As you've probably heard, it was recently revealed that MAR Barker, the creator of the setting Tekumel and one of the earliest roleplaying games, Empire of the Petal Throne, happened to have also written a tract of neo-Nazi doggerel titled Serpent's Walk, under the pseudonym Randolph D Calverhall. (You can read some some rather eye-opening reviews of it on Goodreads. Suffice to say, this is not one of those things which you can equivocate about - the man was an honest-to-goodness racist and a crackpot.)
Most of the online commentary on this revelation has, as one might expect, focused on the hoary old chestnut of whether one can "separate the art from the artist" as with other writers with odious political views and/or dark backgrounds, such as HP Lovecraft, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Paul Gaugin, and so on.
My own view is that, like everything in life, it's complicated, and while I generally think that one should try not to let an artist's background or views influence one's perception of their art, it is inevitable that it will - and in some cases it probably should. It's really hard, for instance, to look at Gaugin's pictures of South Pacific life and not feel tainted when you know what he was getting up to behind closed doors. Art is not like philosophy; the ideas of deeply unpleasant characters such as Carl Schmitt or Michel Foucault can be analysed objectively, on their own merits, but the whole point of art is that it's personal, and has part of the creator in it. To use a deeply technical term, it will quite naturally in some circumstances make one feel icky to discover that whoever came up with the thing you enjoy had something profoundly wrong with them, and to no longer enjoy that thing as a result.
But what I really feel about MAR Barker, and something which seems to be totally absent from the debate about Serpent's Walk and how it affects his legacy, is how completely ridiculous the man now appears, how childish and absurd, and how that acts as a kind of solvent, rendering everything else he created appear frivolous and laughable as a consequence. I mean, just look at him:
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This man wrote a neo-Nazi propaganda novel about former SS members getting revenge for having lost WWII. This purported paragon of Aryan beauty, it turns out, was a white supremacist. This man, at roughly the age of 60, wrote an adolescent wankfest about "the baddies" that an attention-seeking 13 year old would consider beneath him. This is not, we now see in stark relief, a serious person. This is somebody whose views a pub boor would be embarrassed to voice in public. This is somebody whose opinions are about on the level with the kind of stuff you would expect to hear in the context of a park bench and a brown paper bag. This tale is not the stuff of tragedy. This tale, gentle reader, is the stuff of farce.
Which is not, of course, to make light of Nazism (indeed, painting Nazism to be a clownish or mad form of politics is deeply foolish and wrong). Nazism is no laughing matter. Pompous, overweight, elderly windbags who publish Nazi wet dreams under pseudonyms alluding to blood ties to medieval English nobility on the other hand, are.
The question for me therefore is not whether I feel shocked and betrayed by the creator of Tekumel. It is whether I could possibly ever take that setting seriously again. It has gone from beautiful, mysterious and inspiring to outright sniggerfest in one fell swoop - not because of its own content, but because of the profound ludicrousness of the person who made it.
[I am running a Kickstarter throughout April. You can read more about it, and back it, here.]
You got me.
ReplyDeleteSo I thought this was a particularly arch April Fool's gag, but judging by the comments, maybe not.
DeleteI haven't read the book, and have never played or read any Barker.
"Separating the art from the artist", is IMO a child's toy of a debate. A more material question is whether promoting a living "problematic" artist's non-problematic work enables them to continue their bad behaviour or continue to produce the problematic art.
I'd accept an edge case where a dead problematic artist has such huge cultural stature that promoting their non-problematic work legitimises their darker stuff or behaviour and provides cover to other baddies. But let's be honest, most RPGers haven't heard of Tekumel or Barker. I think we're okay.
Have you read Dave Morris's counterpoint - https://fabledlands.blogspot.com/2022/03/was-professor-m-r-barker-nazi.html
I'll admit to being a Morris fanboy, and I also recognise the bias implicit in Morris's impulse to defend someone he knew, but I think the piece is a strong defence against the charge. Barker sounds like a blowhard fool, but not a Nazi. Morris touches on this point, but I think it's particularly relevant that, when Barker wrote Serpent's Walk, Nazis seemed like a relic of history. Yes, there were East German skinheads etc, but Nazism must have felt to many like a very spent force. Unlike now, where we see Nazis lurking in every corner of the internet.
