Jeffrey Fisher schreef:
On Wed, Nov 5, 2008 at 10:46 AM, Jim Devine <[EMAIL PROTECTED]
<mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>> wrote:
It's true about Baum. He was a populist (favoring a bimetallic
monetary system) and 19th & 20th century populism had major baggage,
such as so-called "nativism," which involved racist attitudes toward
the real natives. But you can see that in lefty icons such as Woody
Guthrie ("this land is our land") and even Leo Huberman (if I remember
correctly). Each of us is a product of our times. It's best to judge
old folks like these not only with the benefit of modern hindsight but
also from their own perspective. Even Marx said some stuff that could
be interpreted as racist or anti-Jewish from today's perspective.
On the other hand, I have no apologies for Tolkien. The fact that his
books have become icons with almost religious content attached to them
is scary.
i admit i don't understand this. and i confess to having loved those
books as a kid, and i was frankly growing up in a kind of
dysfunctional shire i was desperate to get out of. but even if accept
moorcock's understanding (and my third confession is to not having
read the essay in question), doesn't it just go to show that stories
take on lives of their own? especially when they are such sweeping
works. they become about whatever the people reading them want them to
be, and that is to my mind less a question of misreading than of the
malleability of the material.
j
ists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
Yes, I agree with this. Nobody really contests the content of Moorcock's
analysis - of course Tolkien was an anti-industrial rural reactionary,
of course his fantasy world is an almost self-parodying romantic
reactionary, sexist and religious illusion. Everyone who reads the books
immediately notices this, there is nothing particularly insightful in
pointing this out. The question is: so what? I think one of the things
about orthodox leninism that we ought to be happy about getting rid of
is the absurd and childish idea of culture: that its expressions should
be carbon copies of our ideological program. This is not and cannot be
how good literature works. I'd ten times rather read Tolkien, for all
his absurdly reactionary personal views, than yet another one of those
Toni Morrison type left-sentimentalist cliché books. Because what is
lasting about literature (and not just literature but also painting,
music etc) is its quality, not the degree to which it expresses a
viewpoint on the issues of the day.
Let's not forget that Marx & Engels greatly admired writers like
Aeschylus and Honoré de Balzac, not exactly heroes of progressive thought.
Matthijs Krul
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