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).
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2. So, Kanye's support of Trump is reviving the familiar (perhaps tired) debate about how an artist's politics relates to their art. Perhaps one way to complicate this is to look at how art is often at odds with explicit ideology.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Fair enough -- I know his reputation in France is much higher than in the anglophone world.
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Replying to @HeerJeet
He's considered a great and serious author in France, even though he's almost considered a children's author here.
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