Tuesday 28 September 2010

Once more, I sally forth in to the lists...

Must be the passing of the autumnal equinox or something, but there's a new mood of Tolkien-baiting out there in internet land. It's not just Tolkien - even Howard is getting it in the neck (much more deservedly, of course, but pointing out that Howard was a racist is a bit like shooting fish in a barrel).

I was thinking about this sort of thing earlier on myself. I'm re-reading Tales of the Dying Earth at the moment, and it occurred to me that people could, especially when it comes to Cugel, read all manner of misogynistic ideas into Vance's work. I don't particularly entertain such readings myself, but I don't doubt that they can and have been made.

What interests me about all this is the way in which people tend to imprint onto works of fiction what they want those works to represent (i.e., the devil incarnate), rather than engaging with them in any sort of formalist sense. This was one of the tendencies that turned me strongly away from English literature as an undergraduate. Feminists, Marxists, New Historicists, Deconstructionists, all of these groups tend to read subtexts into works of fiction that not only do not exist, but which always coincidentally happen to reinforce their own worldview perfectly. It's almost as if, desparate to reassure themselves that their own opinions are in fact true, people clutch on to a literary work and set it up as a strawman for themselves to beat down and thereby reinforce their own political standpoints. Thus you get Marxists such as Moorcock and Melville berating Tolkien for nonexistent crimes while simultaneously digging the foundations of their own Marxist beliefs ever deeper, almost as if they need and are desparate for some sort of enemy to define themselves against.

People remorselessly search for enemies, so as to better define their own opinions - especially when they themselves feel somewhat insecure. This seems to me a fundamental flaw in the human condition which is especially prevalent in people who study English literature. I expect the same flaw was at the root of the rise of nationalism during the 1930s (though of course I'm not comparing idiotic literary pseuds to Hitler); in countries like Germany, Japan, etc. in which the very foundations of society had been rocked, traumatised and destabilised by historical events, society itself began casting about for enemies so as to better and more clearly define what it itself stood for. Thus Germany fixated upon Jews, Slavs and Bolsheviks as a means of differentiating and reinforcing a (ridiculous) notion of what it meant to be German and what a perfect German society should be (i.e., the opposite of what Jews and Bolsheviks were like). This impulse is at the heart of a lot that is bad in the world. Including bad literary criticism.

35 comments:

  1. Wow! If I'd done that, you'd accuse me of comparing you to Hitler.

    I'm not looking for reinforcement of my beliefs here - I like Tolkien, I grew up on his work, I've role-played in Tolkien's world and I admire his efforts. I'm not even arguing for his removal from the canon. I'm simply appraising his work in terms of its negative, as well as positive influences.

    I'm not sure this qualifies me for a search to prove myself equal to hitler, or whatever. Particularly since this whole exploration started from your attack on Mieville.

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  2. The conversation on your blog was just one of the things that got me thinking along those lines - I'm not necessarily grouping you in with the literary critics I'm attacking here!

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  3. Presenting my post as a "new mood" is a bit rich too, given it's the latest in a long series inspired by your half-cocked rant about Mieville[1], and this particular post only happened because a bunch of fascists recommended my study of Tolkien as an explanation of why he's great fascist propaganda.

    fn1: which incidentally I think you meant Mieville rather than Melville in the OP...?

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  4. Following the first link above I can see you boys enjoy a good natter. Garrulous courting one might call it or flirtingism.

    This seems to me a fundamental flaw in the human condition which is especially prevalent in people who study English literature.
    Heh, Ive been saying this for years but never so sweetly.

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  5. fastusnotes: It's only one of three posts linked to, mate.

    Kent: He wishes. ;)

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  6. Hmm. Thank you. That’s something I should perhaps watch out for in myself.

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  7. @Kent: a sensible society makes sure that minds like theirs are kept occupied. ;)

    Of course, if you really want to Godwin a lit-crit argument, just ask what those lions of leftist post-modernism Paul de Mann and Derrida were doing 1940-45. ;)

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  8. "all of these groups tend to read subtexts into works of fiction that not only do not exist"

    How does one differentiate between a subtext that "really exists" and one that doesn't?

    It's *subtext*. If this were possible, it would just be...text.

