In the Shadow of the Status Quo--Fantasy literature and conservativism

[sologdin]

the text is not the author.  the text can be completely deplorable despite the purported virtues of the author (and vv. of course), who is at best merely the first reader.  author is accordingly owed zero deference when we approach the text.

[Darth Richard II]

1 minute ago, sologdin said:

the text is not the author.  the text can be completely deplorable despite the purported virtues of the author (and vv. of course), who is at best merely the first reader.  author is accordingly owed zero deference when we approach the text.

Depends on the style of analysis. 

[polishgenius]

5 hours ago, sologdin said:

the text is not the author.  the text can be completely deplorable despite the purported virtues of the author (and vv. of course), who is at best merely the first reader.  author is accordingly owed zero deference when we approach the text.

 

This is true to a point of course but often (though I don't think OP and co. have done this) people seem to read and judge Tolkien's work via his what they know of Tolkien (which leads to the issue Darth Richard mentioned of assuming allegory in an author known to hold no truck with such things). And when you do that it's fair to talk about Tolkien's intentions as a factor.

6 hours ago, Werthead said:

Mieville's is a bit more nuanced, and he also has a separate essay on Why Tolkien is Awesome (which everyone forgets about) which shows his viewpoint is that Tolkien has many great qualities as well as some negative ones.

I think it's also fair to say from what I recall that much of the criticism in 'Wen on the Arse' (I haven't read the more directly socialist critique I don't think) is aimed at the Tolkien knockoffs down the years and not really the work of Tolkien himself. I think Mieville acknowledged this a bit at one stage.

[Darth Richard II]

Actually I believe it was religious allegory in specific Tolkien disliked, although I could be mud remembering. I actually get pissy about Tolkien and allegory because, and I don't mean to offend any religious types here, I knew some, well, extreme Jesus people who were convinced all of LotR was secretly about Jesus, to an insane extent. For extra irony points, they HATED Catholics and the Catholic Church.

[lokisnow]

18 hours ago, C.T. Phipps said:

Death of the Author is always relevant, I believe.

Pfft. Death of the author is a concept that only exists to onanisticly pleasure those who benefit from the estate of said decedent.

in other words, it's a thin veil for argumentation of authority over property (text) when lacking evidence to argue or support their claim as a beneficiary.

death of the author is great except you have a million heirs all claiming equal provenance over the fruits of the author.

death of the author is about making up facts to flatter yourself into agreeing with yourself, it is the ultimate in lazy, Freudian technique, a recursive ourosboros of shit and semen useful and pleasurable only for the "new" author.

interesting, the typical response of any "new" author to being subjected to the death of the author routine themselves is unrestrained outrage and protestation, heh

[Jo498]

I think the most boring SF/Fantasy could be the one most closely reflecting current social mores and political ideas. One major point of quite a bit of SF was to toy around with societies and morals in a provocative way. E.g. Heinlein oscillating between militarist authorianism and libertarianism (and sexual freedom).

Another fairly basic point seems to be that more traditional and restrictive societies have more interesting possible conflicts for the characters. One of the most prevalent conflict situations in Western literature is the love triangle. But this would not work well as a source of existential conflict in a thoroughly "liberated" society.

[lokisnow]

I very much liked the essay except for the bit about "the exception that proves the rule", as this is used as a dismissive comment to discredit or diminish any counter example as inherently invalid rather than giving them the credence and curtesy alleged outliers deserve. 

It is amusing to see you both commit the same crimes of representation you rail against in so blithely denying the valid existence of anything outside the bounds of your thesis, but the title of the next essay, about the omnipresent representation of female heroes in fantasy and folklore illustrates the scope of what you are belittling as mere exceptions that prove the rule.

all of this said with good natured sarcasm, by the way.  But in general, I would prefer data to sweeping assertions, it's probably quite possible to gather the data on all protagonists in high fantasy novels in the period in question the essay expounds upon (1938-2011) and be able to say if Ged is an exception that proves the rule, or is in fact a substantive representation of a populous but officially ignored minority.  If he is only one  in a thousand rather than 1 in ten, that is very much worth knowing and worth acknowledging. It's easy for authors to write sweeping dismissive generalizations in the absence of data, but if you knew there were 78 geds in 492 examples you investigated, it's much harder for a responsible writer to author a sweeping generalization that effectively erases the 78 from existence for the sake of their argument. On the other hand data illustrating it is 2 in 492 would really make the case far more robustly.

