To save fiction, we must stop censoring it

While a catastrophic war wages in Europe, on a scale not seen since 1945, with a nation defending its freedom against an aggressor at a heavy price, politicians around the world repeat the term, defining a key necessity for human happiness, like a sacred mantra: freedom. In many instances, their previous contribution to freedom has been thoroughly negative. Increasingly, Western governments have indulged in authoritarian behaviour.

Yet the most sinister advance of censorship is taking place far from the electronic or political worlds, within the oldest medium of communication of all, at the heart of our culture: in the realm of books. Like most destructive, anti-intellectual, anti-libertarian initiatives, it is being imported from America. The world of publishing is being invaded by officious censors, dedicated to reducing all books, especially novels, to a lowest common denominator of vacuous, bland conformity to an ideology whose inanity does not conceal its malevolent implications for literature. The rise of the “sensitivity reader” in publishing signifies the death of free expression. The Soviet Writers’ Union is back in business.

Sensitivity readers, or editors, are employed by publishing houses to vet authors’ manuscripts for anything that might offend a reader. Since it is almost impossible nowadays to write a sentence, however bland or well-intentioned, that someone will not claim to find offensive, the only completely reliable recourse would be to publish books of blank pages – though somebody then would probably complain about their “whiteness” and detect a “micro-aggression”.

Recently, The Telegraph published a long article entitled “We’re not the PC police!: what sensitivity readers really do.” In it one practitioner disingenuously claimed: “As a sensitivity reader, I merely have the power to make suggestions but never changes. That’s up to the editor and author.” Why does he suppose the publisher employed him? Does he seriously imagine the manuscript will remain unchanged?

This apologia was apparently in response to a denunciation by novelist John Boyne, who had tweeted: “On Sensitivity Readers: The best writers challenge, disturb, outrage. Imagine Gide, Miller, Dickens with an SR! No serious writer would ever allow their work to be so sanitised.” Novelist Lionel Shriver, writing in the Guardian, gave an equally robust response: “Is it any longer acceptable for characters to be bigoted? Can a character in your novel vote for Brexit? The day my novels are sent to a sensitivity reader is the day I quit.”

Those responses evoke the principle of the author as free spirit, exercising creativity in an uninhibited fashion, leaving it to readers to decide what to make of that creation. Readers are adults, they neither need nor want some literary nanny diluting the author’s strong brew into unreadable pap. The fault lies with publishing houses deferring to the so-called cancel culture at the expense of literary integrity.

Books cannot be cancelled. If publishers with integrity adopt a “publish and be damned” attitude and release books that carry the authentic voice of the author, regardless of whatever mindless witch hunt may blow up on Twitter, the public will buy those books and make up their own minds about them. It is vital that British publishing should not go down the degenerate road of the American book trade.

Apologists for the system of sensitivity readers claim they are helping authors. “Cancel-proof your book,” commercial SRs invite. In other words, pay a stranger with an obsessive cultural mindset to make your work conform to the prescriptions of an intolerant ideology. No self-respecting writer should collaborate in such a Vichy capitulation, nor should any publishing house expect it.

Although the reach of these censors is all-embracing, race is a favourite issue. “Cultural appropriation” and “white saviour narrative” (if a white character is helpful to an ethnic minority character) are just two items from the lexicon of PC policing, but from this flows a secondary abuse. Some authors are acquiescent and express gratitude to sensitivity readers who have effectively rewritten their characters. They have succumbed to the lazy temptation to outsource their creativity. At the end of a thorough sensitivity rewrite, can they truly claim to be the authors of their novels?

Employing sensitivity readers specialising in racial, sexual, disability, etc. minority identities suggests a basic incompetence on the part of the author. It is the privilege and challenge of the novelist to project himself into the characters of people very different from himself; to do so successfully is an attribute of literary genius. A good writer will have a wide range of characters from a variety of backgrounds and cultures he can credibly portray; but he will also know his limitations and not attempt to bring to life someone whose circumstances and interior motivations are obscure to him.

In contrast, writers using sensitivity readers as a crutch are cheating. The fulsome gratitude some of them express to SRs suggests two possibilities: one is that they really got, say, an ethnic minority character wrong, in which case they had overreached themselves, which is unprofessional; or, alternatively, they had created an authentic character who did not match the template of the sensitivity reader, who changed the text to impose that template, in which case the author has abdicated autonomy and, by extension, personal creativity. Both are ruinous for the prospects of good writing.

