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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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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