here are only a few of the examples she and the PEN report give of attempts to ban “offensive” views:

*Online hate campaigns directed at books deemed “problematic” for one reason or another have resulted in books being killed when already in the final stages of publication. A prominent recent example, from this past spring, comes from Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love. After she announced on June 6 that her next book, The Snow Forest, would come out early next year, it was strafed with one-star review bombs. Its attackers were outraged that a book set in Russia was coming out at a time when Russia is waging a brutal war of aggression in Ukraine. Never mind that it’s not a present-day story: The novel is a partly fact-based tale of a Soviet-era family fleeing into the woods to escape religious persecution. By June 12, Gilbert had had enough: She released a video saying that she was indefinitely “removing the book from its publication schedule.”

*. . . OTHER BOOKS, AS BOOKLASH DETAILS, were not literally canceled but endured some degree of suppression. Initial positive reviews in key industry outlets such as Kirkus Reviews have been downgraded; books have been rewritten under pressure; book tours have been canceled, as in the case of Jeanine Cummins’s bestselling 2020 novel American Dirt, a sympathetic treatment of Mexican migrants that was savaged as exploitative “trauma porn.” Aside from the impact on the targeted authors (Cummins seems to have completely withdrawn from public life), there is also the larger chilling effect on publishing. In the case of American Dirt, the report said, “Despite the book’s commercial success, the episode left many within the literary world with the impression that books perceived to trespass across racial or cultural lines could be risky and undesirable.” Indeed, the report cites conversations with authors and editors who would speak only on conditions of anonymity to describe this overall climate of intimidation as well specific incidents in which books were canceled or revised.

*In 2018, the Nation issued an abject apology for publishing a white poet writing in the voice of a black homeless woman. The poem was allowed to stay up, but underneath a contrite statement that read, remarked Nation columnist Katha Pollitt, “like a letter from re-education camp.”

*In June 2020, the young adult novel Ember Days by Alexandra Duncan was at the center of a bizarre drama with two layers of cancellation. First, the novel was withdrawn at Duncan’s request because of complaints about chapters written from the perspective of a woman with Gullah Geechee heritage (African Americans from the Lowcountry regions of Georgia, South Carolina, and Florida). Then, Publishers’ Weekly removed its story about the book’s withdrawal because of complaints that the story had led to “online abuse” toward Duncan’s chief critic, novelist Bethany Morrow, and replaced it with an apology and a pledge to ensure that “our articles will not cause harm in the future.” Obviously, the PEN America report couldn’t cover every such episode without massive sprawl, but these examples seem remarkable enough to merit a mention.

*Novelist, journalist, and Bulwark contributor Richard North Patterson recently wrote about the dispiriting experience of having his novel Trial “rejected by roughly 20 imprints of major New York publishers” despite having 16 New York Times bestsellers to his name. According to Patterson, many of the rejections came with glowing compliments but bluntly stated that the problem was race: the novel deals with racial injustice, and Patterson is white. (Trial was eventually published by a small press.)

There are many more examples, but you get the gist, and I bet you’ve heard of some of these before, like the American Dirt fracas described by Young in greater detail.

Now Young notes that the PEN America report, while conveying a strong message, is somewhat diluted by its occasional tendency to “balance their defense of intellectual freedom with their commitment to the values of social justice, bending over backwards to accommodate the latter.” While it’s okay to give a nod towards social justice, the “Freedom to read” mantra should extend to defending publication of all viewpoints, including those inimical to current versions of social justice.

Here’s Young’s indictment of the greater harm done by the Left than by the Right in censoring books. First, a quote from Jonah Winter, a children’s-book author who has been censored:

As [Winter] put it in a Dallas Morning News column:

Book-banning, the “cancel culture” of the right, doesn’t hurt a book or an author.

What hurts a book or an author is the far more effective cancel culture of the left, by which I mean the small but vocal subsection of illiberal ideologues who’ve commandeered both liberalism in general and the publishing world specifically, often using their power to attack well-meaning authors in the form of social media pile-ons and the resulting cancellations, both of which I’ve experienced.

And I’ll add this since it hits home: one of Winter’s books that was banned was a respectful biography of the great baseball player and humanitarian Roberto Clemente, outfielder for the Pittsburgh Pirates (I saw him play at Forbes Field), who died at 38 in the crash of a plane bringing relief to earthquake-devastated Managua, Nicaragua. Winter says this:

I’ve had two book contracts canceled because of my identity in relation to the subject matter. I am a white man. The irony of the big to-do being made over the banning of my Clemente book by conservative activists is that, were I to try and publish that exact same book today, I would not be able to get it published because of progressive activists.

