Comments on: We shall rise to the challenge of their appointment to life for that single moment – An Essay On China Miéville

By: Glenn Bridgman

Glenn Bridgman — Fri, 14 Jan 2005 01:51:43 +0000

I suppose I should preface my comment by noting that I am one of those odious folk known as libertarians, so my capacity for trafficking in the language of socialist allusion is somewhat limited. Nonetheless, I’ll try to comment without making a total idiot out of myself. I took PSS out of the library when the first of these posts was published and absolutely devoured it—it was an amazing book. These are my initial, unfermented thoughts: Mr. Mieville, it seems to me that in your attempt to escape the limitations of genre, you manage to trap yourself just as thoroughly as if you were writing genre-fiction. At the risk of being too self-referential, are you not simply writing for the “gritty genre-rejection” genre? By self-consciously rejecting simple classification, you introduce the same comfortable familiarities as, say, traditional sci-fi—the reader learns to expect the unexpected. Wouldn’t it be better to just write and if you fall into the trappings of genre honestly, so be it? The strangest part of the novel for me was that you were constantly poised on the edge of making a truly socialist point, but you manage to never quite fall from that tension into political hackery. To my shame, I have to admit that my “crazy socialist” alarm was running for portions of your book, but again, you never actually sparked that reflexive rejection. Despite the presence of many conferrable tropes of the socialist worldview—the bourgeoisie overclass quite literally dealing with the devil was a stroke of genius—the presence of small-scale capitalism seemed to reject a stodgy socialist orthodoxy. Isaac’s offer to buy winged things is met with such success that one could be fooled into thinking you were writing a Hayekian wetdream. Lastly, I think you miss the point with regards to Lin. By having the slake-moth devour her mind, you are, in a way, forcing her back up onto Holden’s cliff. Rather than rejecting the beautiful, Tragic with a capital T, simplicity of Ophelia, you give that to Lin in perpetuity. At least with the consumptive beauties, there is a respectful transience about them—they will decay and pass from this world. Lin is forced to endure it forever. Is that not infinitely more disrespectful?

By: Donald Johnson

Donald Johnson — Thu, 13 Jan 2005 19:27:42 +0000

You should do more threads on Tolkien, just to give me the experience of agreeing with Sebastian more often. Well, I guess this wasn’t about Tolkien, but as he said, there are some names that automatically hijack threads when they are mentioned.

By: Sebastian Holsclaw

Sebastian Holsclaw — Thu, 13 Jan 2005 16:44:49 +0000

“It may seem that I am conflating appreciative antiquarianism and scholarship, the careful and preservation-minded rescusitation of old forms, with primitivism. I agree there is a bit of a problem here. But there is still something self-taught and naive and private and mildly obsessive-compulsive about Tolkien.” Now I’ll definitely give you the obsessive-compulsive part. :) People pretty much don’t do fugues anymore. Personally I would love to hear some new ones even if that made the artist antiquarian. I think I understand what you are saying, and I think it is correct in some parts—but not correct as a more general critique of the work as a whole. Hmm, is this thread proof that if you want to talk about anything else you shouldn’t bring up Tolkien? It is like trying to have a passing reference to Michael Moore—impossible.

By: jholbo

jholbo — Thu, 13 Jan 2005 05:03:45 +0000

I’ll just make another response to Sebastian, who writes: “The complaint about the repetitive nature seems to be a failure to understand the nature of the bardic tradition of storytelling.” I am sure there are many things about the nature of the bardic tradition of storytelling I don’t know, but there are more than a few I do know. I really don’t think my problem is that I don’t see what Tolkien is imitating. I think I see it well enough. It may help matters if I mention that I’ve read the bloody thing a dozen times since I was twelve, I love the council scene. (Not that it honestly matters what I think, but if it helps people to understand what I have written to know that I love Tolkien – well, it’s true. I do.) I just think the way to analyze Tolkien’s achievement is to start by frankly cataloguing all the reasons why it would seem that these antique grafts shouldn’t, by all rights, take. It does occur to me that one thing that may be setting Sebastian off is my ‘outsider artist’ point. Outsider art would seem to be proverbially untutored and naive – a kind of primitivism. It may seem that I am conflating appreciative antiquarianism and scholarship, the careful and preservation-minded rescusitation of old forms, with primitivism. I agree there is a bit of a problem here. But there is still something self-taught and naive and private and mildly obsessive-compulsive about Tolkien. This is, quite frankly, the root of the authenticity of his literary voice, just as the scholarship is the source of its intelligence. What I am indicating by ‘outsider artist’ is that rather indefinite personal stamp that preserves LOTR from being an unfortunate exercise in twee pedantry. So you find Tolkien’s strengths by taking a poke at the things that should, by rights, be his weaknesses.

