Is Brian Jacques a racist?

[Bozo Erectus]

I recently dumpster dived virtually the entire Redwall series of books from Jacques. I enjoyed immensely reading through the stack, but about halfway through, my PC radar started beeping. I started realising all the animals are locked into their roles based on their race. Mice are the dominant race, usually in charge, and always good. The moles are always good, in fact several times characters say 'I saw it was a mole so I knew he'd be friendly'. Another interesting thing about the moles is their speech. It seems that they cant learn how to speak properly, even though presumably theyre schooled along with the other animals. Other animals often laugh at mole speech. When it comes to the 'Vermin': rats, ferrets, stoats, weasels, foxes etc, theyre always bad, never good. There was only one instance in the entire series when a Vermin character turned out to be good, but in the end, it was decided by mutual agreement that he should live apart from the other animals. Even a ferret, a vermin, who was raised by the Redwallers, was unable to overcome his vermin traits. He was a thief, and a murderer. When at the end of his story, he saves the life of a mouse by stepping into the path of an arrow, the mouse he saved (his adoptive mother) even takes this away from him, and says it was probably just an accident. So it isnt obvious Jacques a racist?

 

[Rambuchan]

I hear what you are saying and have read Redwall when younger. It can be taken in two ways IMO.

a) The race thing you mention. But I don't think this is it.

b) A Class thing. In this way it is not dissimilar to Animal Farm's distinction between two legs and four legs.

I might be wrong though as it's quite a while since I read it.

 

[Che Guava]

Those are kids books, right? I find with children's literature its important for the author to make a clear distinction between good and evil for the young reader to understand the plot and conflict. Kids need broad strokes to understand character, and often that comes out as generalisations of certain types of individuals. At the same time, i don't think kids read into it as much, so there's not as much risk of them applying this kind of thinking to the real world.

 

[Bozo Erectus]

I realise chances are few people will have just finished reading the whole series, so the details wont be as fresh in their minds.

 

[Abaddon]

Id say its just simplification for children..

 

[Bozo Erectus]

Che Guava and slozenger, on the surface they appear to be childrens books, but there are some pretty dark themes and plenty of brutal violence. I dont see them as childrens books at all.

 

[AceChilla]

I read it as a kid and didn't notice anything. Kids don't think that way. I agree with Che, it's just as way to show who are the evil ones and who the good. Kids like that simplicity. But if Brian turns out to be a member of the KKK it gets a whole different meaning, before that theres no need to come to such conclusions.

 

[Abaddon]

You could say the same about any author who writes about good and evil..... ever seen a nice Ork.. or a nasty hobbit in LOTR? I therefore claim Tolkein is a racist!

 

[Bozo Erectus]

Ace how old were you when you read the books?

 

[Che Guava]

Hmm..well, if there's anything going on (and keep in mind I haven't read the books) I beleive it has more to do with economic/social classes, rather than racism (although they are tough to separate). Take this exerpt from the wiki article on him:

The Redwall books have been criticized in some quarters for allegedly promoting an overly simplistic view of race and ethnicity. Critics point out that the "good" and "bad" animal characters are drawn exclusively along species lines, so mice, squirrels, badgers, hedgehogs and otters are exclusively "good" whereas rats, foxes, stoats and ferrets are exclusively "bad." These criticisms have been advanced as a concern, as the books are primarily read by children and young people. There is also a "class" element involved in these criticisms, with the denizens of Redwall being either educated, aristocratic animals such as badgers, or rustic, simple creatures such as moles. This contrasts with the "vermin" who are almost exclusively portrayed as a greedy, stupid, and violent rabble commanded by a charismatic evil leader. These narrative structures do resemble in many ways the British class system, with the "upper class" animals governing the "working class" ones, and the Abbey remaining an ever present and strong symbol of religious authority. It is likely that Jacques, who once worked as a docker in Liverpool is very aware of class in his books.

So maybe there is a little more depth to the books than I might have expected. Or maybe Jacques just wrote from his own experience, and didn't really have anything to say about class/race except that divisions exist.

 

[Bozo Erectus]

You could say the same about any author who writes about good and evil..... ever seen a nice Ork.. or a nasty hobbit in LOTR? I therefore claim Tolkein is a racist!

Hmm, why not? Think about it, is it really a modern idea that people are good and evil based solely on their race? Jacques is pretty old, and of course, Tolkien goes even further back. If these books were being written for the first time now, would these strict racial classifications be there in the first place? I dont think so, I think they represent the thinking of the 19th and early 20th century, when the authors came of age.

