Mick Hartley

I posted the other day on China's new cultural revolution, and the similarities with North Korea. We can, though, look closer to home for that Orwellian touch. Sasha White in Tablet – How Politics Makes Bad Books:

[W]hen a regime seeks to crush all spontaneous and free human creativity and ardor, it often produces a secretive, rebellious underground movement. Even in the world of 1984, Winston and Julia seek their rebellion through a passionate and corporeal love affair, subverting the party’s control simply through their love. In the Soviet Union, state-sanctioned literature was vastly overshadowed in terms of artistic importance by its illicit counterparts: samizdat and tamizdat, underground books published abroad and in Russia by dissident authors. With the threat of imprisonment and persecution looming, Russian writers like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Mikhail Bulgakov, and Boris Pasternak wrote masterpieces that are still read throughout the world, while the names of the officially-sanctioned writers who hewed more faithfully to the party line and received fat book contracts and state honors during the Soviet period have disappeared from history.

In the English-speaking literary world today, a narrow set of acceptable ideological views, a culture of hive-minded conformity, and a commercially driven industry have created an environment in which mainstream publishers don’t print certain views, and censor and revise the ones they do put out. Authors who don’t bow to the woke paradigm lose work, are pressured into self-censoring, or don’t ever get their foot in the door, while publishing professionals are fired left and right for ideological nonconformity, not to mention the rise of the sensitivity reader, whose role is to enforce the party line. When I was fired from my former literary agency, my boss kept repeating, “the industry is very liberal” meaning that my criticism of gender ideology is not welcome anywhere in the industry…..

Our era will go down as a dry and unimportant milieu in the history of the written word. Instead of publishing controversial and provocative books that would challenge and engage critically with mainstream beliefs, the publishing industry has become the backdrop for a continuous stream of instructive “scandals” wherein an author, agent, or editor is maligned or even dropped after being accused of heretical thought. In January, literary agent Colleen Oefelein was fired from the Jennifer De Chiara Literary Agency merely for the sin of having accounts on “right-wing” social media platforms Gab and Parler. Last year, Hachette canceled Woody Allen’s memoir after “listening to staff and others” object to the publication on the grounds of the allegations of sexual abuse against Allen. Prior to the cancellation, members of Hachette’s New York staff staged a walkout to protest the Allen memoir, which was then canceled (it seems safe to say that whatever one thinks of the accusations of sexual abuse against Allen, the decision to cancel his memoir only stems the likelihood of a Hachette book actually being of interest to posterity). Just last month, another scandal rocked the literary world when author Kate Clanchy was accused of racism and ableism for rather innocuous language used in her memoir Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me. Statements of contrition were released from the publisher, Picador, as well as the Orwell Foundation, which had awarded the book a prize for political writing in 2020. Clanchy herself tweeted that she welcomed the opportunity to revise her book and added “you are right to blame me.” […]

The fearful crowd who don’t think the public should be subjected to vulgarity or differences in opinion are destroying an outlet that for centuries has allowed people to peer into the less savory parts of our common humanity. Books are more like dreams than perfected utopian ideologies: they are not all kind. Some are nightmares. Sometimes they show us things we’d rather not look at or remind us of painful memories. But dreams, like books, help our brains process these things, and teach us more about ourselves. The use of books to make believe about some pretend perfect standard of humanity is a crime against human intelligence. It is a body blow to the millennia of development that brought us works of literature that shaped and changed the world. Perhaps this blow to the authenticity and audacity of literature signals our decline as a civilization. After all, what good is a culture that refuses to examine itself?

Of course the situation here or in the US bears little comparison with China or North Korea. Challenging books do get through – Helen Joyce's "Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality", for instance. Though, tellingly, no American publisher was brave enough to pick that particular book up: the UK edition is being distributed in the US.