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- Herausgeber: Biteback Publishing
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Amid the flames of the culture wars, politicians have taken up arms over controls on literary culture, spurred on in part by universities 'triggering' canonical texts. Jonathan Swift's 'Battle of the Books' has flared up again. But is 'triggering' utter wokery or responsible pedagogic practice? Through dozens of case studies of triggered works, from Romeo and Juliet to Gender Queer, John Sutherland explores the recent phenomenon of triggering and its consequences for university English departments and literature itself. He maintains that what is routinely overlooked in the heat of polemic is that triggering is categorically different from traditional institutional (religious, educational, dictatorial) controls on literature. Triggering is in essence an alert. Done responsibly it does not erase or meddle; it stimulates curiosity and thought. It honours the fact that great literature is great because it is, as Franz Kafka says, powerful. In this characteristically nuanced and calmly objective study, the witty literary critic guides us through the increasingly rocky terrain of triggering. His advice rings clear: literature matters, to us and what we make of our world, and it must be handled with critical care.
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‘We each have our little triggers.’
Neil Gaiman, Trigger Warning
‘Altogether, I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book does not shake us awake like a blow to the skull, why bother reading it in the first place? So that it can make us happy, as you put it? Good God, we’d be just as happy if we had no books at all … What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.’
Franz Kafka
Contents
Author’s Note
I preface what follows with a trigger warning. This book contains reference, quotation and content discussion of what some may find disturbing material. The warning is not ironic. Some of what follows disturbs me.
Much of what was banned in the past revolved around ‘four-letter words’, notably a word beginning with ‘F’. Much of modern triggering, erasure and cancellation revolves around a word beginning with ‘N’. In discussion where an author uses the word ‘nigger’, I have retained it. Where I use the word, I have asterisked it as ‘n***er’. I have made every effort in the text under my control, not quotation, to avoid offensiveness.
This book, I may add, has not been subjected to any ‘sensitivity reading’ other than that routine in the editorial process.
Many of the trigger points for what follows have been publicised by what is loosely called the ‘right-wing press’ – the Daily and Sunday Telegraph, the Daily Mail and The Times. Although I have a more mixed mind on the matter, I appreciate the valuable light they have thrown on an important topic.
Preface
The topic addressed in this book is, loosely, current controls on literary culture in its many evolving forms. Nominally triggering is the subject along with a range of other impositions on the creative act and product: namely, cancellation, prepublication bowdlerisation, suppression, ‘red flagging’, semi-tolerance. Burning in any other than a metaphorical or theatrical sense is nowadays rare. But even in literary cultures, like those of the English-speaking world, which boast their freedom of expression, extra-literary control exists at points from the moment of creation (inspiration), gestation (editorial revision), delivery (publication), distribution and consumption. And, nowadays, in comes the ‘sensitivity reader’. Creative literature’s superego.
The account which follows begins with a survey of the arrival and rapid evolution of triggering and other ‘warning’ mechanisms: thumbs in the literary pudding and pie.
The Introduction is followed by a section of brief items (500 words or less) presented as ‘Signs of the Times’. They compose a pointilliste picture, without comment, of where we are and where we’re going.
Thereafter, comes a section, ‘Machineries’, anatomising larger and pervasive mechanisms of creation, production, distribution, reception, consumption and, in all of them, new forms of control on the literary product.
The third section, ‘Case Studies’, comprises extended single-case, free-range meditations on triggered works. The book ends with a self-reflective Epilogue.
Introduction
‘Triggering’ was, one fancies, a candidate for the Oxford English Dictionary’s ‘Word of the Year’ in 2014 (‘vape’ won). When and where did the usage originate? No one is sure. There is, however, clear connection with the psychiatric term ‘trauma trigger’ – stimuli which can detonate unhealed wounds. The clinical term was in the air after the Vietnam War in the treatment of American veterans with PTSD (posttraumatic stress disorder).