[lokisnow]

The following is a post I shared on facebook in 2007 (after finding it all here) that I think might be interesting and precisely relevant to the thread title. the original links might be dead, but I believe the first one was about fantasy literature and conservativism and the second dealt with the aesthetics of conservative fantasy that results in a fetishization of Ned Stark as a conservative scion with a sociopathic penchant for claiming all kills as his own (he's shown to be a just man and a hero for sentencing lawbreakers to death and immediately murdering them personally himself).  these links might still be valid on Wayback Machine, I haven't checked.

 

Quote

http://www.sfdiplomat.net/sf_diplomat/2007/08/conservative-fa.html

which led me to this article called the Aesthetics of fantasy

http://www.sfdiplomat.net/sf_diplomat/2007/02/the_aesthetics_.html

The article itself is somewhat interesting, but the comments are where it gets really good with author Scott Bakker taking the critic to task for intellectual laziness and really taking on a fantastic and intriguing debate. 


Part 2 of the debate is a more interesting article, and the comments section is even better, which is where I came across this fascinating comment by Bakker:

-------------------------------------------------------
 

Quote

The question of epic fantasy's SPECIFIC appeal, it seems to me, is primarily a social, historical, and psychological one.

So getting back to your question regarding worlds and laws. Humans are hardwired to anthropomorphize. Among the many specialized inference systems possessed by our brains, we have 'intentionality detection' systems, which we use to track various kinds of agents as opposed to natural events, which have their own inference systems. Our brain literally has modules dedicated to understanding events according to the modalities of intent or according to the modalities of cause. The thing is, our intentional inference systems are (and this is an uncomfortable fact) hyperactive: they regularly impute intent to events which are in fact causal.

Now before the institutionalization of science in the Enlightenment, we really had no way of knowing this, so as a result, we universally understood the world at large in intentional terms. Only as science provided us with its astonishingly reliable and powerful picture of the ways that causal processes monopolize natural events (the so-called 'disenchantment of the world') were we able to recognize the kinds of wholescale anthropomorphizing underwriting our worldviews. In other words, the institutional dominance of science is what allowed us to see these kinds of worlds as FANTASTIC.

Thus the connection of fantasy worlds to the worlds of scripture (myth that is believed) and myth (scripture that is disbelieved). It's no accident that Middle-earth, Homeric Greece, Biblical Israel, and Vedic India all share such similar ontological structures. They all use the same inference systems to interpret the 'world' - the signature difference is that Middle-earth is a classic example of what psychologists call 'decoupled cognition,' which is just a fancy way of referring to the capacity to think 'as if' that underwrites all fiction. Middle-earth is, in a very real sense, 'scripture otherwise.'

The laws of these worlds are quite literally social and psychological as opposed to natural. This is one of the keys to their appeal, I think. Fantasy worlds are intrinsically meaningful worlds - this is what makes them fantastic. They are not worlds of things, but of AGENTS and ARTIFACTS. There's literally not a 'thing' - understood in the strict sense - to be found in fantasy or scriptural worlds.

Since this is our default way of understanding the world (the scientific worldview requires oodles of training), the primordial way, the 'escapism' of fantasy is not so much an escape as a return to worlds that make immediate sense. And this is part of what makes fantasy the antithesis of modernism, if you define the latter as narrative forms involving the struggle of a protagonist trying to find coherent meaning in an apparently meaningless world. (The Prince of Nothing, btw, tries to turn this toothless saw on its head.) The 'great clomping foot of nerdism,' as Harrison puts it (at once evincing and reinforcing the general bias against forms of decoupled cognition without obvious utility), is nothing more than the 'as if denial' of the scientific worldview, a return not to happier times, but to more comprehensible ones. In epic fantasies, we often like our illusions to run deep.

I can go on and on about this - there's many parallel stories to be told here.

