Don’t expect much today; I’m starting to take it easy on Saturday. After all, I’m retired, for crying out loud.  I will, however, call your attention to a new piece by author Lionel Shriver at Prospect Magazine, “Writers blocked: how the new call-out culture is killing fiction“.

You’ll remember Shriver from two years ago, when, at the Brisbane Literary Festival, she gave a talk defending “literary appropriation”—the fictional description of culture or characters from one culture by a writer from another (usually white). That so triggered the black Muslim female Australian author—all adjectives necessary these days—Yasmin Abdel-Magied, that she walked out on Shriver’s speech and wrote about her distress.

That helped kindle a literary debate that continues today: what right do authors have to write about people of different races/genders/sexes/ethnicities than their own? As I’ve said before, although some sensitivity has to be used here, this kind of “appropriation” is not inherently odious. After all, fiction involves putting the author and reader into another person’s shoes, and unless it’s completely autobiographical (which it’s not if it’s fiction), why should those shoes always have to be the same size and shape for the writer and her character? Think of the number of great books we wouldn’t have if, for instance, white authors had to limit themselves to writing only about white people and “white culture” (whatever that is)? I’ve named some before, and you can fill in the blanks. And nobody ever discusses whether those who are nonwhite, or gay, or Muslim, have any right to write about “others”. Are such restrictions group-specific?

But the Pecksniffs are winning, as Shriver argues in this piece. Publishing houses now have “sensitivity” readers to vet submissions for cultural purity, and remember how Laura Moriarty lost a star on Kirkus Reviews because one of their “Own Voices” editors (yes, that’s the name they give to ideological Pecksniffs) deemed her narrative too redolent of a white savior helping a Muslim? Shriver brings that up—and more.

Often when a Leftist intellectual gets attacked or sandbagged by Authoritarian Leftists, they become strong critics of that brand of Leftism. Think of Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying at Evergreen State, Nicholas Christakis at Yale, Laura Kipnis at Northwestern, Alice Dreger, also at Northwestern, and so on. After Brisbane, Shriver also became one of those critics. I’ll just give a few quotes from her piece, which is long but worth reading:

One crucial but now imperilled fictional device is that of imbuing characters with thoughts and emotions that the author may or may not share. When characters speak and think, the writer has plausible deniability. The contractual understanding with the reader—that the content of dialogue and internal reflection does not necessarily represent the author’s own perspective—facilitates putting contradictory feelings and ideas in the same work, providing it with balance and depth. Freedom from a reader’s assumption that every character is necessarily a mouthpiece for the author’s own opinions allows for the exploration of characters who don’t embrace progressive orthodoxies—who are bigots, opponents of gay marriage, advocates of more restrictive immigration, or—the horror—Tory supporters.

Yet the “it wasn’t me, it was my imaginary friend” defence has been challenged ever since Bangladeshis successfully protested against the filming of Monica Ali’s Brick Lane in their area not because of what her novel said, but because of what her characters said. [JAC: I had no idea this had happened.] At the 2016 Sewanee Writers’ Conference in Tennessee, fellow authors accused Allen Wier of a “microaggression” because three old men in a baseball park ogled a young woman in his short story.

Is “hate speech” in dialogue prosecutable? Not long ago, I’d have said of course not. Now I’m not so sure. Minnesota has just withdrawn two great American classics, both scathing examinations of southern racism—Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird—from its school syllabus because the novels’ bigoted dialogue might make students feel “humiliated and marginalised.” Readers highly motivated to find fault often embrace deliberately unsophisticated interpretations of literary texts, for it’s easy to make passages sound atrocious just by taking characters’ assertions and word choice out of context. Indeed, searching for hidden offences has become social media’s updated version of the Easter egg hunt.

and

What is the purpose of literature? To shape young people into God-fearing adults who say no to drugs? To accurately mirror reality? To act as a tool for social engineering? To make the world a better place? Certainly fiction is capable of influencing social attitudes, or trying to. But the novel is magnificently elastic. Fiction is under no obligation to reflect any particular reality, pursue social justice, or push a laudable political agenda. The purpose of any narrative form is up to the author. Yet contemporary university students are commonly encouraged to view literature exclusively through the prism of unequal power dynamics—to scrounge for evidence of racism, colonialism, imperialism, sexism, the list goes on. What a loss. What a pity. What a grim, joyless spirit in which to read.

How did we get so obsessed with virtue? A narrow version of virtue at that—one solely preoccupied with social hierarchy, when morality concerns far more than who’s being shafted and who’s on top. If all modern literature comes to toe the same goody-goody line, fiction is bound to grow timid, homogeneous, and dreary.

I don’t want to read only about nice people, and I don’t turn to novels to be morally improved. I was drawn to writing fiction in the first place because on paper I completely control my world—where I can be mischievous, subversive and perverse. Where I follow no one else’s rules but my own. Where I can make my characters do and say abominations. I have never confused sitting down at my desk with attending Sunday school. And I frankly do not understand readers who go at novels making prissy judgments of the characters and author both, and can’t just sit down to a good story.

This debate fascinates me because it brings up something we don’t often think about: what is the purpose of literature? I’m pretty sure that whatever it is, it doesn’t include ubiquitous conformity to a set of ideological standards, all meant to effect a moral purification of the reader. Yes, some children’s book do that, and that’s okay, but we’re not children.