And from Young:

There is another factor as well. When attacks on literary works come from the right, they are typically counteracted not only by progressive activists but by institutions that act as guardians of culture: public schools and teachers’ unions, libraries, universities, publishers, the mainstream media. When the attacks are from the left, the same institutions typically offer no objections, or even collude.

So what’s the solution? First, we have to recognize that if you’re on the Left like me, you have to indict your own side for this kind of ludicrous and harmful censorship. The cure begins with recognition, and that’s what PEN America has done.  Young also notes that Booklash has recommendations like preventing book-review websites like Goodreads from going after books that haven’t been read, or damning them on flimsy grounds. And publishers should issue “formal statements of principles.” (This is desperately needed.)

Young closes by arguing correctly that being on the Left does not conflict with arguing for free expression in books, nor does condemnation of censorship trivialize the arguments of social-justice advocates. It’s merely a way to enact the First Amendment through publication, for books are one of the most effective ways to make and to vet arguments:

Such a shift [in the present Leftist illiberalism about publishing] must also include much greater willingness on the part of authors and publishers to stand up to pressures, particularly when it’s a matter of just a few voices denouncing alleged bigotry and “harm” in works the vast majority of people from the supposedly injured group do not see as offensive. But this would also require challenging a key tenet of social justice progressivism: the belief that even to dispute a claim of racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. is in itself “problematic,” and in most cases actively harmful. Such claims must be examined skeptically, especially when suppression of speech or other expression is at stake.

Pushing back against left-wing illiberalism in publishing need not entail a general dismissiveness toward the existence of racial or gender-based injustice and prejudice in American culture, particularly given the recent rise of overt white supremacism, misogyny, and homophobia on the far right and their seepage into more mainstream right-wing discourse. What it does mean, though, is understanding that “canceling” books and authors for transgressing progressive moral codes does nothing to counteract injustice and prejudice. Instead, it inhibits and silences important conversations and trivializes the very evils it supposedly protests.

h/t: Steve

A must-read article on Rushdie

February 24, 2023 • 1:30 pm

I’m not a huge fan of The New Yorker or its editor David Remnick, and eventually I let my subscription lapse. That had its bad side, for there are lots of good articles in the magazine. I just didn’t like the political tenor, and, importantly, I couldn’t keep up with the many issues.

Here’s an article someone sent me from the magazine, and it’s by David Remnick. It’s actually the best career/literary summary of Rusdhie, as well as of the recent (and near fatal) attack on him that I’ve seen. It’s not paywalled, and if you’re a Rushdie fan, or have been following his career since the fatwa, I recommend it highly. Click on the screenshot to read it:

(From NYer): Photograph by Richard Burbridge for The New Yorker

I first heard of Rushdie at the beginning of a month-long trip to India, when I scoured the used-book sellers around the cinema in Connaught Circus in Delhi, looking for some reading material to take along. I found a novel called Midnight’s Children, knew nothing about it except that it looked interesting, and bought it. I was mesmerized—transported into another world. (It of course won the Booker Prize, and then the “Booker of Booker”: the best of the Booker Prize winners, but I didn’t know about the Prize.) Since that time I’ve been a fan.

When attacked in New York state, Rushdie was on a book tour promoting his newest novel, Victory City (Remnick lauds the book). That’s the book he refers to in the bit below, and I’m glad (but not surprised) to see that Rushdie still has his sense of humor.

“I’ve always tried very hard not to adopt the role of a victim,” he said. “Then you’re just sitting there saying, Somebody stuck a knife in me! Poor me. . . . Which I do sometimes think.” He laughed. “It hurts. But what I don’t think is: That’s what I want people reading the book to think. I want them to be captured by the tale, to be carried away.”

Many years ago, he recalled, there were people who seemed to grow tired of his persistent existence. “People didn’t like it. Because I should have died. Now that I’ve almost died, everybody loves me. . . . That was my mistake, back then. Not only did I live but I tried to live well. Bad mistake. Get fifteen stab wounds, much better.”

