Just finished a re-read of Drowned World by Ballard, god damn that book is a lot more racist than I remembered.
What's the cut-off point for these things at which you think "well everyone was racist then"? It was written in 1962 and refers to "negro" or "mulatto" characters in proper old school 19th c racist language, all animalistic and grunting, subordinate to the white captain, like cyclops and hippos, they all speak like "yes Mistah, whatever you say sah".
Not found any serious criticism on this, dunno if this is the place to be, I dunno how /pol/ infected /lit/ is these days.
>Not found any serious criticism on this
because it's not warranting serious criticism
the entire point of the book is how everything becomes more primitive as the landscape changes
>>8028770
Yes, I get that, I'm talking as much about his language choices, only the black characters (who never have names) are referred to in an explicitly animalistic fashion. Subservient cyclops and hippos and twisted muscular beats. Unless you think some aspect of primitive existence is that non-white people turn into beasts that doesn't mitigate it.
why do you assume racism is just a product of the times
>>8028752
Haha I got beaned XD , I've GOT to send this to all my friends on Reddit
>>8028752
>all animalistic and grunting, subordinate to the white captain, like cyclops and hippos, they all speak like "yes Mistah, whatever you say sah"
that's poetic
also i want a hippo speaking to me 'yes, mastah!'
i would keep him in my bathtub
>>8028786
Oh don't get me wrong I think we still live in an enormously racist society but it's a little more pernicious and harder to spot in "great" works of literature, where it just basked happily in the daylight in a certain era. Often find myself reading something older and being jarred out of the immersion by clunky use of some hunched, barely-human negro servant.
>>8028789
yeh sorry couldn't be arsed to choose a pic
>>8028810
why would that ruin your immersion
>>8028827
Because it's language which carries associations for me which jar with the context and tone in which they're used in the text. I slightly recoil from it, even if on some occasions I'm aware intellectually that it's just the language of the time (which for the record I don't think applies here, 1962 is too late for the era to be an easy excuse).
>>8028837
he was probably just racist
>>8028841
Yeah that's the direction I'm leaning, apparently someone wrote a hacky biography of him which called him a racist and the entire literary establishment reared up and went "surely not! I won't have it!" and there was a load of sympathetic pieces with his daughter. I might read more of him, he's still really fucking good, see if it shows up again.
