The point of literary analysis shouldn't be to separate out works into the Elect and the Damned. It's not a quest to find the one pure and unproblematic work. Nor should it be all about ferreting out secret bad people through their opaque word codes.
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Of course the moment you find out someone is terrible, this will often change your reading of their books. Innocuous lines could gain much more uncomfortable readings. Implications crystallise. You don't give the author the benefit of the doubt anymore.
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But that doesn't necessarily mean you could have always known. That you could reliably ferret out racists through the magic of textual criticism. That every line of cringe is a secret dog whistle.
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The most prominent example is of course JKR. Given how public her radicalisation was and how substantial her political support for transphobia is, it doesn't have to be about the books. You don't need to double cancel her over the cringe-y way she names Asian characters.
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But I feel like this is a recurring thing. We talk about authors like they're the sum of their works, that art can only be read through a single lens of moral worth and message, that it can't be messy metaphors and inconclusive meditations, screams of pain distilled into words.
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It's a very limiting lens to view art. Sometimes we write ourselves as the bad guys because we are sick of handwringing moral guardians. Sometimes we write about tragedy not to punish or to romanticise, but as a memorial. Sometimes we write a power fantasy because it's just fun.
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But even my tweet feels limiting. Not all explorations of dark themes need to be justified by personal trauma on the part of the author.
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And the point of problematic stereotypes is that they draw on this vast morass of culture, that they develop endless clusters of associations, that their roots run deep. It's incredibly easy to evoke one without realising. To reenforce an idea without thinking.
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I am alluding to the great baggage around Asian stereotypes again. And what I've previously titled "why I can't just repeat to you my uncle's favourite dog-eating joke". I realise this thread is just an unwieldy redux of everything I've ever tweeted.
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But I'm begging our approach to art and analysis not be this straightforward game "problematic or not" that projects back to therefore the author is a good or bad person. And I'm not just saying this because I wrote a dark book with dark themes. It's just a boring way to read.
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PS: I also deeply dislike balancing "good rep" & "bad rep" in a book as though on some sort of absolute moral scale. I'm not sure it works like that. But it is true that I can get something out of a book that speaks to me & also find something else in it eye-rollingly insulting.
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And I'm sure there are plenty of eyebrows to be raised about what (or even who) gets to be a "problematic fave" and what sinks without a trace. But I keep circling back to how literary wack-a-mole isn't the best way to fight big tropes and recurring themes.
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I did also write "But we cannot allow the rhetorical use of little Asian girls waiting to be inspired by Mulan to silence this conversation about actual genocide" so obviously. Exception. But same token, it's not the film itself. It's the circumstances of its production.
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The film is a meandering pile of orientalist nothing but whilst I can decidedly see the shape of bad tropes and worse ideologies informing it, I'm not sure I can read in that like tea leaves the depths of Disney's complicity in genocide. Until the credits that is.
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