Teacher's Bad Rowling Advice

[davem]

Originally Posted by Thenamir

Before we glibly throw out the bathwater, let us make a cursory effort to extract the baby from it first.

You cannot say that all prose of "Form X", as exemplified by davem, is therefore "junk". That's like saying that the great romances are junk because they follow the same basic formula as the Harlequin paperbacks..

No, ok. Most fantasy is formulaic, but some, judged objectively, is great literature. Yet, accepting Nogrod's point about the 'dismissal' of crime & historical fiction one could offer Crime & Punishment as a crime novel & War & Peace as an historical novel which are not dismissed as 'trash'. They are taken up into the 'genre' of serious literature for grown ups. So while the genre of 'crime' or 'historical' novels may be dismissed as worthless the literati are prepared to consider taking novels out of them & placing them alongside ''proper' books. However, they don't seem prepared to look at the fantasy genre at all. It may be possible to find 'gems' among the crime & historical trash, but it seems that its impossible for such gems to be found among fantasy novels - by their nature (ie because there are Elves or dragons in them, & characters with 'odd' names) fantasy books must be bad - no-one can write a serious, adult fantasy novel which is great literature, however great a writer they are, because all fantasy books must be bad.

But is there any way around this? Will we ever see a time when 11 year olds aren't told to forget the fairies & write something 'gritty'? Are children always going to be forced out of faerie by 'well meaning' adults?

[Nogrod]

Originally Posted by davem

Yet, accepting Nogrod's point about the 'dismissal' of crime & historical fiction one could offer Crime & Punishment as a crime novel & War & Peace as an historical novel which are not dismissed as 'trash'. They are taken up into the 'genre' of serious literature for grown ups. So while the genre of 'crime' or 'historical' novels may be dismissed as worthless the literati are prepared to consider taking novels out of them & placing them alongside ''proper' books.

There is a straightforward explanation to this... "Crime & Punishment" and "War and Peace" are old enough... That's why Homer's epics and Malory's Morte d'Arthur are considered real Literature as well...

[davem]

Originally Posted by Nogrod

There is a straightforward explanation to this... "Crime & Punishment" and "War and Peace" are old enough... That's why Homer's epics and Malory's Morte d'Arthur are considered real Literature as well...

So all we have to do is wait a few decades & LotR will be acceptable?

[Lalwendë]

Originally Posted by davem

So all we have to do is wait a few decades & LotR will be acceptable?

Possibly. It happened with Dickens

Now this business about fantasy not being suitable for grown-ups (with a kind of reverse X certificate attached) is odd as some fantasy is acceptable for grown-ups, indeed one Sir Rushdie has just been honoured for his magic realism. And Pan's Labyrinth was lauded to the hilt. You'll also find Angela Carter lurking on most University reading lists. So clearly, some fantasy works are more equal than others.

Why not Tolkien's brand? Is it the fault of Tolkien or is it the fault of those who aped him and gave a bad impression? Is it our fault? That's likely - when at Uni I sought out Tolkien fans and nobody on my degree would admit to liking him apart from a couple of my delightfully mad tutors - quietly though, they had jobs to think about; amongst the students I found it was the unfashionable (at the time), ungainly students of science and engineering who liked their Elves and Dragons. It was the Goths, and the new-Hippies. Scallies too liked their Tolkien - young, working class, unemployed Scousers (there's a lot to be written about how Liverpool is Britain's lost city of dreamers and visionaries...) - I've had many mad all-night conversations with assorted Scousers about how Gandalf is Shamanic and the like. But notably NOT the young students of Literature and The Arts. In summary, Tolkien has had a serious Image Problem.

Yet there's a curveball to throw into this whole topic...

What about Tolkien himself? What would he have said, in his professional opinion?

The public image of Tolkien doesn't exactly make a big deal out of the fact that he loved a lot of popular fiction himself (Asimov and H Rider Haggard, for example); instead it focuses on the more 'high-brow' stuff he liked. So his public image is that he spent his hours in reading sagas and the Eddas and Beowulf and the like... Why? We can't blame the literati for that image. Why has his love of the distinctly mass market, the bestseller, been buried? Are even Tolkien's biographers and critics, and fans, a little embarrassed by his own liking for popular fiction?

It's like discovering Kurt Cobain was heavily into Tiffany...

