Listen to the giant yellow bird, people.

[mrissa]

When I was small, I had a record of Sesame Street songs that included Big Bird singing a song about making mistakes. And since I was a perfectionist little thing, this got some significant play at our house. It included the lines, "Everyone makes mistakes, oh yes it's true: your sister and your brother and your dad and mommy too. Big people! Small people! Matter of fact, all people!"

And I was thinking about this when I was reading the comments on papersky's Tor.com post about the Suck Fairy. Because people were coming in talking about taking authors as products of their times and taking their sexism, racism, etc. as products of their times. (What boggled me is that some of these people seemed to be talking as though Jo, of all people, needed to have taking things in historical context explained to her. Jo. Riiiight.) And to a certain extent, I can totally get behind that. We can't and shouldn't expect authors to be products of our times and to mirror our own contemporary attitudes. It ruins a lot of historical fiction to project backwards, it makes history less interesting to assume that everyone ought always to be the same, and it's just not realistic.

However. I sometimes get uneasy when I hear people using this too blithely. Because I have heard it used to excuse too much. Sometimes people say, "Oh, well, it was another time then," and then don't check the copyright date. Sometimes you need to make sure the other time was not 1985. Sometimes even 1955 was soon enough to know better. Sometimes you need to look at what else was really going on at the time, what other things were being written or discussed or enacted in the wider world, and say, "Well, yes, this author was a product of the times. But this author was also a product of choices. And some of those choices were bad ones. I like these choices in this book. And I don't like these other choices here, whether they're political or aesthetic or typographical."

That's okay. It really is. It is all right to say, not just that a book makes mistakes, but that it is is written by one of your favorite authors and makes those mistakes. It is okay to say that one of your favorite authors wrote a book that has elements in it that were bigger mistakes than its era really justified. Sometimes mistakes can ruin a book, and sometimes they don't have to, but you don't have to defend the mistakes to defend the bits that aren't mistakes. And you don't have to condemn an entire era in order to like a book from it. Sometimes your favorite author had a blind spot that not everybody had. Pretty much every time, in fact. We all do. Your sister and your brother and your dad and mommy too. There doesn't have to be a caveat about historical context every time. Sometimes it's not the history. Sometimes being a jerk--for whatever reason, to whatever person or group of people--really does get to be our own fault.

Comments

[alecaustin.livejournal.com]

Yeah. There is a tendency for people - especially for people who feel strongly about works of art - to act as if their affection for something means that it has to be without flaw, and to take any criticism of the work is a criticism of them. And even once you're past that, there is a lot of using "Oh, it was another time then," as a second-order defense, to gloss over or excuse things that.. aren't really defensible.

I mean, look. It's *not* reasonable to expect older works to adhere to modern sensibilities in every particular. But that doesn't mean that their lapses aren't there, or that they're necessarily okay. Sometimes you just need to note them, silently make correction, and move on. Other times things are much more problematic. And that doesn't necessarily mean that the work in question is without virtues - it means that its flaws are something that should be acknowledged and discussed.

[redbird]

Yes. And there's a difference between shifting terms and shifting attitudes: the problem isn't that people decades ago talked about "colored children" or "lady lawyers," it's what they said about those children and those lawyers. The terminology was part of it, but someone can be nasty and disparaging toward both groups without using either term, or have said something favorable like "I got my will made by a lady lawyer, and she's good" or something that describes racism without being racist, like "this town doesn't let the colored children use the public beach."

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Oh, I don't mind that. But somebody called me a closed-minded sophist, so there you go.

I think there's another subtlety about "it was 1955" which is considering whether the author is better or worse than their time. So Heinlein/sexism -- way better than his time. Shute/racism -- generally better than his time. Trollope and Heyer with anti-Semitism -- worse than their times.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

That's part of what I mean here, yes. "It was 1955" looks to me like it's getting used to mean "so anything sexist, racist, anti-Semitic, homophobic, environmentally appalling, [vamp until ready] is obviously to be expected." And...no. It isn't. 1955 was not a perfect year in either direction: not a utopia, but also not a perfect cesspool of absolute filth. There were standards of behavior, and sometimes people failed to meet them. Sometimes people who are authors who otherwise did beautiful, wonderful things failed to meet them. And if you had a grandparent who was an avid reader when a particular book came out, sometimes you could ask him, and he would wrinkle his nose and tell you that, no, that part didn't sit too well with him even when he first read it, either.

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

Ya, but, yanno. Books aren't always published as soon as they are written, and the parts aren't always written in the same decade. And even if they were, different authors lived in different local cultures. To decide just how much tolerance to give to which faults would take a lot of historical research on context to give insight about the author.

With many books, I prefer to trust* the author to give the insight about her context. If a nice character is saying nice things about 'colored' children, that tells me the word 'colored' was at that time and place not an insult.

*If I didn't have considerable trust in the author, I wouldn't be reading the book at all.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

"Parts aren't always written in the same decade"? Seriously? I have seen people bend over backwards to decide that their favorite authors must be nice people before and therefore the things they've done must be nice things, but this, this is astonishing yoga.

