When the Living Bury the Dead

Wake up babe, a new 95 Theses just dropped.

For those lucky enough to not have your lives inundated by the relentless hellscape that is Twitter, you may have missed the latest discourse. The microcosm of wokescold-eat-wokescold that is Book Twitter (booktwt for short) has once again proven that reading and being utterly illiterate are not mutually exclusive. At 10:39 pm on August 17, a thread dropped which rendered the general atmosphere of Twitter somewhere between uninhabitable and euphoric. The thread–the poster of which remain unnamed to avoid further harassment of her–started like this:

Not a terrible by all means. The purposeful lack of sources detracts from the weight of what OP was trying to say. Without the context of what followed, this thread seems well-intentioned, tasked with exposing authors whose own bigotries have been swept under the rug or ignored because they’re profitable. Unfortunately, I’m here to ruin the context and also your day.

What followed was a notes app spreadsheet of 71 authors spanning genres, audiences, decades, and states of mortality. What do Captain Underpants author Dav Pilkey, and jingoist imperialist Rudyard Kipling have in common? Well, they're both big ol' racists. And according to this spreadsheet, they're not the only ones.

The list varies in accusations and culprits. The likes of Dickens, Shakespeare, and Woolf rub shoulders with, and I don’t mean this in a particularly snide way, authors who aren’t known outside of romance circles. As if the juxtaposition between Virginia Woolf and peddler of faerie smut, Sarah J. Mass isn’t hysterical in itself, the list solidified its’ memeability with its typos and vagueness . Authors who have been the subject of critical debate and examination for decades are condemned in only in the thinnest of terms with one or two-word entries. Meanwhile, modern fantasy, YA, and romance authors are all but dragged around the walls of Troy in alphabetical order.

William S. Burroughs’ culpable homicide of his wife is treated with the same disgust as James Patterson saying that he, as an old white man with more money than I’ll ever see in my entire life, is the most oppressed person in publishing. William Shakespeare is called out for being ‘classist’–put a pin in that one, we’ll be back for it later–following Colleen Hoover’s hilariously blank receipts column, implying that her crime is being Colleen Hoover. Ayn Rand is listed as ‘Any’ Rand, Marie Lu as ‘Maria’ Lu. Marie Rutkoski apparently 'romanized' horrific aspects of slavery. James Dashner is so bad he's listed twice, and Marisha Pessl is accused of using ‘noir stereotypes’ in Night Film, a book which Wikipedia lists ‘noir’ as one of the genres of.

In short, it was open season for anyone who’s been fighting the war against critical thinking on the side of critical thinking. The OP of the original tweet has since locked her account, but the discussion which has developed as a result is worth looking into.

While many of the living authors have said and done things worthy of condemnation–JK Rowlings’s entry reads ‘Transphobic, racist’ as if naming a character Cho Chang (among other sins) and support of trans-exclusiona-sorry, gender critical legislation are the least of her faults–I’m going to focus on the dead. Least of all because they are less likely to throw a hissy fit on Twitter.

This isn’t to say that we should wait until public figures are dead and therefore beyond both reproach and material consequence to criticize them. One of the few instances where OP makes a good point is in the case of Helen Oyeyemi who should have received far more criticism for the vile transphobia at the end of Boy, Snow, Bird. Instead, she’s published several more books in the near-decade following, and doesn’t appear to have publicly said anything about whether she’s learned or grown. Oyeyemi and Rowling are authors whose views have real-world consequences and who are still reaping the financial benefits of their successes. Those who have been dead for 25, 100, even 400 years, well…that’s another story.

Calling out a dead person for not aligning with the current moral standards of behaviour is like beating a dead horse. More accurately, it’s like digging up the horse’s grave, beating it, then crying when the horse does not react.

No piece of media can ever be 100% ideologically pure, but don’t tell booktwt that. In its endless quest to showcase reading as an empty aesthetic you partake in for the benefit of others rather than an emotional and intellectual experience, booktwt is determined to make reading both a political act and a competition.

In the case of some of the dead authors, their crimes amount to existing in the past. Anyone who's taken a high school English class should understand that classic books are equal parts literature and historical artifact. Classics must be understood both in the context of their creation and the context they are being studied in. Moreover, some of the inclusions are just plain weird. J.M. Barrie is dinged for the ‘bad characterization’ of Wendy, Tinker Bell, and Tiger Lily. Charles Dickens was racist like half of England at the time, okay, but the antisemitism in Oliver Twist is fine, I guess? Unrepentant fascist Ezra Pound is absent, as is a man who I can only call the free space of problematic dead white guys, H.P. Lovecraft. It almost pains me that Stephanie Meyer’s depiction of unhealthy relationships is deemed worthy but not Emily Brontё’s when Cathy Earnshaw could unhinge her jaw like a snake and devour the entire Cullen family. I’m surprised that George Orwell didn’t make an appearance, but I suppose Thoughtcrimes were too on the nose.

