Conan

[Connavar]

I find that its best to enjoy what REH and HPL wrote. Nevermind the rest.

Im a black reader from East Africa who has Howard as one of the writers i admire the most, one of the most important writers in my reading life.

I have read alot of his, most of his genres and i read his letters. I dont say nevermind the rest because its important to understand the man and the author for me. His original writing,collections are much less tainted by racism than pastiche works. His racism in his fiction is not nearly as bad HPL to me but that might be because im not a fan of HLP. His southwest contemporary stories,some of those westerns are the only time the views of the blacks got in my face. I dont know Howard the man but the writer was open to writing hardcore,strong women and he wrote pretty well about other minorities often. Howard the man must have been pretty typical of his times where you werent open to blacks, other people. To me its more important his writing about female heroines was almost proto-feminism and not what he did in personal life.

The important thing is his fiction.....and his writing about El Borak who is almost native of Central Asia,Arab lands, friends with Arabs,Afghans etc. Conans black villains who are written as negatively as his white really evil villains. Solomon Kane has several African setting stories and the only thing is the typical pulp views on the fantastic settings of other peoples.

 

[Extollager]

I'll be happy to, once I have a chance (hopefully, on my next day off, sometime early next week -- again, I hope!!!). QUOTE]

I will certainly want to revise this aspect of teaching of Othello if you find this information.[/

 

[j d worthington]

Glad you brought that up, Dale. I've not had a lot of time to go searching, but so far I would say my memory was at fault here. While there were, apparently some black slaves in England in Shakespeare's time, they were extremely few, and yes, the mere fact that a person was black apparently did not take on the negative connotations it came to have until about 40 or so years later (and even then to a much milder degree than it came to have by, say, the late 18th century). If I do come across something which raises this point again, I'll be sure to pass it along; but for the moment I will simply say that I seem to have been quite mistaken. My apologies....

 

[Extollager]

No problem, J. D. If you can be more specific about the "some black slaves," that would be helpful. Some English people might be aware of the use of slaves by Spain and Portugal, but certainly Spain, at least, was not, at the time, regarded in friendly wise by the English -- cf. the 1588 Armada! Moreover I want students to be aware that there was nothing like the dissemination of news in Shakespeare's day that developed later. How would an Englishman have learned of slavery in the New World? Newspapers began to appear there only after Shakespeare's death, so far as I know. It is almost inconceivable to me that any significant number of audience members would have thought of slavery. Yes, some art represented the devil as black, and I wonder how many members of Shakespeare's audience would have seen such art, and where? Not in art books! Falstaff is likened to the devil, and he is an old fat white man... If I had to guess, my guess might be that Othello at first would look strange to Shakespeare's audience* and certainly like an object of suspicion to insular English (they were likely to be distrustful of anyone who appeared to be from another country, weren't they? -- French, etc.), but that they would not automatically think of slavery or devils. Again, the characters who speak disparagingly of Othello at first are all unlikeable characters themselves. However, when Othello is transformed by passionate jealousy, to the extent of killing his wife, etc., then indeed Shakespeare was likely tapping into an additional source of intense emotion, of horror, with the spectacle of a black soldier suffocating a young white woman. Would his audience have felt that "race" had made this violence more likely? I think that could be a little harder for us moderns to tell than we think it is....

*Just the makeup alone would tend to make the actor look a bit grotesque, perhaps -- although it must be remembered that few members of the audience could see actors' faces well thanks to the structure of the theater and their distance from the stage. What most audience members would see would be an actor with black face and hands moving about the stage, making somewhat stylized gestures, etc.

 

[j d worthington]

Just my own opinion here... on that last point, I'm not at all certain that he intended any sort of "racist" overtones there. Let's face it, until that point, Othello has been presented more or less as an admirable figure, in many ways a very sympathetic one. If anything, I think the horror would be in seeing how such a person can have their own mind alienated from them to such a degree by the actions of others, which would indeed seem diabolical. In this I am thinking of some of the resonances of others writing during roughly that same period -- Marlowe, Webster, etc., in their dealings with the diabolical influence (and possibly origins) of certain of their characters....