Lagniappe: Read this extract from Rushdie’s essay “Imagine No Heaven“, which is free online at the Guardian. It appeared in longer form (and under the title under the title “‘Imagine There’s no Heaven’: A Letter to the Six Billionth World Citizen”) in Hitchens’s collection of writing about atheism, The Portable Atheist.

Trigger warnings are useless and counterproductive

February 19, 2023 • 11:30 am

We should have all learned by now that psychological research shows that trigger warnings do not do what they were intended to do:—protect the mental health of people with PTSD. In fact, as the article in Persuasion below reiterates, they simply keep people traumatized. Or they could even increase trauma.

To the contrary, psychologists and therapists recommend that controlled exposure to a traumatic subject is the way to help cure people of extreme PTSD.

Amna Khalid, who wrote the article at hand, is an Associate Professor of history at Carleton College and has a Substack site, Banished.  Her piece below includes links to the data about the ineffectiveness of trigger warnings, so remember to cite these data when people are arguing for trigger warnings.

(You may remember that Khalid, a Muslim, wrote a strong piece in the Chronicles of Higher Education criticizing the dismissal of an instructor at Hamline University for showing an ancient painting of Muhammad that depicted his face. And that instructor even issued several trigger warnings.)

Click below to read Khalid’s piece; its thesis is summarized in the title:

Let me say that, presumably like Khalid, I’m not opposed to every single “content warning”, as they’re now called. If I’m going to post a video that has gruesome stuff in it that might revolt a lot of people, like beheadings, dead bodies, and the like, I will warn people, for a lot of people prefer to avoid such images. They don’t have PTSD or phobias, but find some stuff pretty revolting. The kind of trigger warning that both Khalid and I oppose are those that single out stuff that most people wouldn’t find offensive at all, or that might turn them away from something they need to see or hear, especially in art or literature. One example is putting trigger warnings on books because they contain the n-word, or have violence in them, or depict any aspect of life that at least one reader would find offensive.

I’ve divided her piece into three parts (this is my own take, and I’ve put headings in bold. For each I’ll give an indented quote from her article.

a.) The inanity of many trigger warnings. 

Just days into the new year, Scottish papers reported that the University of Aberdeen had slapped a trigger warning on J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, a classic children’s novel about a place where nobody ever grows up. The reason: the book’s “odd perspectives on gender” may prove “emotionally challenging” to some adult undergraduates, even though it contains “no objectionable material.”

Yes, you read that right—a children’s book now comes with a trigger warning for adults. What’s more, Peter Pan is not the only children’s book to come with an advisory at Aberdeen. Among others are Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, Edith Nesbit’s The Railway Children and C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Last year the university put a trigger warning on Beowulf, the epic poem considered one of the most significant works in the English literary canon, for its depictions of “animal cruelty” and “ableism.” The year before that, the university pushed lecturers to issue content warnings for a long list of topics including abortion, miscarriage, childbirth, depictions of poverty, classism, blasphemy, adultery, blood, alcohol and drug abuse.

Aberdeen is not the only British university following in the steps of American counterparts. The University of Derby issued trigger warnings for Greek tragedies. The University of Warwick put a content advisory on Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd for “rather upsetting scenes concerning the cruelty of nature and the rural life.” At the University of Greenwich, the death of an albatross in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 18th century poem, was deemed “potentially upsetting” and stuck with a content notice.

You can see that a trigger warning for the albatross in Coleridge’s poetry is simply too extreme, treating students as if the description of a dead bird would shatter their world.

b.) The futility of trigger warnings. I once met a guy who was a specialist in therapy for people with phobias or extreme anxieties. As I have a couple of friends who are really afraid of flying (something I don’t understand, as it’s safer than driving)—one of whom was my late Ph.D. advisor Dick Lewontin—I asked the therapist how he helped people overcome this. He said “We go as a group on a couple of flights to Milwaukee, turn around, and immediately fly back again.” He said it was okay to admit your fears to yourself, but you have to act against them. Same for those afraid of elevators. Controlled exposure to these things was the key to getting over them. But I digress; here’s Khalid’s summary of the data:

This trend is alarming for several reasons. First, it runs counter to research on the effects of such advisories. As early as 2020 the consensus, based on 17 studies using a range of media, was that trigger warnings do not alleviate emotional distress, and they do not significantly reduce negative affect or minimize intrusive thoughts. Notably, these advisories, which were at least initially introduced out of consideration for people suffering from PTSD, “were not helpful even when they warned about content that closely matched survivors’ traumas.”

