I’m writing a feminist essay, a pamphlet that I hope will get people talking and excited when it hits bookstores.
And here is the disclaimer I wrote at the very beginning of the book: “No sensitive readers or editorial minesweepers were consulted at the time of writing this book. If you are offended/hurt/shocked by certain words, ideas or comments, then so be it! “.
The intellectual climate
Quebec author Kevin Lambert (in the running for the Goncourt with “Que notre joie keep”) is at the center of a controversy in France because his publisher bragged that Lambert appealed to sensitive readers, the people who re-read your book, um make sure there is nothing offensive or shocking in it.
The most intelligent commentary I have read on the subject of this controversy comes from the Quebec writer Louis Hamelin, author of The Constellation of the Lynx, which will be published this fall, Un lac le matin. Here’s what he wrote on Facebook.
“That Kevin Lambert and his publisher found it useful to publicly demonstrate their credentials by revealing a practice that should be part of every author’s secret laboratory can give a good idea of the intellectual climate in which we live.” Want do we really read novels as fairly as the coffee used to write them? »
Hamelin is absolutely right to be worried. Sensitive readers are also referred to as “editorial bomb defusal,” as if telling readers, “This book is an open-pin grenade, there is no danger of it exploding in your face.”
What is also disturbing is that Lambert described those who opposed the use of sensitive readers as “reactionaries.”
“We don’t really see how such external intervention, probing and right-thinking, could ‘enhance’ the freedom of writing,” Hamelin writes.
“We have the right to believe that literature is, first and foremost, the free exercise of thought and imagination, which should not be held accountable to any new priest. »
The president of the Goncourt Academy, Didier Decoin, defended Kevin Lambert: “He did not want to give a text that could offend people. When you write a book, you don’t want to cause pain. »
Help ! But what is this call to literary nanny? Are we forgetting the essential contribution of all the authors who have dipped their pens in bile or blood, of all the disturbing, disturbing, aggressive books?
Louis Hamelin wrote this brilliant commentary: “Let us crumple the pages of our books, not the people…And when this stream of thought has finally subjugated the authorities of our Arts Councils, we will be condemned to write well, inclusively and diversely.” Novels. Just as Soviet writers produced good socialist literature under Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev. »
The champions of evil?
In a context as reserved as Quebec literature, Louis Hamelin is particularly bold in denouncing the “priests,” the commitment to “right thinking,” and the “inclusive and diverse” catechism. Here is an author who is not afraid.
What I respect above all is that Hamelin asks an essential question at the end of his text:
“If the last novelist has become a champion of good, who will take his place in our gray areas and explore the evil within us? »