The concept of triggering printed and e-circulated text took off in feminist magazines and social media ‘chat’ around 2010. Ms Magazine, Spare Rib and LiveJournal are cited as early adopters. Anything coming which might retraumatise susceptible readers was ‘triggered’. ‘Here be Dragons’ as old maps (supposedly) used to warn. ‘Trigger warning’ entered common use at the same period as the premonitory ‘spoiler alerts’ were being used for films and literature whose effects depend on surprise or shock. It amounted to ‘prepping’ the reader.
There was demographic force behind the triggering of literature. Women and minorities had been, after long suppression and downright oppression, more proportionately recruited into opinion-forming outlets – publishing, journalism, broadcasting – at decision-making not service (coffee-fetching, jiffy-bag-stuffing, short-hand typing, mailroom) level. Once aboard, they were no longer servile. Levers were in their hands.
There were early signs. It was furious middle-rank female employees who strong-armed Simon & Schuster into junking American Psycho (costing the firm hundreds of thousands of dollars in advances paid and compensation) after the proofs of Bret Easton Ellis’s graphically gynophobic (ironically, he claims) novel circulated in-house in 1990.
Around 2013–14, triggering moved, wholesale, into higher education. Again, infrastructural shift laid the way. In humanities disciplines (literature, history, philosophy), women had generally achieved numerical parity at staff, research and student levels. Science subjects, patriarchal to the last test tube, put up fierce resistance before falling.
Triggering among women writing for women received lateral impetus from the #MeToo insurgency and its witness that there was more sexual abuse in society than had previously been supposed, exposed or dealt with. The Black Lives Matter movement made its own assertion about oppression of African Americans. It was allied with another acronym, ‘CRT’ – critical race theory (implication: ‘you’re racist but don’t realise it’). In post-imperial Britain, ‘decolonising the curriculum’ was a parallel rallying call (implication: ‘you’re post-imperialist but don’t realise it’).
Fifty years after historical decolonisation, Harold Macmillan’s winds of change were whipping round the dreaming towers of his alma mater Oxford strongly enough to shake but not topple the statue of Cecil Rhodes – the magnate who believed the greatest thing God could give to man was to be Anglo-Saxon. The second greatest thing was to own Africa.
The 1964 Civil Rights Act in the US and the 1967 Sexual Offences Act and the 2006 Gender Recognition Act in the UK, as well as post-colonial immigration into a newly polycultural Britain, had widened the ethnic composition and sexualities of student populations in the English-speaking world. Optimists saw it as ‘rainbowism’. Change it certainly was.
Over the same period, the whopping cost of fees had transformed the higher education UK and US student body into customers wielding the big bazooka: purchaser power. Proverbially, ‘the customer is always right’. Students were by the second decade of the twenty-first century customers, not begowned ephebes or acolytes. Student money talked. The university listened. Curricular power switched. With the switch it became clear, interestingly, that young people were a different kind of reader from their elders. They largely read what they read on different sites. The iPhone and lectern were generations and planets apart. It was fast food versus sit-down dining.
In May 2014, the New York Times reported, with a gasp of surprise, that at scores of institutions – from Ivy Leagues to community colleges – student bodies were demanding trigger warnings in their courses for canonical texts such as Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf and The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare. Where had all that come from? ‘Follow the Money’ as ‘Deep Throat’ told Bernstein and Woodward.
The student demands for triggers were made on behalf of ‘readers who have experienced racism, colonialism, religious persecution, violence, suicide and more’. The tail wagged the dog. Such was current student financial muscle that triggering was duly installed in the US at college level as ‘responsible pedagogical practice’. It was, more honestly, what in chess is called ‘a forced move’.
For school children and infants, the content warnings were directed by similarly ‘responsible’ publishers and websites at teachers and parents (e.g. Parent Previews, Trigger Warning Database and Moms for Liberty). Here too was a generational difference: tots had not taken over the kindergarten curriculum or the TV remote control. But a pattern was set from above where subtle power exchanges were taking place. Without fanfare, or public notice, bloodthirsty classics like ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ (poor, wolf-snack, granny) slid off the shelf into bedtime nonentity. The Great Reform in children’s reading (‘Up with Dahl! Down with Dahl!’) is discussed in the following pages. It is part of a larger pattern.
