The questions that the Munro and Gaiman controversy raises must hook themselves into our cultural conscience
Like periodic changes in seasons, every few months we are exposed to truths about the secret personal lives of artists we have admired all our lives — or at least have heard great things about. At first, these new developments feel atrocious, but we acclimatise to them ably after a few days. For so long, Alice Munro’s timeless oeuvre represented for her readers a deep engagement with the human condition. Her stories and characters built on the vast emotional intimacies and empathies we share with each other. Something similar could be said about Neil Gaiman, whose magical worlds have offered escapes to many of us, and despite their hyperreal horizons, they have revealed to us our deepest truths and realities.
Fiction so often becomes an armature, or rather projection of our inner lives, whether we produce it as artists or consume it as readers. It allows for lies and comforts that reality does not offer. With yet another cycle of new discoveries about Munro and Gaiman, a series of confounding and timeless questions about the art and the artist dichotomy have erupted. These questions ultimately push the limits of fiction as a genre in these writers’ cases — and art as a whole.
These questions lash at the cliff sides, on top of which our fragile ego-houses perch shakily. Sometimes we like to think that we take away the violence of these urgent questions by dismissing their origins. Language bends to our rules when we choose to call the discomforting facts about our heroes as ‘allegations’ and ‘accusations.’ As soon as these notorious words enter the fray, legal confessions demand to be read with nuance, and evidence (that roving bluffer) becomes something merely circumstantial. Denial is the Olympus of a flaccid patriarchal society.
Art versus the artist
Despite calls to contextualise the respective situations — or worse, empathize with these icons — with the Munro and Gaiman cases, the embers of an everlasting fire have been reawakened. While a lot of their readers have bemoaned the downfall of these giants, there are others who are apparently evolved enough to consider art as an entity of its own, distinct from its creator. An enviable state of mind, to be utterly, voluntarily blind. Admirers of Munro and Gaiman have been heartbroken to find out incriminating details about their personal life. But through a sleight of hand, as it always happens with many ‘broken’ artists, a tide of sympathy and non-judgemental acceptance of the greyness of life extinguishes the coals of criminal acts.
Even if the Gaiman episodes were consensual, the blatant exploitation of gender and power dynamics is enough to puncture his image. Sometimes, lying about and hiding the truth, or as in Munro’s case, negotiating with morals can be disruptive events of their own, perhaps even separate from the actual crime. But there will always be those who inspire us to accept that nobody after all is flawless, and everyone has their darknesses and flaws — an argument vehemently defended by Woody Allen fans particularly, curiously. And why must we hold fallible humans to unreasonable standards of morality and in practice, preach to them from the infamous pulpit of the holier-than-thou? Such arguments miss the point.
The art versus the artist debate is not about holding artists to an unreasonable standard of morality. It is about the expectation that in the face of conflict and exposure, these artists take responsibility for their actions, and lead by example to repair the damage their actions may have caused. That is the charge one must accept to be an artist who can influence public opinion equally with their art and how they live their life. Everyone wants to write a novel these days, or create films, but there are few who understand the crippling demands of accountability that follow the courageous decision to be an artist in a fractured world.
The brotherhood of broken men
Another argument is made in the aftermath of the Munro and Gaiman debacle. Seemingly, it is relevant to argue that art is the domain of disturbed people. Some of the most iconic writers died by suicide, after all. They bled in their works, and when the blood ran dry, they had to take another leap of faith. When people validate the bluster that broken people make great artists — effectively normalizing their disturbing real lives — a huge disservice is done to the power of art. ‘Broken’ is not a pass to go around blowing things and other people up. It’s an excuse to avoid responsibility. X user @BabsVan posted this about the Munro case:
“Lotta folks mourning the Alice Munro news not out of sympathy for her abused daughter, but for how it recontextualizes the art they love. Art is not and should not be fandom. Great art is very often uncomfortable, very often the product of bad, broken people.”
It is true that art is not fandom. But then is it a depthless grail made for depositing our brokennesses? At what point does the paap ka ghada spill over — as a popular Hindi saying assures us that it must?