[Nogrod]

Originally Posted by Lalwendë

The public image of Tolkien doesn't exactly make a big deal out of the fact that he loved a lot of popular fiction himself (Asimov and H Rider Haggard, for example); instead it focuses on the more 'high-brow' stuff he liked. So his public image is that he spent his hours in reading sagas and the Eddas and Beowulf and the like...

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein loved the cinema, especially Hollywood action-films (in thirties and fourties)! And he was the most grim and gritty one indeed, more serious than an apocalyptic.

Hitler loved the popular movies as well, but that's going to require another explanation... or does it?

The popular image of these two are also kind if edited...

[Nogrod]

Originally Posted by davem

So all we have to do is wait a few decades & LotR will be acceptable?

That's probably the case... so sad as it is.

It's not only the years that will give the finishing touch to a future masterpiece but as the world changes the academic tastes will change as well... and I even think Tolkien is more and more appreciated in the academic circles as well. It's only that the academic fashions change slower than the mode of the boutiques.

It's hard to see this current world with it's polarisation and casting things to good and evil without noticing the comeback of fantasy and historical epics. You can see the trend by looking at the box-office cinema hits for example... So there clearly is a social demand for this kind of stuff after all the anxiety and relativism given to us the last 20-30 years.

Even as an admirer of Tolkien I'm not too sure how gladly I look at this cultural transformation though. There are a lot of things that I deem valuable, like tolerance, multiculturalism, human rights not depending on race or sharing a tradition... which are heading for the gallows both here in the west and in the islamist east. These times of needing to take side bring forwards the heroes and the villains, the dragon-slayers and the Wormtongues... and the ladies one should rescue with chivalric action not caring about the means as it is the virtue of the hero and not the universal shared morality of tolerance that governs things...

Gah, sorry to be this depressive....

[William Cloud Hicklin]

We also can't discount the fact that literature faculties are in most places heavily politicized (almost invariably to the Left), and Tolkien is just too Politically Incorrect. How many pinheads have we seen, starting with China Mieville, denouncing him for having kingdoms (instead of autonomous peoples' collectives, I suppose), or charging him with racism. After all, the main thrust of post-Derrida literary criticism boils down to ascribing some political view to a work, and denouncing it. Mosst of this (and God knows I've read a lot) is, under its incomprehensible jargon and the piling up of Authorities' polysyllabic coinages, just a pl;atform for the critic's sociopolitical rantings- certainly they tell you far more about the critic than the work criticised. Unfortunately Tolkien is not ony counterrevolutionary, he's also concerning himself with hopelessly outdated (and class-oppressive) matters like Honor and Courage and Death and Evil and even God- where's the social utility in that?

Edit: Davem- your last post is right on the money. No social 'relevance' - Tolkien himself wass onto that one, when he pointed out the derogatory use of "escapism", and confusing the escape of the prisoner with the flight of the deserter.

[William Cloud Hicklin]

Oh, as to "genre fiction"- I love the very, very clever Umberto Eco setting out to give the Literati a finger in the eye over this, boldly writing a historical detective novel that's as highbrow as anyone could want- he even concludes it by quoting Wittgenstein, fer crissake.

[Lalwendë]

I agree that University faculties and depts are almost all (certainly in the UK) left-leaning, but I disagree that their dislike of Tolkien means he is right-leaning. If they see that in him then that is their mistake - and some will deliberately set out to find 'right-wing nasties' everywhere as much as McCarthy was paranoid about reds under the bed They conveniently ignore that this hokey Tolkien fellow was also an early environmentalist (whoa, a sinister Greenie!), explored the idea of anarchism and even tackled issues of racism. All this with skipping pixies and goblins? yes! Much as it might stick in the throats of a certain breed of leftist, it does not stick in every left leaning throat - certainly not in Europe.

But yes, certainly over here you can divide the left into two camps - the modern, Islington 'set' who fear anything remotely 'parochial' and the older type, us old (and young) beardy-weirdy types who just go a bomb for mad things like talking trees and echoes of ancient cultures Look at how that arch outdoorsman Ray Mears championed Tolkien in The Big Read. Remember Tolkien was one of THE icons of the original counter-culture.