Let us now return to Shakespeare. William Shakespeare died 406 problematic years ago. The world he lived in is so different from the one we live in now that to list all the differences between the two would have a higher word count than his collected works. If I told him that I’m writing this in Canada, he’d probably say "where is this strange land, Canada?" After all, the first incorporated colonial city in the entire country wouldn’t exist until a decade after he passed. The standards by which behaviour was judged in his lifetime would be repugnant to us. Of course, Shakespeare’s plays contain themes and characters who carry with them 400 years of ever-changing baggage. It’s both impossible and ridiculous to expect literature nearly half a millennium old to reflect contemporary society!

And this isn’t to say that we aren’t allowed to criticize Shakespeare because he’s Shakespeare. If that were the case, hundreds of academics would be out of a job. We’re allowed to look at and think critically about the art we consume, in fact, I’ll argue that this should be common sense. I’m allowed to say that The Merchant of Venice makes me uncomfortable, while also acknowledging its importance when comparing it to similar plays of the period, such as Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta which is far less forgiving or humanizing towards Barabas than Merchant is towards Shylock. There’s a reason why post-colonial readings of The Tempest and feminist readings of The Taming of the Shrew exist in multitudes!

Of all the accusations lobbied against Shakespeare, the one that stood out the most is that of classism, partly because I can't tell what it's based in. Though, across forty plays, I'm sure at least one features a poor person who is unpleasant if not outright villainous. Never mind that Shakespeare himself was the son of a glove maker and his formal education ended with grammar school. Never mind that, since 1848, scholars have argued that Shakespeare couldn't have possibly written his plays, because poor people cannot write well. Candidates such as Sir Francis Bacon, Edward de Vere, and Christopher Marlowe have been suggested as the 'true' authors of Shakespeare's plays, disregarding the fact that Bacon apparently had time to compose an entire literary canon in addition to his own, and that de Vere and Marlowe would have taken 'ghostwriting' to a more literal level, writing plays 12 and 23 years after their respective deaths.

The evidence used for these theories includes several scenes of women writing and reading letters when Shakespeare's daughters were likely illiterate, as were his parents. It's too much of a stretch of the imagination to believe that a commoner would be able to fathom other people reading and writing, especially women. Similar arguments are used for Shakespeare's depictions of aristocratic activities such as falconry and lawn-bowling, his knowledge of courtly politics and foreign languages, and his (dodgy) sense of geography. Shakespeare cannot have written Shakespeare's plays because we cannot expect to humour the idea that commoners possess imagination, let alone talent. A commoner would not have the expansive vocabulary necessary to compose 'to be, or not to be', let alone the 1000+ words that modern English attributes to Shakespeare as either creator or documentarian.

Shakespeare's father rose up in ranks, he was without a title but was not starving. Shakespeare's mother was a member of the wealthy Arden family. And yet, genius is something which is only accessible through inherited nobility. Surely only an Earl or a philosopher or a Cambridge graduate would be able to write nine beats of silence before the word "drown'd" drops like a stone from Laertes' tongue. Nobody questioned his authorship while he was alive. Only when Shakespeare's works became the secular Bible in the Victorian era, did men of letters chafe against the idea that one could be both common and a genius.

And now, in 2022, Shakespeare is being labelled as a classist. We have reinvented Anti-Stratfordian truthers and, surprise, they're still classist! It's plain old anti-intellectualism, the TikTok cult of which only grows, but is rebranded as woke for kids who think Shakespeare wrote in 'olde' English.

The past is a foreign country, the dead speak in foreign tongues. We can reach out and touch pieces of the past in the art that has been saved from the fires of time, but we can never fully understand its nuance. Nor can we bend it to our own shape.

It is easy to look back from our oh-so-enlightened seats of 21st-century honour and condemn the dead. Sometimes it’s even alright! Personally, I hope hell is real if only so that incestuous child molester Marion Zimmer Bradley can burn in it! If asked what the deal is with Ayn Rand, I'd say first that her hack philosophy led directly to the rise of the modern libertarian movement, that if you were on fire she'd only piss to put you out if she was getting paid for it, her faith in laissez-faire capitalism, then, maybe I'd get into her racism. Anyone who studies the past in any capacity has a list of five or six people who they would kick in the solar plexus, whether it's for crimes against humanity, or for generally being a dick. If this isn't the case for you, then you're picking and choosing what you want to align yourself with, blotting out everything that makes you squirm, and wilfully ignoring context.

