I re-read Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land last year for the first time in a while, and I was floored by some of the blatantly sexist, anti-woman passages in the book. This may be a little different than the topic in the OP, since this is material specifically from the art itself, and not biographical information taken out of context. Still, the end effect on me was that I now think Heinlein’s a bit of a tool, and that specific book will now hold a slightly lesser place in my memory.
But, I don’t think it makes the good things in the book invalid or not worth reading.
I’m just saying, don’t ignore Jefferson’s enlightened views on government just because he didn’t have what would then have been the extraordinary insight to see that slavery was evil. It’s fine to temper one’s appreciation of Jefferson with the knowledge that he a hypocrite on slavery issues: apparently, Sally Hemmings was enough of a human being to him to keep as his mistress, despite his lack of appreciation for black people generally. Adds a certain richness to his character, if you ask me.
You’ve rolled together two very different questions which I think need to be handled separately:
Should we blame individuals for not rising above the prejudices of their society?
Is racism such a serious error/crime that it almost entirely discredits an author as a thinker?
My answers:
Yes. For one thing I’m not convinced that people were just helplessly oblivious to the evils of racism (and slavery) centuries ago. Throughout history there have been fair-minded people criticizing both and any educated person would have and should have been aware of that. The only difference I’m convinced of is that long ago there no great stigma attached to racism. The peer pressure worked in the other direction.
No. Texts can and should be interpreted from any number of perspectives. A book that might be execrable from the perspective of racial politics might be brilliant from an aesthetic perspective, and it’s perfectly valid to jump from one viewpoint to the next. My guess is that the professors you thought were condemning racist authors in toto were just trying “deconstruct” the identity politics of their works and were more interested in that analysis than in aesthetic or other types of analyses. Anyway that was my experience in college.
Political correctness was *never * a movement. Feminism and civil rights were movements. “Political correctness” was just a perjorative term (used by both the left and the right) to describe the rhetorical orthodoxy that arose out of them as unfortunate byproducts. It really means enforced racial (or cultural etc) sensitivity. And just to be clear - the sensitivity isn’t the problem. The “enforced” is the problem.
As has been stated, the work should be considered independently of the writer. Particularly if you hadn’t noticed the racisim while reading the book!
Many have pointed out that many of the authors in question had viewpoints that were partially or totally commonplace in their time. But I’ll step it up a notch: suppose an author existed now who was blazingly, mindblowingly racist. Hated blacks, jews, orientals, occidentals, women, children, and cats. Then suppose further that he wrote wonderful books that carried little or no evidence of his vitriolic personal preferences. Should one read the books?
I say sure, unless you find the guy is so reprehensible that you can’t stand the thought of a single penny of yours going to support him. (Which wouldn’t seem to be so big a deal were we speaking about some long-dead author.)
Could be, and that’s a valid point. However, I wonder if a case-by-case analysis is ultimately necessary. As monstro pointed out above, Thomas Jefferson appears to have had sufficient exposure to individuals who should have had a major impact on his attitudes if he were fair-minded. Not all worthy authors of the day may have had such experiences, however, so perhaps a biographical context is needed, however laborious the effort.
In my experience, those who I today consider good professors did pricisely what you describe. I really did have some, however, who were pretty happy to cut the rotten tree down at the roots. IOW, to free our minds from the corrupting nature of patriarchalism and ethnocentrism, we must dispense with the mistaken notion that expression and expressor can be compartmentalized from one another, or that we can take a morally neutral stance to a work of art when its creator was an oppressor.
A fad? A dressed up form of cultural elitism promulgated and spread by largely by white intellectuals of the ivory tower, who were socially, economically, and experientially isolated from the minorities they purported to defend, and who largely battled with straw-men and caricatures of racists they perceived within their own ranks, while remaining largely ignorant of their own hypocrisies?
That’s what the discreditors tend to say these days.
I swear I’m not trying to turn this into a bash Jefferson or slavery thread but…Sally Hemmings was a slave, she had no choice whether not to be Jefferson’s mistress. If you believe Jefferson fathered her children, then he allowed his own flesh and blood to live has chattle slaves, let’s not ignore that Sally Hemmings was his wife’s sister (half, but still…) and resembled her, so perhaps she was just ‘human’ enough. Yes, lots of richness to his character…
Still I agree that Jefferson’s views on government are worthwhile and worth remembering and drawing from; but I fail to see why he’s the fair hair child, and not some of his peers who DID have what you call “extraordinary insight”? Like uglybeech noted, there were plenty of examples of that extraordinary insight to draw from.
I’m finding more and more that people confuse the words.
-Racism is the belief that there are levels of superiority among races.
-Bigotry is the devotion to one’s one group. It can be based on race or religion or any other demographic tag.
A person can be one without the other.
If I were to take Thomas Jefferson as an example, he believed Negro’s were intellectually inferior, yet he did not hate Africans. He did not think they would survive on their own in society. It’s odd that a scientist would overlook environment when engaging in the hypothetical. The fact that he himself educated his slaves to a level that was probably higher than Joe 6-mead escaped him entirely. But you can’t really call him a bigot because he held no malice against his slaves (beyond his prejudice).
What about authors whose racism or ethnocentrism is out of proportion to the prevailing view of their times? Is it easier to defend an author whose views are in step with the mainstream or does it not matter?
My favorite 20th century poet bar none is Ezra Pound. His virulent and outspoken fascism, anti-Semitism, and racism exceeded acceptable boundaries of his time so egregiously that he was charged with treason against the United States.