 

[Bozo Erectus]

Che, oh man, I didnt even think of checking Wiki! Well Im not surprised really, the racial stereotyping is so obvious Im sure many people have noticed it.

 

[Leonel]

I read all the books in the series up until 1998 in which I thought there were going to be no more Redwall books and the school library only had so many Redwall books in its shelves. Am trying to get back into reading some new Redwall books I bought sometime around 2000.

But yes I do notice various animals are locked into certain roles but I really don't think about it that much.

 

[Riesstiu IV]

They are different species of animals. So wouldn't it be specieist (if that is a word)? I read the first book back in middle school and never really thought of it in such terms. In the wild, behavioral patterns among animals do have common attributes that distinguish them from other species of animals. I’d say it’s a stretch to call him a racist.

Unless he wrote something along the lines of how blonde hair, blue eyed German Shepards are the uberhund and must destroy all mixed breed inferior mutts in order to make room for lebensraum, I’d say the acquisitions of racism hold no ground.

 

[The Last Conformist]

You could say the same about any author who writes about good and evil..... ever seen a nice Ork.. or a nasty hobbit in LOTR? I therefore claim Tolkein is a racist!

You're not exactly the first to claim so.

But there certainly are nasty hobbits around - Lotho and Lobelia come to mind, and Sméagol wasn't too nice even before he turned into Gollum either.

If you look at Tolkien's works as a whole, you'll note there's rarely a shortage of traitors, cowards, and just generally unsympathetic individuals among the "good" peoples, but the "bad" peoples rarely if ever have any corresponding white sheep.

 

[Rambuchan]

If Wiki says it's racism then I'm sold.

 

[Abaddon]

:bows down to wiki:

 

[Renata]

The comparison with Tolkien is apt, as would be comparisons with any number of other fantasy novels following along in his vein. To the extent that it did start with Tolkien, I don't think that you can blame it on 19th/20th century ideas of class and race per se. What Tolkien was explicitly trying to do was to create a mythological history for Britain comparable to Norse and Germanic legends. If you look at those legends, all of the races of fantastical beings in them (dwarves, frost giants, and so on) inhabit very fixed roles. You'll never hear of a frost giant acting like one of the Aesir would, and so forth. Whatever Tolkien's personal opinions on matters of race and class, I think his characters took shape the way they did mostly because of the type of story he was trying to tell.

But then came along a lot of later writers, and they implicitly accepted the way Tolkien had set up his world, even if their stories were very different, without thinking about it very much. So you get a lot of greedy dwarves, a lot of irredeemably evil minion species, etcetera. A few of the later authors understand the material they're working with enough to make it powerful despite its restrictions (you can get a lot of mileage out of archetypal characters if you're good), while the vast majority just write stereotyped crud.

I've never read the Redwall books, so I can't say which category Brian Jacques falls into. It appears, though, that he's really doing the same thing as a whole lot of other writers, just with mice and ferrets instead of elves and trolls. I wouldn't think you could call him racist on that basis alone. Shallow and cliched, maybe.

As for any harm it does the children reading it? I wouldn't think there would be any. Kids don't make their decisions about society based on vague parallels in the books they read.

 

[Taliesin]

Ah, this brings back wonderful memories of sixth grade. The last one I read was Pearls of Lutra, so I'm probably missing a few titles. Anyhow, I always interpreted the fixed roles as being a carnivore/omnivore thing. It makes sense that the good creatures of the Abbey eat only insects and fish as meat, but mostly vegetables and fruits. The evil types all eat other animals in the real world, though not in Redwall. It would strain credulity to have foxes living in harmony with mice, if in the real world they'd eat the poor things. Also, remember the Sparras, which are fierce and noble but not especially "good".

There definitely are reasonable accusations of classism to be made against Tolkien. People note, for example, that the hobbit principals all live leisurely upper-middle-class or aristocratic lives, and that the three trolls in the Hobbit speak with Cockney accents. This is carried forward in the films, where all the orcs are also inexplicably Cockneys. There's also a bit of racism, with the constant talk about the "blood of Numenor" and the "lesser men" who now rule Gondor, but this is standard mediaeval divine-right legend, so it shouldn't be interpreted as 19th-century racism.

 

[The Last Conformist]

That's an interesting point. In modern Fantasy, the hero is often a lower-class dude who thru skill, luck, or calling advances to a position where princes treat him as an equal. Tolkien's heroes usually start out as aristocrats or high bourgeoisie.