On a somewhat separate point, doesn't "Ah ha, but Nazis loved Muslims" seem like exactly the kind of palpably untrue thing that a Nazi supporter would say?
Well that's kind of the point. I'm not disturbed or horrified by this so much as I am bemused. Barker doesn't now strike me as some horrible villain, but instead as a pretty pathetic character - ludicrous is the right word for him. So it's not that Tekumel now feels psychically tainted by Nazism for me - it's that everything associated with MAR Barker now feels kind of absurd.
DeleteIt's a bit like Philip Larkin. I love Larkin's poems. And yet it's always in the back of my mind when reading them that he wrote laughable school-girl lesbian porn novels anonymously in his spare time. How can you take "High Windows" seriously again, knowing that?
It wasn't just this one book. he was on the board of a holocaust denial historical review.
DeleteYes. In many ways that's even worse.
DeleteI think I misunderstood your point, apologies. I read "He's a fool because he's a Nazi.", rather than "He's a fool independently of being a Nazi - because he wrote a offensive book for ? reasons." I'm confident I agree with the latter, and with your broader point about "psychic taint". You make the point in one of your other comments that the degree of taint has something to do with the relation between the person, the bad thing they did, and what the person does. Gauguin's Tahitian art is a great example of a close relation between the (great) art and the bad thing. I feel weird whenever I see Kevin Spacey in something, but I don't feel weird watching a Weinstein-produced movie.
Delete'On a somewhat separate point, doesn't "Ah ha, but Nazis loved Muslims" seem like exactly the kind of palpably untrue thing that a Nazi supporter would say?'
DeleteWell, its a complicated history (one full of incoherence in some views) that Nazi racial theory is nowhere as black and white (heh!) as people make it out to be today, where it is boiled down to hating Jews and anything in a shade of brown. That isn't quite accurate. Not saying they weren't bigots and murderers, they were, just that they were bigots and murderers who had plenty of exceptions on who they deemed good and bad and as such you had people like the Polish and other Europeans lumped into the subhumans while they were noticeably much more amiable to some Arabic and Asian people.
It's just odd. The man was a practicing Muslim who developed an explicitly non-Eurocentric setting. He wasn't an isolated redneck in the south, he was someone who traveled the world, was exposed to other cultures (and worked to help preserve them), and shaped most of his body of work around that. Not to mention marrying a "non-white" woman, which would have him crucified by the Stormfront-types of the world.
ReplyDeleteWas it something he picked up from his family, and that was mostly (but never truly) buried? Or was it something that he, as an older man, was drawn into within another community, outside of gaming and academia? Or perhaps somewhere between the two lines - perhaps an earnest belief buried, until someone coaxed it out.
It's unfortunate, whatever the case truly is. And it's something that will taint his work - the efforts to help "the forgotten Tolkien" are more or less doomed, by his own hands.
The Nazis were never very anti-Muslim - google Amin al-Husseini. I think they also included Iranians and people from Northern India as 'Aryans'.
DeleteBut probably it's a mistake to look for consistency in these things. People are capable of believing all kinds of things that are totally at odds with how they actually behave. Cognitive dissonance is an amazing thing.
yeah, this is what really gets me. every pitch for Tekumel I've read centers Barker as "the professor," an erudite and cosmopolitan anthropologist who was unique in his ability to fashion a world essentially from scratch. the myth of Tekumel was fundamentally also the myth of Barker. He was a genius, and so he made a genius setting, that's how you'd pitch Tekumel to people.
Deleteand so frankly, I don't see Tekumel ever recovering from this. if I want to play a strange and foreign setting divorced from eurocentric tropes, I've got a million options to pick from in 2022, many written by, y'know actual non-Westerners. I can't really fathom what the Tekumel setting actually brings to the table for the average modern gamer with the myth of Barker irreversibly shattered like this.
