1. So I have a few thoughts about Jules Verne, Les Frères Kip, the Dreyfus case, D.H. Lawrence and Kanye West. (Jack Kirby may or may not show up as well).
-
-
3. Jules Verne was a French nationalist & thus like many others of his sort he accepted the accusations against Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer framed for treason in an anti-Semitic plot.
Show this thread -
4. As it happens, Jules Verne's son Michel studied the case and came to believe, rightly, that Dreyfus was framed. Michel argued passionately with his father about the case, to little avail.
Show this thread -
5. On a conscious, political level, Verne always remained an anti-Dreyfusard. But in 1902 he wrote a novel called Les Frères Kip (The Kip Brothers) which told a very different tale.
Show this thread -
6. The Kip Brothers tells the story of two siblings framed for the murder of a ship captain. It's a story of systematic injustice, the ways the powers that be can conspire to crush the innocent. It's impossible not to see it as an allegory for the Dreyfus case.
Show this thread -
7. On a conscious level, Verne would always insist that Dreyfus was guilty. But The Kip Brothers shows that he was listening to the arguments of his son Michel on the massive evidence of a framing.
Show this thread -
8. The Kip Brothers is Verne grappling with in art what he couldn't admit politically: that high powers could frame the innocent, that Dreyfus was innocent.
Show this thread -
9. I would not make any great claims for Verne nor for The Kip Brothers (a simple adventure story, a minor work of a minor author). But even Verne shows how complicated the relationship between explicit ideology & art is.
Show this thread -
10. D.H. Lawrence: "Never trust the teller, trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it." Good advice since Lawrence himself was a proto-fascist dingbat.
Show this thread -
11. Artists, like almost everyone else, have political views but to the extent their art is complex those views don't map perfectly with the ideology. Often enough, as with Verne, art is a way of exploring possibilities & problems the ideology doesn't allow for.
Show this thread -
12. It's perfectly natural to be interested in an artist's life & explicit views, but that's never quite the same as encountering the art, which has a meaning that includes conscious intent but also goes beyond conscious intent.
Show this thread -
13. All of which is to say that if Kanye's music is meaningful to you, then you should continue to find meaning in it, whether he's dumping on George W. Bush or (ugh) praising Trump. Because the tale & the teller are separate.
Show this thread -
14. The interesting flip side of this is that you can't value an artist just for having your politics. I mean Jack Kirby, from my point of view, had great politics: social democrat, anti-fascist, anti-racist. But those views aren't the sum of his art either.
Show this thread
End of conversation
New conversation -
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.