"In distress", my ass.
Nothing to add at the moment, as I haven't read the entirety of the NYT article, but it can be found here
(archived because sometimes NYT content isn't readily available for various reasons).
NaNo 4328 / 50,000
I don't think it is the audience's job to salve over the moral quandaries of the work. I consider it the storyteller's job to find a way to perfect the art. If you've found a work that no longer speaks to modern audiences, you have the chance to fix it so that it does.
Link to TRS threads in project mode here.
I decided long ago that if I only read authors who shared all of my most important beliefs that I wouldn't find much reading material out there.
It is very important to remember that Values Dissonance can pop up, even if the book is only a few decades old.
It is important as well to remember not to judge people for being products of their environment.
Edited by Kickisan on Jul 3rd 2020 at 12:46:10 PM
There was an interesting essay in the New York Times yesterday. It's called "Virginia Woolf? Snob! Richard Wright? Sexist! Dostoyevsky? Anti-Semite!" It was written by Brian Morton.
He describes a conversation he had with a student on the train where the student said he threw away a book he was reading after he read what he thought was anti-Semitism in the description of a character. They then went on to discuss time machines (from H.G. Wells to Doctor Who).
This is the interesting bit:
It’s as if we imagine an old book to be a time machine that brings the writer to us. We buy a book and take it home, and the writer appears before us, asking to be admitted into our company. If we find that the writer’s views are ethnocentric or sexist or racist, we reject the application, and we bar his or her entry into the present.
As the student had put it, I don’t want anyone like that in my house.
I think we’d all be better readers if we realized that it isn’t the writer who’s the time traveler. It’s the reader. When we pick up an old novel, we’re not bringing the novelist into our world and deciding whether he or she is enlightened enough to belong here; we’re journeying into the novelist’s world and taking a look around.
He goes on to make the connection that if we understand that we the readers are the ones journeying to the past that we might be curious and perhaps interested in exploring rather than shocked and outraged. And maybe we could better appreciate the good that is in these works.
He also wonders if future readers will be equally shocked and revolted at our own moral blind spots. The example he uses is that the cobalt in your smart phone may have been extracted by a 10-year-old in Katanga working a 12-hour shift for dollars a day. Don't you think about that every time you use your phone? You callous monster!
It's a very interesting essay, well worth a read. I love old books, and I wonder if this perspective would help others to enjoy them as well.
What are your thoughts on reading authors with obvious moral shortcomings, or opinions that would not be acceptable in polite company today? Is there any value in such books? Would it help to view it as the reader exploring the author's world, rather than the author being transplanted to today?
Edited by Bense on Jan 9th 2019 at 1:26:42 PM