![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Custom Text
Gnomic Utterances. These are traditional, and are set at the head of each section of the Guidebook. The reason for them is lost in the mists of History. They are culled by the Management from a mighty collection of wise sayings probably compiled by a SAGE—probably called Ka’a Orto’o—some centuries before the Tour begins. The Rule is that no Utterance has anything whatsoever to do with the section it precedes. Nor, of course, has it anything to do with Gnomes.
Expand Cut Tags
No cut tags
no subject
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...)