To the Editor:
Re “How Far Can Novelists Go?” (Arts pages, Sept. 13), about “cultural appropriation”:
The answer is all the way!
Virginia Woolf wrote “Flush,” a biography, from the point of view of a dog.
Norman Rush won a National Book Award for his novel “Mating,” which had a female narrator.
I have written two novels from the point of view of a man. One of them was sold to a publisher who thought that I was male.
Whoever makes up the ridiculous rules against “cultural appropriation” should quit this job and go into something more sensible and benign, like catering weddings.
Four cheers for the American writer Lionel Shriver, who bucked the trend with muscular courage.
ANNE BERNAYS
Cambridge, Mass.
To the Editor:
Perhaps the most absurd tenet of the spreading political-correctness takeover is the objection to “cultural appropriation.” I hadn’t realized that it had jumped, scarily, from the college campus to the critics of writers. Hats off to the novelist Lionel Shriver for speaking out against it at a writers’ conference in Australia.
One writer actually walked out of Ms. Shriver’s talk because it was a “celebration of the unfettered exploitation of the experiences of others, under the guise of fiction.” Isn’t that almost the definition of what fiction is? Will someone soon claim that men should not write about women?
Writers of fiction need to be unfettered to explore the limits of their imaginations, period.
JANICE GEWIRTZ
Mountain Lakes, N.J.
Note from KBJ: When leftists went after conservatives, leftists cheered. When leftists went after theists, leftists cheered. What will leftists do when leftists go after them? We're about to find out. I call it "eating your own." It's going to be delicious to watch. Hillary Clinton may be a woman, but she's white, heterosexual, and wealthy. She will feel the wrath. Brian Leiter, the academic thug at the University of Chicago, may be a leftist, but he's white, male, and heterosexual (or so I infer from the fact that he's married). He will feel the wrath. Jesse Jackson may be black, but he's male, heterosexual, and wealthy. He will feel the wrath. If you live by the sword of identity politics, you die by the sword of identity politics.
