BEING 'OFFENSIVE' IS IRRELEVANT

IN LITERATURE

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

C.S. Lewis

Censorship is the tool of those who have the need to hide actualities from themselves and from others. Their fear is only their inability to face what is real, and I can’t vent any anger against them. I only feel this appalling sadness. Somewhere, in their upbringing, they were shielded against the total facts of our existence. They were only taught to look one way when many ways exist.

Charles Bukowski

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Everything that needs saying has been, on the philistines who’ve censored Roald Dahl. Except perhaps that these people neither like nor understand literature.

This is most acute in our schools. Very few English teachers (especially the younger ones) have any interest in literature, other than as a grim but necessary dietary supplement needed to rid the world of ‘Tories’, ‘Climate change deniers’, ‘Racists’ ‘Transphobes’ - the list is endless, of the demons such prim types see their role as confronting. Texts are promoted simply because of their ‘woke’ propagandising, without a care for any literary value.

I’ve seen this first-hand, over a period of seventeen years as an English teacher. It’s now ubiquitous. The effect is to make reading seem a chore and a bore. Pupils are being massively short-changed, especially the boys. The almost limitless delights of our great writers are being denied to them by a narrow cadre of ideologues, themselves often appallingly badly read.

Examples?

No one in my department had read a single thing by: Graham Greene; Eric Ambler; Ian Fleming; C. S. Lewis; Patricia Highsmith; Wilkie Collins; Ernest Hemingway; Rudyard Kipling…I could go on.

In a meeting on teaching Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four, the only things discussed were countering its supposed ‘racism’ and ‘sexism’ - nothing on the literary value of this wonderful text, on why it’s still read with great joy by so many. Nothing on plot, prose - even character! This for a novel containing the best known fictional character ever created.

Most had degrees in English, but I never once heard any enthusing about writing as an art, nor express any aesthetic joy in it. The most one got was something about how an ‘issue’ was ‘tackled’ by this or that trendy modern writer.

I saw my job as redressing this - so I enthusiastically promoted any and all reading, especially ‘low brow’ stuff - including true crime, detective fiction and graphic novels. I positively discouraged pupils from texts such as Rooftoppers: dull books lauded by dull English teachers.

Needless to say, I promoted Dahl’s creepy short-stories, always using Man from the South as an exemplar to be read and enjoyed in lessons. I loved promoting Agatha Christie’s masterpiece And Then There Were None, and I’m so proud to have been told at parents’ evenings how this had got various pupils reading.

I was - finally - asked to produce a ‘reading suggestions list’. That’s when I belatedly realised the appalling level of literary exposure, amongst my colleagues. Great literature was regarded as The Kite Runner, The Book Thief - perhaps, at a stretch, To Kill a Mockingbird. Nothing wrong with those, but as the high points?

Let’s face it, if literature is going to survive at all, we have to forget its ‘academic’ or ‘cultural’ guardians. Maybe it was always thus; but now those types are positively trying to destroy it.