“Being in a minority, even a minority of one, does not make you mad. There is truth and there is untruth. And if you cling to truth even against the whole world, you are not mad.”
—George Orwell—
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When we think of classic literature, we think of a vast canon of novels that articulate—through fiction—the great struggles and triumphs of Western civilization and the people who have lived within; and which, in the act of reading, constitutes a kind of celebration of Western civilization. Our imaginations perhaps briefly sweep through that vast canon and rest on certain scenes: the obsession of Captain Ahab with the white whale… the tragic suicide of Romeo and Juliet… the clanging swords of the Three Musketeers… Beowulf’s righteous slaughter of Grendel and the monster’s mother… Anna Karenina leaping in front of the train.
Until very recently in human history, the written word was the primary means by which a culture understood itself. And even now with television and the internet, literature is still far from an obsolete medium of information and entertainment. Books still tell us about who we are, and have immense power in determining the future direction of societies.
But walk into a Barnes & Noble or local library and you’ll see that something is a little off.
“Off” but not unexpected.
“Off” but we would be naive to be in any way surprised.
The last ten years—and especially the last six—have given rise to a fanatical identity politics so absurd in its moral pronouncements and so authoritarian in its enforcement of institutional conformity, that it easily looks satirical to all not under its spell; and this fanatical identity politics has led to a “social justice” takeover of the arts. Non-woke writers alive today are dealt with easily enough by sensitivity censors and Karen editors wearing “Good Trouble” t-shirts: they just don’t get published. There’s a big bin labeled “White Cis Hetero Scum” and all the drafts by wannabe Kerouacs and Thompsons and Hemingways and Bukowskis who have any opinions to the right of Chairman Mao get thrown in to be torched later at the next Make Herstory Stomp Dance. But what to do… what in the hell to do… with the problem of already-existing classic literature written by dead oppressors who escaped cancelation by going to the grave too many years ago?
By giving them a makeover of course! Just as the ancient Christians “baptized” or “redeemed” pagan customs, myths, and holidays of the people they evangelized as they traveled further and further into a Europe beyond Roman control, so too is the West’s new religion of wokeness “baptizing” and “redeeming” all the problematic stories that came before it by reinterpreting and revising them. New Dantes are getting hold of new Virgils, resulting in an entire genre of what I call “counter-lit”: fictions published as an effort to “undo” the classics while reassuring and reinforcing modern sensibilities and fashionable causes.
For an example, we could begin with Albert Camus’ The Stranger, the most famous fiction produced from the existentialist camp, about a young man named Meursault living in French Algeria who—after losing his mother, and through a series of random events and quasi-sociopathic acts—winds up staying with his mistress at a discreet beach getaway, where he murders an unnamed Arab man and thereafter is sentenced to death. Because authors of stories about murder typically do not write in moralizing tones, Camus’ choice to describe the Arab’s murder with ambivalence seems to be what has attracted backlash to The Stranger 78 years after its publication. Ryu Spaeth writing for The New Republic denounces Camus as “at best a compromised genius; at worst an oppressor whose lionization has extended the colonial perspective well into the twenty-first century.”
Oh go lie down dear.
Yet for those like Spaeth appalled at Camus’ “callous colonialism”, their anger was likely satiated by Kamel Daoud’s 2015 novel The Meursault Investigation: an inverted revisitation of Meursault’s crime from the point of view of the Arab man’s brother, Harun, who—in condemning Meursault’s deed—indicts the entirety of French colonialism. “An inspired twist, entirely obvious in hindsight, but also revelatory in its way. Daoud is saying that Camus’ entire posture grows out of privilege,” a Los Angeles Times reviewer beams like a smitten teen at the front row of a concert.
For a second example, we could move on to Homer’s Odyssey: an epic detailing the warrior-king Odysseus’ ten-year journey back to his wife and son in Ithaca. Our new class of critics—thoroughly steeped in the ascendent postmodern “wisdom”, and not one over the age of 50—complain that the ancient account is degrading in its portrayal of women; particularly its portrayal of Circe and Calypso as infatuated island nymphs, Athena as an errand girl, Antiope as the mere object of a god’s affection, and Penelope as a prize horse.
But not to worry! At last comes a response to Homer’s sexism! And 3,000 years later no less!
