Should Joyce be ‘cancelled’ for misogyny; Conrad for racism?

Because I am someone who has been formed and nurtured by the literature of the past, I have had to come to terms with the reality that some of the writers whose works I most love have ideas that I hate.

Anti-Semitism, racism and misogyny are baked into western culture, and it would take a heroic moral imagination to overcome them. Some great writers have done this: George Eliot, Turgenev, Ford Madox Ford. But most have not.

And so, when I encounter TS Eliot or Dostoevsky's anti-Semitism, Joseph Conrad or Flannery O'Connor's racism, Henry James or Willa Cather's aversion to "darker" immigrants, Flaubert or Joyce's misogyny, I have to question whether or not I should refuse the gifts writers have given me, aesthetics to be sure, but also gifts of wisdom and understanding of the complexities of being human.

When I was being trained to “read” in the late 1960s and early 1970s, New Criticism reigned supreme. I was told that the writer’s life, or any ideas she or he had outside the work I was examining, were irrelevant.

The Irish Times view on prison reform: A need to look to the long-term

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‘Degradation of the Irish Bench’ – Colum Kenny on Sir John Ross and a private plea in 1919

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The Irish Times view on the IPCC report: the world is listening – but not acting

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We truly are heading into climate territory uncharted in human history

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Now, it seems, some thinkers are insisting that the destructive ideas the writer embraced demand that we stop reading their work, whether or not the ideas present themselves in the actual work.

For example, Eliot’s undoubted anti-Semitism does not enter The Four Quartets and Henry James’ Nativism does not mar the peerless insights of The Wings of the Dove. But some thinkers would insist that these writers be forbidden because of their inherent prejudices.

Family analogy

The family analogy comes to mind. Suppose you have an uncle who ruins every family holiday with his drunken tirades, but was the first to read your childish poetry and introduce you to Emily Dickinson. There's no sense pretending, as he overturns the bottle of red wine onto the white linen tablecloth, that he is not impaired. But do you want to stop inviting him?

Earlier in the evening, having a beautiful tenor voice, he delighted those around the table by singing everybody’s favourite song and introducing new ones they had never heard. So, the family agrees to tell the children that their uncle has a problem, and that it’s all right for them to disappear into the basement when he becomes too disturbing.

But what about the uncle who is not just a rambling drunk, but a sexual abuser? Does the family continue to invite him even though he has traumatised the children of the house? No, he must be banished. This is where the family analogy breaks down for me because I don’t believe there are any works that should be, as it were, banished, never taught or read.

It is much easier simply to banish the difficult, wounded and wounding pilots on the voyage of reading than to do the difficult work of contextualisation.

I sometimes sense a kind of libidinal pleasure in some of those who thrill to throwing the pilot overboard. Living with ambiguity brings no quick relief, and no protection from the glaring light of malign ideas.

But maturity of thought means that we have to understand that the history of the human species is full of hatred, error, and the will to harm. It probably will always be. Who knows what future generations will consider unforgivable in us?

It is a blessing of civilisation that some progress has been made in the history of ideas… but one is born when and where one is born, and the limitations of time and geography are unavoidable and must be acknowledged.

We cannot look to the great figures of the past as unsullied exemplars: we must, as persons inhabiting the present, stare directly at the stained hands of those who have provided us with beauty, joy and understanding.

Our work is to delve into the treasure trove of the greatness of the past, to separate the diamonds from the rot. Not to cancel, with that word’s suggestion that what has been “cancelled” need not even be examined. Our responsibility is neither to erase nor to cover up. But to look. To see. To witness.

Mary Gordon is a writer of novels, stories and memoirs as well as Professor Emerita of English at Barnard College, Columbia University, New York. Her latest novel, Payback, is published by Pantheon