I sympathize with his distrust and disgust for the postwar West. For all of his passion and conviction, he arrived at the wrong conclusions. Nevertheless, how he arrived at them is expressed in his undeniably magnificent poetry. He was a tortured soul in a tortured time. I would have liked to have met him, but I do not think I could have been his friend. I accept the brilliance of his works without reservation and believe that they demand inclusion in the western canon despite his currently unacceptable conclusions.
Do you believe in faithfulness to your spouse? Can you read and appreciate an author who cheated on his or her significant other?
Do you believe in respect for all individuals? Can you read and appreciate an author who was abusive to his or her spouse, children, employees?
Do you believe in ethical behavior? Can you read and appreciate an author who defaulted on debts, cheated creditors, swindled customers or employees, or engaged in robbery or burglary?
Can you read and appreciate an author whom you discover abused his or her pets or livestock, avoided responsibilities by escaping into drugged or alcoholic stupors, avoided paying taxes, or jaywalked?
Yes, it is easier to some extent, because the failing in question is more likely to result from a negative–a lack of any thought about the issue–the effort of independent thinking required to arrive at an offensive non-mainstream failing is greater.
Poor Ezra probably really was clinically crazy as he got older, unfortunately not in a good way. I’m repeating myself here because I said so in another thread, but what bothers me about Pound is that neither he nor his followers (or intellectual heirs or whatever you want to call them) were satisfied that we should read his poems in a vacuum. No, Pound was the leader of a movement, he nutured and encouraged (and threw a few bucks at) struggling young poets he liked, he wrote articles about “what poetry is,” he “translated” eastern poetry he thought should influence the west and he was involved in many journal projects. Given Pound’s failing, the poets he and his followers supported and encouraged did not include any Jews. So, on his own terms, I gotta condemn him. BUT, I’m not gonna let some crazy guy dictate terms to me, so I still enjoy what I can of his poems in a vacuum.
How about sharing what you like best? I like his early short stuff, and some of the translations best; the Cantos (which he intended to be his masterpiece) seem to me more critically acclaimed than actually read (and, IMHO, may suffer due to being later).
I don’t disagree, but what difference should this make in our critical assessment of the author’s work? Pound’s anti-Semitism was very complex: it was at once the product of his considered observation and political thought, it was a self-styled “suburban prejudice” that he later apologized for, and was certainly informed by his destructive mental illness.
Tsk. One of his most important followers and disciples was Louis Zukofsky, Yiddish speaker and son of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants. He was a Marxist and thought rather more highly of the west than Pound did, and his optimistic poem A, inspired by the Cantos, reflects this.
Other than this, I agree with you completely. Poetry and politics were inseparable for Pound, many of whose Cantos are an analysis of usury and the relationship between culture and the state.
Given the fiercely political content of much of his poetry, how do you do this? I certainly don’t like his politics, but I find it very difficult not to engage them when I read his works. The fact that I find them very challenging and even disgusting increases my admiration for the poetry. Perhaps disgust is just an important part of my poetic aesthetic.
I am going to start a thread in Cafe Society about this, as I would love to discuss Pound but do not want to derail this thread too much more.
I also like his short works very much, particularly his translations from the Occitan and The Seafarer. The Cantos were written over an immense period of time, published in chunks, and are enormously varied. I have read several books of them; I enjoy them deeply and understand them rather less so. I find the Chinese-themed books inaccessible to me, but I can usually unravel the Latin/Greek/Occitan sections. I love to dive deep into a few pages at a time. Too much more and I drown.
Please check out my forthcoming thread in CS. I would love to hear your insights and opinions.
I do apologize for the Pound hijack, and will save most comments for the other thread, except for this one which is in furtherance of the discussion here.
Let’s say an author is knowingly anti-semitic, politically active and in favor of laws that oppress Jews. His stature lends credence and cover for like-minded thinkers in the arts who otherwise might have been silent. He writes poetry that is anti-Jewish, he makes radio broadcasts that are anti-Jewish. He gives reasons, and style, to the anti-Semitic position.
Yet, when this author meets an actual Jewish person, he treats him kindly, whether it’s because his mother raised him to be polite or whether the presence of an actual flesh and blood human being sweeps away words or whether becasue this person must be an exception to the rule.
Does this matter? After all, written words live on to influence even after death; OTOH, what do words matter?–traditionally, we have judged people on the standard of what they do, not what they say.
Does this matter in what way? Ethically, I would say yes. The ethical impacts are the same for anyone else who professes or even enables but does not materially act on a belief.
Does it affect how I believe the author’s works should be interpreted? Almost certainly not. This behavior may be illustrative of a certain tension in the author’s beliefs or world view, but his ideas and works stand and fall on their own merit. The quantity of interest is how the works interact with the greater social and cultural milieu, not how the author interacts with the same.
I remember when I was a kid and it became known the Elton John was gay. I didn’t care, not because I was some gay rights crusader, but I just liked his music. It sounded the same to me as it did befor I knew he was gay. It doesn’t change the work.
I had the same attitude about The Dixie Chicks. No matter how much I agreed with their political stance, I still don’t like their music and I won’t buy their music.
So many artists are real jerks that if I had some sort of moral litmus test I wouldn’t read or look at or listen to anything.
Pretty much agreed. I realize I didn’t say so before, but I quite believe that one can and should read lit even in the face of racism or other failings; further that one should know and understand the history that informs lit. You don’t have to have both at the same time, however. I do think that being able to identify what particular tension an author’s works might be susceptible to can be helpful–if Pound’s Jewish position was born in part from naivete, one may look for a parallel social immaturity in his poems.