Neil Mackay: We cannot allow the culture war to infect the study of great literature in our schools

‘Stalin?’

‘No,’ she said. I thought I’d probe deeper. ‘Hitler?’

‘I’ve heard about him,’ she said, hesitantly. By now I was bewildered so I asked, ‘You know about the Holocaust, right?’

‘No,’ she replied.

‘Nazis murdered six million Jews,’ I said. She looked horrified. This was 1991. I was breaking news of the Holocaust to a teenager.

I spoke to her mother. She told me, ‘We try to keep those things away from her – too distressing’. When I got my student to reread Animal Farm, this unknown past opened up to her and I saw a young woman blossom with knowledge through literature. The kid wasn’t stupid, I realised. It was her parents.

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Whenever there’s an assault on literature, I think of that young woman. I thought of her this week when the English Department at James Gillespie’s High in Edinburgh – one of Scotland’s leading state schools – considered scrapping the teaching of texts like Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck. Wonderful Harper. The Great Steinbeck.

The books are seen as having a dated approach to race. Mockingbird, we’re told, has a White Saviour narrative. Greater emphasis should be placed, reports said, on material which challenges white, Western-centric culture.

I despise the word ‘woke’ – it’s a nasty little reactionary culture war shorthand deployed to try and stamp out any move to improve decency in the world when it comes to issues like race, misogyny, homophobia and transphobia. So I’ll have no truck with the word ‘woke’ when it comes to discussions around literature – because literature, if it’s about anything, is about nuance, and there’s nothing nuanced about the word ‘woke’.

So let’s take a nuanced approach to this debate. Literature, like history, is a window to the past. History tells us what happened in the past, literature shows us the souls of those who lived there. To remove literature is to kill off a part of the human story.

I don’t read The Tempest because I love European colonialism in the 1600s, I read The Tempest to understand the spirit of the Renaissance. I don’t read Chaucer because I’m a fan of totalitarian religion, but to navigate the Medieval mind. I don’t read Hemingway because I admire his casual machismo, but because without him I’ll know nothing of the style which affected most Western literature in the 20th century.

John Steinbeck

I don’t read Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart because I like the ‘hero’s’ grotesque sexism, but because through Achebe I inhabit another human soul – in this case an African wrestler. I don’t read Virginia Woolf because I ascribe to her vile anti-semitism but because she’s a gateway to understanding high culture in the early 20th century. I don’t read Don Quixote because absolute monarchy is great, but because I’m interested in the birth of the novel. I don’t read Jean Genet because I’m into petty crime, but for a glimpse of gay life when homosexuality meant jail. Above all, I read these works for their ineffable beauty, the magic of language.

Books aren’t their authors or their characters – books are repositories of human experience. Great literature shows us what we were, and what we can become. Art reveals past errors and teases future possibilities. Read Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King – one of literature’s greatest adventures – for proof of how far Western society has come in its attitudes, and how far we’ve still to go.

Mockingbird may well have a white saviour narrative – but it also turned a generation of young white people into anti-racists. It’s culturally and historically of great global significance. In her own brave, beautiful way, Lee charted the growing awareness in white America that the past was monstrous. Without Steinbeck, we lose the poetry and the pain of the working class, and works of exquisite sadness like The Red Pony.

I’ve no time for a world which bans beauty.

None of this means the current English curriculum is perfect. It needs diversified. But diversity doesn’t mean guillotining the past. Add to the curriculum, don’t take away.

There’s no shortage of great writers of colour, or great LGBT writers. Just make room for them without destroying the study of other great writers. Read more, not less. Teach Dutchman by LeRoi Jones; teach Jeanette Winterson, Alice Walker, James Baldwin, Alan Hollinghurst, Rita May Brown, Armistead Maupin, Radclyffe Hall, Zadie Smith. I could fill this column with the names of great black and LGBT writers.

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But to teach these great texts – as we should – we mustn’t remove other great texts. Nor can we judge the literary past by today’s standards. If we do, rest assured the future will soon judge us.

I don’t think those who’ve suggested removing Mockingbird and Steinbeck are bad – far from it. I believe they’re motivated by a desire to do good – to make their teaching more reflective of the world around us. However, in trying to do good, decent people sometimes make bad choices, lose perspective. Babies, bathwater and all that.

We should also put this ‘row’ in perspective. One school is having a discussion about its curriculum. Good. Discussion is welcome. We’ll never make the changes we need in society unless we debate uncomfortable issues. It’s also necessary to debate art – that’s what students of literature do every single day. Is this text good? By what standard do we measure beauty?

However, literature is the study of the human soul. To me, it’s a semi-religious vocation. I want to hear from every writer who’s put a voice to the human soul from the Marquis de Sade to Marcus Aurelius.

The culture war has poisoned nearly every tributary in the river of modern life. I would build a dam with my own dead body to prevent the culture war wending its destructive way into the waters of literature.

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