J.K. ROWLING & tyranny of historical processes

ON the 10th, June 2020, J.K. Rowling Wrote about Her Reasons for Speaking out on Sex and Gender Issues:

'But endlessly unpleasant as its constant targeting of me has been, I refuse to bow down to a movement that I believe is doing demonstrable harm in seeking to erode ‘woman’ as a political and biological class and offering cover to predators like few before it. I stand alongside the brave women and men, gay, straight and trans, who’re standing up for freedom of speech and thought, and for the rights and safety of some of the most vulnerable in our society: young gay kids, fragile teenagers, and women who’re reliant on and wish to retain their single sex spaces.'

She added: 'The last thing I want to say is this. I haven’t written this essay in the hope that anybody will get out a violin for me, not even a teeny-weeny one. I’m extraordinarily fortunate; I’m a survivor, certainly not a victim. I’ve only mentioned my past because, like every other human being on this planet, I have a complex backstory, which shapes my fears, my interests and my opinions. I never forget that inner complexity when I’m creating a fictional character and I certainly never forget it when it comes to trans people. All I’m asking – all I want – is for similar empathy, similar understanding, to be extended to the many millions of women whose sole crime is wanting their concerns to be heard without receiving threats and abuse.'

Evolution of Fashionable Addiction in the Cultural Realm

When I read the above address from a children's author of which I must admit to having only read the occasional oddments in newspapers, and I haven't even seen any of the associated films related to her work; I was drawn back to George Orwell's essay 'Inside the Whale' written in 1940. Orwell was then aware and worried about the poor state of English literature and he wrote of the period: 'Symptomatically, that is more significant than the mere fact that five thousand novels are published in England every year and four thousand nine hundred of them are tripe.'

Back in 1940, Orwell was clearly as pessimistic, as J.K. Rowling seems to be today, and he felt the writer was living in 'an age in which freedom of thought will be at first a deadly sin and later on a meaningless abstraction'. He believed that: 'As for the writer, he [sic] is sitting on a melting iceberg: he is merely an anachronism, a hangover from a bourgeois age...'

A few years earlier in 1936 Orwell clarified the problem while reviewing 'The Novel Today' by the Marxist critic Philip Henderson, when he wrote that the official 'art for art's sake' school was finished and it was then being replaced by two gangs of extremists: 'Both the Catholic and Communist usually believe, though unfortunately they do not often say, that abstract aesthetic standards are bunkum and that a book is only a "good" book it it preaches the right sermon. To the Communist, good literature means "proletarian" literature. (Mr Henderson is careful to explain, however that this doesn't mean literature written by proletarians; which is just as well, because there isn't any.)'

Sermons and the Winter of Anarchistic Free Thinking

In that bleak world of 1940 with the bombs falling, the year in which I was born, Orwell pinned his hopes on Henry Miller's 'Tropic of Cancer' and a novel 'With No sermons, merely subjective truth'

Orwell during the war regarded Henry Miller then as the best bet in the circumstances: 'a completely negative, unconstructive, amoral writer, a mere Jonah, a passive acceper of evil, a sort of Whitman among the corpses.' Not very edifying but once read never forgotten; J.K. Rowling is clearly a much more fragrant specimen and one more easy to get behind in the battle against the current cancel culture fanatics. For freedom of expression is under attack now just as much as it was in the 1930s when the Marxists held the sway; today it is now the obsessive identity politicians cracking the whip, and as a consequence writing and literature is suffering under the current historical process.

Nowadays though, it's not just the general message which is under threat from the 'cancel culture' clans, but anyone can pulled-up for some throwaway remark: a recent example is J.K.Rowling for mentioning 'Never trust a man in a dress' in her book 'Troubled Blood[' a 900-page novel that is said to be Dickensian in its scope.