A poll of 800 American college teachers in 2016 revealed that half of those surveyed had issued student-impelled trigger warnings on taught materials in humanities courses. There was also content origin complaints to act on. Where were the multi-ethnic writers, philosophers, scientists? By the third decade of the century, triggering and ‘curriculum cultural spread’ were on the way to being universal ‘good practice’. Literature now came into the seminar locked and loaded. And a quantity of it triggered.
On being informed in 2014 of what was going on in America by The Guardian, John Mullan, the head of English studies at UCL, retorted dismissively that triggering was ‘treating people as if they are babies, and studying literature is for grownups at university’.
There was a cheering chorus of ‘hear, hear!’ from those who saw themselves as grown(er) up(er) than fractious students with weak knees. But the tide was with youth. It reached a floodmark with a survey by The Times in August 2022 which found, via freedom of information requests, that British universities had covertly triggered over a thousand texts, including the work of literary greats such as ‘William Shakespeare, Geoffrey Chaucer, Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens and Agatha Christie’.
The Scottish Daily Express did its own FOI survey in August 2022 of Scottish universities. Among its ‘catch’ was that the University of the Highlands and Islands had triggered Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, on the grounds of ‘graphic fishing scenes’. I shall never eat a Stornoway kipper, or an Arbroath smokie, again without thinking of the poor herring’s pain.
Triggering was by now a hot political issue. On reading in the Daily Mail in January 2022 that Harry Potter had been triggered by Chester University,* the then British Universities Minister, Michelle Donelan, protested that ‘Harry Potter is actually a children’s book. Fundamentally it is probably a multi-million-pound industry that has been franchised into films.’
It was a slightly cock-eyed but truly Tory argument that J. K. Rowling’s books should be read by university students untriggered because they had made millions for United Kingdom PLC.
Donelan has a degree in history and politics from York University, a member of the 24-strong elite Russell Group. The group – as a magnet for high-paying overseas students – earns handsomely for Britain. The University of York is, as the 2020s roll on, a dedicated triggerer. The study of literature, in toto, carries the warning: ‘In many cases, the language forms we will encounter in the module are taboo terms (slurs, insults, swear words, slang terms, etc.) with the potential to cause offence.’
An archaeological module on Egyptian mummies warned prospective students that they would find reference to dead bodies. It seems absurd, but the actual business of embalming is, indeed, if you look it up, stomach turning – particularly if the class is before lunch.
The minister’s comment that ‘Harry Potter is actually a children’s book’ is dubious. Later instalments of the Potteriad are teen fiction, verging on adult. Questionable too is the implication that children’s literature requires no triggering.
In 2021, Cambridge University’s Homerton College, an institution for the higher education of future schoolteachers, announced that it was subjecting its huge library archive of children’s books to ‘sensitivity reading’, with necessary warning inscribed. The laborious exercise was part funded by an £80,633 grant from the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council. Big bad wolves who huffed and puffed little piggies’ houses down and giants who ground up Englishmen for their daily bread were themselves for the chop.† Fee, fi, fo, fum.
The commonsense party airily vilifies triggering with the sarcasms ‘wokery’ and ‘snowflakery’. Some instances do seem on the face of it wonky. In January 2022, in response to an FOI request, Northampton University (motto: ‘Ne Nesciamus’ – ‘Let us not be ignorant’) revealed that it had triggered George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four in a course entitled ‘Identity Under Construction’. Constructing ‘identity’ (notably gender identity) was currently topical.
Students choosing the module were warned that Orwell’s novel ‘addresses challenging issues related to violence, gender, sexuality, class, race, abuses, sexual abuse, political ideas and offensive language’.
