Fiction isn’t real

Until I was in my late 20s, I was a pretty regular reader of fiction. Particularly from elementary school (Tom Swift, Hardy Boys, Jules Verne) through junior high (Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov) and high school (Flannery O’Connor, William Faulkner) and in college, when I took several lit courses that required essays based on novels and short stories. It tapered off in grad school, when there was just so much science I needed to read to get up to speed.

One of the few fiction books I’ve read twice is Lord of the Rings; once in junior high and again in college. A few years ago, I saw the film realization, which I thought was pretty good.

Now, it seems, there is an Amazon Prime series based on the Tolkien fantasy, and some folks have their knickers in a twist because the ethnicity of the characters doesn’t conform to their bleached Anglo-Saxon ideal complexion.

“American white nationalism has attempted to appropriate certain cultures, times and places as quintessentially “white,” and so it is no surprise that, as John Blake at CNN writes, there is controversy on the American Right about the multicultural casting visible in the Amazon Prime series Rings of Power, based on the fantasy writing of Oxford Don J. R. R. Tolkien. Some people are offended by seeing persons of African or Latin heritage play roles in this fantasy series and others, such as HBO Max’s House of the Dragon, and the Marvel Studios films about Thor.”

Honestly, is there nothing the grievance-mongering right won’t turn into a race-based attack? One of the great things about reading is that you can make the images and sounds in your head, and everyone sees and hears something different, no matter how detailed the author’s description. That’s what makes good art good—diverse people can find diverse meanings in the same experience. I’ve seen Shakespeare performed by Black, Hispanic, Asian and white actors, and in both period and contemporary costume. I’ve seen Shakespeare’s King Lear and Kurosawa’s “Ran” and enjoyed both. If you are so bereft of imagination that you cannot see past the superficiality of skin pigment to the art, then the problem rests with you, not the performance.

I don’t intend to watch the Amazon Prime series and don’t know if it is good or bad art, but if you don’t like it, at least don’t attack it because the images don’t conform to some platonic ethnic ideal in your head.

https://www.juancole.com/2022/09/africans-medieval-england.html