From: jack@dcs.glasgow.ac.uk (Jack Campin)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books
Subject: Re: Political Correctness in the Dark Ages
Date: 12 Jan 93 20:36:15 GMT
Reply-To: jack@dcs.glasgow.ac.uk (Jack Campin)
Organization: COMANDOS Project, Glesga Yoonie

dani@netcom.com (Dani Zweig) wrote:
> They're at it again in rec.arts.sf.written:  The perennial and unkillable
> were-Heinlein's-politics-acceptable debate, from the stable next to the
> is-Huckleberry-Finn-racist debate.
> In one sense, it's not a fair question.  Writers from fifty and a hundred
> years ago are assailed for not making their female characters more
> independent, for not giving their cast a more international flavor, for
> assuming that characters are heterosexual, for callously diregarding
> the environment.  It's nice to find authors who are decades ahead of
> their times, but it's not reasonable to demand it.  Nor is it reasonable
> to demand of those authors styles and conventions which either didn't
> exist or didn't sell at the time.
> In another sense, it is a fair question, because it affects the ability
> of modern readers to enjoy and appreciate the books.  If we read these
> books today, we have to do so on two levels; we have to both enjoy them 
> on their own terms and read them in "period piece" mode.  
> Was X racist/sexist/whatever?  "Not for his time" is a reasonable answer.

[ sorry for quoting in full but that was too compressed to summarize ]

This leaves out the fact that no time has ever had homogeneous attitudes.
There have been precedents for not describing women as biologically-
determined doormats ever since Ibsen: while some got the message, most
writers ignored that precedent and some wrote consciously against it
(Kipling being one who seems to have thought that eroding sex roles would
be the end of civilization).  There have been democrat writers ever since
Milton: most 18th-century English fiction treats the class system as
inviolable, but you still have exceptions like Blake and Godwin.  The
intellectual achievements of non-Western civilizations have been available
in translation since the 18th century: it didn't stop imperialist writers
implying that those civilizations were incapable of ever running their own
affairs either from original feeblemindeness or degeneracy (exceptions here
are a bit harder to find, but the imperialist tradition ran out of excuses
after Multatuli, anyway).  Disregarding the experience of the working class
could not be done unconsciously by any well-read writer in English after
the publication of "The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists", at least: still,
disregard it is exactly what most novelists continued to do.  Yeats, Eliot
and Pound were not just typical products of their time, they were conscious
agents of reaction within it, and there was no shortage of contemporaries
to call their attitudes murderous bigotry.  And liberalized attitudes to
homosexuality were on the agenda from Magnus Hirschfeld onwards, though
putting this in a novel was a much harder step.

So what happens is that a "radical tradition" and a "conservative
tradition" get constructed ("tradition" in a rather peculiar sense
sometimes, where authors are linked by common political aims rather than
historical influence) and present-day readers get to sign up for one or the
other.  The "period piece" mode Dani describes then translates into whether
if you'd been around at the time you'd have been on the side of Milton or
Sir Thomas Browne, Blake or Burke, Orwell or Waugh.  And if you *don't* ask
that question you just aren't taking these writers seriously.

One thing I do find baffling is the utter absence of blacks and Chinese
from English fiction in the 18th and 19th centuries.  Black slaves or
servants had been in the country in substantial numbers since the 17th
century.  They were an obviously exotic and colourful subject, as were the
Chinese, whose civilization was well-enough known to inspire the
restructuring of the British Civil Service and whose pottery was in half
the bourgeois homes in the country.  You couldn't help noticing blacks and
Chinese in person on any dockside carting your bags aboard for the Grand
Tour.  But nobody seems to have put either in a book until the adventure
writers of the late 19th century started using them in sea stories and the
like.  What happened?

I see I left out the environment, which was also on Dani's list.  Are there
really many novels from earlier periods in which environmental destruction
is implicitly supported out of ignorance?  (I don't think you'll find
Greenpeace activists campaigning against Moby Dick, somehow).  For that
matter, what was the first novel to take the environment as a problem,
apart from specific concerns about urban squalor?

-- 
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