Just before a book is published, the author is asked to read it through to make any corrections in spelling and grammar that seem necessary, at the very least. If that author does not say, "Oh no! I wrote this bit back when we still called them x---, and now decades later that word sounds horrible to me, let me change it to y----," it is that author's responsibility. And I think that most readers would certainly agree with this if I was talking about a science fiction writer having started a book a few decades ago and not having anticipated the existence of cell phones, so I don't see why not having anticipated treating women or non-white people or Jewish people or [vamp until ready] as people should count any differently.

You can always choose to trust the authors you're reading in all particulars. Sometimes it's even a good idea. It's just that sometimes it's not. See papersky's comments above for examples/counterexamples.

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

Before computers, such changes were not so easy. And it would not always be a change as extreme as a word (by correction time) sounding "horrible". There would be gray years in between when the author might think: "Well, my character might not use that word today, but this story is set last decade and too modern a tone might be jarring, and I've got a deadline...."

For a different example, Dodie Smith's I CAPTURE THE CASTLE treats domestic violence as acceptable. So what are we to conclude about her, and how should our conclusion affect our reading of the rest of the book?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Having characters use a word that is appropriate to their time is a different question from having that word used in authorial voice, and how those characters are portrayed ("nice" vs. "not-nice" is usually oversimplifying, as I know you know) is a different question also. But just saying that having a nice character use a word means that word is acceptable does the opposite of taking those complexities into account--it glosses them over completely. "And I've got a deadline," is the worst reason I have ever heard of for noticing--for example--that you used to have more anti-Semitic attitudes than you now find acceptable and not fixing them. "I could have my characters stop with the casual Jew-bashing, but this book is due soon," strikes me as something that is at least as bad as, "I did not notice that I was doing it."

I haven't reread I Capture the Castle recently enough to say whether your characterization of its treatment of domestic violence is accurate, but if it is, I'd say that it's a brilliantly written book by an author who was wrong about domestic violence. What did you expect me to say? "Oh, no, I am stumped and stymied by how to handle this question the minute it exits the realm of racism"? That book came out in the mid-1950s. If we still had my grandpa around, you could be treated to his views of people he knew in the mid-'50s who were violent towards their families; Grandma still is around, and she certainly has firm opinions on that topic. And no, they weren't from the same place as Dodie Smith, but I will bet you money that you could find people from Britain of her age and class who did not condone knocking their families around. Who were making different choices, who had different ideas. If you read The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, you can see in the way that Lewis treats Eustace's parents that he knows that the prevalence of alcohol in the Narnia books is an active choice, not "the way things were then." And so on.

Authors. Make. Choices.

Authors make judgments.

Readers make judgments too.

And saying, "I automatically assume that everything the author says was the way it had to be at the time"--that kind of abdication of judgment is itself a judgment.

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

As to I CAPTURE THE CASTLE, for once my tolerance for uncertainty failed me, so I wondered what other readers made of it: where were the daughter and stepmother (and presumably the author) coming from?

Back to the main question. Personally I'm leery of any approach that might lead to me spending more time reading modern histories of the period, than reading texts from the period itself.

Lewis's Scrubb family may be a good example. I'd rather hear the Scrubbs' side of things from Shaw than from some 2010 commentator (especially since the Scrubbs turned out to be right). (Woops, there's mutable gray time again: I'd rather understand Lewis as continuing a dialog with Shaw and Chesterton, than condemn him as being behind the times in the 1950s.)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Why can't he be and do both? Why can't he continue a dialog with Shaw and Chesterton and also be somewhat backwards for the 1950s? And how does getting context from what others were thinking in the period in any way stop you from reading texts from the period? That would, in fact, be more useful, not less.

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure whether you have a typo here or I was unclear. "And how does getting context from what others were thinking in the period in any way stop you from reading texts from the period?" What others were thinking in the period IS found IN their texts from the period.

1. Texts from the period include both fiction and non-fiction written within the period. In period as fiction: Lewis's HIDEOUS STRENGTH and Rand's fiction (and stretching a little, GKC's Father Brown). In period as non-fiction: "The Green Book", Sayers' essays.

2. Modern histories of the period (or comments on it) would include non-fiction written by anyone born after, say, 1950.

I do think #1 is more useful than #2.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

So: the bit in the original entry when I said, "Sometimes you need to look at what else was really going on at the time, what other things were being written...."

Is that what you're deciding to argue against when you're talking about how necessary it is to look at what else was being written at the time, instead of modern histories of the period?

Because as far as I can tell you have decided that I am saying, "Read modern histories of the period!" more or less on your own steam, because that is what you want me to be saying, because that is what you feel like arguing against.

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

I think I have a larger bin for "unsorted/uncertain/insufficient data" than many people have. Scotch verdict maybe: "Not proven."

For me, "WEll, it was a different time" means something went in that bin. I don't know, and I don't know one way or the other. Maybe as I read more (from #1) some clues will turn up (as to where different people in that different time were coming from about different things).

I'm not trying to argue with you or challenge you, or attribute anything to you.

My method of reading books from the past is like ... hopping around in Middle Earth. No telling what landmarks I've missed. No zoom out, no big map with a "you are here". Certainly not with a modern map superimposed to show where the past writers were Wrong.

That would be the kind of perspective that no era can have about itself. Which means, it would have to be found in books from later writers, ie #2.