Quote:
Originally Posted by William Cloud Hickli
It's always struck me as odd that "modernism"- the mandatory artistic creed for most of the past century- has actually meant so many and often contradictory things. "Modern" literature - I remember not long ago some pompous poster on rabt going on about the "post-World War I consensus" (meaning of course the bourgeois novel)- seems to be obsessed with "realism" (preferably of course gritty)- and the Literati seem always to prefer petty, miserable stories about the petty, miserable little lives of petty, miserable little people in petty, miserable little suburbs. Whereas over the same period visual art, of course, has been running screaming away from anything resembling realism, and the 'serious' musical world utterly rejected tonality, realism's aural analogue. How bizarre! How can what is purported to be the same intellectual movement denounce la phantaste as childish, yet praise Paul Klee to the skies?
I suspect a very great deal of it has to do with snobbery. Nothing that peasants and philistines might enjoy can possibly be any good.
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Yes, Klee could have taken some lessons in perspective from my seven year old daughter. I wonder if she'd receive a passing grade in art class if she presented a Klee painting as one of her own? It's rather like the tale of 'The Emperor's New Clothes', isn't it? Literati walking about in naught but cellulite and freckles putting on airs (or airing it out, as it were). For years I made the effort to read through Joyce's 'Finnegan's Wake', and finally gave up in disgust. For all its supposed brilliance, it becomes rather quickly an indecipherable hodgepodge of allusive obscurities, even though critics like Northrop Frye (whom I respect greatly) considers it the greatest modern ironic epic. But I think there comes a point where the iconoclasts (or decronstructionists) of art and literature hammer the shards of their work until it is indeed only vaguely intelligible. For all Joyce's brilliance (and he was uncanny and a fantasist of sorts, as described by Joseph Campbell), he alienated far more readers than those he snared.
But Joyce was unlike Tolkien in that sense. Tolkien's style is deceptively simple and familiar, whereas Joyce's is deliberately dense and daunting. But the farther one goes, the further one gets a feeling of infinite corridors being opened in Tolkien's work, and suddenly nothing is simple or familiar. Hence, 'The Lord of the Rings' is always atop the reader's polls of great novels, while Joyce's novels tend to receive the critics' accolades on a comparative list. Like this one for instance...
http://www.randomhouse.com/modernlib...estnovels.html
Please note the inclusion of several fantasies on the reader's list (like LotR and Watership Down), as well as inclusions from the Science Fiction genre, whereas the critic's list is devoid of either (save for Huxley and Orwell, which are more political/social commentary and thus 'acceptable').
It is unfortunate, as davem so eloquently pointed out, that in the vast sea of mundane fantasy novels there are but few islands of true magic and profundity. The derisive term 'pulp' has long been a desriptor of the genre in general, and a brief perusal of the major book chains' fantasy aisles seems to bear that out. One could certainly say the same for the Science Fiction genre (for every Heinlein, Herbert or Asimov, there are hundreds of non-entities and thousands of throw-away Star Wars and Star Trek serializations). And regarding serializations, I think perhaps one problem with the fantasy genre is that authors with even nominal success are required to continue expanding their sub-created worlds beyond trilogies and tetralogies and septologies in imitation of Tolkien's standard. One wouldn't have gone up to William Golding and asked, "Hey, when's the sequel to 'Lord of the Flies' coming out?" (it is with much ironic humor that I remember an ill-fated attempt at offering a sequel to 'Gone With The Wind' a few years back ). Yet it seems there are fewer and fewer recent standalone fantasies of note being published.