THE LAST REFUGE OF THE OUTRAGEOUS
The Australian, Australia
Sept 29 2006
Government attempts to legislate virtue are like a noose around the
necks of fiction writers. Lionel Shriver is appalled and claims the
right for her characters to offend
September 30, 2006
SO tired is political correctness, both the phrase and the
concept, that it’s now politically correct to despair of political
correctness. But however shop-worn, this nuisance isn’t going away.
Especially in an era of super-sensitivity about relations between
Christians and Muslims, it’s getting worse.
Thus, fiction may be the last refuge of the outrageous, the last
redoubt of Orwell’s thought crime. Moreover, even the freedom to be
outrageous in fiction is under threat.
Were political correctness merely a matter of social conventions,
what we swallow for being unacceptable at parties, it would be
odious enough. Yet governments in Western countries such as the US
and Britain increasingly legislate virtue, telling us not only what
we may do but also what we may feel, and even what we may believe.
Implicitly, they’re also telling us what we maywrite.
The evolution of the special category of hate crimes, for example,
might seem progressive. How laudable, that we should levy additional
penalties — often many more years in prison — for committing
crimes for what are now regarded as particularly unvirtuous reasons:
antipathy towards blacks, or Mexicans, or homosexuals. Presumably it
is far worse to murder someone for being gay than because you want his
wallet, or you dislike him personally, or you just don’t like his face.
Yet in selecting out for legal demonisation one set of unpleasant
motivations, what is criminalised is the hatred itself: an imputed
interior state, an emotion, an attitude, a disposition. Hate crime
is thought crime.
Equally disturbing, this past year Tony Blair’s Government tried to
pass a bill (later mercifully watered down in the House of Commons)
that would add incitement to religious hatred — punishable by seven
years in prison — to the equally dubious legislation already on
the British books banning incitement to racial hatred. Laws that
prohibit incitement to illegal action, such as murder or arson, seem
defensible enough. But these statutes criminalise incitement to the
state of hatred itself.
If we’re classifying hatred as a crime, what’s the limit? Aren’t
there various other emotions that are disagreeable, and that we might
eliminate to make the world a better place? How about criminalising
envy, greed or bile?
More to the point, wouldn’t laws against incitement to racial or
religious hatred apply to fiction? Could I be hauled into court
because I crafted a character who harboured distasteful racial or
religious views but who was portrayed as insufficiently villainous,
or even as beguiling? With these incitement laws, would my characters
not be permitted to use racist epithets in dialogue, or to express
contempt for Islam or Scientology?
I wish these questions were specious. But two recent set-tos in
Britain, where I live, suggest the noose is getting tighter around
people who make up things.
Passage of that law against incitement to religious hatred might have
given the goons who shut down a theatrical production of a Sikh play
called Behzti in Birmingham two years ago a legal leg to stand on.
On December 18, 2004, 1000 enraged Sikhs stormed the Birmingham
Repertory Theatre, throwing eggs, smashing windows, injuring three
police officers and attempting to climb on to the stage. The
mob successfully halted the production after it had played for
20 minutes. Behzti, Punjabi for dishonour, had enraged the crowd
because it set a rape in a Sikh temple. Playwright Gurpreet Kaur
Bhatti, herself a British-born Sikh, had resisted local pressure to
re-situate the rape scene in a religiously neutral setting such as
a community centre.
Reluctantly, the Birmingham Rep cancelled the run, for neither the
theatre nor the police could guarantee the safety of audience and
staff. Determined to defend free speech, a second Birmingham company
volunteered to stage the play, only to withdraw the offer at the
request of the playwright, who went into hiding after receiving
death threats.
Even more unsettling than the triumph of yahooism was the rhetoric
surrounding this event. The spokesman for the Roman Catholic Bishop of
Birmingham applauded the cancellation of Behzti, claiming that "with
freedom of speech and artistic license must come responsibility". But
the now-familiar "with rights come responsibilities" line simply
promotes self-censorship. With rights come responsibilities decodes as:
"It’s all very well to hold rights in theory, so long as you don’t
choose to exercise them." Making this case all the more extraordinary,
the playwright wasn’t allowed to criticise her own religion.
The views of Harmander Singh, spokesman for a Sikh advocacy group,
were echoed by numerous British commentators at the time: "We are
not against freedom of speech, but there’s no right tooffend."
Oh, but indeed there is.