The offensive term Orwell allowed himself in print was ‘bollox’. This seems, on the face of it, to warrant, in the novel’s Newspeak ‘doubledoubleplusbollox’. But looked at more closely, Orwell’s novel has uncomfortable moments. Take, for example, the fantasy Winston has when first seeing Julia at the Two Minutes Hate:
Suddenly, by the sort of violent effort with which one wrenches one’s head away from the pillow in a nightmare, Winston succeeded in transferring his hatred from the face on the screen [‘Emmanuel Goldstein, the Enemy of the People’] to the dark-haired girl behind him. Vivid, beautiful hallucinations flashed through his mind. He would flog her to death with a rubber truncheon. He would tie her naked to a stake and shoot her full of arrows like Saint Sebastian. He would ravish her and cut her throat at the moment of climax.
The switch from Jew-hating to sadistic misogyny is alarming.
It is, of course, Winston Smith who has this fantasy. Whether or not Orwell was antisemitic has been a long-running, still-running, argument. The prosecution case, with multiple examples, is mounted by Richard Bradford in the Jewish Chronicle on 3 January 2020. His article was precipitated by what he saw as the new-Orwellian (i.e. supposedly ‘non-offensive’) antisemitism in the Corbyn-led Labour Party. Bradford’s examination pivots on what Orwell himself said, in a 1945 essay, ‘Why does antisemitism appeal to me? What is there about it that I feel to be true?’ It’s an extremely honest, extremely discomfiting confession for someone who was already a widely read sage to put into print.
It’s topical since, at the time of writing, one can recall the first entry in Winston’s diary (for a Times editor his punctuation is strangely shaky):
April 4th, 1984. Last night to the flicks. All war films. One very good one of a ship full of refugees being bombed … then you saw a lifeboat full of children with a helicopter hovering over it. there was a middle-aged woman might have been a jewess sitting up in the bow with a little boy about three years old in her arms. little boy screaming with fright and hiding his head between her breasts as if he was trying to burrow right into her … then the helicopter planted a 20 kilo bomb in among them terrific flash and the boat went all to matchwood. then there was a wonderful shot of a child’s arm going up up up right up into the air.
This, again, is not Orwell but the as yet unregenerate Winston Smith. But, in a novel published in 1951, with the Holocaust and foundation of Israel in the world’s mind, it is insensitive. I imagine any undergraduate at Northampton of Jewish heritage might well feel uneasy after studious examination of Nineteen Eighty-Four.
With our current PM pledging (again as I write) to ‘deal with the small boats’ (i.e. ‘illegal’ refugees), any first-generation British undergraduate whose family received asylum in Britain might be similarly uneasy.
There is no indictment intended here; I am merely pointing towards a trickiness in a great novel. Similarly tricky is the misogyny in the Two Minutes Hate. The authorised biography by Bernard Crick as well as other eye-witnesses testify to the fact that Orwell was not always safe around women, especially alone with them in open places when, the suggestion is, he was assaultive.‡ It’s an uncomfortable topic but again makes the point that Northampton’s triggering Nineteen Eighteen-Four was not egregious snowflakery (as the press generally took it to be) but imposed on the basis of careful, legitimately sensitive reading.
What is routinely overlooked in the heat of polemic, heated up by examples like Northampton and Nineteen Eighty-Four, is that triggering is categorically different from traditional institutional (religious, educational, dictatorial) controls on literature. Triggering is in essence an alert. Done responsibly it does not erase or meddle; it stimulates curiosity and thought. It honours the fact that great literature is great because it is, as Kafka says, powerful.§ It should, for that reason, be handled with critical care. Like, to modify the firearm metaphor, a hand grenade with the pin pulled.
I, personally, can live with triggering if done properly. I also believe, more importantly, that triggering is a recent phenomenon of future consequence. It is not something to be pooh-poohed away. It is a significant theatre of culture warfare. Politicians, hungry for office, in the two great sectors of the English-speaking world have taken up arms in that conflict. Jonathan Swift’s ‘Battle of the Books’ has flared up again.
