{"id":240054,"date":"2021-05-01T15:50:14","date_gmt":"2021-05-01T12:50:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/the-publishing-industry-has-turned-into-modern-day-book-burners\/"},"modified":"2021-05-01T15:50:14","modified_gmt":"2021-05-01T12:50:14","slug":"the-publishing-industry-has-turned-into-modern-day-book-burners","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/the-publishing-industry-has-turned-into-modern-day-book-burners\/","title":{"rendered":"#The publishing industry has turned into modern-day book burners"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#The publishing industry has turned into modern-day book burners<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

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Serious accusations have been made against Blake Bailey, the author of an acclaimed new biography of Philip Roth. Bailey has not been convicted of anything, or even criminally charged, yet the book\u2019s publisher, W.W. Norton, announced it was withdrawing the book from print. That doesn\u2019t make sense and it\u2019s a terrible precedent.<\/p>\n

Harvey Weinstein is a convicted rapist, but does that mean no one should ever be allowed to see \u201cThe English Patient,\u201d \u201cClerks,\u201d \u201cPulp Fiction\u201d or \u201cThe King\u2019s Speech\u201d again? Roman Polanski does not deny he carried out a gruesome sex attack on a 13-year-old girl in 1977. Should we pull everything he\u2019s ever done off the cultural shelf and throw it on the bonfire? We\u2019d lose \u201cChinatown,\u201d \u201cRosemary\u2019s Baby\u201d and \u201cThe Tenant.\u201d The French philosopher Michel Foucault, who died in 1984, raped thousands of boys as young as 8 in Tunisia in the 1960s, according to a shocking recent claim<\/a> by writer Guy Sorman, who knew him then. Should all of Foucault\u2019s books be taken off the shelves, or can we acknowledge that we are not endorsing a man\u2019s character when we allow his books to exist?<\/p>\n

Bailey\u2019s book on Philip Roth is an important contribution to literary scholarship. Cynthia Ozick, in The New York Times, calls<\/a> \u201cPhilip Roth: The Biography<\/a>\u201d \u201ca narrative masterwork both of wholeness and particularity, of crises wedded to character, of character erupting into insight, insight into desire, and desire into destiny.\u201d And Roth himself was, famously, not exactly a gentleman<\/a> when it came to women. Roth has not yet been canceled, but his name seems to be drifting toward the Cancel Zone.<\/p>\n

\"Should
Should work related to Harvey Weinstein (left) and Roman Polanski be canceled because of their criminal behavior in real life?<\/figcaption>
Getty Images (2)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The claims<\/a> made against Bailey \u2014 two women say he raped them \u2014 are disturbing and should be taken seriously. But even if we assume the claims are true, that is no reason to pull his book, which is now part of the literary record. It would have been understandable if Norton had fired Bailey, by canceling his advance, while he was working on the book. But now that the book exists, its merits exist independently of questions about Bailey\u2019s character. America isn\u2019t supposed to work like a college campus, where outrage unleashes an impulse to annihilate everything connected with a person who is out of favor. Grown-up people can recognize that good, and even vital, work sometimes comes from bad people.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Nor is Bailey\u2019s Roth book an example of someone profiting from crime, though many have noted that what attracted Roth to participating in the project was Bailey\u2019s promise that he would not be too judgmental about the novelist\u2019s sex life. Bailey is not, like O.J. Simpson, a murderer who sought to enrich himself<\/a> from the blood on his hands. He turned in a valuable piece of scholarship whose existence has nothing to do with the claims made against him and should not affront anyone. Those who believe Bailey is a man of low character are free not to buy the book, but publishers should hardly start down the path of removing all books by tarnished people. Publishers are supposed to be in the business of expanding access to human knowledge, art and culture, not extinguishing it. And if mere accusations of sexual misconduct by an author are enough to render a book unpublishable, then the books written by three of our last five presidents should be unpublished too.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"W.W.
W.W. Norton has bowed to public pressure and essentially burned the very book it published. <\/figcaption>
Alamy<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Meanwhile, the books of actual killers continue to be sold, up to and including \u201cMein Kampf,\u201d which will always be of historical interest and, because of that, should never be canceled. Lenin\u2019s books, and Mao\u2019s, and Stalin\u2019s poetry shouldn\u2019t be yanked off the library shelves either. This all seems obvious, because we\u2019ve had plenty of time to weigh these figures and their depravity. That the charges against Philip Roth\u2019s biographer are new should not blind us to what is happ<\/a>ening: The culture is being menaced by the 21st century equivalent of book burners. Their willingness to let their emotions guide them to destruction is a disservice to humanity.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Kyle Smith is critic-at-large at National Review.<\/em>\n <\/div>\n

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Source<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“#The publishing industry has turned into modern-day book burners” Serious accusations have been made against Blake Bailey, the author of an acclaimed new biography of Philip Roth. Bailey has not been convicted of anything, or even criminally charged, yet the book\u2019s publisher, W.W. Norton, announced it was withdrawing the book from print. That doesn\u2019t make…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":240055,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/nypost.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2021\/04\/blake-bailey.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=1200","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[70897],"tags":[104101,71502,32128,104140,70675],"class_list":["post-240054","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-5-1-21","tag-authors","tag-censorship","tag-philip-roth","tag-sexual-abuse"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240054","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=240054"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240054\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/240055"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=240054"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=240054"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=240054"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}