Ramblings on Librarianship, Technology, and Academia

Yeah. When I first realized the Christian metaphor I was hella pissed because I felt betrayed. Then eventually I came around (largely due to a convenient, uh, conversion to Christianity >_>).

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).