Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny
257 pages
Published 1967
Read from March 25 to March 28
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
Cultural appropriation has been on my mind a lot in recent years. Well before J. K. Rowling stuck her foot in it with some apparently ill-considered worldbuilding generalizations on Pottermore (I haven't read the story in question, but there was quite the kerfuffle over it), I was wrangling with complicated questions about power, privilege, exploitation, and my own half-unconscious neo-colonialist assumptions. I'm a white American of largely English, French, and Irish extraction, atheist now but raised more or less within a Protestant context, and as a writer as well as a reader, I've become deathly bored of pseudo-medieval fantasy extracted from an idealized or folkloric conception of Western Europe. Chinese folklore or Malaysian stories or Yoruban theology -- that's what stokes my imagination. But I'm socially aware enough not to rush in and incorporate these intellectual and conceptual systems into my silly fantasy adventures, not without a lot of leftist hand-wringing and concern.
On one hand, I want to say that (respectful!) cultural interaction and intermingling can only be a good thing. On the other hand, I recognize that it's very easy for me to say that, having been born into such a culturally privileged demographic. On the other other hand, the implication (more common, I suspect, among internet radicals and freshman college activists than elsewhere) that everyone should keep their heads down and stick within their own assigned cultural and socioeconomic categories sounds an awful lot like a textbook example of horseshoe theory. On the other other other hand, there's a long history of unquestionable cultural appropriation within genre literature (as well as within everything else), and it can be as insidious as it is pernicious. On the other other other other hand, another issue that's been on my mind a lot is representation -- I want to populate my novels and stories with a diverse and inclusive cast from every background, so that I'm not merely cranking out bland white fantasy protagonists like it's still the 1980s. But if my characters have, say, a fantasy-Korean vibe to them, where is the line between respectfully drawing inspiration, and obliviously appropriating and distorting another's culture? Even with the best intentions, the line can be tricky to find, subjective and constantly in motion. I mean, as an upper-lower-class person with a history of extreme poverty and homelessness, I certainly wouldn't want a one-percenter writing my life story, let alone making money off of it. There are no easy answers.
Multiple opposing theses could be written, I suspect, about cultural appropriation and Lord of Light. Lest I seem to be divorcing the novel from its historical context, I would peg it as a countercultural novel from a time when mystical Orientalism was hip and sitars were beginning to seduce their way into rock 'n' roll. On the whole, I would guess that Zelazny's intention was essentially to ride that zeitgeist, to profit from something trendy, and, on a more basic level, to tell a pretty cool story. At a couple points, the text specifically states that Buddhism is "true" within the universe of the story, which has to count as a positive. (An aside: One chapter of Lord of Light was published as a standalone short story, "Death and the Executioner," which I read and reviewed here. I have to say that "Rild is the real Buddha" makes so much more sense here, in context, than it did in that selection.)
Nevertheless, many of the uglier assumptions of the time show through. First of all, there's the matter of all the "gods" (the crew of a colonizing spaceship, who kept all the advanced technology for themselves while leaving the passengers, and their own descendants, to live in an agrarian feudal society for millennia) in their original bodies all seem to have been white Europeans, while the passengers all seem to have been dark-skinned subcontinental Indians. The ship, it turns out, was named Star of India, implying that this star-colony expedition was drawn from the subcontinent but piloted and crewed by Europeans. Deliberate social commentary on Zelazny's part? Or an oblivious artifact of the times? Without knowledge of his personal politics and sympathies, which a cursory glance at his Wikipedia page did not provide me with, it would be hard to judge. But I'm just raising that point for hypothetical thesis writers. It's late, and I usually don't (okay, never) put in that much effort into these reviews. And while Buddhism is "true" in-narrative, Zelazny's portrayal of classical Hinduism is rather less positive.
One of Zelazny's perennial motifs was mythology from around the world. I think humanity's great religious texts and myths are arguably the bedrock of almost all literature, and so might be considered a sort of free-use IP for everyone around the world, exempt from concerns of cultural appropriation. But again, I'm of a privileged demographic, and I'm atheist, so who am I to make that call? It made my twenty-first century liberal heart bleed a little, the way Zelazny portrayed the gods of classical Hinduism, but it was in service to a broader point of class exploitation and the use of religion as control over the (literally) low-caste masses. One might even argue that a bunch of interstellar white dudes taking control over an ancient religious system to exploit Indian peasants is the entire point that Zelazny is aiming for here. In which case the modern concern over cultural appropriation, had it existed fifty years ago, might have had a stifling or obfuscating effect on potentially quite interesting social commentary. Not that I really think treating people with respect stifles creativity or social commentary, as the "political correctness is a scourge and must be stopped!" crowd would like to pretend, but approaching Lord of Light as deliberate social commentary gives me a lot to think about.
Less ambiguous is an essentially du jour treatment of transgender identity. Unsurprising, but ugly.
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