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deborahI've been listening to a fair number of classic public domain children's books recorded by the Librivox project, and I'm fascinated by how different the reading experience is when I can't skim. (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
diceytillerman, I know you are always impressed by how fast I read, but honestly, it's because I skip half the words. Maybe more.)
A Little Princess has always been one of my comfort books. My copy is swollen up to twice its size from having been dropped in the bathtub so many times when I was little. Yet it's also the only book that has ever been lessened for me when I learned to read critically; the first time I turned to A Little Princess after learning to apply Marxist theory to children's literature I cringed at the text's class issues. So for a long time I avoided listening to the Librivox audio book, because I dreaded having to listen carefully to one of my favorite books, unable to skip past the icky parts.
What I found was that the book was much less discomfiting than I had expected. In fact, I will solidly classify A Little Princess as Kinda Subversive, Kinda Hegemonic. As often as the class structure is reinforced, we are reminded again and again that it is random. Yes, Becky as Sara's best friend is rewarded with the incredible luck of being her beloved personal maid, a complete reinforcement of class. But on the other hand, Sara constantly reminds Becky that her wealth and Becky's poverty are just "an accident". She explicitly acknowledges, multiple times, that hunger and poverty make her pettier, nastier, and less friendly (proportionately to how sweet she was to begin with, anyway). The only reason she continues to learn (or is she phrases it, doesn't start dropping her aitches) is because of the love of reading and learning, which is part of her personality, but also which was instilled in her when she was rich and spoiled. Again and again, the text makes it clear that it has no interest in disrupting the class status quo except by the deus ex machina of diamond mines (after all, even when the Large Family likes and feels sorry for The Little Girl Who Is Not a Beggar, they don't do anything to help her; only the Indian Gentleman does, and then on a whim because he is sick, and he still doesn't go out of his way to help Becky). Nonetheless, it also makes it clear that class is an accident. An accident to be supported, an accident which is part of society, but nonetheless completely an accident. It reveals nothing inherent in a person.
... let's not talk about A Little Princess and race or colonialism, though, okay?
Now, on the other hand, The Princess and Curdie (which was never a comfort book of mine) is absolutely appalling when listened to in this no-skimming audio book manner. The self-righteousness of that book is unbearable. The king rules not because he is good but because he has the blood of the fairy princess in him, and that is Right. When his people go bad, it couldn't possibly be his fault. Instead it's because "evil teachers" come in through no fault of his and teach his people to be bad, so completely that he doesn't notice, can't stop it, and has nothing to do with it. When his people decide they don't want him, because collectively they would rather rule themselves it is proof of their Badness. When the bloodlines of the fairy princess ends because the little princess and Curdie die childless, and the people become so evil that within less than one generation their entire city collapses into a sinkhole and that is a good thing, that in no way reflects on the rulership of the king and the princess and Curdie, who were themselves completely Good and had nothing to do with the people's inability not to be Bad without constant supervision. By the end of the book, it was such a train wreck of bad morals taught didactically that I was listening to it for the train wreck value more than anything else.
diceytillerman, I know you are always impressed by how fast I read, but honestly, it's because I skip half the words. Maybe more.)A Little Princess has always been one of my comfort books. My copy is swollen up to twice its size from having been dropped in the bathtub so many times when I was little. Yet it's also the only book that has ever been lessened for me when I learned to read critically; the first time I turned to A Little Princess after learning to apply Marxist theory to children's literature I cringed at the text's class issues. So for a long time I avoided listening to the Librivox audio book, because I dreaded having to listen carefully to one of my favorite books, unable to skip past the icky parts.
What I found was that the book was much less discomfiting than I had expected. In fact, I will solidly classify A Little Princess as Kinda Subversive, Kinda Hegemonic. As often as the class structure is reinforced, we are reminded again and again that it is random. Yes, Becky as Sara's best friend is rewarded with the incredible luck of being her beloved personal maid, a complete reinforcement of class. But on the other hand, Sara constantly reminds Becky that her wealth and Becky's poverty are just "an accident". She explicitly acknowledges, multiple times, that hunger and poverty make her pettier, nastier, and less friendly (proportionately to how sweet she was to begin with, anyway). The only reason she continues to learn (or is she phrases it, doesn't start dropping her aitches) is because of the love of reading and learning, which is part of her personality, but also which was instilled in her when she was rich and spoiled. Again and again, the text makes it clear that it has no interest in disrupting the class status quo except by the deus ex machina of diamond mines (after all, even when the Large Family likes and feels sorry for The Little Girl Who Is Not a Beggar, they don't do anything to help her; only the Indian Gentleman does, and then on a whim because he is sick, and he still doesn't go out of his way to help Becky). Nonetheless, it also makes it clear that class is an accident. An accident to be supported, an accident which is part of society, but nonetheless completely an accident. It reveals nothing inherent in a person.