On the contrary, researchers found that trigger warnings actually increased the anxiety of individuals with the most severe PTSD, prompting them to “view trauma as more central to their life narrative.” A recent meta-analysis of such warnings found the same thing: the only reliable effect was that people felt more anxious after receiving the warning. The researchers concluded that these warnings “are fruitless,” and “trigger warnings should not be used as a mental health tool.”

c.) The counterproductive nature of trigger warnings. Khalid’s view, with which I agree, is that “there is something particularly perverse about appending [trigger warnings] to works of literature and art.” It treats the students like fragile infants, and in fact could make them more traumatized (or fragile) by somehow validating their emotional responses. I would give a content warning to students were I to show a movie of lions taking down a zebra, but would not if I were teaching The Great Gatsby (“trigger warning: death, spousal abuse, adultery, religious stereotypes”).

Khalid:

In other words, literature is transformative precisely because it has the ability to shock and surprise. It can jolt us out of complacency, force us to contend with the uncertain, the strange and even the ugly. For Franz Kafka, the only books worth reading are the ones that “wound or stab us.” He observed:

If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for?… we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like suicide. A book must be an ax for the frozen sea inside us…

Contending with “the frozen sea” opens the door for the kind of contemplation that is necessary for growth. When a classic such as Beowulf comes with “animal cruelty” and “ableism” on the cover, a piece of literature that offers us a unique window into the traditions and values of medieval Anglo-Saxons is devalued, and simply becomes a text riddled with “problematic” themes.

I read Beowulf in the original (I took a year of Old English in college), and I don’t remember “animal cruelty” beyond the death of Grendel, a fictitious monster, nor any “ableism” at all. But back to Khalid:

I can’t help but think that something is broken when universities, the very institutions entrusted with helping young minds mature, infantilize students by treating them as fragile creatures. What accounts for this shift?

Students across Britain seem to be in favor of trigger warnings. According to a survey published by the Higher Education Policy Institute last year, 86% of students support trigger warnings (up from 68% in 2016). More than a third think instructors should be fired if they “teach material that heavily offends some students” (up from just 15% in 2016).

Sadly, it appears that universities in Britain have fallen prey to the kind of corporate logic that is already firmly entrenched in the United States. This growing managerial approach with its customer-is-always-right imperative is increasingly evident in university policies.

. . .But university is not a television or radio show. Far from it. It’s a place where students come for an education. A model where faculty and administrators pander to student sensitivities—to the extent that it starts undermining the mission of the university—would be comical were it not so serious. If we fail to equip our students with the skills and sensibilities necessary to cope with life, we are doing them a great disservice.

When adult university students ask for trigger warnings for children’s literature, we as a society should realize that somewhere along the line, we lost the plot. Instead of coddling our students we should be asking why they feel so emotionally brittle. Might it be that their fragility is the result of limited exposure to what constitutes the human condition and the range of human experience? Is shielding them and managing their experience of art and literature not just exacerbating their sense of vulnerability?

Perhaps, in the end, what they need is unmediated, warning-free immersion in more literature, not less.

I know that some schools actually require trigger warnings on syllabi. Mine doesn’t, thank Ceiling Cat, so you’ll never get into trouble here if a student runs crying to the administration that you didn’t warn him about the albatross.

Pamela Paul defends J. K. Rowling

February 16, 2023 • 10:30 am

Anybody who defends J. K. Rowling against the mob’s assertion that she’s a “transphobe” will get lots of flak, and I’m no exception. (I get the most private attacks on two issues: my atheism and my writings about transgender and transsexual issues.)

I’ve followed Rowling’s saga from the beginning, and have read her supposedly “transphobic” tweets and her account of “reasons for speaking out on sex and gender issues.”  I’ve also seen the social-media mob go after her to the extent of some of the offended burning Harry Potter books! And it won’t be news to you that in this issue I’m pretty much on Rowling’s side.

I have seen nothing “transphobic” from her: no hatred of trans people at all. What she’s demonized for is insisting that transsexual women, while deserving of the compassion that should accrue to all humans, are not identical in every respect to biological women. She does not agree in the literal sense with the mantra “trans women are women”, and has explained why. She is navigating a tortuous path between the rights of biological women and those of transsexual women, and has been attacked because she sometimes uses sarcasm and humor to make her point.

