EVERY time I go to Istanbul, I make sure to visit Hagia Eirene. The church sits just behind the walls of the Topkapi Palace, a much less famous little sister to Hagia Sophia. It is remarkable, partly because of its plainness. It was built by the Iconoclasts — loathers of all that gave religion colour — and I go to remind my flippant Cavalier heart that Puritans can produce things of beauty.
The possible positives of Puritanism sprang to mind as I read John Sutherland’s timely and comprehensive Triggered Literature. People wanting to dive into a culture-war tract will be sorely disappointed, but then I suspect that those who seek to be standard-bearers either for or against cultural change spend their lives being disappointed by the realities of human apathy.
Sutherland’s masterly overview of recent “triggerings” is a dispassionate selection of case studies, some comic — such as the Green Party Councillor who tried to cancel Charles Dickens using paint — and some tragic — such as the suicide of 14-year-old Molly Russell. Perhaps the most interesting for readers here will be the biblical content: Sutherland’s review of the “trigger warning” placed on 2 Samuel by Newman University, Birmingham, is superb. Rightly, he concludes, David’s activities raise questions about God’s relationship with history and righteousness. He also points out, however, that a trigger can raise interest: no bad thing when your subject is, as Old Testament studies can be, unfairly maligned as boring.
For all the author’s even-handed presentation of great literature as necessarily “tricky”, there is the odd pantomime appearance. The then universities minister’s defence of Harry Potter — that it had “made millions for UK PLC” — is “truly Tory”. There was I, naïvely hoping that the epithet of “true Toryism” might yet be reserved for Samuel Johnson or Jonathan Swift, not Michelle Donelan. Though, rather gloriously, on the other side of the ledger, I enjoyed Roy Jenkins’s being characterised as “dishonest”.
Politics aside, the overarching sense is that the fate already suffered by the Iconoclasts, the great figures of Tory Anglicanism, and Jenkins awaits almost all classic literature: to be eventually ignored.
alamyCancelled or not, Thackeray may be destined for oblivion. Daguerrotype by Jesse Harrison Whitehurst, c.1855
The author ends by assessing his own attitudes, using the tellingly theological term “unregenerate” to describe his past instincts to defend his beloved Thackeray against accusations of racism. He now, depressingly, suspects that Thackeray will “sink into oblivion” anyway.
At the very start of the book, Sutherland reminds us that “triggering” was a candidate for word of the year in 2014. In the end, “vape” won, instead. I suspect that it will win the battle for hearts, minds, and time over the coming century or so, too. This new puritanism will build no Hagia Eirenes, just rows of vape shops. Mine’s a bubblegum blow.
The Revd Fergus Butler-Gallie is a priest and a writer.
Triggered Literature: Cancellation, stealth censorship and cultural warfare
John Sutherland
Biteback Publishing £18.99
(978-1-78590-817-0)
Church Times Bookshop £17.09