The newly appointed deputy chairman of the Tory Party, Lee Anderson, put the issue with his customary bluntness: ‘The big thing in terms of 2019, there were three things that won us the election. It was nothing to do with me. It was Brexit, it was Boris, it was Corbyn and it was as simple as that. Those three things together were a great campaign, great ingredients.’
That was yesterday’s battle and crushing Tory victory. For 2024, Anderson forecast that a ‘mix of culture wars and trans debate’ would be ‘at the heart’ of the party’s coming election campaign along with critical race theory and ‘brainwashing’ in schools and universities.
Newspapers (principally the Telegraphs, Mails, Sun, Expresses and more judiciously The Times and Sunday Times) supportive of the Conservative cause had already sensed where the soft underbelly of the Labour Party which Anderson talked about would be. The forces of the right (I use the phrase hyperbolically) located a main point of attack: the defence of ‘classically “English” books’. Books which incarnated post-Brexit, sovereign England.
By early 2023, the strategy was cooked and ready to serve in articles, such as Richard Littlejohn’s on 27 March which was headlined: ‘Roald Dahl, Ian Fleming and now Agatha Christie… when are the wokerati going to stop butchering classic works of literature?’
Littlejohn continued with reference to the previous night’s first instalment of the BBC adaptation of Great Expectations:
No author is safe from the revisionists, not even Charles Dickens, judging by the BBC’s latest adaptation of Great Expectations by the Peaky Blinders’ creator Steven Knight.
Reading our TV critic Christopher Stevens’s brilliant review in yesterday’s Mail [he entitled the series ‘Woke Desecrations’ and gave it one star], it is blindingly apparent that this bleak production lives down to our worst expectations.
It features an opium-smoking Miss Havisham, a foulmouthed Pip and a little light spanking as Mrs Joe – now called Sara, to prevent her being seen as a mere chattel of her husband – turns dominatrix. Not exactly ‘sensitive’ but utterly in line with today’s warped artistic values.
Yet while drug-taking, a torrent of four-letter words, graphic sex scenes and sado-masochism sail through the ‘best possible taste’ barrier, far more innocent works are bowdlerised to appease the ‘diversity’ brigade and plastered with trigger warnings. Talk about double standards.
The Labour Party was currently introverted verging on paralytic; not yet come to terms with its deCorbynisation programme and being torn to breaking point by tensions between its radical young members (formerly Momentum) and the grizzled hands on the levers of party power, patronage and revenue (formerly Union Barons).
In the USA, also looking forward to 2024, the Governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, the hopeful Republican presidential candidate, had devised as his wedge issue (against Trump as well as the Democrats) ‘parental’ rights.
Who owns your child’s mind? Mom and Dad or the school your child attends? DeSantis, his wife on his arm, daughters at his knee, asked. Centripetally, DeSantis’s ‘parentalism’ drew in a hotpot of issues: CRT; gender fluidities; ‘metropolitan’ (pro-choice) vs ‘homeland’ (pro-life) prejudices but above all what was being imposed on young minds by school reading materials. It was, as DeSantis argued, a crisis for the soul of America: children were being brainwashed out of their home values. Higher brainwashing was going on at college level – paid for, in state colleges – by the taxpayer.
Following DeSantis’s ‘Stop Woke’ and ‘Don’t Say Gay’ initiatives, America in 2022 saw more books banned than ever before in its recorded history. And if/when DeSantis became the 47th President of the United States – with federal power – what then would be banned?¶
There are contrary arguments that triggering is utter wokery, or responsible pedagogic practice. There is a third view – it’s a hoax. Every student entering the University of Chicago as an undergraduate in September 2016 received the following welcome letter from the dean of students:
Welcome and congratulations on your acceptance to the College at the University of Chicago. Earning a place in our community of scholars is no small achievement and we are delighted that you selected Chicago to continue your intellectual journey. Once here you will discover that one of the University of Chicago’s defining characteristics is our commitment to freedom of inquiry and expression … Our commitment to academic freedom means that we do not support so-called ‘trigger warnings’, we do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial, and we do not condone the creation of intellectual ‘safe spaces’ where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own … Again, welcome to the University of Chicago. See you in September!