But one thing I haven’t seen in her is a fear or hatred of transsexual people. What I have seen are bravery, persistence and compassion in the face of “Rowlingphobia” (now she’s being called a “Nazi”), but also her fierce conviction that some trans activists are trying to infringe on the rights of biological women, rights that are not 100% in synch with the rights of transsexual women.

I digress, but It would be craven of me to call your attention to Pamela Paul’s new defense of Rowling without giving my own views.

You can read Paul’s NYT column on the site (click headline below), but if you don’t have a subscription, you can find the piece free on The Wayback Machine, an internet archive. You can go to that site, put in the URL of the article you’re looking for in the box at the top of the page, and see if anybody has archived it. If they have, you can read it by clicking on one of the dates and any of the links that come up. Paul’s article, for example is archived here.  As always, I urge you to use the “pay” option if you read something like the NYT often (I subscribe).

I wrote what’s above before I read Paul’s piece beyond the title, but I see that she says pretty much what I did, though of course more eloquently and thoroughly.  Let me give one one longish excerpt from Paul’s piece. (Those who demonize her, of course, will accept no evidence that she’s not a  “transphobe”.)  Note, too, there’s about to be a podcast about Rowling and this controversy. While it features Rowling herself, along with her friends and foes, I think, judging by what Paul says (she’s heard it), that it leaves the listener sympathetic to Rowling.

Paul (her words are indented; mine flush left):

“Trans people need and deserve protection.”

“I believe the majority of trans-identified people not only pose zero threat to others but are vulnerable.”

“I respect every trans person’s right to live any way that feels authentic and comfortable to them.”

“I feel nothing but empathy and solidarity with trans women who’ve been abused by men.”

These statements were written by J.K. Rowling, the author of the “Harry Potter” series, a human-rights activist and — according to a noisy fringe of the internet and a number of powerful transgender rights activists and L.G.B.T.Q. lobbying groups — a transphobe.

Even many of Rowling’s devoted fans have made this accusation. In 2020, The Leaky Cauldron, one of the biggest “Harry Potter” fan sites, claimed that Rowling had endorsed “harmful and disproven beliefs about what it means to be a transgender person,” letting members know it would avoid featuring quotes from and photos of the author.

Other critics have advocated that bookstores pull her books from the shelves, and some bookstores have done so. She has also been subjected to verbal abuse, doxxing and threats of sexual and other physical violence, including death threats.

Now,  in rare and wide-ranging interviews for the podcast series “The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling,” which begins next week, Rowling is sharing her experiences. “I have had direct threats of violence, and I have had people coming to my house where my kids live, and I’ve had my address posted online,” she says in one of the interviews. “I’ve had what the police, anyway, would regard as credible threats.”

This campaign against Rowling is as dangerous as it is absurd. The brutal stabbing of Salman Rushdie last summer is a forceful reminder of what can happen when writers are demonized. And in Rowling’s case, the characterization of her as a transphobe doesn’t square with her actual views.

So why would anyone accuse her of transphobia? Surely, Rowling must have played some part, you might think.

The answer is straightforward: Because she has asserted the right to spaces for biological women only, such as domestic abuse shelters and sex-segregated prisons. Because she has insisted that when it comes to determining a person’s legal gender status, self-declared gender identity is insufficient. Because she has expressed skepticism about phrases like “people who menstruate” in reference to biological women. Because she has defended herself and, far more important, supported others, including detransitioners and feminist scholars, who have come under attack from trans activists. And because she followed on Twitter and praised some of the work of Magdalen Berns, a lesbian feminist who had made incendiary comments about transgender people.

You might disagree — perhaps strongly — with Rowling’s views and actions here. You may believe that the prevalence of violence against transgender people means that airing any views contrary to those of vocal trans activists will aggravate animus toward a vulnerable population.

But nothing Rowling has said qualifies as transphobic. She is not disputing the existence of gender dysphoria. She has never voiced opposition to allowing people to transition under evidence-based therapeutic and medical care. She is not denying transgender people equal pay or housing. There is no evidence that she is putting trans people “in danger,” as has been claimed, nor is she denying their right to exist.

Paul (who used to be the NYT Sunday Book Review editor) has gone way further than I: she’s read every book Rowling has written (I read only the first Harry Potter book), including her crime novels written under a pseudonym. If you’ve followed this fracas, you’ll know that the people looking to be offende find “transphobic” stuff in all her books. And Paul reminds us that even before gender activists went after Rowling, the Harry Potter series was widely attacked and even banned by religious people horriied by her depiction of magic and witchcraft.