There's no reason to be confused about a practicing Muslim hating Jews or admiring National Socialism (look up Ba'athism). Those things might all be completely unrelated to one another in a given individual, or they might not. But the comment above to the effect of "he was a practicing Muslim, not a Southern white, so how could he be evil? So confusing!"... that kind of commentary ironically stems from the same demon that corrupted Barker.
DeleteA friend of mine in grad school wanted to learn Arabic (to study Avicenna actually) and she started taking free classes at a local mosque. Like many academics she was an impressionable person. Within a couple months she started talking all kinds of trash about Jews (and making plenty of misogynistic remarks too). It's unfortunate when people blunder into these ideas, but it's tragic when they give them a home inside (and there are antisemitic jerks in my religion too... not pointing fingers here).
Hitler himself heaped praise on Islam, and The Nazi government publicly stated that Muslims we're not verboten. At one point the government even went and changed all it's laws and such from reading "sematic" to "Jewish" as to not include the Arab world.
Deleteand as @noisms states the original Aryan concept that the Nazi's adopted, was that the European Aryans came out of somewhere between North India and Iran and basically became white on the plains of southern Poland and Ukraine. Nazi Scientists literally went out looking for the place with the highest rates of albinism in Europe, and were like "yup, that's where the white Aryans came from" but still considered the Aryans of North India and Iran to be Aryan-Cousins.
"He wasn't an isolated redneck in the south"
DeleteFor the past few years I've been teaching a class to first year Law students in London where we discuss 'To Kill a Mockingbird'. The reading includes an article from a left-wing Jewish US academic comparing white Southerners to Nazis and claiming they were anti-Semitic. I have to explain to the students that US Southern Redneck culture is/was much more pro-Jewish than anti-Jewish; a standard feature of the Protestant Dissenter sects.
That's a pretty tendentious thing to say. A group can be "more pro-Jewish than anti-Jewish" and still be riddled with anti-semitism.
DeleteIME they are highly philo-Semitic. I understated. They do dislike 'New York Yankees' though.
DeleteThe last few years of the Labour Party in Britain demonstrates just how tricksy it is to make any kind of judgement on whether somebody is pro-Jewish, anti-Jewish, anti-semitic, whatever. In the last few years Labour has kicked out more Jews than in any point in its history due, allegedly, to them all being anti-semitic.
Delete"I have to explain to the students that US Southern Redneck culture is/was much more pro-Jewish than anti-Jewish; a standard feature of the Protestant Dissenter sects."
DeleteAs somebody who lived in the area for 20 years & married into a redneck family (extended if not immediate), this position surprises me. It's not inconceivable, but it's not really supported by my experience. Is there a good brief reading to understand your claim?
Yeah, it sounds like bollocks to me, to be honest. Questioning mainstream assumptions is one thing, but this seems to be like being contrarian for the sake of it.
DeleteAs others have said, there's countless ways to get around the "Barker was a neo-Nazi... BUT Barker married someone nonwhite!" issue. Lovecraft married a Jewish woman but (by her account) essentially said "you're not Jewish anymore, you're my wife", told her didn't ever want to hang out in Jewish-majority circles, and remained antisemitic till the end of his days. Or, as others mentioned, it could be the "even Nazis didn't necessarily hate *every* nonwhite group equally" thing.
DeleteIt's an old joke - but a philosemite is an antisemite who likes Jews. Attributing to Jewish people certain positive traits borne from antisemitic canards still makes you an antisemite.
DeleteAn interesting take on the situation and well worth giving thought to. I am still resolving my own thoughts on Tekumel and its creator so thank you for this point of view.
ReplyDeleteWell, I think that it is possible to differentiate between the author and his work. But of course, in my case I hate the egocentric personalism of "modern" art. In fact, for me, the best author that exists is the anonymous author, in the ancient and medieval way.
ReplyDeleteSad but hard to argue with.