In terms of content, the laws of fantasy worlds are CONCEPTUALLY different, which is just to say they engage different inference systems. In terms of composition, where hard SF uses what I call pseudo-cognitive transition rules to build speculative versions of the stochastically mechanistic world we've gained thanks to the Enlightenment, epic fantasy uses 'associative elimination rules' to build alternate versions of the intentional worlds we've lost thanks to the Enlightenment.
- Scott Bakker

The point here in raising this is that the the 'conservativism' of fantasy in looking back to a presumably better past and trying to restore it is a reflection to the nihilism of a disenchanted meaningless world.

If @Kalbear is struck by lightning, in our world, that's just bad luck. If he is struck by lightning in 1558 London, it is because of his nefarious ways and God is just punishing him, as God is wont to do. If he is struck by lightning in Middle Earth, Illuvatar is just punishing him as Illuvatar is wont to do.

The world we live in is the disenchanted one--there is NO MEANING to being struck by lightning. To believe otherwise is to fall victim to the "just world fallacy." But we all, still, instictively, believe that when bad things happen that there is a narrative reason for bad things to have happened, thus we have all said, "she'll get what's coming to her," or, "he's only getting what he deserves" when bad things without meaning happen. This instinctive behavior indicates that this is the sort of the world we want to believe in. We want to believe there was some reason that some houses were destroyed in the Blitz, and some houses weren't. We want to believe there's a reason my daughter survived multiple bombing runs without a scratch during the blitz, while my neighbor's daughter was blown into four pieces and he cried for three days before hanging himself in the half-collapsed ruins of his once home.

This desire for meaning often manifests itself as a desire for restoration of meaning, and that then manifests itself as fantasy concerning itself with the restoration of meaning in a world where it is threatened.

[C.T. Phipps]

3 hours ago, Darth Richard II said:

Actually I believe it was religious allegory in specific Tolkien disliked, although I could be mud remembering. I actually get pissy about Tolkien and allegory because, and I don't mean to offend any religious types here, I knew some, well, extreme Jesus people who were convinced all of LotR was secretly about Jesus, to an insane extent. For extra irony points, they HATED Catholics and the Catholic Church.

Fun-filled fact: Tolkien's quote about allegory was specifically that it was about WW2. Which offended him on multiple levels because he'd been working on it since WW1. Basically, he got bombarded on a daily basis asking if Sauron stood for Hitler or the One Ring for the Atomic Bomb and what it REALLY meant.

[C.T. Phipps]

1 hour ago, lokisnow said:

Pfft. Death of the author is a concept that only exists to onanisticly pleasure those who benefit from the estate of said decedent.

in other words, it's a thin veil for argumentation of authority over property (text) when lacking evidence to argue or support their claim as a beneficiary.

death of the author is great except you have a million heirs all claiming equal provenance over the fruits of the author.

death of the author is about making up facts to flatter yourself into agreeing with yourself, it is the ultimate in lazy, Freudian technique, a recursive ourosboros of shit and semen useful and pleasurable only for the "new" author.

interesting, the typical response of any "new" author to being subjected to the death of the author routine themselves is unrestrained outrage and protestation, heh

Ehhhh, not so much.

For me, Death of the Author is about how the text an author creates is fundamentally subject to criticism beyond their intent based on biases and circumstances. For an easy example, Atlas Shrugged is a text about the awesomeness of John Gault's rich smart people and how they;re being held down by the parasites of the proletariat. At least according to Ayn Rand.

The DoTA reading could well be its about a psychopath narcissist who destroys the world.to rule the ashes.

[The Marquis de Leech]

3 minutes ago, C.T. Phipps said:

Fun-filled fact: Tolkien's quote about allegory was specifically that it was about WW2. Which offended him on multiple levels because he'd been working on it since WW1. Basically, he got bombarded on a daily basis asking if Sauron stood for Hitler or the One Ring for the Atomic Bomb and what it REALLY meant.

To clarify, he'd been working on The Silmarillion since WWI.

The Hobbit was written for his children's amusement in the 1930s, and (by great good fortune) published. Stanley Unwin wanted a sequel... the result was LOTR, which was (in the context of Tolkien's life) a sort of unexpected literary diversion from his actual life's work. The early bits of The Lord of the Rings (especially The Shadow of the Past) predate the outbreak of war, and certainly the Rings of Power were conceived well before Tolkien even knew about the Atomic Bomb.