Enter Madeline Miller’s 2018 novel Circe: a new version that focuses on a small portion of the Odyssey that makes the divine mistress of Odysseus the main character rather than Odysseus himself. In this “revisitation” (as these types of books are now always called), Odysseus is portrayed as an arrogant charlatan who first woos Circe, and then victimizes her by leaving her island when the fling has run its course (“Humbling women seems to be the chief pastime of poets. As if there can be no story unless we crawl and weep,” our heroine notes in a Chapter 16 feminist diatribe that rivals any thread on Twitter). In interviews, Miller is unabashed in her belief that “male-centric” mythology is unacceptable in a “post-#MeToo world” and that not only can canon works considered foundational to our civilization be “challenged” but also that people living today have a moral responsibility to challenge them. By no means is she alone in that sentiment. “Miller’s lush, gold-lit novel told from the perspective of the witch paints another picture of Homer’s Odyssey: of a fierce goddess who, yes, turns men into pigs, but only because they deserve it,” writes Annalisa Quinn for NPR. And in a review headline reminiscent of Soviet phraseology, Public Books magazine calls Circe a “literary corrective.” A corrective. Homer needed correcting.
If this revisionist trend were not bad enough, large portions of the Western canon are being banned in schools and libraries by legislators and boards at the same time their “correctives” are being shelved in their place.
In recent years, both The Odyssey and The Stranger have been identified as “troubling” volumes in need of removal, along with Huckleberry Finn due to Mark Twain’s use of racial slurs and stereotypes (while Huckleberry Finn’s woke “corrective”—Norman Lock’s The Boy In His Winter—is readily available and celebrated as “a treatise on memory and time and the nature of storytelling and our collective national conscience”). Other classics that have been banned from libraries and schools within the last year include To Kill A Mockingbird (over racism concerns), The Great Gatsby (it centers “the white male gaze”), and Of Mice and Men (racism and offensive language). But take comfort: their “retellings” will no doubt grace bookstore shelves within the year.
But the “counter-lit” impulse has not been restricted to lit. These abominations are also polluting cinema.
The world of Sherlock Holmes dreamt by Arthur Conan Doyle gets a shakeup in this year’s Enola Holmes: a movie about Sherlock’s younger sister (played by Millie Bobbie Brown of Stranger Things) who is just as brilliant—no, more, sorry! MORE—brilliant than her detective older brother (played by Henry Cavill). The opening lines from our spunky female main character are, I shit you not:
“The first thing you need to know is that my mother named me ‘Enola.’ And ‘Enola’ spelled backwards is ‘Alone.’ She would continually tell me ‘You’ll do very well on your own, Enola.’ My father died when I was young. I don’t remember him. And both my brothers left home soon after. I barely remember them either. So it was just me and mom, and it was wonderful!”
No men. Alone good. Got it.
“She was no ordinary mother…”
Ordinary mother?
“She didn’t teach me to string seashells or practice my embroidery. We did different things. Reading, science, sports, all sorts of exercise.”
Laying aside the manipulative distinction Enola Holmes makes between “ordinary moms” and “empowering girlboss moms”, the film’s insulting historical perspective appears to be that 19th century motherhood meant wanting nothing more for your daughter than to “learn how to string seashells and practice embroidery.” Imagine—just fucking imagine—traveling back to 1880 to ask a woman condescending questions about her parenting: “cAn YoUr DaUgHtEr ReAd? dOeS sHe ExErCiSe?”
Perhaps the makers of Enola were motivated to create this insufferable spinoff of a classic series by a sense of competition with a far more insufferable revision that took place in the previous year - 2018’s Mary Magdalene: a “modern take” of the gospel account where miraculous occurrences like walking on water and feeding the 5,000 fade to the background, while a plucky girl from Galilee takes center stage vying for the affection of a mysterious rabbi against his band of 12 misogynists. “She is one of the most transformative yet misunderstood women in history; alternately vilified as a sinner and canonized as a saint,” the AppleTV description tells us, “In the first century A.D., the free-spirited Mary flees the marriage her family has arranged for her, finding refuge and a sense of purpose in a radical new movement led by the charismatic rabble-rousing preacher Jesus. The sole woman among his band of disciples, Mary defies the prejudices of a patriarchal society as she undergoes a profound spiritual awakening.”
This culminates in a scene toward the end when—soon after Jesus’ crucifixion—Peter tells the ten remaining apostles that it is now their responsibility to spread their master’s message. Mary looks up and replies with cold, stern, you-go-girl conviction “Not his message. Yours.” BAM! Viewers are amazed to find the sharp feminist rejoinder was going strong even in first century Judea. But that’s just it isn’t it? The movie is called Mary Magdalene. Jesus is merely a supporting character and the apostles are a bunch of egotistical mansplainers. Even a tale of god becoming human and defeating death must come second to the more powerful tale of a woman becoming fiercely independent against the will of patriarchy. It’s all just empty pink palette ra-ra ideological bean-flicking in front of a mirror. (And when it comes to participating in a string of hamfisted preachy feminist movies, no one flicks her bean more than Rooney Mara.)
