David Foster Wallace, the brilliant oddball behind Infinite Jest, has been accused of abusing fellow writer Mary Karr. Charles Dickens cast off his wife (and mother of his ten children) after leaving her for a younger woman. Woody Allen has been accused of molesting his adopted daughter.
Should we stop paying attention to these artists’ work? This is the question plaguing academia right now, as the age-old debate over separating the art from the artist is being relitigated through a social justice lens. While an increased attention to the issue of sexual assault permeates our conversations, should we still pay attention to all these men accused of mistreating women?
This week, writer Emma Goldberg asked as much in the New York Times, wondering, “Do Works by Men Toppled by #MeToo Belong in the Classroom?”
Several academics weighed in, including Clare Hayes-Brady, a professor of American Literature at University College Dublin. “Shakespeare abandoned his family. Norman Mailer stabbed his wife,” she said. “We don’t love the people we love because they’re morally virtuous.”
Others weren’t so sure, with some railing against Woody Allen films and some scrapping Wallace from their syllabus. The scales in academia now often tilt toward censorship, or at least toward letting students opt out of certain discussions if they find themselves “triggered.”
If we refuse to have these discussions, however, we may miss the point of literature. By censoring authors whose works have already immersed themselves in the culture or found their place in the literary canon, we’re not punishing them. We’re hurting ourselves.
“To address these questions, we need to ask first why we read,” Karen Swallow Prior, an author and professor of English at Liberty University, tells me in an email. “If we read for learning and pleasure, then we understand a work of literature or art to have an existence connected to but separate from its creator. But increasingly, literature, like many things, has been overly politicized.”
Identity politics would try to make the contents of authors’ lives inseparable from an evaluation of their works. Yet while authors’ pasts are important to understanding the substance of their creations, any moral bleakness should not lead readers to scrap their books altogether. Wallace might have been sexist, but that doesn’t mean Infinite Jest has less to tell us about ourselves. If we understand Wallace’s failings, perhaps it tells us more.
But unfortunately, many literature professors no longer feel this way. “Readers are seen as tainted by what they read rather than being able to gain mastery over it,” Prior explains. “By rejecting the opportunity to even make such judgments, however, we diminish our ability to make such intellectual and aesthetic judgments.”
A trend toward elimination of “problematic” authors is not only unhelpful; it’s entirely impractical. Prior asks: When are authors simply sleazy, and when do their actions take them beyond the pale? Which gatekeepers have the moral authority to decide? The line is not only not worth drawing, it’s also impossible to draw.
Of course, professors assigning books by living authors might want to encourage students to purchase used copies of books to avoid putting cash into morally reprehensible writers’ hands. In that case, “we do need to let our informed consciences be guides,” Prior says. But “this is a completely different judgment from one that might be made about the value of their work and the insights it offers to human experience.”
There are plenty of artists we could “cancel” if we liked: Renoir, Roald Dahl, even actors such as John Wayne. The rise of #MeToo and a greater social consciousness about sexual assault and other trespasses presents readers with an opportunity to understand the fuller legacies of the ill-behaved artists who inform our lives.
It means we ought to have this discussion, but it also means that we must continue to engage with art that has permeated our culture, however imperfect its creators may be.