... let's not talk about A Little Princess and race or colonialism, though, okay?
Now, on the other hand, The Princess and Curdie (which was never a comfort book of mine) is absolutely appalling when listened to in this no-skimming audio book manner. The self-righteousness of that book is unbearable. The king rules not because he is good but because he has the blood of the fairy princess in him, and that is Right. When his people go bad, it couldn't possibly be his fault. Instead it's because "evil teachers" come in through no fault of his and teach his people to be bad, so completely that he doesn't notice, can't stop it, and has nothing to do with it. When his people decide they don't want him, because collectively they would rather rule themselves it is proof of their Badness. When the bloodlines of the fairy princess ends because the little princess and Curdie die childless, and the people become so evil that within less than one generation their entire city collapses into a sinkhole and that is a good thing, that in no way reflects on the rulership of the king and the princess and Curdie, who were themselves completely Good and had nothing to do with the people's inability not to be Bad without constant supervision. By the end of the book, it was such a train wreck of bad morals taught didactically that I was listening to it for the train wreck value more than anything else.
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Date: 2008-12-11 03:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-12-11 04:52 pm (UTC)I'm glad I'm not the only one having this experience with audio.
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Date: 2008-12-11 05:03 pm (UTC)The race issues are still there, but when I heard it read aloud to me, I realized that the class issues are much greater (and, might I add, not entirely screwed up: part of the problem with Calormen, it's clear, is that they have a society which includes a completely disenfranchised underclass, whereas in Narnia poorer people - including animals - are educated and have the opportunity to rise through merit). It actually takes head on questions of cultural relativity: is it racist to say that I think that X culture does government wrong and unequally? (I do think that A Horse and his Boy is a racist text, but I also think that it's a more complicated thing than just "Lewis was being an asshat," and that it's easy to just say "Lewis was being an asshat" because that means we don't have to examine our own, more subtle racism...)
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Date: 2008-12-16 02:48 pm (UTC)I see what you are saying about class and the Calormen, and I find it fascinating. On the other hand, the question of race is a more complicated one. I don't think it's racist to say "that particular culture has bad values", but I do think it's racist to construct a culture of a different race in the fiction and give them only stereotyped negative values. (And stereotyped positive values: they value storytelling, as long as they are elaborate stories.)
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Date: 2008-12-16 03:09 pm (UTC)I don't think it's racist to say "that particular culture has bad values", but I do think it's racist to construct a culture of a different race in the fiction and give them only stereotyped negative values. (And stereotyped positive values: they value storytelling, as long as they are elaborate stories.)
Yeah, that's true. That's the discussion I'm interested in having, though, not the discussion that usually gets trotted out about Calormen (in my admittedly limited experience), which has no subtlety.
I also sometimes wonder about historical relativity. I read tons of Greco-Roman texts that are terribly racist. In fact, they're the beginning of the tradition that Lewis and Tolkien both write in, and that I suspect they were perfectly aware they were writing in, that constructs a monolithic, stereotypical, monarchic "East" as the major opposition to the multivocal, democratic-or-anyway-less-monarchic "West." But I don't spend a lot of time thinking "Thucydides, what a racist shit." I spend a lot of time wondering where the historical point is that we sort of shrug and go "yeah, but that was a long time ago."
I actually think the answer is that we need to interrogate Thucydides, Herodotus, etc more, btw, and not let Lewis off the hook either, but that's beside the point...
If you want to read a really mature novel Lewis wrote, though, you should definitely try Till We Have Faces. Most people haven't read it, but it was (I think?) his last novel and I'm positive that it's his most mature and excellent one. It's very Christian, but it's interestingly Christian, which is something you can't really say about Narnia (though God knows I love Narnia).
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Date: 2008-12-11 08:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-12-12 07:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-12-12 07:31 am (UTC)Hmm, I wonder if printed books emphasize things differently from books read on screen.
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Date: 2008-12-12 07:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-12-16 03:13 pm (UTC)I think they do. I've also noticed this in editing my own work: I read it very differently on and off screen. I'm actually doing a lot of stuff as a sort of grad school side project right now on publishing and reading and online vs. offline and e-texts vs. paper text editions...
I mean, there's so many more options than just ebooks too. Ebooks themselves can be so different. Take a look at Des Imagistes (http://www.desimagistes.com), a compilation of imagist poetry - it's available on that site in both PDF and HTML version (I worked on preparing it for online publication, LOL). We purposely tried to make the HTML version quite like the book version but it's still a completely different experience...
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Date: 2009-01-05 12:24 am (UTC)