[davem]

I wonder if the comment in OFS is actually 'criticsm' of Shakespeare as a playwright. Tolkien seems only to be criticising Shakespeare's use of fantasy in Macbeth (& also by extension in A Midsummer Night's Dream & The Tempest, I suppose.) Certainly he never goes as far as Pullman in calling his 'father's' work 'infantile'. Tolkien at least offers a valid reason for his criticism, & doesn't resort to mere insult. He states he disliked reading Shakespeare, but also states that he was moved by Ophelia's singing. In short his problem seems to be with the reading of Shakespeare as opposed to watching it, & when Shakespeare puts fantasy on stage. His statement that Shakespeare should have written Macbeth as a story implies that he respected his narrative talents but felt that in that case they were misapplied.

Anyway...

Pullman's statement that LotR is 'infantile' clearly sets out Pullman's position - fantasy is inherently 'childish' & it is the 'duty' of an author to help his child readers 'grow up' & put away childish things. So Pullman uses fantasy to undermine fantasy (in his own words). The end of HDM is the end of fantasy. The worlds seperate forever, & the children proceed to get on with the 'grown-up' task of 'building the Republic of Heaven'. Now, being that 'Heaven' is essentially a metaphysical concept, its difficult to work out what this statement actually means, or how it could be achieved.

What Pullman seem s to mean is that everyone should work to make the world a better place, where everyone is nice to each other all the time & they all live happily ever after. And this is a 'grown up' novel according to the Literati (among whom Pullman presumably numbers himself!

Of course, this 'Republic of Heaven' is anything but 'Heaven' in the sense we understand the term. It is 'Heaven' without any spiritual aspect at all - yet Heaven is spiritual if it is anything. We have to conclude that the whole 'building a Republic of Heaven' idea is a meaningless phrase. To have read a thousand page novel & end up with a piece of nonsense like that as the author's final word is enough to make you throw the book across the room & demand those lost hours of your life back. To compare the words 'build the Reublic of Heaven' with Sam's final words: 'Well, I'm back' is to experience a real shock - the power of Tolkien's simple statement (what Pullman would describe, one assumes, as 'infantile’ with Pullman's bland & meaningless rhetoric, is almost overwhelming & shows that if either work is 'infantile' it is certainly not Tolkien's.