TRICK OR TREAT Part 3

In which the novelist Lionel Shriver puts on a sombrero, and brings down hell on her head

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This is the minefield Lionel Shriver stepped into – unwittingly, she later claimed – when she gave her speech and donned her own sombrero at the Brisbane Writers’ Festival 2016.

The Festival itself has run for nearly sixty years and has, in its own words “held the place of Queensland’s premier literary event for over a decade.” On the Mission section of its website, it states one of its key aims as “creating a space for robust discussion of ideas and reflection on the human state.”

The sincerity of this aim was now about to be tested.

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There is something else to remember about Lionel Shriver before this gets underway. She was – is – the daughter of a Presbyterian minister, with prayers and the Bible at mealtimes. This father of hers she grew up devoted to, but she battled with him nonetheless, and one imagines that tension stood in for wider spiritual conflicts: “There is a very thin line in my family,” Shriver said, “between God and my father.” Met by her flat refusal to attend church one Sunday, her father dragged her to the car by her hair. “I remember,” she said in a later interview, “sitting Sunday after Sunday in a state of repressed rage at having a raft of beliefs that I didn’t embrace imposed on me… It was as if I had no rights. I didn’t have a right to my opinion. I was actually told that. To this day, religious matters still enrage me.”

Later, in a telling extract, she quoted in the Guardian from her childhood diary.

“Father once said one of the “requirements” of living in Our Family was going to church… I submit 1) that if belonging to Our Family means believing in an accepted doctrine, then I want no part of it. That is totalitarianism. 2) As an ethicist, I cannot imagine how Father can condone pretending to subscribe to a set of beliefs because of social custom. That is advocating hypocracy [sic] for the sake of one’s image.”

It seemed, over the next few years, as if none of these feelings had gone away.

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On 8^th September, before the Brisbane audience, Lionel Shriver gave her speech.

The talk, she announced, would be about “fiction and identity politics”, which she admitted didn’t sound the most rock n’ roll of topics.

“But I’m afraid the bramble of thorny issues that cluster around “identity politics” has got all too interesting, particularly for people pursuing the occupation I share with many gathered in this hall: fiction writing. Taken to their logical conclusion, ideologies recently come into vogue challenge our right to write fiction at all. Meanwhile, the kind of fiction we are “allowed” to write is in danger of becoming so hedged, so circumscribed, so tippy-toe, that we’d indeed be better off not writing the anodyne drivel to begin with.”  

The author in fact – she pointed out – was now caught in a double-bind. If you went ahead and used the characters you wished in your work – of whatever colour, religion, sexuality and so on – hostile onlookers were now willing you to fail and hunting for ways they could speed up the process. To placate them, you could always treat the said characters “with kid gloves”, but that, Shriver pointed out, was “no way to write. The burden is too great, the self-examination paralysing.”

But there was another side to this too, equally perilous. If you decided to play it safe and avoid any “problematic” characters altogether, attacks came from the other direction – being told your book was insular and stalely monocultural, that you were trying to create an all-white world. The result, Shriver said a few minutes in, would be “a contraction of my fictional universe that is not good for the books, and not good for my soul.”

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Was Shriver being paranoid, or at the very least catastrophizing just a bit?

A year after her speech, the UK writer Anthony Horowitz was caught in the exact pincer movement she had described. On the one side, he was warned off by an editor from writing characters of colour, for “by its very nature, [it was] artificial and possibly patronising.” He was then attacked by others for not doing so. “If you don’t feel confident or just don’t want to write black characters, just say so,” tweeted fellow-writer Ben Aaronovitch. “Don’t pretend it’s political correctness gone mad.” This was the no-win situation Shriver had described, but it was nothing new.

In 2012, a full four years before Shriver’s speech, Lena Dunham had been harried and harangued over the lack of racial diversity in her hit series Girls – four white girls, her detractors hissed – and had quickly addressed it, thereafter shoehorning in characters of colour. Since they had to be positive and, one assumes, were outside Dunham’s life experience, they were inevitably insipidly drawn and amorphously benign. Dunham herself had put her finger on the problem in an interview. “I am half-Jew, half-WASP, and I wrote two Jews and two WASPs. Something I wanted to avoid was tokenism in casting…. Not that the experience of an African-American girl and a white girl are drastically different, but there has to be specificity to that experience (that) I wasn’t able to speak to."

