Trigger warnings aren’t just for snowflakes – here’s why
Triggering, as a phenomenon and catchword, snuck up on us about 10 years ago. The popular press and reading public have made hay with its sheer silliness – the absurdity of “woke”. Often, it happens in Britain’s universities. For instance, a prime example last year was the University of Greenwich adding a trigger warning to Coleridge’s poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner on the grounds of “animal death”. One bird is killed, you will recall. At the other end of the country, the University of the Highlands and Islands had just added a warning to Hemingway’s novel The Old Man and the Sea, on the grounds of “graphic fishing scenes”.
Despite such examples, I believe that triggering deserves a second look. It can have, when done sensibly, a worthwhile function; in fact, I would argue, it can encourage a more serious engagement with literature, music and art.
Triggering, to make a primary distinction, is not cancellation as practised, historically, by the Catholic Church’s Index of Forbidden Books. It doesn’t physically suppress or prohibit. Nor is it akin to the level of ideological censorship that at its extreme, burns books. Both Salman Rushdie and JK Rowling have in recent years been subjected to that ritual insult; their achievement, as writers, patently survives.
Margaret Atwood, the wittiest of novelists, made the latter point in 2022 by commissioning an asbestos copy of The Handmaid’s Tale – for years one of the most censored books in American public and school libraries – then using a flamethrower to immolate it for the cameras. It survived, symbolically, and was sold at Sotheby’s for $130,000 (￡107,000), which the author donated to the anti-censorship organisation PEN.
Triggering, to make a further distinction, is not bowdlerisation. Thomas Bowdler and his sister produced, in the early 19th century, The Family Shakespeare, with all the naughty bits excised or replaced. The aim was to make the “immoral” but “immortal” Shakespeare a safe place for women and children. Other than as a literary curiosity, their project failed, but bowdlerising lives on, most recently in the works of Roald Dahl from which their publisher, Puffin Books, with the aid of sensitivity readers, removed “language” that might offend; notably that which was “fatphobic” or maintained gender binaries (“boys” and “girls” became “children”; “mother” and “father” became “parents”).
Salman Rushdie – a man who has suffered more physical injury for what he writes than almost any other living author – was at the forefront of those protesting. Puffin reverted to the original texts, Dahl’s moral rights as creator were grudgingly respected, And a discreet trigger warning, instead, was added.
Routine “content warnings”, as they were initially better known, originated online at the end of the 2000s, amid the new circulation of early feminist magazines and the rise of social media. Anything coming that might traumatise susceptible readers was flagged in advance, and online readers could brace themselves or stop reading.
In following years, these warnings – soon, as they received wider notice, becoming known as “trigger warnings” – became institutionalised in university humanities departments across the West. By May 2014, The New York Times was reporting, with a gasp of surprise, that at scores of institutions – from community college to Ivy League – student bodies themselves were demanding trigger warnings on such canonical texts as Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald, Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf and Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice.
Last year, Freedom of Information requests by The Times revealed that, by 2020, exactly the same thing had happened in British universities, with Chaucer, Shakespeare, Austen, Dickens and Agatha Christie all branded “triggering”.
Why did this happen? In a word: fees. The mountainous size of these had transformed the student body from begowned ephebes into customers who were, proverbially, always right. And as those bodies became more gender balanced and increasingly diverse, they wanted an anti-patriarchal, decolonised curriculum. Their money talked; the university listened. Curricular power switched. The tail wagged the dog.
Yet trigger warnings, rightly done, respect the text as written. They don’t censor, they merely forewarn, adding only a little more information than the highly useful “spoiler alert”, which came into common use at around the same time and is now found routinely in fiction and film reviewing.
There are many fatuous examples of triggering which have made the practice a running joke. Nonetheless, done intelligently, triggering is useful when it serves to create a more scrupulous reading with the accompanying option, for those of weak heart, not to read.
In January 2022, in response to a Freedom of Information request, Northampton University disclosed that it had triggered Nineteen Eighty-Four. Students in the class were forewarned that Orwell’s novel “addresses challenging issues related to violence, gender, sexuality, class, race, abuses, sexual abuse, political ideas and offensive language.”
This seems, on the face of it, balderdash. Nonetheless, Orwell’s novel has for the scrupulous reader profoundly discomfiting moments. For me, notably, the fantasy Winston Smith indulges when first seeing Julia during the Two Minutes Hate – the ceremony directed at “Emmanuel Goldstein, the Enemy of the People” while his face is depicted on a cinema screen, in gross anti-Semitic caricature.
Winston, at the peak of his hate, fantasises flogging Julia who sits nearby with a rubber truncheon, tying her naked to a stake, “ravishing” her and cutting her throat at the moment of climax. The sudden switch from public Jew-hatred to private sadistic misogyny is alarming. Orwell consciously intended to link racism and violent pornography – but it will lead contemporary discussion into some very dark places. They are not, I fancy, dwelt on in GCSE classes, where Nineteen Eighty-Four is a favourite text. Such moments in the book would surely come up in Northampton’s seminar – under a content warning which serves as both a guide post and warning flag. This book, as the trigger signals, is a minefield.
Also in January 2022, Royal Holloway University, in answer to a Freedom of Information request, disclosed that they had triggered Oliver Twist on a postgraduate Victorian literature, art and culture course. When questioned, a spokesperson explained that Oliver Twist had been triggered for its “themes of child abuse, domestic violence and racial prejudice”.
Oliver Twist is the most adapted of Dickens’s works, with versions in film, cartoon, TV, and musically. It is known to millions who have not read it, let alone studied it. But Dickens’s Fagin, the Jewish villain, is troublesome for dedicated Dickens lovers. The “child abuse” cited in the Royal Holloway trigger is explicable. Young Dickens grew up an abused child in a traumatisingly abusive household. He was recycling, artistically, his own suffering.
But why did he perpetrate the hideously anti-Semitic Fagin caricature? No satisfactory answer has ever been supplied other than an odd racist spasm. Atypical of him, over the length of his life and works, but not the Victorian culture of his time.
There is local context to Oliver Twist being triggered by the north London university. In 2000, Royal Holloway set up The Holocaust Research Centre. It is the British university leader in this scholarly field. The adjoining English department could have chosen a non-controversial novel. They did not. The clash, they decided, would be productive if painful. They signalled the problematic nature of the novel, scrupulously read and historically placed, with a trigger warning. I applaud them for what looks to me to have been a brave decision.
My belief is that conscientious teachers, critics and cultural custodians have always in various ways sought to “trigger” us. But they didn’t put it in a box and give it a catchy name. It was thought of as “contextualisation”. That’s no big deal, if done responsibly. We can, and should, live with it. And, where appropriate, practise it.
John Sutherland is emeritus professor of modern English literature at University College London; ‘Triggered Literature’ is published by Biteback Publishing
