Literary Clusterfucks 2013

Speaking of Canlit clusterfucks & Benaway, Hal Niedzviecki has taken to Quillette to decry mob rule and cancel culture

mob rule? heavens!

which institutions of legal governance are being overruled here? the NBCC? goodness me! did they do something forbidden by their charter and bylaws?

thwarted the will of the people of the republic of letters, who should revolt and install a new government

A short story about John Boyne in tweets...

Once upon a time there was an Irish writer called John Boyne who wrote a book called “The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas”. It was very successful, bringing John fame and lots of money... pic.twitter.com/dKbyc3COy2

— Helen🧜🏻‍♀️ (@mimmymum) July 19, 2020

^^ thread

Holy heck. What a series of terrible decisions. I don't know how that man could've been offered more opportunities to course-correct, and failed more drastically at each one.

Hmmm

You think it would have gone differently?

I don't like the sound of those Irish libel laws though they sound like the ones we had in UK ... NDAs was it?

Mostly surprised that the Striped Pajamas backlash only happened after the trans book backlash because the concept of that book seems like a Very Bad Idea.

only tangentially literary, but the ortberg family saga is a lot

wow, a lot has happened since I used to read the toast

there's absolutely nothing wrong with the basic premise of TBITSP imo, but he certainly seems like he's being a total arse rn

Before anyone accuses me of not understanding that this book is written from the perspective of a surprised and confused younger brother, reacting to discovering their sibling is trans - I understand that, and it's not what I'm talking about.

— Jay Hulme (@JayHulmePoet) April 15, 2019

Although Hulme makes some good points, I'm not sure the rest of his thread bears this caveat out? I have no interest in reading Boyne's book but the increasingly more widespread assumption that narrative and authorial voices are ultimately indistinguishable from each other rankles me to no end. Not every novel is a roman à clef.

on the other hand i don't think this lad is Nabokov either

white middle class cis dude gets rich writing a book about issues, follows his gravy train without really having the imagination or empathy to transcend his research, gets pissy as fuck when called on this, now *that's* a believable narrative

I've 'taught' BiSP a few times and it's bad at almost every level: contextual, thematic, syntactic. That the language is insipid to the point of invisibility is one thing, but Boyne somehow manages to make the text - in a book about Auschwitz-Birkenau, mind - pivot around reader sympathy for a grieving German family.

It does sound thoroughly mediocre, I'm just pining for a critique that goes beyond 'this book contains objectionable material'. Not a fan of the 'let's ban To Kill a Mockingbird and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' school of would-be criticism.

Jay Hulme
@JayHulmePoet
·

Apr 15, 2019
Replying to
@JayHulmePoet
The most dangerous part is: Though some of the problematic parts of the book can and will be picked up on by almost anyone, much of the issue lies in the overarching themes, inaccuracies, and stereotypes, which will then be perpetuated by the readers.

This last phrase gives the game away imo, there is zero faith in the reader being able to pick apart the book on their own here. They're responding to the book like it's a meme with inaccurate/libelous messaging circulating on social media (which is no doubt a thing that happens in this age of inaccurate items circulating on social media).

white middle class cis dude gets rich writing a book about issues, follows his gravy train without really having the imagination or empathy to transcend his research, gets pissy as fuck when called on this, now *that's* a believable narrative

This post, by contrast, is just pulsing with imagination and empathy.

Cardamon, empathy for an obvious that like Boyne isn't compulsory, so please STFU

Randall Flagg Chocolate bar
@avalanche_andy
·
Jul 19
Replying to
@mimmymum
I presume his next book will be about Black Lives Matter from the perspective of a cop who hurt his knee while killing a black woman.

"It was then that I really came to understand the anguish of hundreds of years of oppression. My knee really hurt."

brilliantly witty that may be but it's very much not what TBITSP is doing

not that i will die on boyne's hill, as i say he seems to have been something of an arse about this latest scandal, albeit i'd need a more detailed breakdown of why his new book is so cancelled

cardamon i know you enjoy white knighting for the oppressed victims of cancellation but

zero faith in the reader being able to pick apart the book on their own here

these are YA books? i think the level of picking apart one expects from the reader might be slightly different to your conventional unreliable narrator.

also as far as i'm aware there's no indication that Boyne's authorial voices are meant to be unreliable.

also the thread which started this conversation revolves around a series of trans people patiently explaining their problems with his book, based on their own lived experience, and his apparent refusal to tolerate any form of criticism whatsoever.

i'm not even gonna ask why your reaction in these situations always seems to be to try and find a defence for the poor gobshite who's attracted the ire of people they've miscategorised, lied about or misrepresented. it's a boring question, i'm sure you've got your own answers.

clearly as far as defending the poor victim of horrible woke Twitter you're not the only one always at it

been a lot of showing of arses about trans issues on ilx lately

these are YA books? i think the level of picking apart one expects from the reader might be slightly different to your conventional unreliable narrator.

This is a fair point btw, although I do take issue with the implicit notion that YA readers are incapable of coping with ambiguity and therefore need to be force-fed a straightforward morality by novel's end.

Fwiw Boyne's rejection of any kind of dialogue post hoc is the most disturbing part of this beef.

Yes.

I've actually met Boyne and I've taught BITSP many times to its intended readership. I don't have any special love for it.Bbut, to be fair... the narrator of 'boy in striped pajamas' is inherently unreliable, and his gradual awakening to the horrors around him does call his voice into question for most of the book. Haven't read the new book one, and I'm not reacting to the book per se, but to Boyne's total lack of humility in the face of (polite) disagreement about his premise and writing.

also as far as i'm aware there's no indication that Boyne's authorial voices are meant to be unreliable.