For those of us who felt such things shouldn’t need defending, this business of being told which characters you had to put in a script was deeply, deeply weird: only someone who had never tried writing could think this was how the good kind was done. But – although we didn’t know it – we were still living in another dimension, one that was currently having a bomb fitted underneath it.

Like so many developments in this decade, what started out as head-scratchingly improbable started to seem the norm. Under the new religion, it was becoming clear, art was there for one purpose – to engineer a more inclusive world – and artists were to be the religion’s servants. It was there to right injustices and edge viewers away from the “isms” that were perceived as standing between society and the new Holy Trinity of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.

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Which takes us back to Brisbane, where Shriver was getting into her stride, and was out to defend her craft and the rights of authors, in words that would have gone without saying even five years before.

First, there was the right of creators to create. Any story a writer could make theirs, Shriver said, was theirs to tell. It wasn’t about how realistic a novel was – it was about “what you can get away with.” She herself had written a book about the mother of a school-killer and her convicted son. This didn’t mean she’d shot nine people with a crossbow. It also didn’t mean she should have refrained from telling it. If the culture police had their way, all fiction would effectively become memoir, and she herself would be reduced to writing only “from the perspective of a straight white female born in North Carolina, closing on sixty, able-bodied but with bad knees, skint for years but finally able to buy the odd new shirt.”

She finished thus:

“Efforts to persuasively enter the lives of others very different from us may fail: that’s a given. But maybe rather than having our heads taken off, we should get a few points for trying. After all, most fiction sucks. Most writing sucks. Most things that people make of any sort suck. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t make anything…”

“We fiction writers have to preserve the right to wear many hats,” she added, “including…”

And then she put a sombrero – that bugbear of the UEA Student Union and their like elsewhere - onto her head.

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The backlash started almost immediately. First out of the gate were the organisers of the Brisbane Festival itself, who quickly dissociated themselves from Shriver’s speech. She “did not speak to her brief,” they spluttered, “The views expressed during her address were hers alone.”

Shriver was later to declare the first statement to be nonsense - she had the emails to prove it. But, urged on, a chorus of (women) writers now reached for their sharpest weapons. One of the festival volunteers, Yen Wong Rong, blogged about the speech the next day. “People walked out of the address, and I don’t blame them.” She shuddered to think, she said, where literature might be if everyone subscribed to Shriver’s “dangerous” way of thinking.”

Another writer, Ariella Van Luyn, lecturer in Creative Writing at James Cook University, weighed in. Her article, the snappily titled “Lionel Shriver and the Responsibilities of Fiction Writers”, was a model of correct thinking, glowering at Shriver through a lens of jargon and modish ideas. It accused her of failing “to capture the complexity of the issue, or histories of colonisation, discrimination and intergenerational trauma” (n.b. Watch for those “ation” words in discourse – not often a sign of rigorously good faith). Van Luyn confessed that she herself was “a white, cis, able-bodied, female fiction writer, whose desires are unruly…. I am learning.”  In her own case (for this was fast becoming an article about Van Luyn and her shining authorial practices) “awareness of privilege, research and self-reflection continue to deepen my writing.”

It should be pointed out that Yen Wong Rong and Van Luyn were, in terms of fiction, effectively unknowns. Wong Rong described herself in her attack on Shriver as a “semi-aspiring writer” (and thus at two removes from her subject, whether we talk about success or not). Van Luyn’s novel 2016 novel Treading Air appears to be published only in Kindle Edition and has, at the time of writing, commanded just one full review on Amazon entitled ‘It was ok.’

But this was the marvellous thing about the New Orthodoxy, and why it enjoyed such mass-support. Magically shifting the index of merit away from talent and achievement, it made everything fall into place. As long as you were passing judgement based on other criteria, you could consider yourself someone’s equal or - whatever the paucity of your own accomplishments - even their superior and educator. It recalled the poet Stephen Spender’s words about the persecution of writers under communism. The most nauseating thing, he said, had been “the crowing of inferior talents.”