”The language of sympathy and identity and what we call political correctness is killing the way we read. That’s like the end of civilisation.” Author Howard Jacobson
Howard Jacobson
The novel is in danger, according to Howard Jacobson, the Man Booker prize-winning author of The Finkler Question. The fault, he said, lay not with novelists but with the lack of good readers.
Describing his experience of appearing at reading groups – ”Sometimes they are lovely, sometimes they aren’t, sometimes they are just staggeringly rude” – Jacobson said he felt a sense of heartbreak when he heard readers say: ”I don’t like this book because I don’t sympathise with the main character.”
He added: ”The language of sympathy and identity and what we call political correctness is killing the way we read. That’s like the end of civilisation. In that little sentence is a misunderstanding so profound about the nature of art, education and why we are reading, that it makes you despair. Who ever told anyone that they read a book in order to find themselves?”
Speaking at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, Jacobson said the reader needed a strong stomach and ought to be able to withstand the ”expression of an ugly point of view” in a book. There was great danger in the politically correct pressure that urged: ”You can’t write about women like that, you’ve got to be careful what you say about gays, what you say about Jews … You have to be able to say of the novel that it has free rein – it can go anywhere.”
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