Inspired by Chicago’s fighting declaration, which received countrywide publicity and approbation, a team of seven psychologists and scholarly aides, under the auspices of the National Library of Medicine, resolved to investigate experimentally whether trigger warnings actually worked.
Their research and its conclusions were published in March 2021 in an article entitled ‘Student reactions to traumatic material in literature: Implications for trigger warnings’.
The implications were interesting. As the report described, 355 undergraduate students from four respected universities were invited to read a passage describing incidences of both physical and sexual assault. Longitudinal measures of subjective distress, awakened PTSD symptoms and emotional reactivity were taken at various stages.
The results were, on the face of it, decisive:
Greater than 96 per cent of participants read the triggering passage even when given a non-triggering alternative to read. Of those who read the triggering passage, those with triggering traumas did not report more distress although those with higher PTSD scores did. Two weeks later, those with trigger traumas and/or PTSD did not report an increase in trauma symptoms as a result of reading the triggering passage.
The conclusions were similarly forthright: ‘Students with relevant traumas do not avoid triggering material and the effects appear to be brief. Students with PTSD do not report an exacerbation of symptoms two weeks later as a function of reading the passage.’
Case closed. That triggering forestalls the incidence of trauma stress in vulnerable individuals is untrue. The practice is provenly unnecessary.
Afterthoughts arise, however, with consideration of the passage the students were exposed to that was potentially traumatising. It was the incestuous paedophile rape scene in Toni Morrison’s first published novel, The Bluest Eye (1970). The action is set in the Depression era. Pecola is an eleven-year-old child; Cholly, the rapist, is her father; an alcoholic with a traumatic past.
The students were given a hard copy of the book. The requirement was they should read the page-assigned rape scene along with a ‘neutral scene’ from the novel which served as a ‘control’ to measure response norms.
All 355 students were in the same nineteen to twenty-one age group and all were taking an introductory psychology course at one of their four institutions. Most, one assumes, would go on in their junior (third) year to a variety of majors. They received course credit for no more than merely participating in the triggering experiment: an easy ‘A’ towards their grade point average. Sixty-eight per cent of total participants were female; 32 per cent male. They identified as being from a variety of majority and minority ethnic and racial backgrounds. The important numbers were 69 per cent white; 10 per cent black; 30 per cent other.
The format of the experiment was standard across the four institutions. On day one, the participants came to a lab, or classroom; there they signed a consent form and were given a pack. It included a personal questionnaire, one of the two passages (‘rape’ or ‘neutral’) and response forms. The initial reading of the scene in question lasted thirty minutes before papers were collected. Students took away the book.
As a follow-up, over the next three days, the participants received an email link and were asked to find a ‘quiet place’ to complete the survey within twenty-four hours. Two weeks later came a second email designed to pick up lasting effect. Finally, investigators debriefed them thoroughly.
The procedure, as an experimental process, was impeccable. There are, however, on close inspection, disturbing factors. Morrison’s novel had (with her Nobel win) canonical status by 2020. Although The Bluest Eye was one of the most banned novels in America, many mature school pupils would have read the book or heard about it and its author.
The rape is black on black. The self-identified white/black participation ratio in the experiment, roughly 70:10, is disproportionate. The crime isolated from context could, for some participants, be seen to slander African Americans as animalic.
Morrison’s narrative is carefully diagnostic of Cholly’s ‘tender’ violation of his child. Commentary makes the point that he has internalised white prejudices about African Americans such as he. Cholly, like Pecola, is a victim of larger historical violence. The scene, taken this way, does not invite or allow sympathy – only a degree of understanding.
Equally the (roughly) similar female/male 70:30 imbalance could, one fancies, skew results. As critics have pointed out, this rape scene is unusual in that it is visualised by ‘the female gaze’. It will not excite the primitive male lusts common in violation-themed pornography.
