Ian McEwan, considered by many to be Britain’s greatest living novelist, is not a fan of trigger warnings and safe spaces.
The award-winning author of Atonement and On Chesil Beach gave a commencement speech at Dickinson College last year in which he told graduates, “I hope you’ll use your fine liberal education to preserve for future generations the beautiful and precious — but also awkward, sometimes inconvenient and even offensive — culture of freedom of expression we have.”
Turns out he’s not done yet. In his new novel Nutshell — published September 13 in the US — McEwan has a fetus narrate the tragic story of his parents in a bizarre re-telling of Hamlet.
Nutshell has received good reviews in the UK, but the unborn child is highly critical of safe spaces and campus life which, although fiction, echo McEwan’s previously expressed concerns over the future of free speech.
McEwan writes in Nutshell: “Here’s a new politics in university life…A strange mood has seized the almost-educated young. They’re on the march, angry at times, but mostly needful, longing for authority’s blessing, its validation of their chosen identities…A social-media site famously proposes seventy-one gender options- neutrois, two spirit, bigender…any color you like…If I turn out to be white, I may identify as black. And vice versa.”
“I may announce myself as disabled, or disabled in context. If my identity is that of a believer, I’m easily wounded, my flesh torn to bleeding by any questioning of my faith. Offended, I enter a state of grace.”
“Should inconvenient opinions hover near me like fallen angels or evil djinn (a mile being too near), I’ll be in need of the special campus safe room equipped with Play-Doh and looped footage of gambolling puppies. Ah the intellectual life! I may need advance warning if upsetting books or ideas threaten my very being by coming too close, breathing on my face, my brain, like unwholesome dogs.”
“I’ll feel, therefore I’ll be. Let poverty go begging and climate change braise in hell. Social justice can drown in ink. I’ll be an activist of the emotions, a loud, campaigning spirit fighting with tears and sighs to shape institutions around my vulnerable self. My identity will be my precious, my only true possession, my access to the only truth.”
“The world must love, nourish and protect it as I do. If my college does not bless me, validate me and give me what I clearly need, I’ll press my face into the vice chancellor’s lapels and weep. Then demand his resignation.”
Safe spaces and trigger warnings evidently irritate McEwan as much as the time two decades ago Macaulay Culkin’s family ruined his Hollywood movie script The Good Son.
It will be interesting to see how receptive campus authorities will be to a liberal author who happens to place a premium of freedom of speech when McEwan is over in the US for a book tour later this month.