Underlying themes

I'm not one to ban old books for racist or maybe-racist content: if we block the past, the risk of repeating it grows exponentially. Yes, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Robinson Crusoe and Huckleberry Finn display black people in rather unfavorable light. But that's how they were displayed back then.

If we block the popular culture of the past, we're sort of erasing history as we do it. And if we refuse to acknowledge that our history wasn't all sunshine and lollipops we run the risk of repeating it. What I'd much more rather see is people reading these books, Ten Little Nigger Boys still on the cover of the now Then There Were None and people actually discussing these things in their cultural context.

There's a movie out with just such a theme now: Django Unchained. I haven't seen it yet, but I can make a few educated guesses: it's a Tarantino movie, so it will be an overfluous splatter fest with a perverse liking to violence. I hope it will be a good story that forces people to think as well, but we'll see. No matter the presentation, the point is very much valid: cultural products are this are necessary if we are to remember the lapses in humanity that have happened before.

I think that even more important than having these sort of overt cultural products that point fingers and use light-up billboards is discussing the underlying themes in those that aren't as self-evident. As a case example, I'll use everyone's favorite dead guy at the moment, J. R. R. Tolkien.

You know, the guy that wrote this.

... and this.

Mr. Tolkien wasn't exactly a writer as such: he was an academic, a linguist and a historian (mostly in literacy), and very good at both. Tolkien is mostly the father of much of modern fantasy literature, both in good and bad. Tolkien was a good writer, although his focus in building worlds and languages made his stories a bit huge. The influence he had was in how he took classic folklore, changed it, and sometimes added completely new parts. For example, the pointy-eared, lithe and graceful elves of today are the work of Tolkien (much of their being has been taken from folklore fairie, though), as well as the short, stout and gold-greedy dwarves (again, a bastardization of old folklore, but the combination in itself is basically Tolkien's).

So, while giving us much of the loved, liked and known tropes of high fantasy, Tolkien also gave us the bad ones. The webcomic, Order of the Stick, had a pretty good strip on this some years back, on color-coded dragons: read it here. The point that the comic underlines and I'm trying to make is that Tolkien's work made all of fantasy monotone black and white: everything was based in very, very deep-set stereotypes. I'll throw around some examples to prove my point.

Elves are good: the first children of the Ilúvatar, a shining example of right about everything. They are the epitome of good and justice. Dwarves are greedy, taciturn and haughty: basically good by proxy, but often too proud and greedy for the good of anyone. Hobbits are magnanimous, have a penchant for food and rest but are basically good. Orcs and goblins are bad, period. Honestly, the only defining characteristic orcs and goblins have is that they're evil, serve evil lords, and want to kill all the good guys. That's it.

But harken, I hear you cry, humans are creatures of changing morals and many themes in the books. Sorry, nope. A character is either good or bad, and most of the time this is defined by one's race. The Eastlings and Southlings, people that are mostly defined as being strange, foreign and just not very much like us are, by default, evil.

I'm not saying what Tolkien did was wrong. I am saying that it built tropes that have hurt fantasy literature as a genre and made it very, very difficult to do anything different (for quite a while). I also think his stereotyping hurt his own writing, but that's a personal opinion.

If these things - innate racism, tropes, stereotypes - cannot be discussed, our culture is driven into an evolutionary cul de sac. Until then, the discussion is necessary.