Nick Cohen in The Spectator [15/09/20] reviewed Ms. Rowling's sin thus: 'Troubled Blood is a 900-page novel that is Dickensian in its scope and gallery of characters. Strike and his business partner Robin Ellacott are hired by a middle-aged woman to investigate the disappearance of her mother in the 1970s. Detectives at the time thought Creed had killed her, but no one knew the truth and the woman’s body had never been found. Strike and Ellacott investigate Creed, but then they investigate a good dozen others. You have to search hard to find a justification for the belief that the book’s moral 'seems' to be "never trust a man in a dress". But then relentless searches for the tiniest evidence of guilt are the marks of heresy hunters.'

The trouble is that this kind of censorship is that it is not just the preserve of the usual suspects among the political authoritarians on the left and the right. Curiously, the socalled libertarians at the 'anarchist' Freedom Press have been vigously rooting out dissidents who have supported people like Helen Steel and J.K.Rowling. Dave Douglass, an anarcho-syndicalist, and in August 2019 a member of the Friends of Freedom Press, was told by the secretary of the group Steve Sorba that he had 'had embarrassed his fellow Director colleagues by favouring a booklet which questions some of the stranger aspects of gender politics'. Dave was then encouraged to spare his colleagues blushes as directors of Freedom Press and to step down.

The Freedom Press directors have had a troubled history since it was found that Secretary Sorba had been been running the show without reference to his fellow directors, and even placing the names directors on the Company's House register without their knowledge. Since that was discovered and exposed on the NV Blog, Secretary Sorba is believed to have cleaned-up his act.

The Seed within el Culo de un Burro

There was a time more than two decades ago when the anarchist newspaper Freedom had a good reputation for being courageous, controversal and a kind of political Daniel in the lion's den, but that seems no longer to be the case. Its current publishers seem shy and quite willing to censor folk, and to court any fashionable fad no matter how despicable.

When a few years ago two distinguished academics and historians, David Goodway and Peter Marshall, gained entry as directors of Friends of Freedom Press it was thought that things may improve. Alas, it has not really happened. Not only was Dave Douglass effectively shown the door by Secretary Soba, but the rest of the directors have not covered themselves with glory and their committee seems to continually side with censorship and the prescriptions of the cancel culture.

In 2005, David Goodway wrote 'Anarchist Seeds Beneath the Snow - left libertarian thought and British Writers from William Morris to Colin Ward' which tried to show that anarchistic forms and projects can be discovered within the structures of everyday life if we seek them and that these 'seeds beneath the snow' should be thrown into relief and promoted by anarchists. It is a seductive theory and can easily be shown to have some credibility substance by focusing upon the ordinary and everyday activities of 'people's methods' which Orwell himself had long ago advocated as a form of common place sociology. In 1967, Harold Garfinkel had even introduced what he came to 'ethnomethodology' [people's methods], which became a form of response to the then conventional sociology of Talcott Parsons with social action theory and structural functionalism.

Colin Ward had long ago criticised British anarchists for being too obsessed with history when he thought they would do better by focussing on a more sociological approach. The work of Colin Ward is very popular in Italy, and the original author of the novel 'The Seed Beneath the Snow'* Ignazio Silone is Italian. But Goodway and Peter Marshall are themselves both English historians, and both are historians presenting artful historical naratives. Now Silone was one of those writers who Orwell in 1944 said belonged to the school of foreign writers who are 'what one might call concentration-camp literature' in that they had seen and understood totalitarianism from the inside. In his book Silone has the seed hidden from the police by the peasants, not beneath the snow, but up the culo of a donkey. It is perhaps a more approprate place since neither of the two historians on the Friends of Freedom Press directorate have covered themselves with glory.

* The Seed Beneath the Snow, the final novel in The Abruzzo Trilogy, follows the fugitive Pietro Spina as he refuses to accept the conditions of pardon for his transgressions against the fascist state and flees to the mountains. As in Fontamara and Bread and Wine, Silone achieves a rich harmony of allegory and realism in his portrayal of the cafoni of Abruzzo and their struggle for freedom. An extraordinary, unburnished vision of the conflict between good and evil, communicating to its reader, in the words of F. W. Dupee, “Silone’s deep integrity, his sufferings and aspirations, his radical sense of the world’s wrongs.” ****************************************************************