NP Tolkien Picks Up A Few More Bits Of Cultural Baggage

[Dave Monroe]

Well, okay, at least we're back to being civil about
this, so ...

--- jbor <jbor at bigpond.com> wrote:
> 
> Yes, I understand the argument, and yes, actual
> human ethnic groups were and are sometimes referred
> to in a "racist" way in literary texts - demonised,
> dehumanised, as it were. In Conrad's _Heart of
> Darkness_, for example. Kipling. But the point is
> that Tolkien's orcs are explicitly not humans, and
> for a reader to see them as having a particular (or
> even general) human ethnicity, well, that's that
> reader's problem, not Orwell's, nor the text's,
> nor anyone else's for that matter.

Having largely reread the novel these past few days,
Paul Verhoven's (1997) adaptation of Robert A.
Heinlein's Starship Troopers (1959) renders pretty
well (the problematics of) RAH's/ST's cold warrior,
anti-communist caricatures of the enemy other.  You
can argue all you want, hey, they're only fictional
apace aliens, them bugs 'n' humanoids, but given when
ST was written and published, not to mention RAH's
avowed right-libertarian politics, well ...

See also, on, say, the (rhetorical, iconographical,
not to mention brutally practical) dehumanization of
the Japanese enemy other in WWII ...

Dower, John W.  War without Mercy: Race and Power
   in the Pacific War.  NY: Pantheon, 1986.

The Nazis were treted far better in these regards, not
nearly so crudely stereotyped/caricatured ...

Point is, texts are neither written, published or read
in a vacuum, and given the imperialist-to-cold war
plenum Tolkien not only wrote and published but indeed
lived and was read in, well ... well, first off, texts
are as permeable to their atmospheres at their
inception and during their production as they are and
continue to be at their ongoing reception.  Concepts
of "good" and "evil," "friend" and "foe" et al. are
historical, cultural, contextual ...

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