I actually do care about the author's politics to some extent. I tried not to, because one of my erstwhile favorite authors turns out to have really objectionable politics. I argued for a long time that it doesn't impact the work, but eventually I found that for me it did.
Not because knowing any bad thing about them personally automatically poisoned the well, but because with that additional information about how he thinks I was able to identify patterns -- and rather disquieting ones -- in his books that I had heretofore not noticed or discounted as being without significance, artifacts of a particular imaginary society or narrator's shortcomings or plot convenience.
Now that I know that's not the case -- that's they are part of a coherent worldview which I consider to be counterfactual, not just repellant -- I can't look at any of the works in which that pattern appears the same way as I used to. It hasn't made me completely stop reading or liking them, but it has complicated them a lot. It is definitely a loss of innocence that I in some ways regret and yet in other ways am grateful for. (Like most innocence it seems in retrospect quite scary that I was walking among horrors and could not protect myself because I did not see them.)
One of the things I value this community for is that kind of consciousness raising about issues that I might be even more blind to, since they don't implicate me directly, as this one did. If I could miss MY OWN OPPRESSION for so long, how often must I be missing other people's? That's not to say I want a simplistic "don't read so-and-so, they're a schmuck", but I do like to see, where relevant, an analysis of what the author professes and how it interacts with their fiction. Especially in cases where they appear to be at odds.
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2011-06-29 02:43 am (UTC)Not because knowing any bad thing about them personally automatically poisoned the well, but because with that additional information about how he thinks I was able to identify patterns -- and rather disquieting ones -- in his books that I had heretofore not noticed or discounted as being without significance, artifacts of a particular imaginary society or narrator's shortcomings or plot convenience.
Now that I know that's not the case -- that's they are part of a coherent worldview which I consider to be counterfactual, not just repellant -- I can't look at any of the works in which that pattern appears the same way as I used to. It hasn't made me completely stop reading or liking them, but it has complicated them a lot. It is definitely a loss of innocence that I in some ways regret and yet in other ways am grateful for. (Like most innocence it seems in retrospect quite scary that I was walking among horrors and could not protect myself because I did not see them.)
One of the things I value this community for is that kind of consciousness raising about issues that I might be even more blind to, since they don't implicate me directly, as this one did. If I could miss MY OWN OPPRESSION for so long, how often must I be missing other people's? That's not to say I want a simplistic "don't read so-and-so, they're a schmuck", but I do like to see, where relevant, an analysis of what the author professes and how it interacts with their fiction. Especially in cases where they appear to be at odds.