ReplyDeleteI assume I'm not the only one who heard of this and thought "new MAR Barker novel, cool" and read it. I thought "I liked 'Man of Gold', how bad can it be?". It is just artistically bad, it made me think he had some kind of mental decline at the time he wrote it. At the same time you can see that nobody but MAR Barker could have written it, and a lot of it is very personal (and Mary-Sue-ish). 1/5, took serious effort to finish.
ReplyDeleteFor a minute I thought this was an April Fool's Day joke. It appears not...
ReplyDeleteI think about this sort of thing often, and when I do, my thoughts usually turn to Eric Gill. A worse human being you would struggle to imagine, and yet his art (which is completely, to use a related technical term, ickified once you know about him. I'm often shocked (although can certainly understand) that his work is still such a part of the BBC's visual DNA, right down to the statue above the entrance, when Jimmy Savile is *such* a poison potato.
ReplyDeleteWith regards to Tekumel, although I've heard of it and often heard it praised. What surprises me about the current context, if indeed separating the art from the dead artist is not enough, is how people who have never previously seen any undertones of Naziism in this part of his work are suddenly so keen to distance themselves from it.
WRT Nazi Aryan Beauty wankfests, have you ever heard of the Stalag comics? Again, I can completely understand the context in which they arose but, fuck me, there's some dark shit!
Sorry, on Eric Gill, I meant to say "and yet his art (...) still has enormous appeal to me, and I'll never ditch my Eric Gill book.
DeleteYeah, I love Eric Gill's art and my favourite typeface is Gil Sans - I think it's partly a question of time (he's been dead for ages) and partly because his art isn't really contingent on any of the awful things he did. Whereas with Jimmy Savile the point was that his "art" (if you can call it that) was his MO - that's how he procured his victims.
Delete(Same with Gaugin. Looking at his pictures of Tahitian girls sort of makes you somehow complicit in something really nasty - much in the same way none of us can now stomach watching "Jim'll Fix It" because we knew what was going on in the dressing room after filming.)
For me, it's not that Tekumel is going to poison my mind now. It's just that Barker now comes across as ridiculous, and hence so do his creations.
I have to admit I don't know much detail about either Gill or Gaugin's behaviour, but I don't really see the difference. Much of Gill's work is very sexual, and every time I see it I can't help wonder what's going on. I mean... there's something dubious going on on the cover of the book I own, The Engraved Work of Eric Gill.
DeleteMy parents' had a big (maybe 6 foot wide) copy of "Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?" on the living room wall when I was a kid. TBH it kind of elided my attention, the collage-y nature of it confused me I think and I never looked beyond that, apart from the central figure. But, yeah, I think about that sometimes. In fact also in that house, where we moved when I was 5, the bathroom wall had been painted by the previous occupants - a couple of lesbian set-decorators or some such - in the style of a Gauguin painting. That was soon covered up after we moved in, but re-emerged briefly about 15 years later when the bathroom was redecorated.
Yeah, weird.
I've also just remembered a snippet from my friend Lara Pawson's book, This Is The Place To Be (an excellent and very singular book, a kind of autobiography told in disordered and very contrasting vignettes moving between Lara's growing up privileged in London and working as a BBC correspondent in Angola. Anyway). Here's the snippet:
"I loved Gary Glitter, and I wrote to Jimmy Savile. I wanted him to Fix It for me to have a pony or go pony trekking or to spend a week with a pony on a pony holiday. It never crossed my mind I'd be lucky to be one of those who wasn't picked."
A friend of mine also met Jimmy Savile as a young girl. She has a difficult Irish name and Savile apparently gave her a signed card written out "To Bob" because he couldn't spell her real name.
DeleteRemember those "Jim Fixed It For Us" huge badges that used to get given out whenever Jim "Fixed It" for a group? My uncle used to make those. Yeah. (They were made out of polystyrene sprayed gold).
DeleteOur junior school class had one, I forget what it was for. It was balanced above the door of our classroom. I used to say "my uncle made that" and my classmates used to say "stop making things up, Daniel".