Tolkien's point with the allegory comment was  to drive home the idea that if his story really had been an allegory, the Ring would have been used, Sauron enslaved (rather than annihilated), and there would have been no future for hobbits.

That said though, there will always remain the issue of applicability (Ithilien being the Alsace-Lorraine of Middle-earth; the Mouth of Sauron trying to create Vichy Gondor and Rohan). History shapes every author, whether they know it or not. 

[maarsen]

4 hours ago, Darth Richard II said:

Actually I believe it was religious allegory in specific Tolkien disliked, although I could be mud remembering. I actually get pissy about Tolkien and allegory because, and I don't mean to offend any religious types here, I knew some, well, extreme Jesus people who were convinced all of LotR was secretly about Jesus, to an insane extent. For extra irony points, they HATED Catholics and the Catholic Church.

It wasn't religious allegory that Tolkien disliked as much as CS Lewis's Narnia religious allegory in particular. Can't  say I blame him as I never cared for it either.

[SeanF]

12 hours ago, Werthead said:

Tolkien's conservatism is always oversold a bit. He regarded corrupt rulers, even "rightful" ones, as needing to be removed and he had democratic institutions and councils in Middle-earth. The Silmarillion has several major female characters kicking the shit out of the bad guys (Luthien bewitches and defeats both Morgoth and Sauron before rescuing her useless boyfriend who got captured due to ineptness). He epicly trolled the Nazis when a German publisher tried to buy the rights to The Hobbit in 1938 (saying how much he regretted not being Jewish). He even bought a motorcar with royalties from Lord of the Rings and roared along the back roads of Oxfordshire screaming like a motherfucker (probably) despite his much-vaunted dislike of the internal combustion engine. He absolutely despised racism and wrote an article condemning apartheid in South Africa when people asked him about it (having been born there), and even became quite guilty over what he perceived as a racist bias in his characterisation of the orcs, and wrote an article explaining the corrupting magic of Morgoth to explain why they were all evil (but still seemed a bit peturbed by it).

Yeah, Tolkien was conservative in some senses, but he wasn't in others, and the same with his fiction. Moorcock's Epic Pooh essay is bullshit due to the fact that Moorcock clearly has not read Tolkien (certainly not beyond The Hobbit). Mieville's is a bit more nuanced, and he also has a separate essay on Why Tolkien is Awesome (which everyone forgets about) which shows his viewpoint is that Tolkien has many great qualities as well as some negative ones.

I'd add that the Silmarillion is a catalogue of royal and aristocratic incompetence.  The Elven leaders are frequently spiteful, treacherous, arrogant, overconfident, and poor military leaders.  The elves of Beleriand had been virtually annihilated by the time of the War of Wrath.  The Numenorean rulers became as bad.  Ar Pharazon was corrupted by Sauron, but long before that, Numenor had become a brutal empire.  No reader of the Silmarillion could conclude that Tolkien glorified royal and aristocratic leadership.

[SeanF]

WRT the original essay, there seems to be an implication that an author has a duty to present "progressive" views in their novel.  Where does that obligation arise from?

[The Marquis de Leech]

3 hours ago, lokisnow said:

If he is struck by lightning in Middle Earth, Illuvatar is just punishing him as Illuvatar is wont to do.

It'd be Manwe and Numenor.

Tolkien does actually address this point, by presenting us with scenarios that can be read either way: is the tragedy of Turin a combination of innate personality flaws (rashness, self-pitying) and bad luck, or is it a result of Morgoth's curse? Is the failure of the Noldor to regain the Silmarils a result of inept leadership, or are they simply Doomed, as per Mandos? Is Gollum falling into the Crack of Doom (thereby saving the world from Sauron) chance or a divine nudge? Gandalf likes to think that Bilbo was "meant" to find the Ring, but this is an individual character finding meaning in events, rather than anything explicit.

[C.T. Phipps]

3 hours ago, SeanF said:

WRT the original essay, there seems to be an implication that an author has a duty to present "progressive" views in their novel.  Where does that obligation arise from?

I, as an author, hold progressive views. I believe in equality for all and love and kittens.

None of which are likely to show up in a Great Old One ruled Wasteland.

