I'm going through C.S. Lewis's letters right now, and frankly I find myself appalled at some of the things Lewis said. Lewis seemed to have a fairly virulent dislike of homosexuals, which was only matched by his disdain for communists and the laboring classes. I do understand that Lewis was tormented, possibly in homerotic ways, in his British boarding school experience, and frankly I would not be surprised if Lewis struggled with some sense of sadism or homoeroticism himself (not that I'm equating homosexuality with sadism, just saying Lewis might have.). But I don't think there's a similar excuse for his position on labor.
I'm going to an Episcopal church right now, and so you'd think I would feel closer to Lewis than I did before. And I still do have a certain fascination with the Inklings' charm. Whatever one might say about them, they were great novelists. But I can't escape the feeling that Narnia and Middle Earth were corrupted in some sense, by the very real prejudices Tolkien and Lewis exhibited in their works.
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"But I can't escape the feeling that Narnia and Middle Earth were corrupted in some sense, by the very real prejudices Tolkien and Lewis exhibited in their works."
ReplyDeleteI remember as a kid reading the Lord of the Rings and doing a double take on the descriptions of Sauron's human collaborators. Each group was described in terms classically ascribed to near-east ethnicities. This was apparent to me even then.
The one that caused me personal discomfort was the description of those slanty-eyed goblins. The method in which he described those goblins in vivid detail very easily bought to mind stereotype descriptions of many Asian peoples, particularly east Asians. In fact my younger sister had watched a children's show around the same time that highlighted the why such descriptions were stereotypical.
That hit me particularly hard because of my Asian heritage. It took me a moment to rationalize that the book was written in a different time and the description may have been a coincidence based on my own interpretation of it. I happily continued and finished the series, but that moment stuck with me even after all these years.
Such descriptions are thankfully limited. I think many readers do rationalize that the authors were of a different generation and upbringing.
Another famous fantasy author who takes a lot of slack and receives equal amounts of understanding regarding prejudices is Robert E. Howard. I think REH fairs better than Tolkien in that both his ethnic villains and ethnic sidekick heroes are often not much worst or better than his main heroic characters. He also holds a cynicism towards the facade of the precarious social agreement we call civilization, regardless of the ethnicity or races that runs or controls it. In that matter, he dislikes everyone equally.
It seems as though you are being critical through todays views. At the time of penning, these views were pretty much the norm. Maybe less so in the England than the U.S. but still within the norm.
ReplyDeleteI haven't read any of the letters and I'm far from a scholar on fantasy, but there is a strong authoritarian strain within fantasy novels. It doesn't surprise me that someone who writes pro-king fantasies would be anti-peasant [a.k.a. workers] in the modern era.
ReplyDeleteI haven't read the stuff so I'm not confirming it, just not surprised if what you say is true.
Hey guys,
ReplyDeleteYea, Lewis and Tolkien's letters do have occassional racial asides. Both men were definitely more anti-racist than racist (Tolkien opposed Nazi Germany, Lewis was a critic of imperialism and segregation, as was Tolkien). But those stereotypes were there. And Henry's absolutely right. There's a letter of Tolkien's in which he described the Orcs as
"...they are (or were) squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes; in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types"
That being said, Tolkien seemed clearly aware that this was just a European prejudice, not a universal one. But it certainly does seem to be an over-generalization, one not born out by the frequent intermarriage between Asians and whites in the States, or in modern Britian. I tend to see a whole Nordicist element buttressing Tolkien's works, though I think for the most part he was unconscious of how much racialist thinking had inflitrated those same works.
John
P.S. Sorry, I had to do the anon thing again