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  9. @Will Mistretta
    I think that comes down to that ephemeral beast known as author intent.

    The line between me telling you what I mean versus you telling me what I mean is where most agenda based lit crit seems to arise.

    But perhaps I'm putting words in noisms' mouth here...

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  10. Chris: The more you read about the founding fathers of Deconstructionism, the more you realise that the entire thing is a desparate attempt on the part of a coterie of Frencex-h and Belgian Nazi sympathisers to whitewash their own guilt and self-loathing by coming up with a means of denying that those pro-Nazi things they wrote weren't really pro-Nazi at all. At least that's how I read it.

    Will Mistretta: Well there's the rub. You can't tell. And that's the fundamental fact on which literary criticism rests!

    BigFella: I have no problem with, say, a feminist saying for example that "to me, Vance is a misogynist". Everybody is free to read a text however they want. You can even state that, to you, The Lord of the Rings is really all about bananas and I'd have no problem with it if there was a reasoned explanation. The problem is that it's never couched in those terms. Interpretations always seem to be presented as Truth. (Even Deconstructionists and post-Structuralists who argue that there is no Truth say it as if it's True.)

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  11. "The line between me telling you what I mean versus you telling me what I mean is where most agenda based lit crit seems to arise."

    The issue there is sometimes people encounter, internalize, and propagate certain notions without being fully conscious of it. As an example, imagine someone who denies including any sort of racism in their writing because "I'm not racist." Right there is your statement of authorial intent. And it's probably quite sincere.

    On the other hand, one might look at that writing and observe such things as Asian characters who are somewhat meek and reserved, but very scholarly and good at mathematics, Native America characters who are very wise and "spiritual", and so on.

    Sometimes we're much better at knowing what we feel we "mean" than what we're actually communicating. Just being willing and able to put pen to paper doesn't gift one with absolute self-knowledge.

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  12. People interested in literature tend to be very earnest and thoughtful and therefore terrified that they're spending so much time with something that might just be, basically, a hedonistic luxury.

    Oh no, meaningless pleasure!

    So they try hard to believe that literature does things to people's minds so that they can feel ok about reading books instead of going out and actually doing stuff.

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  13. Good observation. I alwasy felt that Moorcock's critique of Tolkien was very weak.

    On the other hand it's quite interesting that Howard gets spanked as a racist quite often, while Lovecraft, who's letters are quite frightening is rarely mentioned.

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  14. >So they try hard to believe that literature does things to people's minds so that they can feel ok about reading books instead of going out and actually doing stuff.

    Ba-ding-ding-ding!

    This is exactly why in 1987 I made the decision not to go into lit/crit studies. I can trace it back to one presentation I saw at a conference in college where the speaker was arguing that "reclaiming the image" (whatever that means) was somehow going to bring down Ronald Reagan. And I thought, "So go work for an ad agency then."

    As for Tolkien - there is a difference between realistically pointing out the assumptions and influences he absorbed from the mythology of the British Empire - and applying the currently moralized tag "racist" which tends to shut down rather than open thought.

    A little humility is in order. Who knows if in 100 years' time we'll all be devils for eating meat.

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  15. good thing nobody's applying the tag "racist" then, isn't it?

    Zak S is probably partially right, but I think it's interesting (and sometimes fun) to look at what influence a novel has had, and what themes it contains. And as I keep having to tell Noisms, saying a novel contains certain ideas is not the same as saying that the author holds them.

    Will Mistretta is on the money here - authorial intent doesn't have to be particularly relevant. I don't think Tolkien intended his books as a rallying cry for fascists long after his death, but that's what they appear to be. We can say that without calling Tolkien a fascist, and (if we're interested in these things) we can ask ourselves "why him"?

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  16. In graduate school we had a professor who was well known worldwide as Melville scholar...Moby Dick in particular. Once a semester, he would lecture on the ability to find any sort of symbolism you want out of Ahab and his White Whale. This lecture was a tour de force where he would present Moby Dick as a discourse on God vs Satan, as a polemic on the dangers of animal cruelty and extinction of species, as a cruel misogynistic text on the worthlessness of women, as a racist screed, as a love letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne (who Melville was great friends with), as a subtle political manifesto advocating any number of things, as an existential rant on the meaning of the universe, etc. Three hours later, you knew more....and less...than you ever wanted about Melville's masterpiece.