Every human being on this planet who has ever lived comes with their own set of biases. It is your responsibility as a human being to recognize and unlearn these biases. Those biases are carried over into the art we create, implicitly or explicitly. Living in a world where oppression exists means that reality will be reflected back to you, and sometimes it ages badly when looked at with a distance of two hundred years between creation and modern reception. Moral purity is an impossible goal, but booktwt would have you believe that all you have to do is read the right books–fluffy contemporaries that are husks of better works hollowed out and filled with regurgitated tropes; diversity included for diversity's sake rather than any meaningful examination of lived experience. Even those books, even the millions of words of fanfic available on AO3, cannot hold up to impossible standards of purity that would put the Salem Witch Trials to shame. Imperfect people write imperfect books. If we could accept that and move on, I wouldn't be writing three thousand words on the subject. Enjoying a piece of art does not make its artist infallible. Sometimes artists make tone-deaf comments, and sometimes they deliberately set out to cause harm with their platform. But, when you align charges of being bitchy online and mispronouncing someone’s name with sex crimes and murder, you create a false dichotomy of good vs evil. Is writing about 11-year-olds having an orgy in a sewer (cannot believe OP let Stephen King get away with this one) better or worse than actual child abuse? Well, by this measure they’re about the same.

Writing about child abuse is not the same as condoning that abuse, it is not even comparable to actual child abuse. Brandon Sanderson's past homophobia isn't even uniquely horrible, he's just Mormon. When you posit an active agent of colonialism and author of 'The White Man's Burden' such as Rudyard Kipling against someone like Willow Winters who involves herself in #booktok drama, you erase any semblance of nuance. The legacy of Kipling's work still echoes today across India and the Philippines. If I were to ask my friends who Willow Winters is, none of them would know.

However, even this logic is a double-edged sword. You can't deplatform Charles Dickens for his racism and antisemitism on account of him being dead. While he's baked into the western canon, you're not in danger of lining his pockets. On the other hand, de-platforming JK Rowling and refusing to financially support her racism, antisemitism, transphobia, and other assorted bigotries would make a difference when she's actively raking in millions from licensing, feeding Blairite biases to children, and has been lobbying against trans people since 2018. She has an upcoming Harry Potter video game about putting down a rebellion of hook-nosed money-loving goblins. De-platforming her would bring widespread change, de-platforming the dead does nothing.

A piece of media making you uncomfortable is not grounds for striking it from the face of the earth. It is a horrible practice to read a book, say "vibes are off", then demand nobody ever read or talk about it ever again. A book that makes readers uncomfortable doesn't always mean the author is a bourgeoisie degenerate. Sometimes it simply means that it handles difficult subject matter. Not every person has the same comfort level. It'd be ludicrous to deny the whole world strawberries because one person is allergic to them. Besides, in some cases, a book making readers uncomfortable is a good thing; it's a sign that both the author and your sense of empathy are doing their jobs. Books such as Night and Beloved should make you uncomfortable because they're about crimes against humanity. I'd be more concerned about the person who reads Elie Wiesel and remains unperturbed. In some cases, the only way to understand tragedy and horror is to confront them head-on. It isn't easy because it's not supposed to be.

Obviously, I'm not saying that everyone should go out and purchase a copy of Mein Kampf. Nor should you force yourself to read something you know will upset you. Still, it's a good exercise to read things which disgust you, which you disagree with, or which inspire critical thought.

Writing about a difficult topic does not mean condoning it. This sort of thing is basic media literacy, but perhaps that is too much to ask for.

The spreadsheet from hell also allows no room for personal growth. OP does not operate on a three-strikes-you're-out system, one strike is enough. Stephen King's entry says 'homophobic (acknowledged and apologized)'. There is no return from the moral event horizon of cancelling. Dav Pilkey worked with Scholastic to remove a book from publication following accusations of passive anti-Asian racism and donated the royalties to charity. That doesn't stop him from being on the spreadsheet. Dr. Seuss revised earlier depictions of Asian people as his views changed, and wrote Horton Hears a Who in direct response to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That doesn't mean his original cartoons, which were racist caricatures and praised Japanese incarceration, didn't exist in the first place. All it means is that sometimes people recognize their own bigotries and address their growth. Some people will be proudly vile to their graves, and others will try to make amends. The fact that Dr. Seuss drew racist cartoons shouldn't be swept under the rug for the sake of childhood nostalgia, but it also shouldn't be used to guillotine the corpse of a man who died before the poster of the spreadsheet was born.

There are far better uses for this energy and outrage than trying to cancel the dead. Any genuine points of discussion in this spreadsheet are muddied by the sheer absurdity of it. OP's ridiculous methodology is better satire of Gen Z 'Puriteenical' pseudo-leftist values pivoting from banning kink at pride to banning literature than most comedians could ever hope for. Only, it isn't satire, and that's the worst part.