By: Robert McDougall

Robert McDougall — Wed, 12 Jan 2005 21:32:49 +0000

“Novelost” is a fine new word, now it just needs a suitable job to do. Like David G I loved the “Council of Elrond” way back. The “badly chaired committee meeting” complaint I don’t understand. The chapter gets in lots of back story and side story just when the reader’s ready for it; it makes an effective transition from the “four little hobbits on an adventure” part of the book to the “mission of world-historical importance” part; the committee meeting machinery marshalls the flashbacks fluently without getting in the way, till in the end the committee does get down to work to some dramatic purpose. One might even admire the skill with which Tolkien shifts from using the council as a narrative device to making it a substantive part of the narrative. To critique the meeting’s chairmanship seems like faulting Pamela for her unduly copious correspondence. [I agree though that is a funny quote.]

By: jholbo

jholbo — Wed, 12 Jan 2005 11:19:38 +0000

I should mention that my crack about the ‘badly chaired committee meeting’ is in fact not my crack but someone else’s from the TT commentary. I don’t think it was Shippey or Walsh. I can’t remember who it was. But I thought it was funny. (In writing my post I probably should have made clearer the scope of my DVD commentary paraphrasis.)

By: david g

david g — Wed, 12 Jan 2005 11:04:59 +0000

“The Council of Elrond” was always one of my favorite chapters (38 years now since I first read it). But that’s probably because I’m (1) a historian, not a literary critic, (2) love invented history and (3) am therefore one of those people whom Tolkien himself said “found this sort of thing [invented history, invented languages] only too fatally attractive.” He was himself split between the urge to follow his own made-up words and legends into mythological and etymological labyrinths and his desire to tell a story people would want to read and which would (I quote again from memory, bard-style), “deeply move them”. For me and millions he succeeded. As for the silly and typically late-twentieth-century immature argument that he glorified war, Shippey pointed out the truth about that. I recall that C. S. Lewis in his religious autobiography “Surprised by Joy” talks about what he felt and realized when he first got to the front in 1916. He said it suddenly came to him that “This is war. This is what Homer wrote about”. I loved that, not just because I also love Homer (all of which Lewis had read in Greek under a tough tutor in Belfast), but because Lewis meant that whatever the Great War was, it was also neither more nor less than “war”, and so, as Lewis and Tolkien would put it, a tragic feature and consequence of our fallen condition. John is of course right that Tolkien is unique, I think for more reasons than he adduces, and that the imitators are almost all hopeless. They imitate the form without the religious and philological ballast that T. had. Of course they fail.

By: Sebastian Holsclaw

Sebastian Holsclaw — Wed, 12 Jan 2005 07:13:57 +0000

Umm, ok. It is a tremendously successful hybrid of 19th century novel and historical fiction in the Norse oral tradition that you find annoying in some parts then. :) I guess my problem is that the issues you have explicitly raised seem to me to be non-appreciation of the form rather than poor expression of the form. The Elrond council is absolutely demonstrative of that. The complaint about the repetitive nature seems to be a failure to understand the nature of the bardic tradition of storytelling. The complaint about the suspension of the narrative thread is similar. You complain about missing genre cues, but it follows the Roman military story and the style of stories which it later influenced quite noticeably. There is a riff on the Return of the King myth that should be familiar to practically anyone versed in English or German literature. There is chivalry in both its good and bad aspects. There is the monster story repeated in at least four instances. There are the interesting blends of Christian and pagan relgions. Which of your complaints about repetitiveness or ‘boring’ parts couldn’t be used to damn Clarissa or any of the major epistolary novels of the 1700s? Have you read Robinson Crusoe? Many of the boring parts are quite obviously in the vein of the travel narrative, which meshes easily with Tolkien’s view of his story as a real history of a fictional world. I presume are a fan of biographies? I guess ultimately I feel that you are confusing what fantasy became with what Tolkien was doing. I won’t say that he did it perfectly, but the specifics of your complaints suggest a lack of resonance to your modern style more than anything else. And so your description of annoyances will be useful to those who aren’t interested in older forms. There isn’t anything wrong with a lack of interest in older forms. But that doesn’t make them bad or poorly crafted. A lot of people don’t like Kunst der Fugue but that doesn’t mean that Bach didn’t know how to craft counterpoint.

By: Nick

Nick — Wed, 12 Jan 2005 06:47:23 +0000

Speaking of the last, it’s di-phthong, not dip-thong :-) Oops. Of course it is. Thanks for that. : )

By: jholbo

jholbo — Wed, 12 Jan 2005 02:38:05 +0000

No, Sebastian, I’m really NOT judging the novel from a provincially 20th Century perspective (well, no doubt I am; but no doubt you are too to some degree.) I’m trying to judge it from the perspective of whether it works from any perspective. I’m certainly not insisting it pander to my taste in 20th Century novels, merely that – whatever it does – it has to work. If I am staging a gritty naturalistic drama and I decide to have all the characters suddenly burst into song, it is no sufficient defense of this that ‘you wouldn’t complain if it were a musical’. Not every plan works, so it is simply not sufficient to say that he planned it this way. And of course we aren’t arguing about much because I think it works, but it creaks at the joints. That is part of what makes it work in the end. It seems to me you are on the verge of denying that LOTR is a novel, because it wasn’t written as one, and because that would cut the legs from under my critique quite handily. It seems to me that it’s a novel – or three, as you like it – even if it was written with certain other models in mind. I take it you aren’t going to argue that it is a pure return to earlier forms. It’s a hybrid, so the question is whether it’s a successful hybrid.