One of the most nihilistic, counter-artistic prescriptions, again imported from America, is “Stay in your lane.” In other words, write exclusively about what you know, your own “lived experience”. Nothing could be more contrary to the spirit of fiction writing, where the novelist’s imagination soars free and far. By that restrictive rubric, Flaubert could not have written “Madame Bovary” because he was not a woman, nor Jane Austen have conjured Mr Darcy. All historical fiction would be abandoned because no writer today has a lived experience of the 14th century.

Under the intolerant regime represented by sensitivity readers, Evelyn Waugh’s “Brideshead Revisited”, the greatest English language novel of the 20th century, could not be published, nor his other masterpiece “Sword of Honour”. The best novelists are abrasive and satirical, proclaiming by their cavalier mockery that no one has the right not to be offended. Is it seriously proposed to subject the work of Michel Houellebecque to a professional offence-finder?

The whole jargon-laden, priggish imposition is a nonsense. Yet, if it is allowed to progress and gain a stranglehold on British publishing, contemporary English literature could be destroyed. We already have universities where, in the name of “decolonising” curricula, the classical canon is being marginalised and work of little literary merit being substituted, for political reasons. That relegation of past classics is now being supplemented by censorship aimed at strangling the next generation at birth.

There is a real prospect that publishers’ complicity in censorship could create a gap of an entire generation, or more, in the continuum of literary excellence. Nor is fiction the only target. Poet and author Kate Clanchy published an article last month entitled: “How sensitivity readers corrupt literature. They sullied my memoir to suit their agenda.” In it she described how her Orwell Prize-winning memoir, “Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me”, was submitted by her publishers to assessment by a posse of sensitivity readers.

Among the gems in these experts’ opinions was the censure that “I should not use ‘disfigure’ of a landscape (infraction level 3, as presumably comparing bings – spoil heaps – to boils might be harmful to acne sufferers).” What is most concerning is not so much the invincible stupidity of the mind that conjured that objection, as the fact that a publishing house is employing such clowns to censor an author’s work – in this instance a prize-winning writer’s opus.

The publishing industry is now a cause for concern for all those who value literature. Women currently occupy 78 per cent of editorial positions in publishing, a situation that is beginning to be criticised by some women commentators, among them a literary agent who said recently: “Most of the tastemakers in publishing are now young women. And they will look for the things that interest them and reflect their lifestyle. But it means publishing isn’t reflecting back the world as, say, a young white man might find it.” As Lionel Shriver suggested, it is axiomatic in today’s London publishing world that a novel favourable to Brexit would be unlikely to find a publisher, despite reflecting the view of a majority of the country.

There is a real danger that a new generation of potentially significant male writers may find the gatekeepers impassable and turn, as many are doing, to writing film scripts instead of novels. Some male novelists, e.g. Sebastian Faulks, have said they will no longer include physical descriptions of female characters, after being criticised for doing so. That is ridiculous: physical descriptions of most central characters in a novel are essential, to guide the reader’s imagining of them into congruence with the author’s. If all female characters are left blank, it will be a microcosm of the whole feminist movement’s success in shooting itself in the foot and effectively cancelling women.

Writers must be brave and resist the imposition of sensitivity readers on their work: it is censorship, pure and simple. It could also destroy the industry it is colonising. Not many people will want to read woke narratives, comparable to the Party-idolising pap that was dished up in the Soviet Union. As we come out of lockdown a slump in book sales is to be expected; sensitivity publications will accelerate that trend. Authors should refuse to submit their manuscripts to publishing houses that employ sensitivity readers. Established writers should follow suit, using their reputations and following to sanction the censors.

This is not simply some absurd fad, to be shrugged off with the passive mantra “Political correctness gone mad”: it is a grave threat to the freedom and integrity of that consummate art form, the English novel, as well as all other written expression. Totalitarians used to burn books: today they rewrite them according to a cultural Marxist template. People at the far end of Europe are giving their lives for freedom. Surely we can find the determination, without risk of physical danger, to make a stand against the Putins of publishing.