Wednesday, August 12, 2015

Anne Rice: " I think we are facing a new era of censorship, in the name of political correctness..."

Here's the full quote from her facebook page:
Signing off with thanks to all who have participated in our discussions of fiction writing today. I want to leave you with this thought: I think we are facing a new era of censorship, in the name of political correctness. There are forces at work in the book world that want to control fiction writing in terms of who "has a right" to write about what. Some even advocate the out and out censorship of older works using words we now deem wholly unacceptable. Some are critical of novels involving rape. Some argue that white novelists have no right to write about people of color; and Christians should not write novels involving Jews or topics involving Jews. I think all this is dangerous. I think we have to stand up for the freedom of fiction writers to write what they want to write, no matter how offensive it might be to some one else. We must stand up for fiction as a place where transgressive behavior and ideas can be explored. We must stand up for freedom in the arts. I think we have to be willing to stand up for the despised. It is always a matter of personal choice whether one buys or reads a book. No one can make you do it. But internet campaigns to destroy authors accused of inappropriate subject matter or attitudes are dangerous to us all. That's my take on it. Ignore what you find offensive. Or talk about it in a substantive way. But don't set out to censor it, or destroy the career of the offending author. Comments welcome. I will see you tomorrow.
Via Reddit... top comments after the jump...
Well, she sure aint wrong... 
In the last thirty years, there has been this constant refrain that political correctness is going to sanitize all media. That's at least thirty years, mind. I'm too young to know if it was being said before that although I strongly suspect it was.
More books are published today than at any point in history. Authors of any and all persuasions are more common. More films and television shows in more diverse settings than at any point in history. We live in the least censored period of human history.
There were more female authors in the twentieth century than in the previous two thousand years. Anne Rice is a hugely successful author who wrote about pretty bisexual vampires in the nineties. I think her rallying cry against censorship is pretty misplaced.
Are there crazies who try to have things censored? Yes. There always have been. Anybody who thinks we live in world that is actually significantly censored is living in a very strange part of the world, though.
There is almost no governmental censorship. All attempts of social censorship inevitably invite counter attempts and the resulting controversy usually bring even more attention to it. Is censorship something we should still be wary of? Of course. If you actually consider what happens in the world (instead of the lunatic fringe groups you find on Reddit or Tumblr or Twitter), though, you're being very foolish or incredibly disingenuous to suggest we are facing "a new era of censorship".
I find it grotesque to watch people stoke their outrage and contempt over imagined slights. I believe in freedom of the arts. I believe that the answer to objectionable art is more art, not less.
Before you complain about the evils of political correctness, though, take a minute. In the eighties, people complained that political correctness scolded them from saying nigger. In the nineties they complained it said they shouldn't say faggot. History is rarely on the side of people who complain about political correctness because it is, at its core, an attempt to avoid saying hurtful things to people.

9 comments:

ricpic said...

The assault on PC has to be frontal. A big reason why Trump is so important. It's great that Anne Rice is for freedom. Heck, I'm for freedom too and so what? But think of what it will mean when we have a President Trump MOCKING PC! Then freedom will begin to ring again.

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

Jason the commenter tweeted this article... a must read on the subject.

The Coddling of the American Mind

(got high praise from ChipA)

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

The path from getting somebody fired because they donated to an unapproved cause and censoring books is not very far.

edutcher said...

New?

Where has she been for the last 25 years?

AllenS said...

Political correctness was a Nazi invention. It gave those in charge a reason to imprison you, or kill your fuckin' ass.

Nothing has changed.

Methadras said...

All The Atlantic had to do was come talk to me. I would have set them straight.

William said...

I haven't read any Ann Rice novels, but I've heard that she stereotypes vampires in a crude, racist way. Whoever wrote those Twilight novels has the real scoop on vampires. They're just like us, except older and treat Kristen Stewart in a respectful way.

William said...

There's a lot that's ephemeral about being politically correct. They haven't discovered any great, immutable truths about the way society is structured and narratives are told. Madame Bovary was written by a man, and people will reading it long after the days and works of Gloria Steinem have been forgotten......Back in the thirties, they couldn't show the Little Rascals down south because it showed Buckwheat sitting in a class of white students. Now they can't show it because Buckwheat is not as uplifting a figure as Nelson Mandela.

Synova said...

Science fiction has been going crazy... the thing is, the quoted response comment ain't wrong... but it's not really right either. Sure, in the meta-sphere attempts to censor literature and genre fiction are an abject failure on all fronts. On the personal level the story is different. And nothing happens in the world that doesn't happen at a personal level.

While the "industry" will go on as if the dramas aren't happening, and independent publishing and a few publishing houses with their eye on the bottom line mean that ultimately popular fiction will win, no matter who writes it or what they write about, that is no protection for the authors who come under attack by self-appointed thought police and activists. Those authors who *want to be a good person* are the most vulnerable. But what we've seen and what has been exposed are situations where some person sets up as an authority on who has written acceptable fiction, science fiction, (same process as video games, etc.,) whatever. This pretty much ends up being... whoever kisses that person's ass and supports their little tyrannies. The next author, maybe a new hopeful, maybe just someone who is getting some buzz and is a threat professionally because the person who's made an internet name as being the person who *knows* wasn't the one to promote them... maybe wrote something very little different from the approved author, maybe is a person of color themselves, maybe wrote about, oh, brothels in Thailand... but somehow something they did was *wrong*. Not in any predictable way, but anything can be found at fault and it will be.

No... the *industry* and *literature* are not at risk here, but that Real Life Person can have his or her or its-non-gendered-uniqueness destroyed by mobs out to fight the good fight and to solve all the social problems of the world by taking down that one foe...