A 13 year-old boy tho…

xp

xps

To whoever it was telling me to STFU, NV invoked the empathy rule, not me!

For the record I don't think Boyne should have written a trans issues cash-in book in the first place, which is what this book arguably is, the sequel to his holocaust issues cash-in book. As a rule of thumb, you'd want the author of a yes fictional but also commentary text to have better, and to be honest more personal, knowledge of what they're writing about.

Turning that from a rule of thumb to a moral imperative doesn't work, sadly, because it's trying to make a fish climb a mountain.

Also approaching this issue positively - publishers and agents going out to find authors from groups pushed to the edges, reviewers making an effort to get those books into the conversation - gets pretty good results whereas approaching it negatively - finding people like Boyne and having a go - just ends in pointless, hypocritical denunciation.

xp

on a technical level i'd say there's a difference between a narrator with a restricted view and an unreliable one but it feels like a sidetrack here

the more serious indicator of douchiness is the refusal to engage with critical voices, yeah

Also lol @ those accusing me of white knighting for victims of cancel culture, etc. Come come. If this was a forum where everyone went to complain about fucking woke sjws and their cancel culture or whatever, I'd a) not be here in the first place b) be calling all those terms into question as my 'priority'.

also a side-track, but when Wayne booth coined 'unreliable narrator' he included naïveté as one of the prime reasons for unreliability. in Boyne's first book that unreliability is pretty on-the-nose for even a kid at a low comprehension level. 'boy in the striped pajamas' is about a concentration camp commandant's son meeting and befriending a prisoner, and the steps of his awakening as he develops empathy and friendship for the 'striped pajamas' people.

hi, i'm trans, is there something i should be particularly upset about w/r/t this guy? i have twitter blocked on my computer so i'm not entirely sure what the issue is here.

xp that's fair remy, i've not read the books. my point would've been better made by saying that just because the narrator's voice isn't the authors that doesn't mean that the author's attitudes within a book can always be written off as "it's the narrator"

Re: the point about Boyne responding like a bell end to reasonable feedback from trans critics

I am sure there was much reasonable feedback

I wonder if there was also a wall of hostility and people going from book is a bit questionable to author is transphobic, lose him work, get this book out of schools and off reading lists, in 60 seconds flat or less

It would not surprise me if this had happened, on Twitter, nor would it surprise me if him experiencing that had caused him to act like a bell end in response because that is precisely the response that Twitter denunciation is trying to get (whoever's doing it at whoever)

It's really very simple playground tactics, get a group together and have them point at the target saying how terrible they are. Target attempts to defend self. Judges unmoved. Target eventually explodes in anger. This is taken as an example of how terrible they are.

lol @ those accusing you of white knighting for victims of cancel culture

"lol"

the author's attitudes within a book can always be written off as "it's the narrator"

Certainly not, but identifying the extent to which an author's attitudes seep into their works is never as simple as that, if only because the mere act of writing fiction – and/or poetry, for that matter – tends to depersonalize the writer and put them in touch with a version of themselves (and of all things, really) that diverges from day-to-day lived experience. Completely? No, never, but just enough to plant seeds of doubt (…to varying degrees, depending on who/what we're talking about).

well lit crit isn't science, no. but it's not nothing either

For sure, but ime lit crit is often at its most 'scientific' when it refrains from making grand pronouncements about what the author really meant. (I don't give a rat's ass about Boyne btw, this is interesting to me from a theoretical perspective.)

yes i assumed that's what we were doing, probably belongs elsewhere, Boyne convicted himself outside the pages of his books by the look of it

i'm on record all the time as not being very interested in intent, or in meaning as part of some form/function binary

cardamon i know you enjoy white knighting for the oppressed victims of cancellation but (...)

i'm not even gonna ask why your reaction in these situations always seems to be to try and find a defence for the poor gobshite who's attracted the ire of people they've miscategorised, lied about or misrepresented. it's a boring question, i'm sure you've got your own answers.

― À la recherche du scamps perdu (Noodle Vague), Monday, July 20, 2020 9:18 PM (thirty-one minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

clearly as far as defending the poor victim of horrible woke Twitter you're not the only one always at it

― À la recherche du scamps perdu (Noodle Vague), Monday, July 20, 2020 9:20 PM (thirty minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

If this isn't an accusation I must have misread your authorial intent. Soz!

albeit i'd need a more detailed breakdown of why his new book is so cancelled

― imago, Monday, 20 July 2020 20:12 (thirty-two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

having read a little deeper into the links from the initial twitter thread it does seem extremely sus at best tbf

It's a cash in, no?

just to spin back to relevance to this thread pom, the difficulty of showing intent works both ways - if your book contains shitty ideas then intentionality doesn't really come into it, the least you can do when people who know much much more about a situation than you do point out what they hate about yr work is listen to them respectfully

no my accusations were just that cardamon, the "lol @ people accusing you" bit was an ironic callback based on you making two or three posts about how awful the woke twitter mob is in bullying people with more media profile and power than them. unless those posts were ironic? who knows, i'm not that interested in intent.

Everyone is asking about the ending... Jessica's mum wants to be Prime Minister. She's on the brink of getting the job when her rival leaks the fact that "her son thinks he's a girl" to the press (cue transphobic headlines). It's made very clear that this has ruined her career.

— Jay Hulme (@JayHulmePoet) April 16, 2019

cancelling boyne for this alone on the grounds of sheer crassness tbh