We need to talk about Lionel Shriver. On September 8, the author of We Need To Talk About Kevin and several other novels gave the keynote speech at the Brisbane Writers’ Festival. Shriver had wanted to talk about “fiction and identity politics,” but the organizers asked her to talk about “community and belonging.” She talked about fiction and identity politics anyway.
Shriver argued that fiction and identity politics are fundamentally inimical. Fiction is “inherently inauthentic” and “self-confessedly fake.” It describes individuals who do not exist and events that do not happen. Identity politics is about “authenticity.” It sees individuals as representing collective identities and politics. Novelists appropriate other lives and “purloin whole worlds.” The “culture police” call this “cultural appropriation” and throw away the key.
“Taken to their logical conclusion, ideologies recently come into vogue challenge our right to write fiction at all,” Shriver declared. “Meanwhile, the kind of fiction we are ‘allowed’ to write is in danger of becoming so hedged, so circumscribed, so tippy-toe, that we’d indeed be better off not writing the anodyne drivel to begin with.”
Shriver admitted to being intimidated by the “culture police.” Raised in North Carolina, she had a “pretty good ear” for dialects, and once “didn’t hesitate to write black characters.” But some of the reviews of her most recent novel, The Mandibles, have made her “anxious about depicting characters of different races.”
The Mandibles is a futuristic satire, set in 2047. It imagines the decline of America through the decline of one family. Its patriarch, Douglas, has left his wife for Luella, an African American. She becomes senile, and the family end up on the street. Eventually, they “put the addled, disoriented Luella on a leash, to keep her from wandering off.”
The reviewer for the Washington Post called The Mandibles “racist.” But Luella is leashed because she is senile, not because of her color, and because the collapse of the dollar has taken America’s social services with it. The image of a yoked African American evokes the worst of American history. Shriver raises it as a specter of the future, summoned by a different kind of economic immorality.
The image is distasteful, but then so was Jonathan Swift’s image of cannibalism in A Modest Proposal. Satirists are moralists, and they moralize through our distress. It is for individual readers to decide whether The Mandibles succeeds or fails as a work of imagination. To do that, Shriver must be allowed to express herself, and we must be allowed to read.
Shriver, who remarked on her reputation as an “iconoclast,” must have known that the image of Luella on a leash would be controversial. In Brisbane, she donned a sombrero, in symbolic rebuke of the administration of Bowdoin College, which had placed students on probation for wearing sombreros to a tequila-themed party. She suspects that social media are carrying the foul wind of political correctness from the campus into the adult world. Her speech and headgear caught that wind and were carried around the world faster than a crate of Vegemite.
Two days later, the Guardian published an attack on Shriver by Yassmin Abdel-Magied, a Sudanese-born Australian activist. Abdel-Magied had walked out during Shriver’s speech, after detecting “the stench of privilege.” So she probably missed Shriver’s reasoned conclusion, that to represent reality, novelists must retain “the right to wear many hats—including sombreros.”
Shriver had discussed Little Bee, the 2008 novel by Chris Cleave. He is a 43-year-old white British male, his protagonist a 14-year-old Nigerian girl. Shriver did not judge whether Cleave had “got away with it” in terms of plausibility and literary quality—”I haven’t read the book yet”—but she did “admire his courage.” To escape the limits of the author’s personal experience is “part of a fiction writer’s job.” After all, crime writers are not serial killers, and Dickens did not run a gang of juvenile pickpockets.
Abdel-Magied accused Shriver of “racial supremacy,” cultural “disrespect,” and the “kind of attitude that lays the foundation for prejudice, for hate, for genocide.” Shriver’s speech was “a celebration of the unfettered exploitation of the experiences of others.” Cleave did not have the right to write Little Bee, because “the actual Nigerian woman can’t get published or reviewed.”
Nor was it possible for us to read Shriver’s actual words, at first. The organizers of the Brisbane conference removed her speech from their website. The Guardian ran Abdel-Magied’s attack three days before it published a transcript of Shriver’s speech. Her concerns about censorship had been censored.
“In our age,” Orwell wrote in “The Prevention of Literature” (1946), “the idea of intellectual liberty is under attack from two directions. On the one side are its theoretical enemies, the apologists of totalitarianism, and on the other its immediate, practical enemies, monopoly and bureaucracy.”
The “practical enemies” are economic, and erode intellectual independence by demanding conformity of product. The “theoretical enemies” are the real danger. Deliberately or not, the theorists wish to prevent literature entirely. They demand the “falsification of reality” according to their preferred dogma.
This denies the nature of literary creation. All art grows by appropriation, and “the imagination, like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity.” To condition the right to write on an author’s place in the hierarchies of sex, color, and class is to replace the challenges of the market with the strictures of dictatorship.
Fiction is not true; that is why it is easily dismissed. Fiction is made up; that is why every species of tyrant and bully has sought to limit it. Works of art possess the power to evoke other lives and other states of mind, to create private emotions and empathy with those different from us. Privacy and empathy are foundational to liberal civilization. For the same reason, they are anathema to tyrants.
The peculiarity of Western culture, Orwell observed, was that the “intellectuals,” the people who stand to gain most from creative liberty, are the ones calling for censorship. It makes little difference whether the censorship is that of Communists and class snobs, as in Orwell’s day, or academics and Islamists, as in ours. The outcomes are the same: the restriction of individual expression and impoverishment of culture.
Imagine your mind without the “cultural appropriation” of Othello and Huckleberry Finn, or the colonization of the English language by Joseph Conrad and Vladimir Nabokov, or the colonization of England by T. S. Eliot and Henry James. No more popular music, either, because the chords of the blues came from English hymns. And the French are taking back the movies. What remains is parched, gray dullness, politically correct and utterly barren. If we try hard enough, Orwell thought, we might be able to extinguish entirely the “liberal culture that we have lived in since the Renaissance.”
As Shriver said, the democratic exchange of people and ideas is “self-evidently one of the most productive, fascinating aspects of modern urban life.” The right to “appropriate” should not be in question, only the quality of the appropriation. Which brings us to the tartan pantaloons that Yassmin Abdel-Magied sports in the photograph on her Wikipedia page. This is a shameful appropriation of the indigenous culture of Scotland’s first people—not appropriate.
Dominic Green, the author of Three Empires on the Nile, teaches politics at Boston College.
