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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Replying to @HeerJeet
Off the top of my head, I really can't think of a single human being, from ancient times to today, in any given field of endeavor, who is as godawful stupid, ignorant, classless and politically gross as Kanye but who people imagine has a lot of talent. Help me here.
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Replying to @HeerJeet
Okay. I might disagree on the "godawful stupid" charge when applied to Pound. But, this is a reasonable nominee based on the known facts.
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