Mieville's thoughts...

[Nerwen]

See, this is getting complicated. There's what writers say, and there's what readers think they said, and there's what readers think they should have said, and there's what readers think other readers think, or should think, about what writers say, or should have said– quite a head-ache recipe.

Originally Posted by tumhalad

But from Mieville's point of view we are complicit in an immoral way. The act of reading a book with questionable morals is thus an act of political immorality.

Again, how much of this is Miéville now, and how much are you reading into it, based (perhaps) on your own thoughts on the ethics of reading, or something?

EDIT:X'd.

[tumhalad2]

Originally Posted by Nerwen

See, this is getting complicated. There's what writers say, and there's what readers think they said, and there's what readers think they should have said, and there's what readers think other readers think, or should think, about what writers say, or should have said– quite a head-ache recipe.


Again, how much of this is Miéville now, and how much are you reading into it, based (perhaps) on your own thoughts on the ethics of reading, or something?

EDIT:X'd.

This is not all based on my own thoughts on the "ethics of reading", and I'm not even sure where you came up with that. Let me set this out:

1. Mieville makes claims about the values inherent in the text
2. Mieville claims these values are retrograde, reactive and backward looking
It follows, therefore, that if a reader engages with the text without criticising the values Mieville says are there, then the reader is morally complicit with them, in Mieville's eyes. This does not mean we are necessarily conciously complicit; indeed that is the point. That we do not recognise these backward values and seek to deconstruct them is evidence of our complicity; we are ideologically blinded.

I don't actually agree with this version of reader response theory; but I deduce Mieville would, considering the thoughts he expressed in the quote I provided above.

[Nerwen]

Originally Posted by tumhalad2

1. Mieville makes claims about the values inherent in the text
2. Mieville claims these values are retrograde, reactive and backward looking
It follows, therefore, that if a reader engages with the text without criticising the values Mieville says are there, then the reader is morally complicit with them, in Mieville's eyes. This does not mean we are necessarily conciously complicit; indeed that is the point. That we do not recognise these backward values and seek to deconstruct them is evidence of our complicity; we are ideologically blinded.

I don't actually agree with this version of reader response theory; but I deduce Mieville would, considering the thoughts he expressed in the quote I provided above.

I don't say he wouldn't, but I also don't say it follows. If I say, "such-and-such a novel has a backward political and social outlook", I'm not trying to imply that anyone who reads it for enjoyment, without critiquing its politics, is doing something wrong. Furthermore, I also wouldn't think for a moment that someone who outright agreed with the author's politics was doing something morally wrong, just that such a person, like the author, was misguided. (The exception would be if those politics were of a very extreme nature, and supported actions that I do consider immoral, like killing everyone who disagrees with you or something.)

So, maybe Miéville does, or did, think that way, but you haven't shown it; you're the one who brought morality into the equation.

[tumhalad2]

Originally Posted by Nerwen

I don't say he wouldn't, but I also don't say it follows. If I say, "such-and-such a novel has a backward political and social outlook", I'm not trying to imply that anyone who reads it for enjoyment, without critiquing its politics, is doing something wrong. Furthermore, I also wouldn't think for a moment that someone who outright agreed with the author's politics was doing something morally wrong, just that such a person, like the author, was misguided. (The exception would be if those politics were of a very extreme nature, and supported actions that I do consider immoral, like killing everyone who disagrees with you or something.)

So, maybe Miéville does, or did, think that way, but you haven't shown it; you're the one who brought morality into the equation.

Once again, let's agree to disagree. I don't think this point is all that important in the scheme of things...

[Nerwen]

Originally Posted by tumhalad2

Once again, let's agree to disagree. I don't think this point is all that important in the scheme of things...

Fair enough; it's getting somewhat OT, I guess.

[Morthoron]

Originally Posted by tumhalad2

This is not all based on my own thoughts on the "ethics of reading", and I'm not even sure where you came up with that. Let me set this out:

1. Mieville makes claims about the values inherent in the text
2. Mieville claims these values are retrograde, reactive and backward looking
It follows, therefore, that if a reader engages with the text without criticising the values Mieville says are there, then the reader is morally complicit with them, in Mieville's eyes. This does not mean we are necessarily conciously complicit; indeed that is the point. That we do not recognise these backward values and seek to deconstruct them is evidence of our complicity; we are ideologically blinded.

Miéville makes faulty assumptions based on the self-imposed limits of his intellect. Just because someone makes specious pronouncements about a book neither implies moral complicity on the reader's part, nor that Tolkien even wrote in the manner Miéville or Moorcock claim. Let's look at what was said by Miéville (and by inference, Moorcock):

Michael Moorcock has written brilliantly on this in his book Wizardry and Wild Romance (1987):

The little hills and woods of that Surrey of the mind, the Shire [where the protagonist 'hobbits' live], are 'safe' but the wild landscapes everywhere beyond the Shire are 'dangerous'... Lord of the Rings is a pernicious confirmation of the values of a morally bankrupt middle class... If the Shire is a suburban garden, Sauron [the 'evil' dark lord] and his henchmen are that old bourgeois bugaboo, the mob--mindless football supporters throwing their beer bottles over the fence--the worst aspect of modern urban society represented as the whole by the a fearful, backward-yearning class.

That Miéville considers Moorcock's venomous and unfounded mud-slinging "brilliant" indicates an undue level of bias, magnifying and distorting a single aspect of the book with tendentious partisanship. Should I say that Moorcock is a sexually deviant lecher who advocates genocide based on the subjects of some his books? No, that would be absurd, wouldn't it? But using phrases like "pernicious confirmation of the values of a morally bankrupt middle class" or "mindless football supporters throwing their beer bottles over the fence" is shocking in the unscholarly nature of the broadside. That one should consider the other brilliant for such a juvenile attack confirms my low opinion of both.

Then we have davem's timely quote of Miéville in an utterly different and confounding context:

Whatever we see as the drive behind Tolkien's tragic vision, and however we relate to its politics and aesthetics, the tragedy of the creeping tawdry quotidian gives Middle Earth a powerful melancholia lamentably missing from too much of what followed. It deserves celebrating and reclaiming.

As I stated previously, Miéville is a hypocrite of the first order and deserves censure and condescension. I have nothing further to add to this conversation.

[CSteefel]

I can certainly buy into the idea that overall Tolkien is conservative, rural to some extent, and even anti-modernist, but how does this have anything to do with "bourgeois values" one way or the other??