In a deeply fraught patriarchal society like ours in India, the omnipresence of sexual abuse is unbelievable, and often produces and sustains a culture of impunity. As in all other domains where the metric is how poorly India performs, we are not shy in producing, retaining and celebrating our own diabolical artistic heroes. From Tarun Tejpal to Mahmood Farooqui, we have our own crop of broken artists, whose incredible contribution to society acquits them of every form of abuse. Provided they perform their prayaschit by going underground on a deep journey of self-discovery for a few years. Because in that duration, the wheels of time turn enough to erase memories and mellow down public rage. After a few years, they can write their novels again and perform on stage again. As it seems, sexual abuse allegations hardly ruin men’s careers. They do get their sabbaticals though. When Tejpal published his latest novel in 2022, Farooqui wrote a rave for a reputed publication, because clearly mutual endorsements serve a pivotal covenant of the brotherhood of broken men.
It is not surprising that the MeToo movement met one of its most crushing defeats in India. As a culture that excels in mass producing expert gaslighters in their men, and sacrificial epitomes of endurance in their women, India is a cesspool of the holiest venom of patriarchy. In most Indian households, we grow up seeing our mothers repress their feelings to keep the peace at home and fathers robustly claiming pride in their inept emotional intelligence. A random survey among your friends and family would reveal that sexual abuse is all too common in your families and childhoods too, but a majority of these incidents are never shared knowledge, even within our sequestered (or perhaps because they are sequestered) family units. Even if, or when parents find out the truth, most of them are likely to cover it up, to save the family from shame and embarrassment.
Munro’s moral lapse
For us, the convenient moral negotiability of Alice Munro with the abuser of her nine-year-old daughter — her second husband Gerard Fremlin — is all too familiar. In the Toronto Star essay by Munro’s daughter Andrea Robin Skinner, the latter writes: “She said that she had been ‘told too late,’ … she loved him too much, and that our misogynistic culture was to blame if I expected her to deny her own needs, sacrifice for her children and make up for the failings of men.” Skinner also goes on to write something more abominable. “She [Munro] then told me about other children Fremlin had ‘friendships’ with, emphasising her own sense that she, personally, had been betrayed.” Another viral post on X quotes the final lines of Munro’s final collection: “We say of some things that they can’t be forgiven, or that we will never forgive ourselves. But we do — we do it all the time.”
Recently, I read the critically acclaimed Taiwanese novel Fang Si-Chi’s First Love Paradise by Lin Yi-Han, translated by Jenna Tang. In the novel, a thirteen-year-old junior high school girl is sexually abused and groomed over five years by her 50-year-old teacher. The original book was published in February 2017. In April 2017, the author died by suicide, at the age of 26. Paradise was her first and last novel. Yi-Han left behind a note, which revealed that the novel was inspired by her own experiences.
Skinner first revealed to her mother that she was abused after reading a story by Munro, in which a step-father molests his step-daughter. But Munro dismissed this letter, and even after Fremlin admitted to the abuse in 2004 and was even convicted later, Munro found in her a depthless ocean of forgiveness for herself and her paedophile husband to justify her heinous choice of abandoning her daughter. Clearly, she also knew that Fremlin abused other young girls too, but she stayed with him till his death in 2013. What does it say about the Nobel laureate’s personal life, so complicatedly removed from the lies she composed in her prose?
Forgiveness versus kindness
It seems that we often conflate and misunderstand the related but independent concepts of forgiveness and kindness. There may be perhaps all of ten people internet-wide, who would not be amused by a video of a puppy cuddling with a cat. For those who find the moment heartwarming, the distinct label of being kind-hearted is self-imposed and obvious. They may not say anything about a genocide in Gaza, but they remain kind-hearted regardless. C.S. Lewis once summed it up in these timeless words, suggesting that the standards of kindness are easily manipulated and hence, deceptive:
“The real trouble is that ‘kindness’ is a quality fatally easy to attribute to ourselves on quite inadequate grounds. Everyone feels benevolent if nothing happens to be annoying him at the moment. Thus a man easily comes to console himself for all his other vices by a conviction that ‘his heart’s in the right place’ and ‘he wouldn’t hurt a fly’, though in fact he has never made the slightest sacrifice for a fellow creature. We think we are kind when we are only happy.”
There is no consequential response to the Munro and Gaiman controversy. Except that the questions that it raises must hook themselves into our cultural conscience, and instead of finding boundless, rational forgiveness for personal choices of public figures, we must be enraged. They must challenge us to confront all those who shamelessly claim that MeToo failed because it was corrupted by false cases and allegations. It failed, rather, because the powerful half of the society found its foundations were shallow and shaky, and in response, its constituting members mutually decided to work up a counter narrative, which seems to be prevailing too.
