Posts Tagged ‘Lionel Shriver’

Lionel Shriver calls fraud. (Photo: Tony Sarowitz)

Last month, The Nation published a poem that upset a few people. Well, more than a few. The poet adopted an African-American dialect, and he used the word “cripple,” too.

The Nation backed down, and the editors said they were sorry. Even the poet apologized for his poem. Katha Pollitt, a columnist for magazine, called the apology “craven,” “a letter from re-education camp.”

Grace Shulman, a poetry editor at the magazine from 1971 to 2006, wrote in The New York Times: “I was deeply disturbed by this episode, which touches on a value that is precious to me and to a free society: the freedom to write and to publish views that may be offensive to some readers.”

But now the U.K.-based American author Lionel Shriver has taken off the gloves. In The Spectator, she has called the protest a “screaming emotional fraudulence in the public sphere.”

A few excerpts:

“Employing today’s prescribed lexicon, those apologies regretted the ‘pain’, ‘harm’, and ‘offence’ this sad-ass little poem had caused to stricken communities. But let’s get real. None of those poetry readers felt any pain. (Remember pain, actual pain? Drop a brick on your foot in sandals. Yeah. That’s ‘pain’.) No one suffered any harm — either tangible or psychic. Why, I wager that those irate chiders in the peanut gallery were no more genuinely offended than the magazine editors doing damage control were genuinely sorry.”

***

“I don’t buy into the notion that the ‘snowflake’ generation is all that sensitive, either. Antifa protestors in balaclavas can be quite violent for little specks that melt. ‘Snowflakes’ may have induced institutions to employ the language of fragility, but I think a lot of these kids are tough as old boots.”

***

“When during that Evergreen foofaraw a rabid convocation of students cowed the college president into lowering his arms at the podium because they found his hand gestures ‘threatening’, those students didn’t feel jeopardised; they were dominating and emasculating a man supposedly in authority. The students cowering in ‘safe spaces’ don’t feel endangered; they’re claiming territory. In protecting the faux-helpless from noxious opinions via no-platforming, they’re exercising power. The experience of exercising power isn’t scary, except on the receiving end; it’s supremely gratifying. These people aren’t frightened. They want you to be frightened of them. And we’re not talking ‘microaggression’. PC police often prefer macroaggression, the kind that can get people sacked.”

***

“Reliably entwined with self-deceit, the problem isn’t solely among the young. When American liberals my age claim to suffer from white guilt over slavery and the slaughter of Indians, I question whether they really feel guilty. They weren’t personal agents of these crimes, and they know it. Nothing wrong with being historically aware. But white guilt is often a blind for moral vanity.

“We keep hearing about the terrible ‘distress’ caused by, say, a Canadian production that uses whites to sing slave songs, or a straight actor playing a trans role. But bullies on the left ply weakness to conceal aggression, and today’s torrent of touchiness is bogus. No one’s truly in distress. No one’s feelings are hurt really. This stuff is all about pushing other people around.”

You can read the whole thing here. It’s worth it for the use of the word “foofaraw” alone. However, I don’t think Millennials should take the rap. I sense a lot of aging Boomers on a tear. Thoughts?

Jenny Davidson likes sentences.  More than that.  She says that “sentences are my obsession—I linger on them compulsively, it is the feeling of words in the mouth that got me hooked on literature in the first place as a very young child…” She wanted to write a book that conveyed some of the magic of that way of reading.  And she has. The Columbia University Press blog has an interview with her about her new book, Reading Style: A Life in Sentences.

An excerpt:

Q: You’re a scholar of eighteenth-century English literature, a novelist, and a blogger; how did these three hats you wear inform your approach to writing Reading Style?

Jenny Davidson: From my point of view, those three hats—scholarship, fiction-writing, blogging—are part of a single fully integrated set of activities, and I wrote this book partly to show what that means for me as a reader and writer. The separation between scholarship and fiction-writing has always seemed to me largely artificial—I will write a novel because there’s a problem or topic that I’ve pursued as far as I can by scholarly means and want to think about further in a different medium, and the same thing goes in the other direction. Blogging is something I took up about ten years ago: it was largely for my own enjoyment, with some minor self-promotional aspect I suppose, but I found as I continued to do it that it became an excellent way to develop and refine an easy, fluent critical voice that I could then take back into the more formal kinds of criticism I also write.

***

Q: Chapter 2 is intriguingly titled “Lord Leighton, Liberace, and the Advantages of Bad Writing,” so what are some of these advantages?

Many hats.

JD: The names in the title are drawn not directly from life but from one of my favorite novels, Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai, which among other things is a brilliant and profound examination of the relationship between morality and prose style. The kinds of bad writing DeWitt’s protagonist attributes to the characters she dubs “Lord Leighton” and “Liberace” are not redeemable. But other kinds of bad writing are, or at least that’s what I want to argue. George Eliot is a good bad writer, and so is Lionel Shriver: in the case of each of these authors, there is a kind of muscular intellectual force that bludgeons you and impresses itself on you at one and the same time. The sentences are often slightly cringe-worthy, but it is in aid of a greater good. Harry Stephen Keeler is another writer I single out for praise—the supposed “badness” of his writing really strikes me as a kind of imaginative strangeness that amounts at times to genius. If we always restrict ourselves to books written in the best possible taste, we risk losing a whole continuum of aesthetic and moral effects.

She also has a blog called Light Reading.  “For me, blogging has not been a form of personal revelation,” she said to Columbia News. “Light Reading mostly gives me a way to comment on what I’m reading, watching or otherwise thinking about in a mode that’s at once less formal and more flexible than a conventional book review or an academic article. The personal voice of the blogger is part of what draws us to a given blog, but I don’t find myself drawn—either as a reader or a writer—to very personal blogs.