Λογοτεχνική ηθικολογία

Ένα ψύχραιμο άρθρο για την λογοτεχνική ηθικολογία που ξεκίνησε από τα βιβλία των εφήβων και απειλεί ευρύτερα την λογοτεχνία.

Το θέμα είναι αρκετά γνωστό, αλλά θέλει προσοχή, μην παρασυρθούν κάθε φυλή/εθνότητα ή μειονοτική ομάδα απειλώντας με λογοκρισία όχι μόνον όσα βιβλία έχουν εκδοθεί ως τώρα αλλά και όσα αναστέλλονται για έκδοση για τον φόβο των νεοηθικολόγων της λογοτεχνίας. Η λογοτεχνία δεν βάδισε ποτέ με κανόνες και πάντοτε κρίθηκε στο χρόνο από τον δικό της Κανόνα και από τους αναγνώστες και όχι από τις εποχιακές τάσεις πολιτικής ορθότητας. 

Εδώ ολόκληρο το άρθρο:

https://www.persuasion.community/p/beware-of-books

Απόσπασμα:

There’s nothing new about the denunciation of ideas and authors in the name of morality. It’s a power that has always been used by those seeking to assert cultural dominance.

Two thousand years before the advent of mass print publishing, Socrates was sentenced to drink poison for having polluted the minds of the YA community of Athens. From the mid-16th century until 1966, the Catholic Church maintained its Index Librorum Prohibitorum, a list of prohibited books. Over the past century, the establishment used anti-obscenity laws to ban Ulysses and Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Norman Mailer couldn’t depict soldiers cursing in his World War II novel The Naked and the Dead because it would be “obscene.” The likes of Native Son and One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest were stricken from school curricula for their political subversiveness and perceived vulgarity. Meanwhile, all totalitarian states suppress transgressive writing, sometimes trying to do so across borders, as when Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran issued his fatwa against Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses in 1989.

When I was growing up in the 1980s and ’90s, the social conservatives of the Moral Majority patrolled the virtue of the American reading public. They were especially exercised by the subject of witchcraft and sorcery, and found a nemesis in Harry Potter. Some organized public burnings of J.K. Rowling’s books. Such right-wing censoriousness hasn’t disappeared: Conservative attacks on literature are still common with respect to books for young people that present LGBTQ characters and themes in a positive light.

What is new, though, is the trend of policing books for social goodness from within the left-leaning literary community—the very people whom we entrust to steer the course of our artistic and intellectual culture.

Those currently burning Rowling’s books aren’t the religious right but members of the progressive left, angered by her comments about gender and trans issues. Numerous articles have asked if it still is permissible in good conscience to enjoy not only Harry Potter, but Rowling’s latest adult detective thriller, Troubled Blood. Reviewers have scoured the text for signs of her alleged transphobia, many noticing that one character, as a Los Angeles Times reviewer pointed out, is “a male serial killer known to have worn a dress.”

“Is that enough to say the author is transphobic?” the reviewer asked, citing various elements in the novel. “Perhaps.” A better question is this: Is it the role of a book reviewer to parse texts for insight into an author’s morality? It’s not far from looking for satanic messages in rock ‘n’ roll. And even if heavy-metal songs were rooting for the devil, should people have been prevented from hearing them?

This new literary moralism isn’t only scrutinizing contemporary writing for evidence of sin; it’s looking to the past as well. #DisruptTexts, a group dedicated to helping teachers “challenge the traditional canon,” talks of “problematic depictions” in Shakespeare, and complains of The Great Gatsby being defined by the white male gaze. If applied fully, that objection would wipe out innumerable works of literature—including many containing moral messages that progressives would endorse.

Does the canon of classics suffer from a lack of diversity? Absolutely. But canons expand with each generation. We don’t simply let old works drop off the back end. And a canon includes books not because they are virtuous, but because they are in complex conversation with one another, or are mighty in their own terms. Writers who broke the canonical color barrier—from W.E.B. Du Bois to Toni Morrison—didn’t do so by tearing up what came before, but by asserting that they too had a place in that long conversation.

Even literary traditionalists like Harold Bloom often had more expansive views than activists like those at #DisruptTexts might give them credit for. As the National Book Award-winner Andrew Solomon wrote after Bloom’s death, the critic “admired the work of Toni Morrison, Chinua Achebe and other writers of color; and to say that someone who lionized Hart Crane, Walt Whitman, Elizabeth Bishop and Tony Kushner was ignoring LGBT voices seems at best perilously naïve.”

One point that nearly all of these controversies, cancellations, and critical analyses share is that they are ostensibly seeking justice, particularly concerning race. Bigotry and related social ills are worth serious attention. But treating literature according to political goals—and doing so in fear of a righteous online mob—devalues art in meaningful ways. It makes writers fearful of exploring perspectives outside simplistic definitions of their own identity, or of inhabiting morally complex characters or themes. And it diminishes the prospects of the reader too, restricting the scope of books to narrow conceptions of power and privilege.

If we expect literature to fix social problems, we wrongly imagine it as a wrench that might twist the world into a more pleasing position. This is to misunderstand art, which challenges and expands our sense of the world, rather than simplifying it. Art forces us to see with complexity. In return, we must accept that no easy solution awaits. Profound writing is never just an answer.

None of this is to say that the inequities of our time can’t be addressed by other means—through economics and elections, through debate and compromise. But we must ask ourselves: Is this frenzy for censure, moralizing, and a seemingly endless expansion of the definition of harm, how we’ll correct current disparities and historical wrongs? Is this how we intend to talk about art from now on? Which is to say, we’d just talk politics, and hardly mention art at all.

Otis Houston lives in Portland, Oregon. His writing on books and culture can be seen at the Los Angeles Review of Books.