This is becoming, dangerously, a shibboleth of our time: there’s
no right to offend. More recently, with the publication of the
notorious Danish cartoons depicting Mohammed, both irate Muslims
and many Western talking heads touted the same dubious dictum that
we have no right to offend, as if it were self-evidently true. Hence
mainstream British and American newspapers refused to publish those
images, despite their centrality to a headline news story.
As a fiction writer, I took this craven capitulation to mob threats
personally. Would those riots have been any less violent, or any less
effective at frightening the Western press into suppressing them,
had those cartoons been short stories about Mohammed instead? Are
we not well on our way to submitting that artists of any sort —
caricaturists, film-makers, or fiction writers — have no right
to offend?
Freedom of speech that does not embrace the right to offend is a
farce. The stipulation that you may say whatever you like so long as
you don’t hurt anyone’s feelings canonises the milquetoast homily:
"If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all." Since
rare is the sentiment that doesn’t outrage somebody, rest assured
that if we enshrine this prissy fortune-cookie aphorism into law,
none of us will say anything at all.
We hear a lot about tolerance these days but the concept of tolerance
seems to have warped. We forget that in the olden days we tolerated
through gritted teeth; we tolerated what we could barely stand. It’s
now becoming accepted social cant that to tolerate is ipso facto to
accord respect. Indeed, respect is gradually achieving the status of
one more hallowed human right.
I’m sorry, but I’m under no obligation to respect you, or anything
you believe. Respect is earned. It is not an entitlement. Since I
find evolution credible and well supported by material evidence,
I have every reason to regard creationists as delusional crackpots,
which would make my at once respecting their beliefs patently absurd.
Similarly, in books and articles, I am under no obligation to accord
respect to any group, to any ethnicity, community, nation, or religion
that hasn’t, in my view, earned it.
***
ALTHOUGH less violent than the Behzti riots, a more recent incident
in Britain raises similar concerns and, for me as a novelist, strikes
closer to home.
Monica Ali’s best-selling novel Brick Lane takes place in a Bangladeshi
community in London’s East End. Ali is half Bangladeshi, not that
this should matter.
Ruby Films was to have begun shooting the movie of her acclaimed novel
this past July in the eponymous neighbourhood where the novel isset.
Yet irate Bangladeshi locals organised a group called (believe it or
not) The Campaign Against Monica Ali’s Film Brick Lane, a painfully
literal nomenclature betraying that these folks were not creative
geniuses themselves. The group rallied hundreds of people to protest
against the filming and threatened to stage a public book-burning of
the novel. As with the Behzti riots, the hoo-ha was successful. Ruby
Films decided to shoot the movie somewhere else.
The problem? Ali’s Bangladeshi characters were not "representative"
of East End Bangladeshis, if only because the novel includes an
adulterous relationship. (Ostensibly they don’t have adultery in
the real Brick Lane, in which case it ain’t only creationists who
are delusional.) The protesters also complained that Ali promoted
stereotypes, although surely you can’t have it both ways. Is a
perfectly representative character not, inevitably, a stereotype?
What most dumbfounded me was the group’s indignation that some of
Ali’s characters — her characters, not the author herself — were
"racist and insulting". These offending characters call Sylhetis
— 95 per cent of Britain’s Bangladeshi community — "dirty little
monkeys" who are "under-educated, illiterate and closed-minded". Thus
my concern that pretty soon people may be telling me what my characters
can and cannot say is not groundless. (Alas, this very month Turkish
novelist Elif Shafak was on trial for insulting Turkishness because
her characters utter disparaging remarks about Turks and dare to
mention the Armenian genocide.)
The rhetoric surrounding the Brick Lane protest was familiar from
Behzti. Said the campaign’s leader: "We are protecting our community’s
dignity and respect." Ali’s novel was "a violation of the human rights
of the community". The chairman of the Brick Lane Business Association
begrudgingly praised Ali — "She is definitely a good writer" — before
chiding that "she didn’t use her skill to benefit the community".
I’m reminded of a letter I received recently from an Armenian
in America who grilled me on why exactly I had chosen to make
my protagonist in We Need to Talk About Kevin Armenian. And if I
insisted on making a character Armenian, why, he asked, must she be
so unappealing? I was given to believe (a) I had to justify borrowing
this man’s ethnicity for my novel, and perhaps I should have asked his
personal permission beforehand, and (b) if I insisted on borrowing his
ethnic identity without asking, I was obliged to make that character
charming as could be.