    The best thing was after the monologue, the professor would shrug and then say "But I may be wrong". Never trusted so called literary critics an inch ever since......

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  17. Badmike, many years ago I stumbled on a teaching text for university that used Winnie the Pooh to teach different styles of literary criticism. There were about 6 chapters and each chapter was a different Pooh story analysed in a different tradition: Marxist, feminist, psychoanalytic, deconstructuralist(?) etc. I can only clearly remember the Marxist one (it was "Pooh meets a heffalump" with the elephant cast as the working class, and Pooh as the petit bourgeoisie).

    It's a hilarious read if ever you can get hold of it, because the criticism is provided in a deadly earnest tone, but clearly to no purpose, because it's Pooh.

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  18. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  19. I enjoy literary criticism but not methods that place a template over a work and seek to analyze it from one particular perspective. I've heard a convincing Marxist interpretation of The Hobbit, for instance (Bilbo was an insulated member of the bourgeoisie, the goblins and trolls were the coarse working class, etc.), but ultimately these types of analyses prove tedious and reductionist. I find that they end up shoehorning and/or ignoring evidence that doesn't fit within their rigid frameworks.

    And of course I find Epic Pooh an epic failure, but that goes without saying :).

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  20. I think it depends on the text, Brian. Some books are just begging to be analysed in a particular way - I think Kate Millet's (psychonalytic/feminist?) analysis of Jean Genet's work was (from very vague memory) pretty appealing, whereas probably the same methods applied to Tolkien would be pretty crass and pointless.

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  21. “The problem is that it’s never couched in those terms. Interpretations always seem to be presented as Truth.”

    I don’t know. I tend to think it is pretty obvious that what people write is their opinion, even if an informed one. (Especially when it is explicitly labelled as “criticism”.) It doesn’t need to be constantly pointed out as such. When you want to make the point that something is a fact, that’s when you add qualifiers (and citations).

    If they’re explicitly calling it truth, then I’d agree.

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  22. I got my degrees in English and philosophy and got out as quickly as possible. Since then, I've avoided academic discussions and practitioners within either of those disciplines as if my life depended on it.

    Of course, I wound up practicing law and game-blogging, so maybe discussing queer theory with folks who don't capitalize their names wouldn't be so bad.

    I'm told that the situation in liberal arts departments at my last university - not exactly a leftist bastion - is now so laughable that degrees are even more useless for any real world application than when I was there. I can't imagine paying for an education somewhere like Antioch or UCSD.

    (Which is why, if I go back to school in the fall, I'll probably take up engineering or med school. I've reached the stage in my life where if I'm paying professors, I'd like to learn something more useful than critical theory.)

    word verification: minglab, haha

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  23. first the leading marxist literary critic of our time terry eagleton never wrote more then a passing note about tolkien and i feel that it was probably because he felt at the same time both close and distanced from that particular narrative (he was brought as catholic and still has a great fondness). china and moorcock simply do not qualify as serious literary critic. especially moorcock's comparison between joyce and tolkien and bemoaning the fact Ulysses is not voted the best book of the century by readers is quite crass and stupid. literary criticism is not a horse race (or elections) and i feel that joyce wouldn't loose too much sleep over that. or tolkien for that matter.

    second, if you apply one particularly benjaminian reading of the rings (and we might be well justified in doing so because tolkien's dwarvish language is semitic in its essence - in professor's own words) we might say that it is about the end of myth and beginning of the history and that definitely not a right wing narrative. esentially it does the same thing as joyce's masterpiece: it submerges myth into history and not the other way round (like Nazis did).

    third, I am marxist (of benjaminan bent) and art critic and do not feel threatened when some skins use to justify their vile position through the book that probably defined me as a kid. almost every literary work is a battlefield and instead of retreating and giving in to the right wingers you should stake your claim on that text. tolkien's language is one of redemption and universal salvation and has more akin with william morris and even george orwel then with any other english writer.

    uh, i had to get that off my chest.

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  24. Opossum: instead of retreating and giving in to the right wingers you should stake your claim on that text. tolkien's language is one of redemption and universal salvation and has more akin with william morris and even george orwel then with any other english writer.

