Without the least idea of what is innately transgressive about the literary imagination, cultural journalism is ever mindful of phony ethical issues: 'Does the writer have the right to blah-blah-blah?' It is hypersensitive to the invasion of privacy perpetrated by literature over the millennia, while maniacally dedicated to exposing in print, unfictionalized, whose privacy has been invaded and how. One is struck by the regard cultural journalists have for the barriers of privacy when it comes to the novel.
If I had something like Stalin power, I would not squander it on silencing the imaginative writers. I would silence those who write about the imaginative writers. I'd forbid all public discussion of literature in newspapers, magazines, and scholary periodicals. I'd forbid all instruction in literature in every grade school, high school, college, and university in the country. I'd outlaw reading groups and Internet book chatter, and police the bookstores to be certain that the costumers did not dare to speak to one another. I'd leave the readers alone with the books, to make of them what they would on their own. I'd do this for many centuries as required to detoxify the society of your poisonous nonsense.