Maybe they feel uncomfortable about being linked with hippies who smell a bit of patchouli oil and damp afghan coats? Maybe they have some Tolkien secretly stashed under the bed for when their dinner party guests have gone home after a nice evening discussing post-modernism?

[Nogrod]

Originally Posted by William Cloud Hickli

I love the very, very clever Umberto Eco

Don't you know Umberto Eco is a leftist literati?

[Nogrod]

Originally Posted by William Cloud Hickli

We also can't discount the fact that literature faculties are in most places heavily politicized (almost invariably to the Left), and Tolkien is just too Politically Incorrect.
---
After all, the main thrust of post-Derrida literary criticism boils down to ascribing some political view to a work, and denouncing it. Mosst of this (and God knows I've read a lot) is, under its incomprehensible jargon and the piling up of Authorities' polysyllabic coinages, just a pl;atform for the critic's sociopolitical rantings- certainly they tell you far more about the critic than the work criticised.

What you say is most certainly true. But still I'd like to challenge that a bit.

If you look at the humanist departments - or those of sociology etc. - you can see that they are mostly manned (and "womanned") by people leaning more to the left than to the right. Whatever the context - like in France or Finland being leftist or rightist is a different thing from being one in Russia or the U.S., at least in scale.

But I'm not sure if your criticism can be founded on just politics this easily. Even if the view is luring: good-hearted conservatives against the reckless egoistic radicals...

In the 18th century France from where this dicothomy stems from the "modernists" or "liberals" (meaning the "bourgeois") were to the left of the chairman in the parlament and the conservative aristocracy were to the right. The liberals demanded more liberal economy (to boost their own situation in front of aristocracy's priviledges) and more liberal values (to suit their metropolitan experience of life) while the conservative aristocracy wished everything to remain the same as the status quo at that time was nicely on their side as they had all the wealth and priviledges.

But after socialism emerged these two parties joined hands to be the "right" against the terrible uneducated masses of the workers ("left") who demanded their share of the wealth they helped to pile for both the bourgeois and the upper-class.

If you have ever wondered about the irreconciability of the values both left and right, here's your deal. They are historically developed ideologies that have their roots that contradict themselves. Like the "rightist" belief in free market economy which automatically destroys small communities and traditional values or the "leftist" belief in the institutional or communitarian organisation of the society which leaves the free individual whom they praise in the shade.

So you can't add Tolkien to this soup without getting into problems.

Many ideals Tolkien goes for can be found from the agenda of the extreme rightist conservatists as well as from the most communitarian leftists.

---

I don't claim to have understood a lot from those few texts by Derrida I have read but we should give him - as any human being - an honest judgement as someone who has tried to communicate something to us and thence worthy of recognition. I can't see anyone claiming that his life's work was just a sham! What I think was central to Derrida - and his followers - was the idea that you could handle the work anyway you wanted. There was no primacy of the author as we couldn't tell anyway what her/his intention was (as s/he her/himself couldn't do that because of the different psychological hindrances) and because language was a system that had an autonomy of it's own that governed our thinking and thence also the text we were treying to interpret. So it was a free space then: literary criticism was an area where nothing was right or wrong. A few people have actually read Derrida's studies but they stick to his general program - and scorn it understandably. I think he has quite an interesting ideas on many authors - philosophers included.

What ideology or party-membership Tolkien would have gone for today? Or what style of literary criticism he would have accepted?

It's hard to say.

Not so easy as to say that generally the leftists hate Tolkien and Derrida is a fake....

[Thenamir]

Originally Posted by Nogrod

So the literati aren’t always wrong or stupid and thence we should seek for the bad publicity of the fantasy also from other areas.

That reminds me of the old joke -- "97 percent of lawyers (or literati) are giving the rest a bad name."

[davem]

It occurs to me that Rowling hasn't suffered from the same venom as Tolkien has & I'm wondering whether this is because Rowling has 'done the proper thing' & written her fantasies for children. She hasn't had the 'temerity' to write adult fantasy. In fact the only real attacks I've come across in relation to the HP books are against adults reading them ( the 'adult cover' editions are considered to be condoning this 'sin).

So, fantasies for children are ok, but adults must treat them with contempt, or with a knowing wink as they read them to their children.

EDIT

I wonder whether Tolkien would have been more highly regarded by the Literati & the educational establishment if he'd stopped at The Hobbit?