Paul has listened to the podcast series, which begins next Tuesday (Feb. 21), and you can sign up here. It’s more than just Rowling discussing her views, but includes interviews with both supporters and critics of the author. Clearly nothing in the podcast convinced Paul that Rowling is hateful or a transphobe. In fact, the host of the podcast is Megan Phelps-Roper, described as “a former member of the Westboro Baptist Church and the author of ‘Unfollow: A Memoir of Loving and Leaving Extremism.’  Phelps-Roper adds that “she appreciated the novels as a child but, raised in a family notorious for its extremism and bigotry, she was taught to believe Rowling was going to hell over her support for gay rights.”  Clearly she’s had a change of heart, and now sees Rowling as someone who, though “privileged”, is using her voice to speak up for those who have been cowed or bullied into silence.

Finally, Paul notes that the tide may be turning: actors in the Potter movies who once were silent have sprung to her defense, and journalists are starting to support her. Here’s are two tweets from Caitlan Flanagan of The Atlantic:

Paul ends this way, having noted that Rowling herself says that bullying and authoritarianism is a trope in many of her own books:

Rowling could have just stayed in bed. She could have taken refuge in her wealth and fandom. In her “Harry Potter” universe, heroes are marked by courage and compassion. Her best characters learn to stand up to bullies and expose false accusations. And that even when it seems the world is set against you, you have to stand firm in your core beliefs in what’s right.

Defending those who have been scorned isn’t easy, especially for young people. It’s scary to stand up to bullies, as any “Harry Potter” reader knows. Let the grown-ups in the room lead the way. If more people stood up for J.K. Rowling, they would not only be doing right by her; they’d also be standing up for human rights, specifically women’s rights, gay rights and, yes, transgender rights. They’d also be standing up for the truth.

Them’s strong words in the NYT. I advise you to follow Paul’s columns by subscribing to them. Her critique of “progressivism” is refreshing, and perhaps portends a new openness in the NYT. Along with John McWhorter, she’s one of the new antiwoke but liberal columnists who have a regular gig at the paper.

Annie Ernaux nabs Nobel for Literature; nobody won our contest

October 6, 2022 • 7:36 am

The 2022 Nobel Prize for Literature has been awarded to French writer (and literature professor) Annie Ernaux, already laden with awards. I’d never heard of her, and those who informed me of this award hadn’t, either. I wondered if her books haven’t been translated into English, but it turns out that many of them have been, including The Years, mentioned by the NYT below.

Nobody guessed her in our October 4 contest, so the losing streak there continues, despite people being asked to guess just one winner. Many guessed Salman Rushdie, and I agree that he deserves a Nobel, but the  Committee surely knows what would happen if he was given that prize. But if that’s the reason he hasn’t won, they are cowards.

At any rate, it’s time for you  literature mavens to give Ernaux a try.

Here’s the announcement from the Swedish Academy (click to read):

The citation and press releases are very short, saying just this:

The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2022 is awarded to the French author Annie Ernaux “for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory”.

In her writing, Ernaux consistently and from different angles, examines a life marked by strong disparities regarding gender, language and class. Her path to authorship was long and arduous.

I presume the video below will tell you more as does this NYT article (click to read):

The announcement was made with her having heard of it! From the NYT:

The Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded on Thursday to Annie Ernaux, the French novelist whose intensely personal books have spoken to generations of women by highlighting incidents from her own life, including a back-street abortion in the 1960s and a passionate extramarital affair.

Mats Malm, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, which that decides the prize, announced the decision at a news conference in Stockholm, lauding the “courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory.”

The committee had not been able to reach Ernaux by telephone, Malm said, but he expected her to “soon be aware of the news.” They intended to present her with the prize on Dec. 10.

Ernaux, 82, becomes only the 17th female writer to have won the prize, widely considered the most prestigious award in world literature, since it was formed in 1901. She is the second woman to be given the prize in three years after Louise Glück, who was awarded the 2020 prize for writing “that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.”

. . . Outside France, she is perhaps best known for “The Years,” which weaves together events from over 70 years of Ernaux’s life with French history. In 2019, “The Years” was shortlisted for the Booker International Prize, a major British award for fiction translated into English.

And the 42-minute live announcement: