Yahoo Finance Lionel Shriver: Arguments about authenticity are ‘anti-imagination’
Fearing criticism for cultural appropriation would stop authors being able to write fiction and limit them to memoir, Lionel Shriver has said.
The bestselling author of We Need To Talk About Kevin, a novel about a school massacre, said that if authors are too hesitant to create characters or settings outside of their own lived experiences, due to fear of causing offence, they would stop being able to write fiction at all.
“I’ve spoken at length before of my dislike of this ostensible presence of cultural appropriation, which can mean all you end up writing is memoir,” she told the Cliveden Literary Festival. “It’s basically anti-imagination.”
Shriver, 64, whose latest book Should We Stay or Should We Go depicts an ageing couple coming to terms with their impending death, said cancel culture needs to be resisted in order to guarantee artistic freedom.
Social media, she said, has created a list of rules that authors must follow, prescribing which characters they can or cannot write, which places they can explore, and even which accents they can have their protagonists speak in.
Shriver said: “I believe these rules ought to be resisted also, because who makes these rules? Who thinks they can tell me how to do my job?”
‘It takes a little more nerve than it used to’
Although readers are welcome to find “the execution of a book wanting in some ways”, the author has the “absolute right to create character or to use material that is not personal”.
“Being a fiction writer now is a little more complicated than it used to be, it takes a little more nerve than it used to, and it takes a certain amount of political nous,” she said.
“You can’t be as naive as you used to be, and you have to stake out your claim to write, to make up whatever you want. You didn't have to do that before.”
Speaking about a meeting she once had with two French authors who had written a book about the American south, without ever having visited the area, Shriver said she felt momentarily angry about the element of cultural appropriation – but realised they had a right to exercise their artistic freedom.
She said: “I was born in the American south. These two men had never been to Alabama, and had written about American race relations in the American south in an age in which I would have been a kid.
“I had a reaction like: Are they kidding me? That doesn’t belong to you. And I had to catch myself on – I don’t own that.”
Authors have come under fire for cultural appropriation in recent years, with 2020’s American Dirt, by US novelist Jeanine Cummins, being lambasted by critics for its depiction of a Mexican family’s plight after fleeing a drug cartel in their hometown.
Cummins, who is not Mexican, was accused of appropriating native suffering and experiences and displaying “white savourism”.