Are we not prospectively getting into a territory where a fiction
writer is obliged to consult whatever community a novel’s characters
hail from? Must a fiction writer start conducting focus groups to
ensure that nothing about the characters offends, to ensure that they
are perfectly representative, and that their portrayal accords the
ethnicity or religion in question with respect? Are we so concerned
with this new version of tolerance that characters in novels may not
say anything nasty about groups of people, even in dialogue? Do we
want novelists always to use their skills to "benefit thecommunity"?
And let me ask you this: If even novelists have to massage their texts
to guarantee that no line, no plot development and no characterisation
steps on anyone’s toes, do you really want to read these books?
I’ve written about a variety of subject matter, but the single thread
running through most of my work may be this: my characters don’t
follow the rules. The quasi-antihero in my fourth novel, Game Control,
is a cynical misanthrope named Calvin Piper, a disaffected demographer
convinced that population growth threatens our species with extinction.
Calvin plans to save the human race — rather an odd impulse for a
misanthrope, an irony the reader is not meant to miss — by murdering
two billion people overnight. A political inconvenience, most of
these haplessly superfluous folks whom Calvin would cull are poor
people from the Third World.
Game Control is usually interpreted as satire, but its intent is not
entirely tongue-in-cheek. The novel encourages us, as Calvin urges
his do-gooder girlfriend, to "think abominations".
I’ve written more than one novel in which characters think
abominations. Double Fault is about the marriage of two professional
tennis players. Driven to distinguish herself in the sport from
childhood, Willy plummets in the rankings just as her husband soars.
She can’t bear it. We like to think of spouses as on the same side
but our friend Willy starts to perceive her husband as the enemy.
So this is a novel about a wife who does not wish her own husband well,
who when watching him play a tennis match cheers for his opponent. It’s
a novel about jealousy, about a woman who does not follow the rules of
marriage: it’s about thought crime. Most infamously, of course, my main
character in Kevin, the mother of a Columbine-style killer, also fails
to follow the emotional rules. Eva Khatchadourian is not overjoyed by
motherhood and cannot love her own son. She experiences pregnancy as an
infestation. She gives birth and feels only a horrifying blankness. She
imputes all manner of wickedness to her son, even as an infant. She
interprets what could be a toddler’s innocent prankishness as malign
destruction. She seems to defend her one act of real physical abuse
as "finally communicating", in a passage that has sometimes been
interpreted as an authorial justification of domestic violence.
What has most flummoxed me about Kevin post-publication is the way
a bossy, moralistic subset of its audience has insisted on applying
nonfiction standards to fictional characters. Eva should have attended
more PTA meetings. Eva should have taken her six-year-old to see a
therapist whether or not this is something that, within the internal
world of the novel, this character would do. Any day now I expect a
booming knock on the door: "Lady! We’re here to arrest your narrator!"
The more constrained we are in nonfiction, and the more emotionally
and intellectually prescriptive we are with one another in real
life, the more vital it is that we have some vehicle free of these
constraints. At its best, literature expresses the unconscious,
the unfiltered, the contradictory, the irrational, and yes, even
theunacceptable.
Thus I have finally come to understand that if I am ever to come
to grips with immigration — an issue with which I am unhealthily
obsessed — I will have to write a novel about it. Every time I’ve
poked my head above the parapet on this matter in newspapers, it
has been chopped off. Immigration stirs many feelings that offend,
and The Guardian would never allow these no-nos into the columns I
write for it. In a novel, I could stuff outrageous sentiments into
the mouths of characters, thus employing what I call the "It’s not me,
it’s my imaginary friend" gambit.
Until some new self-righteous law stops me, I will continue to
write characters who don’t follow the rules. My characters are not
necessarily representative of the communities in which they live, and
I will not hesitate to make them Armenian or Catholic or Pakistani,
even if they’re not portrayed as perfectly emblematic of Armenians,
Catholics or Pakistanis as a whole.
My characters are full of prejudices. My characters may not like
Chinese people. My characters may believe that homosexuality is
unnatural. My characters may slander Islam, or belief in crystals,
or my father’s Presbyterianism. My characters murder schoolchildren,
plot to massacre two billion people overnight and hit their husbands
over the head. My characters are obnoxious, spiteful, seething,
difficult, resentful and inconsistent; and no, my characters will
not always take their six-year-old kids to therapists to get help. My
characters think abominations. In other words, my characters are the
closest approximations I can contrive of real people.
This essay is based on Lionel Shriver’s opening address to the Brisbane
Writers Festival. Her novel The Post-Birthday World will be published
early next year.