Jiggery-wokery Trigger warnings, sleepy thinking and egomania are the enemies of good writing, says English don Frances Wilson
CLASSICPAINTINGS/ALAMY
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friend who teaches English at one of our more august institutions says her students want a trigger warning on W B Yeats’s Leda and the Swan. For the lucky few who don’t know the term, trigger warnings – the worst part of the wokery plaguing the study of literature – are given to protect those who have suffered a trauma from content they may find upsetting. Leda and the Swan describes how Zeus, in the form of a swan, assaults Leda: ‘A sudden blow: the great wings beating still/ Above the staggering girl.’ Her thighs are caressed by his ‘dark webs’; her ‘nape’ is ‘caught in his bill’; she lies in his ‘white rush’. She later lays eggs which hatch into the twin war gods Castor and Pollux, and the sisters, Helen – whose face will launch a thousand ships – and Clytemnestra, who will murder her husband. Leda’s rape results not only in the birth of the classical era but also in the foundations of Western literature: the Trojan wars are the subjects of The Iliad and The Odyssey. The consequences of Zeus’s lust are caught by Yeats in three breathtaking lines: ‘A shudder in the loins engenders there/ The broken wall, the burning roof and tower, / And Agamemnon dead.’ Given that it is all very graphically depicted, where’s the harm, you might ask, in cautioning vulnerable students beforehand? I teach in a university and care a great deal about my vulnerable students, but I also care a great deal about culture, and slapping a trigger warning on this poem is tantamount to the death of Western literature. A trigger warning belittles and humiliates Yeats’s masterpiece. Trigger warnings, I gather, have little to no impact on the readers they aim to shield, but they have a huge impact on poems. The harm caused to this one is nothing less than the reduction of its meaning. 32 The Oldie July 2021
Leda and the Swan is not about the sexual violence experienced by one woman; it is about the violence at the heart of civilisation itself; how a single event initiates a cycle of historical catastrophe. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘woke’, an AfricanAmericanism deriving from ‘to be awake’, means ‘alert to racial or social discrimination and injustice’. But wokeness is also used to mask sleepy thinking. Take Meghan and Harry spouting their woke word salads across the airwaves – Harry the ‘feminist’ armed with a vocabulary neither he nor we fully understand, Meghan patronising us with her vacuous emotional wisdom. Take away the jargon and it becomes clear that they have nothing much to say: viz Prince Harry saying recently, ‘What if every single one of us was a raindrop, and if every single one of us cared?’ The weakness of wokeness is that it won’t be argued with and without debate there is no hope of mutual understanding. I learned this to my cost when a woke student in one of my classes protested solidly for an entire year that the only novels she was prepared to read were those that described what it was like being her. No lives mattered except her own, and the fact that the book describing her specialness had not yet been written proved that she was a victim of discrimination.
X-rated: Veronese’s Leda and the Swan
She was an extreme example of woke-reason. Yet several of my students insist that those novels in which the novelist describes the experiences of people other than themselves (which, to my mind, is the purpose of all novels) are a sign of ‘cultural appropriation’. What they call cultural appropriation, I call imagination. What they demand from a novel, I expect from an autobiography. If wokery is a particularly tiresome form of judgement, try being on a judging panel with those who have a-woken. I recently judged two literary prizes, and on each occasion did battle with co-judges who championed the books that met their ideological criteria rather than the books that met the criteria of the prize. Any book concerned with a century other than our own was dismissed as ‘ancient history’. Books by or about white men were discarded. And, because wokery has no aesthetic sensibility, all my attempts to discuss the merits of language, style and structure were met with bafflement. The worst problem was with clichés, which the woke judges couldn’t recognise. But why would people who think in clichés wince at them in writing? If someone were to set up a prize for the Wokest Book of the Year, perhaps the other prizes could get on with the business of awarding literary merit. I hear that publishers are now hiring ‘sensitivity readers’ to vet manuscripts for indications of transphobia, Islamophobia, ableism, fat-shaming and other variations of accidental bias. Before long, the canon will be presented to us in the form of The Collected Wokes of W B Yeats and The Collected Wokes of William Shakespeare, bowdlerised volumes that provide a ‘safe space’ for readers. Presumably Leda and the Swan will by then be cancelled. In the interests of my mental health, I hope these books come with a trigger warning.