 

[Extollager]

I think you're right, J. D. Shakespeare is at pains early in the play to make Othello stand out as exemplary in the midst of the other characters. Othello embodies the knightly ideal stated in Malory -- courteous, modest, stern to his foes, etc. Thanks to Iago, Othello falls dreadfully from that kind of ideal.

I suspect, too, that Shakespeare -- always aware of theatrical craft -- figured that the spectacle of a black man murdering a white woman (in a white nightgown, perhaps with white pillow and bedsheets) would be compelling, sensational, simply in a visual sense.

 

[BAYLOR]

Conan- while I find the plot devices hackneyed (evil sorcerer wants to do something terrible to beautiful naked woman) I absolutely love the way he writes- especially Conan. Is it possible to be jealous of a fictional character?

Howard wanted to be like Conan. At least thats the impression that i get.

 

[j d worthington]

Howard wanted to be like Conan. At least thats the impression that i get.

I have seen it argued that Conan was an idealized version of Howard, but that Balthus(?) in "Beyond the Black River" was actually much closer to how Howard saw himself... to the extent that Balthus' dog was based on REH's own beloved "Patch"....

 

[Ray McCarthy]

spectacle of a black man murdering a white woman (in a white nightgown,

Presumably though both were played by white men.

 

[Fried Egg]

I can't remember if I've commented on this before but my feeling is that racism just doesn't come over very strongly from reading Howard's (or even Lovecraft's) fiction. That is not to deny they did hold racist views which were made plain in their correspondence and that clues and hints to these views can be gleaned by a careful reader of their fiction. But having read a large portion of both writer's fictional works, I just can't see that it is so pronounced that it should annoy or offend the modern reader.

Whether one feels that they can overlook an individual's personal views to appreciate their creative works even if these views weren't so readily expressed in said works is another question. I can understand why one might not be able to allow themselves to enjoy a writer's fiction knowing what they know about an author. I just don't think these views come across particularly noticeably from their fiction writing (from what I have read).

I've also experienced people erroneously picking up on evidence of racism in such authors writing by jumping to false conclusions. e.g. The black cat called "nigger man" in Lovecraft's "Rats in the Walls".

 

[BAYLOR]

I can't remember if I've commented on this before but my feeling is that racism just doesn't come over very strongly from reading Howard's (or even Lovecraft's) fiction. That is not to deny they did hold racist views which were made plain in their correspondence and that clues and hints to these views can be gleaned by a careful reader of their fiction. But having read a large portion of both writer's fictional works, I just can't see that it is so pronounced that it should annoy or offend the modern reader.

Whether one feels that they can overlook an individual's personal views to appreciate their creative works even if these views weren't so readily expressed in said works is another question. I can understand why one might not be able to allow themselves to enjoy a writer's fiction knowing what they know about an author. I just don't think these views come across particularly noticeably from their fiction writing (from what I have read).

I've also experienced people erroneously picking up on evidence of racism in such authors writing by jumping to false conclusions. e.g. The black cat called "nigger man" in Lovecraft's "Rats in the Walls".

I think is self defeating to apply PC standard to his work. It is what it is .

 

[BAYLOR]

It's too bad the animated Red Nails film didn't happen.

 

[BAYLOR]

Some of the Conan pastiches are actually good and fun the read.

 

[Vince W]

Some of the Conan pastiches are actually good and fun the read.

And some are gut wrenching awful.

 

[BAYLOR]

And some are gut wrenching awful.

Indeed.

 

[BAYLOR]

Sometimes its fun to revisit Howard's stories. My favorite non Conan story is Kings of the Night In this story The Pictish sorcerer Gonar summons King Kull from the past to aid Bran Mak Morn in fight against the Romans. In terms action and story telling this one a treat.

 

[BAYLOR]

There was comic they did , in which Conan and Solomon Kane were both taken out of the era and thrown together in an adventure.

 

[BAYLOR]

There was a comic What if Conan The Walked the Earth Today?

 

[BAYLOR]

where have all the Conan pastiches gone?

 

[Vince W]

True. There hasn't been a new one in quite some time. I'm not sure that's a bad thing. Some of those pastiches were truly, truly, horrible. The ones written by Robert Jordan especially.