    I agree 100%. William Morris is an excellent comparison, which I hadn't really thought of before.

    Incidentally I really enjoy reading Terry Eagleton; he's one of those literary critics who manages the difficult trick of being readable, sensible and interesting. His introduction to literary criticism was one of my core texts as an undergrad and it still sits on a bookshelf somewhere.

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  25. I think the point isn't that Tolkien is overtly racist; if people say that, and that it's apparent from his fiction writings, I disagree with them (I did see an interview where Tolkien admitted the Dwarves were supposed to be like Jews, but this appeared to be more on linguistic grounds than miserliness).

    What I saw from rereading Tolkien at a later age was simply how the silly moral simplicity of his works conflated with his enchantment with Finno-Germanic civilization. I think there's a certain similarity between his description of orcs and two of the main enemies of his age, Turks and Japanese (squat, swarthy, slant-eyed, curved swords, reputation for cruelty, ugly language, etc), but I wouldn't say that's because he thinks Turks or Japanese are monsters. It's simply the case that once you naively define goodness as being coequal with white medieval aristocracy, then anything that's evil must necessarily be different from that. I am willing to chalk this up to naivete rather than malice.

    Someone once told me on an internet forum that Tolkien later regretted his characterization of orcs as incontrovertibly evil; he had no citation, but if true this would tend to support my interpretation.

    @Zak: I disagree, art isn't just meaningless pleasure, it's the transmission of culture. It's no coincidence that the stories of Greek mythology began to be formalized at the the same time Greek culture emerged from a dark age, began to reunify as an identity, and come into contact with other near Eastern civilizations in Egypt, the Levant, and the Black Sea.

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  26. anonymous, something that's constantly forgotten in debates about whether Tolkien is racist is that it's not about the man. The phrase "Tolkien is X" refers to the books, not the man. It's a high-school error to assume that interpreting the books equals judging the man.

    It's certainly useful to ponder how someone can produce a racist work without intending to be racist, etc. - this is a question of narrative error - but what generally happens is that people assume any criticism of Tolkien or Howard is a direct attack on the fabric of existence. This is what the guy at the Silver Key is doing about Howard, accusing the OP of not contextualizing Howard's racism and ignoring the fact that half the OP is a contextualization of Howard's racism.

    It's impossible to have a genuine critical appraisal of Howard or Tolkien or Star Trek or Dr. Who because the fan boys are a bunch of bootboys who stomp hard if you say anything but "Tolkien is god." Witness opossum at my blog presenting Tolkien as a triumph of Marxism as your final proof of this.

    The possibility that it's not about the man but about the interpretation of the books escapes them, because we're attacking their first love. Or something.

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  27. I see what you're saying, but I think saying that a book is racist (as opposed to being racially insensitive or unaware) necessarily blurs the distinction, because racism is as much a matter of intent as of content.

    You could, for example, make this distinction between "Tolkien is stupid" and "Tolkien was stupid"; whatever your opinion of the value of his work, it's hard to argue that he wasn't an extremely talented linguistics scholar. However, I don't think you can argue "Birth of a Nation is racist" without also arguing "Griffith was racist"—it's even harder when you propose to do it with race-analogs like Southrons/Africans and orcs/Asians. You could even do the opposite and argue that the author was racist but the work is not, which is how I feel about Gone with the Wind.

    In other words, to me a work can only be considered racist if its portrayal of one or more races is polemical.

    Consider Othello: Shakespeare doubtless had attitudes about black people that we would today consider racist. Negative racial stereotypes about Africans, particularly them being prone to angry outbursts, crop up in the text of the play and are not refuted. But even so, they are neither the point of the play nor the essential to it—Oedipus murders his father on the road back from Delphi over less, and no one considers the tale to be "anti-Theban"—so it's hard to construe Othello as being racist.

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  28. racism doesn't have to be a matter of intent - you can construct a system that's racist without intending to, and the same applies to books.

    In fact, all you have to do if you're writing in the interwar period is reproduce the ideas of the time without challenging them or caring about them. It's not hard to do, people reproduce aspects of their culture (good and bad) without thinking all the time.