I was always gutted not to have been chosen as one of the people to go on the programme.
I don't imagine my uncle ever spent much time with Jimmy Savile, thank god, but I did enjoy reading what he wrote about his time with Benny Hill: https://ourlifewithprops.wordpress.com/2015/08/12/benny-hill-a-cherub-sent-by-the-devil-michael-caine/
Delete(Disclaimer, I only have a tangential knowledge of MAR Barker as a person and his works.)
ReplyDeleteI am utterly shocked and greatly surprised by this revelation. I find this hard to believe. Not that I am doubtful of this story, but more it is so unexpected that I feel reality has been rewritten and this has been implanted into the past (like time travel or reality warping, not that there is a conspiracy to tarnish this guy's legacy.)
To go off on what an Anonymous commenter said, I do find this surprising and makes me a little bit sad. I only read Barker's wiki page and, although I only read that, I did feel a companionship as an anthropologist with Barker's interest in various different cultures in Asia and beyond. I thought that Barker's curiosity and fascination, like I hope my curiosity and fascination is, came from a source of appreciation (and not the modern superficial "cultural appreciation') and respect for different cultures as wonderful examples of just how varied and
ingenious the human spirit could be and thrive. Perhaps he did feel that way, but not in the way I envisioned.
I am also a little sad because of a wiki quote of Barker, describing the overwhelming religious awe Barker had at the 99 names of Allah recited in the Taj Mahal. I too feel that awe, not specifically in the Taj Mahal, but for the religious works and practices of Asia, the Middle East, etc. I don't want to seem like I am forcing a religion here, one can argue that we feel that awe because that is what religious art is supposed to do, like any art. Now I look that quote in a different light. Don't know what light, but a different one.
I once felt a kinship with MAR Barker, now I don't know what to think.
There's really no way that Barker was a white supremist.
ReplyDelete1. "He wrote a book from the viewpoint of neo-Nazis who won a war!" Who cares? It's fiction. It's not real. It's a made-up story about people that don't exist in a future that doesn't exist. If someone writes a book from the viewpoint of Judas or Caiaphas, does that mean he hates Jesus?
2. "He had his book published by a neo-Nazi publisher!" Also, who cares? He couldn't get anybody else to publish the book. Why? The uproar around Barker tells you why. People would start accusing the publisher of being a neo-Nazi.
3. "He sat on the board of a holocaust-denying journal!" That doesn't mean that Barker hated Jews or was a white supremist or denied the holocaust. Maybe he was told that adding his name to the journal's board was part of the deal for publishing his book. Maybe Barker never lifted a finger to help with the journal. Maybe Barker laughed at the journal people as nothing more than silly, naive optimists who lived in their own little fairy tale world in which 6,000,000 Jews weren't murdered in World War II. Maybe he thought having his name on the board was as good a joke as having his name on the board of the Flat Earth Society. Maybe he didn't even know his name was included in the journal. Maybe your name or my name or Gary Gygax's name is included on a journal like that. How would we know? I don't read those journals. Most normal people don't. Do you think a journal like that would be too conscientious to slip a name in it without the guy's permission? "Hey, this Barker has a Ph.D! He'll never know if we add him to our list of editors. It'll give some oomph to our list, and Barker will never know."
Thinking that Barker was a closet Nazi in spite of his overall life and character is crazy. The so-called proof so far offered sets off my baloney detector so hard that it breaks. And it's not even fair. He can't answer the charges against him. It's just automatic Nazi and anyone who doubts it is also automatic Nazi. That's why this comment is anonymous.
Yes, I must say that all sounds entirely plausible........
DeleteWe should all be more circumspect about hearing quacking and slap-slapping of webbed feet as we may confuse for a duck some other small water fowl...
DeleteThese aren't terribly good defenses. "Barker wasn't actually a Holocaust denier, he was just willing to sit on the board of a Holocaust-denying journal in order to get his book published."
DeleteMAR Barker isn't a neo-nazi. Skeletons cannot hold political beliefs.
ReplyDelete