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Originally Posted by Bęthberry
After all, if you establish a difference between our world and a fantasy world, and then criticise Rowlings for muddling up "our world" in comparison to an apparently self-contained secondary world of Tolkien's creation--
then perhaps it would be best to distinquish between Tolkien's "Men" and us.
At the very least, I think it is a great overexaggeration to treat of all "Men/homo sapiens" as lacking any sense of beauty in their desires for knowledge/change.
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I wouldn't claim that all 'Men' lack any sense of beauty. I do think beauty is out of fashion at the moment. The things we create are not designed to be beautiful - sometimes beauty is taken into consideration as an afterthought, but cost, functionality, & ease of production are foremost in the creator's & producer's minds. We live in a utilitarian age.
As to the seperation of the worlds...
Tolkien's secondary world was intended to be this world in the ancient past, but because of that it is by its nature a closed world that we cannot enter - other than imaginatively by reading about it. Mentally we do enter into that world, physically we cannot. It is seperate, self contained, but we may learn things about ourselves through our experience of it - though that is not its purpose, or it would be allegory.
The issue with Rowling is different - though I must admit that my playing of Devil's advocate in the Outrage thread has got me somewhat backed into a corner - my own position was best expressed in my first post on that thread. Rowling is presenting this world - & only this world - in her stories. Her characters live in this world & to that extent it is a contemporary novel with fantastical aspects - Magic realism as opposed to true Fantasy. I'm not saying that we cannot learn something about ourselves as a species from her books, just that we don't learn very much.
Tolkien's work - even The Hobbit, a'children's' book - deals with profound 'spiritual' questions. Rowling's doesn't, & the argument that it is only a children's book doesn't hold water - HDM is also a 'children's book' & while (in my opinion) it fails to deal with the themes it sets out to explore & Pullman's 'theology' is simplistic in the extreme, at least he makes the effort to ask, & offer answers to, meaningful questions. At least Pullman respects children (& Art) enough to try & deal with the eternal verites. Rowling offers a twee 'morality', asks banal questions & answers them with platitudes.
But this belongs on the other thread, so I apologise for straying...