“HE was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.” So begins Ernest Hemingway’s novella, The Old Man and the Sea. I remember reading it when I was at school, the punchy, unvarnished style a thrilling revelation.
Nobody could mistake Hemingway’s sentences for anyone else. One of the greatest stylists of the 20th century, he changed fiction forever, and his influence continues in the terse, economical, self-consciously masculine tenor of many of today’s writers.
But Hemingway is also profound. The Old Man and the Sea is a deeply spiritual account of an elderly fisherman defying his run of bad luck by reeling in an 18-foot marlin – two feet longer than the skiff - which he then harpoons. Before he can sail home – spoiler alert! – sharks come for the dead fish. He fights them off, killing them, but by the time he returns all that’s left of his fish is its skeleton and tail. He too is almost done for, the struggle between him and his noble adversary almost too much for his ebbing strength.
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Hemingway’s masterpiece could stand as a simple story of the sea, or as a metaphor for life and death. It is filled with awe and reverence, but also with ugly truths, among them the recognition that killing is part of being human. Now, if you can believe it, the University of the Highlands and Islands has placed a trigger warning on it, alerting students to “graphic fishing scenes”.
Let’s put aside the irony of students at a Scottish university, based in Inverness, being shielded from the raw facts of a trade that plays a crucial part in the national economy. Let’s forget also that most of them, as children, will have been encouraged to read fairy stories, with the most grisly, murderous plots imaginable.
No, what is galling is that warnings like this treat students as if they are in first term of kindergarten rather than on the cusp of adulthood. Going to university is the gateway to maturity. The point of further education is not merely to instil facts and knowledge, but to give young people the intellectual and emotional grounding to become thoughtful, well-rounded adults capable of understanding and handling whatever comes their way.
Among other works on the University of the Highlands and Islands curriculum is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which comes with a caution over “violent murder and cruelty”. Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet also carry notices of “stabbing, poison and suicide”. It’s laughable, and risks turning the university into a joke.
After all, where does this stop? Library shelves are full of novels where fish and other creatures come to a bad end, from Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, to Neil Gunn’s Morning Tide and The Silver Darlings. How about John Buchan’s John McNab, where a group of bored toffs set out to poach stags and salmon without being caught? Not to mention countless children’s classics, from Jack London’s blood-soaked White Fang to Henry Williamson’s Tarka the Otter, which happily crunches on its catch.
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Trigger warnings are wrong on so many levels, it’s hard to know where to begin. Not only do they infantilise students, but they must surely embarrass their mentors. Goodness knows how proper academics feel to be associated with what can only be called a nanny state.
Even more offensive, however, is the signal it gives about literature. Offering advance notice of a work’s contents removes all element of surprise. It’s like reading a review that gives away the ending. Warnings suck the life out of a story, reducing it to one theme, or scene, which needs careful navigating. Yet the whole point about art is that it has the power to startle, shock or disturb.
How else do we learn about the human condition, or what makes other people tick? When you pick up a book, or watch a play, you should be ready for anything it throws at you. In this, as in other ways, it is a replica of life itself: we need to know how to react to events that are awful to contemplate. How else to prepare yourself for the day’s news bulletins?
Of course, if you don’t want to encounter distressing ideas or images, then there’s plenty of pap to satisfy the need for undemanding diversion. There’s nothing wrong with that, although too much of it will result in the literary equivalent of rickets. And while it’s understandable that some readers will have harrowing personal experiences that make certain subjects unbearable, trigger warnings are a very blunt tool. Advance notice of a plot’s contents does not begin to address the problems of how to study a text that provokes traumatic memories.
I would argue all of the finest and most enduring works deal with matters that are intrinsically difficult. Few books worth their salt are bland. Instead, authors set out to mirror, echo or amplify real life, to plunge readers into scenarios they could not have imagined. To issue warnings, therefore, is profoundly disrespectful to writers, whose aim is to deliver the most powerful and memorable impact they can devise. To be forewarned is to lose the jolt of discovery, the shock of the reveal, the nuance of the wording.
At the weekend I read a brilliant short story by Alice Munro – Royal Beatings – about domestic violence. The title was the only clue as to what it contained, and by its end I was stunned by the portrayal of the complex emotions around a daughter’s abuse, and her response. The single scene of violence was uncomfortable, but not gratuitous. Other thrashings were merely alluded to. Most disturbing of all was the way family life resumed swiftly afterwards, with everyone’s collusion.
We’re all used to the warnings that precede films where, as at the Bingo, you settle down in anticipation of a full-house: strong language, sexual content, harm to lilies cut for a vase, and so on. The day book jackets come with similar guidance, however, is the day I stop going into bookshops. Treating students as if they need to be cocooned in bubble-wrap is a contradiction in terms. A student is by definition a person eager to learn. Shame on the University of the Highlands and Islands for diminishing that experience.
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