    In any case, the portrayal of Orcs in LoTR is polemical, so where does that leave you? I think I much prefer to think Tolkien's racism is unintentional.

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  29. Anonymous: What I saw from rereading Tolkien at a later age was simply how the silly moral simplicity of his works conflated with his enchantment with Finno-Germanic civilization. I think there's a certain similarity between his description of orcs and two of the main enemies of his age, Turks and Japanese (squat, swarthy, slant-eyed, curved swords, reputation for cruelty, ugly language, etc), but I wouldn't say that's because he thinks Turks or Japanese are monsters. It's simply the case that once you naively define goodness as being coequal with white medieval aristocracy, then anything that's evil must necessarily be different from that. I am willing to chalk this up to naivete rather than malice.

    Likewise I have to chalk this sort of comment up to naivete rather than malice. The idea that Tolkien's work is morally simple is quite bizarre - yet part of the received wisdom of supposed "mature" fantasy readers which I can only assume is based entirely on Tolkien's imitators (like Terry Brooks and Robery Jordan) and not on Tolkien's own work at all. (He defines goodness as being "coequal" with white medieval aristocracy? I know this sort of thing gets bandied about a lot, but I mean, let's behave.) So is the idea that he was enchanted with "Finno-Germanic civilisation" - I'd love to know precisely what "Finno-Germanic civilisation" is supposed to be; does it perhaps come from the same plane of existence (i.e. somebody's arse) as Egypto-Nigerian civilisation, and Japano-Burmese?

    Faustusnotes: It's a high-school error to assume that interpreting the books equals judging the man.

    And vice-versa. What happened to that guy who used to call himself faustusnotes and who used to have the funny idea that there was some sort of relationship between Roger Scruton's personal ethics and his own work? Oh wait, wasn't that you?

    Anyway, this all presupposes that people are interpreting Tolkien in a sensible way. Neither you nor the neo-Nazis are. So where does that leave us? I refer you to my initial position: Mark David Chapman interpreted the Catcher in the Rye as meaning John Lennon had to be killed. So what does this say about J. D. Salinger? Fuck all, really. Case closed.

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  30. That final section should of course have read "So what does this say about J. D. Salinger and The Catcher in the Rye? Fuck all, really. Case closed."

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  31. Anonymous: That comment I just made comes across as more snide than I intended. Please read it with a jocular tone.

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  32. Noisms, if Tolkien had been secretly funded by a neo-Nazi group to write LoTR as a racial allegory, then strenuously denied the importance of allegory in his work, you might have a point with your last little dig... but as it is you just show you still don't understand the point of that little spat, as you don't understand this.

    I mean, really, now you're disputing that Tolkien saw goodness and white aristocracy as co-equal?

    Do you see any meaning in Tolkien at all, or does it all just float through your head and out into the ether without making any deeper impression than "ooh, hobbits, ring, war!"?

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  33. Noisms, if Tolkien had been secretly funded by a neo-Nazi group to write LoTR as a racial allegory, then strenuously denied the importance of allegory in his work, you might have a point with your last little dig... but as it is you just show you still don't understand the point of that little spat, as you don't understand this.

    This is like arguing with a precocious 14-year-old; your lack of ability to construct, let alone maintain, a coherent argument despite all of your bluster is actually kind of charming in its own way. Think about things a little harder, then get back to me. On second thoughts, nah, I could do without another hissy fit, so don't bother getting back to me.

    I mean, really, now you're disputing that Tolkien saw goodness and white aristocracy as co-equal?

    Do you see any meaning in Tolkien at all, or does it all just float through your head and out into the ether without making any deeper impression than "ooh, hobbits, ring, war!"?


    So you haven't really read or understood my comments in this thread or any of the others, which was pretty much what I suspected. As I said, I have some faith that in the future you'll revisit all this and realise you've made a complete fool of yourself... although with this last comment I have to say my faith is steadily diminishing.

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  34. Is it too much to ask for another post sometime soon, friend? You have sallied a bit too long.

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  35. Greg: Actually I have one in the pipeline about Jack Vance. Work is eating up most of my time at the moment, and what little online time I have has mostly been devoted to the quixotic goal of trying to dissuade people from cast-iron opinions they'll never contemplate changing. But there will be new substantive content soon.

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