Finally, how well, it is not condescending to ask, can 355 first-year psychology students read an intricately voiced symbolically wrought work of fiction like The Bluest Eye? Morrison is a difficult author. Every class on her from twelfth grade to postgraduate seminar will start from that point. What, ideally, the investigating team could have done was to commission a completely fresh written, simpler, scene of violence and sexual assault – without ethnic, high literary or gender contaminants. The Bluest Eye comes trailing with too much baggage.
With all respect to the team who went to such lengths to test the theory and practice of triggering, the question, I believe, is still open.
But what do authors think about triggering? Most writers triggered are dead – beyond resentment or approval. Among those still with us who have voiced an opinion is Neil Gaiman, who speaks his mind (a remarkable one) in the preface to his eponymously entitled collection of short fiction, Trigger Warning.
He sees such ‘warnings’ not as fingers on the loaded firearm but unwanted fingers in his, Neil Gaiman’s, pie. Such interference is, he believes, contrary to the wholly unpredictable nature (even to authors themselves) of what lies, hitherto unknown, within his head. His fiction revolves around ‘the monsters in our cupboards and our minds [which] are always there in the darkness’. His art unlooses them to ravage on his pages. He does not, he says, want his readers ‘groomed’. Like Kafka, he belongs to the hammer to the skull authorial party.
‘I first discovered the phrase “trigger warning”’, Gaiman says,
where it existed primarily to warn people of links to images or ideas that could upset them and trigger flashbacks or anxiety or terror, in order that the images or ideas could be filtered out of a feed, or that the person reading could be mentally prepared before encountering them.
I was fascinated when I learned that trigger warnings had crossed the divide from the Internet to the world of things you could touch. Several colleges, it was announced, were considering putting trigger warnings on works of literature, art or film, to warn students of what was waiting for them, an idea that I found myself simultaneously warming to (of course you want to let people who may be distressed that this might distress them) while at the same time being deeply troubled by it.
He continues: ‘I wonder, Are fictions safe places? And then I ask myself, Should they be safe places?’ No, he resolves, they shouldn’t, adding:
I know a lady called Rocky who is upset by tentacles, and who genuinely needs warnings for things that have tentacles in them, especially tentacles with suckers, and who, confronted with an unexpected squid or octopus, will dive, shaking, behind the nearest sofa. There is an enormous tentacle somewhere in these pages. Many of those stories end badly for at least one of the people in them. Consider yourself warned.
Here be giant squids.
* For incoming students in an ‘Approaches to Literature’ module. It was triggered on the grounds that it could generate ‘difficult conversations about gender, race, sexuality, class, and identity.’
† Homerton kept the results to themselves but it was leaked that the Dr Seuss books were triggered for ‘overt blackface’. See below, pp. 203–5.
‡ I deal with this issue at some length in Orwell’s Nose: A Pathological Biography (2016).
§ Incidentally, there are seven trigger warnings recommended for Kafka’s story Metamorphosis on the website Book Trigger Warnings, including ‘pessimistic thinking’.
¶ For more on Governor DeSantis, see pp. 49–50, 224–8.
Part One
Signs of the Times: A Calendar
All in a Day
The day was 31 January 2023. That morning the Daily Telegraph carried an editorial noting, with wry distaste, that the University of Greenwich – having the previous year triggered Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ on the grounds of ‘animal death’ and ‘supernatural possession’ – had triggered Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey on the grounds of ‘toxic relations and friendships’. On the same day, The Guardian carried a front-page story headlined ‘One in 10 children “have watched pornography by the time they are nine”’.
According to a report by the Children’s Commissioner for England, the figure had risen to a quarter of the cohort by the time they left primary school. And ‘four out of five of those surveyed have seen pornography involving violence by the age of 18 … Nearly half of the male 16- to 21-year-olds who took part in the survey assumed girls either “expect” or “enjoy” sex which involves physical aggression, such as airway restriction.’
‘Airway restriction’ means erotic strangulation.