Of course, the insertion of woke politics into old stories is not limited to modern feminism. Racial justice grabs the spotlight in Channel 5’s Anne Boleyn, whom producers announced last October would be portrayed by Jodie Turner-Smith, a black British actress. “Predictably racists are losing their heads over it,” writes The Guardian’s Arwa Mahdawi.
Truth be told, I could care less who plays Anne Boleyn. Really. A wholly unremarkable noblewoman plucked from obscurity by a bloated horny tyrant, it’s a wonder she gets played much at all. But if the public dare ask why a black actress was chosen for a queen who historically was whiter than Ivory soap, the response inevitably will be that it was done to improve “equity and diversity” in casting… and that is double standard horseshit. None of us are holding our breath for Gerard Butler as Nelson Mandela or Woody Harrelson as Martin Luther King Jr. (“I got a dream yawl”), and, in fact, a host of examples abound where light-skinned celebrities have forfeited “darker” roles due to pressure from the very same activists who applaud black casting for Boleyn.
One might ask: “How do you know you’re not just being reactionary and sentimental? Why isn’t the art produced by ‘wokeness’ just an organic outpouring of marginalized perspectives that before were suppressed by white male supremacy?”
Well, first off, because this widespread narrative that “The publishing, film, and sports industries were hellbent on suppressing female and minority voices all the way up until the mid-2010s” is outright nonsense. From the 1960s to the 2000s there has been an abundance of art produced by, about, and for women and people of color; from the poetry of Langston Hughes and novels of Toni Morrison, to the athletic stardom of Wilma Rudolph and Serena Williams, to the diverse lifestyles and ethnicities of Disney princesses like Mulan and Pocahontas presented to children all over the world. The most-watched American television shows of the 1970s and 80s were all female-led, including Golden Girls, Designing Women, Charlie’s Angels, The Facts Of Life, Mary Tyler Moore, Roseanne, and Maude. Some of the bestselling fiction books of the 1990s were also written by women, including Bridget Jones Diary, The Secret History, We Were The Mulvaneys, Girl With A Pearl Earring, and The Deep End Of The Ocean. The same goes for music in the 2000s. Of the many artists and bands ranked in the top ten of the Billboard 200 (meaning most sold albums of the decade), all were either women, minorities, or both with the exception of Nickelback and Eminem. Suppression? Really? “Marginalized”?
Secondly—and more to the point—organic cultural and artistic uprisings are far more subtle and unfold over longer periods of time, and generally are only recognizable when looked at in hindsight a decade or two after the fact. On the other hand, highly-orchestrated “uprisings” are rolled out very quickly and are seen by many for what they are… forced. Agenda-driven messaging “being nowhere yesterday and everywhere all at once today” feels anything but organic.
Third and finally, to believe that women and minorities—up until this point—have been suppressed by a white male supremacist culture depends upon a willful forgetting of the past for those who lived it. And not only a willful forgetting but, rather, a willingness to misrepresent deliberately what the last few decades were like to those not born yet or those too young to remember. The image of Ta-Nehisi Coates as a sort of “black nihilist prophet revealing white America’s ugly truths” depends upon the forgetting of James Baldwin. The accusation that “white America is unwilling to confront racism” depends upon our forgetting the memorable films which center around the subject that have been made every decade: Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner in the 1960s, Roots in the 1970s, Mississippi Burning in the 1980s, American History X in the 1990s, and Remember The Titans in the 2000s (all of which—every single one—were blockbusters at the times of their releases in a majority white country). The widely-disseminated tale that “it is difficult for women to make it in the entertainment industry” depends upon our forgetting iconic female actors and comedians like Carol Burnett, Audrey Hepburn, Gilda Radner, and Julie Andrews, along with writers like Harper Lee, Zora Neale Hurston, and Joan Didion. The whole premise of women and minorities only just now claiming their place in an America (and Europe) in industries that “until recently have been been dominated by boorish Caucasian men” is so absurd—and requires such a high level of denial about how much moral progress we’ve made over the last half century—that one truly has to be younger than 25 to buy it. Everyone else is pressured to go along and pretend. But why? To what end?
Perhaps a better question to ask is whether we will even be talking about any of these “counter-lit” books and films sympathetic to wokeness in 20 years’ time. I suppose this depends upon the long-term success of the ideology currently entrenching itself into our institutions, as well as depends on how influential the culture of the empire in which it has taken root will be long after that empire has fallen. We are, after all, still discussing the writings of Dante, arguably more than the writings of Virgil on their own, centuries after the collapse of both Florence and Rome. We are still talking about Aristotle’s concept of motion on Aquinas’ terms. But the optimist in me has its doubts about Circe outlasting the Odyssey, and Daoud is no Camus.
