Caving In

Roger Berkowitz
Francine Prose writes about Elizabeth Gilbert’s decision to pull the publication of her new book in response to protests from Ukrainian activists. The offense in Gilbert’s book is simply that it is set in Russia, albeit Stalinist Russia. These activists who take offense have not read Gilbert’s book. They simply believe that since the book is set in Russia, it will be offensive and do harm to Ukrainians. Prose takes issue with this worry and Gilbert’s decision to cave-in to such pressure. She writes:

So let’s start with the most obvious: writing a novel set in a country waging a monstrous imperial war is simply not the same as condoning that war. Of course it would be quite different had Gilbert written a work of pro-Putin propaganda, or if she intended the proceeds from her book sales to be channeled into the Russian dictator’s war chest. But that is clearly not the case. Indeed, the book is reportedly about a group of people who resisted Soviet oppression, which, it could be argued, might be seen as encouraging (rather than wounding) those who are engaged in a similar struggle today.
But the problems with Gilbert’s decision to cave to the objections of people who haven’t even read her book go further than this novel, this author, this war. If we are to ban the cultural products of countries who are attacking, or who have attacked, smaller weaker nations and innocent populations, there would be almost nothing left for us to read. Does the ban on Russian literature work retroactively? Should I build a bonfire in my backyard and consign Gogol, Tolstoy and Chekhov to the flames? What are we to do about the work of refugees who left Russia to escape the excesses of its past and present dictatorships? And should each new (and old) global conflict ignite a ban on the aggressor’s writers and artists? Taken to its illogical extreme, no one should have been allowed to publish or read books set in the United States during the costly and indefensible wars we fought in Vietnam and Iraq.
But what’s equally unreasonable – and disturbing – is the precedent that Gilbert’s decision sets, the potential danger it poses to writers, to the future of literature, to the culture, and to our freedom of speech. What will happen if authors allow themselves to be bullied by their readers? What if the themes we write about, and how we write about them, are to become the subject of a general referendum? Should survivors of domestic abuse band together to prevent any future productions of Othello? Should we quit reading Anne Frank’s diary because it takes place in a country that was hospitable to Jewish refugees – until it wasn’t? Should animal rights activists campaign to have Moby-Dick banned for its portrayal of the horrors of the whaling industry? One can all too easily imagine what might have occurred had Nabokov submitted Lolita to the court of public opinion before it appeared in print.
I’ve always thought that the great subject of literature is the question of what it means to be a human being. Whether we like it or not, whether we are proud of it or not, cruelty and violence have always been part of the human experience. It’s hard to think of a situation worth writing about that doesn’t involve conflict of some sort. To set our novels in an earthly paradise and populate them with angels would be to lie about the nature of existence.