What's the point of them? They infantilise; they encourage a narcissistic sense of victimhood; they pretend that art is about therapy rather than about broadening the mind, about struggling to meet the nasty old world rather than facing it head on. When authors themselves add trigger warnings to their books though….well, it's just getting silly.
Trigger warnings have become a totemic feature of our times, symptomatic of an age that is both hopelessly fragile and insufferably judgemental. They have spread like a canker as publishers and authors have sought to parade their sensitivity and flaunt their moral superiority. And they are increasingly a means of a virtue signalling and projecting one’s ego.
Evidence of this has been on show this week with the revelation that Joanne Harris has begun to add content warnings to her own books. Readers of her bestselling 1999 novel, Chocolat, will now be cautioned that the story contains ‘spousal abuse, mild violence, death of parent, cancer, hostility and outdated terms for travelling community and religious intolerance’. Furthermore, Harris’s website has been updated to add that her Loki novels include ‘depictions of eating disorders’, that The Blue Salt Road contains ‘depictions of whale hunting’ and The Little Mermaid contains ‘ableist and transphobic slurs’.
Pass the smelling salts.
Whereas trigger warnings have traditionally sought to pour scorn on the past, here we see them employed to cast aspersions on the present, to lay bare our own lazy acceptance and even representations of all that is wrong and unjust in society: spousal violence, religious intolerance, ableism and transphobia. Through this gesture, Harris seeks to assert and clarify that she is more compassionate than her readers and contemporaries, more alert and more aware about deplorable aspects of society today. This is the trigger warning as a virtue-signalling vanity exercise.
Suzanne Moore in the Telegraph – My hope for 2025? That we finally scrap absurd ‘trigger warnings’:
The sins of darkness are visited upon the souls of us sensitive readers. Which is why we read in the first place. I don’t remember how old I was when I read The Diary of Anne Frank or The Grapes of Wrath or Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. I don’t remember when we were taught about Salome demanding the head of John the Baptist.
It’s amazing we all survived somehow. Just as we were let out to play all day as long as we got home in time for tea, so too did our teachers let us read at whatever level we were at. There isn’t much that’s darker than Thomas Hardy anyway, is there?…
What lived was our imagination and who in their right mind would want to curb that? Quite a few mediocre, middlebrow authors it seems.
One such person is Joanne Harris, author of the best-selling Chocolat and now a proponent of trigger warnings, including in her own novels. Her best-seller contains “spousal abuse, mild violence, death of parent, cancer, hostility and outdated terms for travelling community and religious intolerance”. Be still my beating heart and pass me Brett Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, or actually any classic.
Harris is not only sweetness and light though, as it turns out. When Salman Rushdie was stabbed she conducted a jolly little Twitter poll to jokily ask which writers actually received death threats. Her intervention came after JK Rowling, who had come out in support for Rushdie in the wake of the attack, had just been warned: “Don’t worry, you are next.”
Instead, Harris appears to be a fully paid-up member of the “being cruel to be kind lobby”, which cancels anything that does not fit the current stultifying orthodoxy of publishing. She was, after all, head of the Society of Authors and defended the hounding of women – such as Rowling – who did not agree with her on the issue of trans rights.
As Rowling herself said: “Harris has consistently failed to criticise tactics designed to silence and intimidate women who disagree with her personal position on gender identity ideology and has said publicly, ‘Cancel isn’t a dirty word. We habitually cancel things we no longer want.’”
This culture is still everywhere. Actually, culture is the wrong word, this is profound parochialism. In the dying days of 2024, “social justice” now means that Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey are issued with trigger warnings at the University of Exeter.
There are references to “sexual violence, rape and infant mortality”, undergraduates are counselled. Students who feel upset are advised to “leave the classroom and contact wellbeing” if they are distressed. Wellbeing? What fresh hell?
The truth is that trigger warnings – a lazy idea, largely imported from American campuses – are an embarrassing offshoot of the therapising of everyday life.
Joanne Harris, as it happens, is a big fan of gender ideology, and when head of the Society of Authors repeatedly failed to defend writers like Rowling, Rachel Rooney, Onjali Rauf, Julie Bindel and others who lost work and received death threats because of their gender critical views. Now she's not happy about Helen Joyce and Julie Bindel being asked to speak at a literary festival. With or without a trigger warning.
The former Chair of the @Soc_of_Authors finds it 'disappointing' that two published authors will speak at a literary festival. The suppression of #FreeSpeech, & support of cancellation & censorship, within the publishing/writing world is the reason I resigned from the SoA pic.twitter.com/qVZgtM9Hg5
— Fiona Graph (@fiona_graph) December 30, 2024
Mick Hartley 
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