Publish and be damned

The other day Will Self unburdened himself on the state of fiction with crushing hauteur. ‘What’s now regarded as serious literature would, ten or 20 years ago, have been regarded as young adult fiction… in terms of literary history, it does seem a bit of a regression. If you consider that Nabokov’s Lolita was on the New York Times bestseller list for nine months, it’s a different order of literature…’

Stop right there! Will Self’s top pick was Lolita. This was the novel of the 20th century that stood the test of time. But would Lolita even be plucked from the slush pile in 2019, let alone be listed as one of the 100 best novels ever written by Le Monde, Time, and newspapers passim?

If placed on the curriculums of universities (big ‘if’), surely it would attract an automatic trigger warning along the lines that ‘The plot of the novel is the systematic rape of a young girl’.Would the big book of the last century be prejudged as ‘inappropriate’ by this one?

Those who have followed Lionel Shriver of this parish on the new ‘morality clauses’ in authors’ contracts, or on new targets for publishing work by BAME authors, will be aware that publishing is having a massive attack of wokeness. Indeed one casualty of the Nouvel Pudeur was Shriver herself, who was dropped as a short story prize judge after calling into question in these pages Penguin Random House’s ‘voluntary inclusion tracker’, a worthy initiative the publisher launched to make its output less pale, male, stale and so on.

All well and good (disclosure: I am proud to be published by Penguin) — but what disturbs me more is how identity politics is leading to the scapegoating of authors. When it comes to biography, point of view, even voice, authors must tell the truth — not even their truth.