On the same day, The Times reported the fact that ‘Kevin Anderson & Associates, a company that supplies sensitivity readers, says its “cultural accuracy editing” will “ensure your manuscript isn’t offensive, inaccurate or perpetuating harmful stereotypes”’.
Hamlet: The Andrew Tate Version*
On 15 April 2023, the Daily Mail warned its readers that a forthcoming BBC programme ‘has been commissioned to mark 400 years since the publication of the Bard’s First Folio’. Well and good. The Folio was being touted as the most important British book since the King James Bible. Anything but good was that an ‘Oxford professor’, the series presenter, would argue that ‘Hamlet is a misogynist like Andrew Tate’.
The ‘Oxford professor’ was Emma Smith. Her declared aim was to ‘reexamine the works of the Bard through a modern lens’. What that optic would reveal was that Hamlet is the embodiment of
‘toxic masculinity’ like the ‘alpha male’ influencer Andrew Tate, who is reportedly being sued by three women in the UK for rape and sexual assault … In the series, the host will challenge celebrity guests to look at the playwright’s work differently, speaking to the likes of Gordon Brown about Julius Caesar.
‘Alpha male’ is too flattering. As Shanti Das described him in The Guardian on 6 August 2022:
Andrew Tate says women belong in the home, can’t drive, and are a man’s property.
He also thinks rape victims must ‘bear responsibility’ for their attacks and dates women aged 18–19 because he can ‘make an imprint’ on them, according to videos posted online.
In other clips, the British-American kickboxer – who poses with fast cars, guns and portrays himself as a cigar-smoking playboy – talks about hitting and choking women, trashing their belongings and stopping them from going out.
‘It’s bang out the machete, boom in her face and grip her by the neck. Shut up bitch,’ he says in one video.
Hard to square, perhaps, with Ophelia’s eulogy:
O, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown!
The courtier’s, soldier’s, scholar’s, eye, tongue, sword;
The expectancy and rose of the fair state,
The glass of fashion and the mould of form,
The observed of all observers.
Only the last line fits Andrew Tate. He had 4.6 million ‘observers’, so to call them, on Instagram before being banned.
Professor Smith would use her programme, it was forecast, to persuade the witty contrarian Will Self of her case. As she put it: ‘Talking about toxic masculinity and Hamlet, we can see him as a young man radicalised, on a mission to clear things up, and turning against women’s sexuality in a very violent way, maybe like the guy who takes a gun to school … That was revelatory for me.’
Revelatory too for most critics before Professor Smith.
Seeing Hamlet as kin to an American school spree shooter is a very dark new lens. It is true, though, that Hamlet’s personal murder count in the course of the play – five or more – is high. And Professor Smith does make us ponder whether he is Shakespeare’s John Wick.†
Andrew Tate, who lives on TikTok (when not languishing in a Romanian prison on sex trafficking charges), has not commented, at the time of writing, on his being Hamletised.
Universal Darkness Covers All
On 23 January 2023, the Washington Post (motto ‘Democracy Dies in Darkness’) reported:
Students arrived in some Florida public school classrooms this month to find their teachers’ bookshelves wrapped in paper – or entirely barren of books – after district officials launched a review of the texts’ appropriateness under a new state law [Florida House Bill 1467, which] … mandates that schools’ books be age-appropriate, free from pornography and ‘suited to student needs.’ Books must be approved by a qualified school media specialist, who must undergo a state retraining on book collection. The Education Department did not publish that training until January, leaving school librarians across Florida unable to order books for more than a year.
The new law comes atop an older one that makes distributing ‘harmful materials’ to minors, including obscene and pornographic materials, a third-degree felony – meaning that a teacher could face up to five years in prison and a $5,000 fine, a spokeswoman from the Florida Department of Education said Tuesday.
All Change
The London Evening Standard reported on 20 April 2023 that
a leading London private school has overhauled its English curriculum to introduce a diverse range of authors and challenge ‘white-centric, patriarchal and cis-gender ideologies’.