[Jo498]

I think it is historically wrong that people until the 17th century lived in a magical world where everything was intentional. (There are very clear distinctions, e.g. in aristotelian or thomist conceptions of causation between intentional and "merely causal" bringing about something.) It was more likely that some uncommon events, e.g. comets or natural desasters would be taken as portents or ascribed some meaning such as a heavenly punishment. (It should also be noted that early modern science co-existed with magic and astrology for more than 100 years, basically all of the 17th century and even longer.) But it is a wild exaggeration that most people (especially educated politicians or scholars) in the classical or medieval world lived in some animist universe where everything that happened was to be seen as a direct influence of some malevolent or benevolent god or witch doctor. (And even 300+ years after disenchantment there are still plenty of superstitious people around...)

But more importantly, I do not think that such a contrast with a disenchanted world is all that relevant for literature. Because we know full well that in post-disenchantment literature (both fantasy and non-fantasy) the author might have intentionally put all kinds of events intentionally in the path of his figures, so they are often meaningful almost in the sense they would be in an enchanted world. And I do not think the difference between a lot of "fantasy" and other literature is all that great here. It is never revealed whether snow on Caradhras was merely bad luck or vaguely supernatural malevolence. It is also rather unimportant; the important thing is that the Fellowship is forced to enter Moria.

I'ts been ~20 years that I read Earthsea but to my recollection while brown skinned Ged is not part of some minority. Either most people are dark skinned in his environment or it does not matter at all in the scenario. So in-world I do not think that this works as an example of "empowered minority".

 

[Liver and Onions]

3 hours ago, SeanF said:

WRT the original essay, there seems to be an implication that an author has a duty to present "progressive" views in their novel.  Where does that obligation arise from?

I can't speak for the essay authors, but, personally, I don't feel any writers have an actual obligation to include "progressive" stuff in their works. One writes about what one wants to write about. However, as a reader, I find myself drawn to books which include some progressive ideas- ie. not the typical stuff that dominates the genre. ASOIAF, for instance, interests me because it has characters pushing against their repressive world, everyone from Jon to Dany to Tyrion.  If a work is insultingly sexist, racist, so forth, I'm not going to like it and won't read it. 

With that said, just because an author uses progressive concepts in their works and characters does not automatically make them good or interesting. 

[SeanF]

12 minutes ago, Liver and Onions said:

I can't speak for the essay authors, but, personally, I don't feel any writers have an actual obligation to include "progressive" stuff in their works. One writes about what one wants to write about. However, as a reader, I find myself drawn to books which include some progressive ideas- ie. not the typical stuff that dominates the genre. ASOIAF, for instance, interests me because it has characters pushing against their repressive world, everyone from Jon to Dany to Tyrion.  If a work is insultingly sexist, racist, so forth, I'm not going to like it and won't read it. 

With that said, just because an author uses progressive concepts in their works and characters does not automatically make them good or interesting. 

Dany's often accused of  inconsistency (the point seems to be made in the O/P's essay too) for not championing progressive ideas, on things like womens' equality, or democracy, to go with her anti-slavery views. But it seems to me that it would be very odd to expect someone inhabiting a medieval-type world,  who had been brought up to believe that the Iron Throne belonged to her as of right, to champion ideals that no-one in her class would have thought of. 

[maarsen]

On 2016-09-03 at 11:20 AM, TrackerNeil said:

Hi there. My co-author and I published an essay, entitled, "In the Shadow of the Status Quo" on conservative assumptions in fantasy fiction. Given that we use A Song of Ice and Fire as a big part of our analysis, we thought some here might be interested in reading, and we are certainly interested in hearing feedback. 

You can learn more about the book here, but don't think I'm trying to entice you to buy; we don't make a dime from sales. (Like all textbooks, it's pretty pricey.) You can read our chapter in the free sample, though.

I read and enjoyed the sample chapter. I somewhat agree with your premise but there is a fantasy series out there with a gay protagonist that was not written by Richard Morgan. Sam Delaney wrote his Neveryon series during the 80's. It is very rarely mentioned here in the forums, probably because most of the boarders here were not born then. No disrespect to GRRM or Tolkein, but Delaney completely blows away anyone else. What you are looking for has been written.