Adjacent to recent conversations and debates about the relationship between art, politics, and the canon, another rumbles just below the surface, informing and making possible the very question of a work of art’s politics or ideology. I’m going to get to a specific case in a bit, but before I do, here are a few assumptions that complicate everything I will suggest: 1. Trotting out and dusting off the good old intentional fallacy here, the potential difference between an author’s worldview, or ideology, and their work makes it difficult to parse out the politics of a text, let alone the internal contradictions that make attempts at buttonholing it so fraught.