By: Sebastian Holsclaw

Sebastian Holsclaw — Wed, 12 Jan 2005 02:06:31 +0000

You are judging the technique from the point of view of the modern 20th century novel, which is not what Tolkien was writing or attempting to write. Most people would think that telling a story entirely through ‘reproducing’ letters—many repetitive—is a questionable technique, but Clarissa is still very good for what it is and what it was trying to be. You wouldn’t slam a musical for the fact that it has that silly convention of having people unrealisitically sing instead of talk. LOTR is called a novel only because we don’t read the type of thing that it really is anymore and because it is kind of similar to a novel. The fact that it does not follow all of the conventions of a novel has more to do with the fact that we are mislabeling it than that Tolkien was a poor writer. It shares many forms which you can see in earlier English pre-novels including most specifically what you think is tedium in the Rivendell scene. Another ‘problem’ many people complain about is that he doesn’t get in the heads of the characters like we see in many modern novels. But that isn’t a complaint for a fictional history. They recount actions and words, they don’t pretend to be able to see into the characters’ heads. If you have a taste for the modern novel, you will think that Tolkien doesn’t write one very well. And you will be correct. But you are correct because it wasn’t written as a novel.

By: jholbo

jholbo — Wed, 12 Jan 2005 01:30:23 +0000

Yes, of course I know, Sebastian (how could I not?) I admit that there is something clunky about saying ‘it’s almost artificial to regard Two Towers as a novel’ because it wasn’t even supposed to be one. So it’s not just almost but ACTUALLY artificial. (Fair enough.) And of course it’s SUPPOSED to be like a history, as you say. But that hardly automatically gets him off the hook of being a poor writer. The question is whether writing a novel with this sort of history-like structure is a good idea. Of course I love the novels – excuse me, the one codex – so I think it proved to be a good idea. But it was touch-and-go. Ending all those chapters by bonking hobbits on the head, while pretending to be writing epic history. Very questionable technique.

By: derek

derek — Wed, 12 Jan 2005 00:19:17 +0000

fantastic names that would traffic in lots of apostrophes and dipthongs with potentially unpronounceable juxtapositions of consonants Speaking of the last, it’s di-phthong, not dip-thong :-)

By: eric

eric — Tue, 11 Jan 2005 22:07:21 +0000

Just a quick note as I scan through this post at work. Shippey has a whole lot of interesting things to say about Tolkien’s mindset and about the members of the TCBS who were killed during the war (couple of them at Somme) in The Road to Middle-Earth. In the same work, Shippey debunks a boatload of anti-Tolkien criticism with a detailed reading of the text.. see the sections on entrelacement and narrative structure. None of this, of course, really excuses the fact that Tolkien wrote in a way that no self-respecting commercial author would try. Shippey just points out some of the underpinnings… LoTR is a bit more intricate than some realize. That plus Shippey’s description of Tolkien’s mode of work (which is mentioned above), combined with his OCD tendencies (yes, I agree that Tolkien was a little crazy. How else can you explain the countless revisions… I keep thinking that it would be nice to see his papers at Bodleian library, and then think I would be horrified at the sheer bulk of them.) and we end up with LoTR in all its odd brilliance. Anyway. Check out the book.

By: Sebastian Holsclaw

Sebastian Holsclaw — Tue, 11 Jan 2005 21:37:55 +0000

And there’s a lot to dislike – his cod-Wagnerian pomposity, his boys-own-adventure glorying in war, his small-minded and reactionary love for hierarchical status-quos, his belief in absolute morality that blurs moral and political complexity. Tolkien’s clichés – elves ‘n’ dwarfs ‘n’ magic rings – have spread like viruses. He wrote that the function of fantasy was ‘consolation’, thereby making it an article of policy that a fantasy writer should mollycoddle the reader.

Assuming Miéville was serious, he seriously misunderstands the word ‘consolation’ in Tolkien The entire text of the speech which Miéville is referring to can be found here. The part which he finds objectionable is probably this:

And lastly there is the oldest and deepest desire, the Great Escape: the Escape from Death. Fairy-stories provide many examples and modes of this—which might be called the genuine escapist, or (I would say) fugitive spirit. But so do other stories (notably those of scientific inspiration), and so do other studies. Fairy-stories are made by men not by fairies. The Human-stories of the elves are doubtless full of the Escape from Deathlessness. But our stories cannot be expected always to rise above our common level. They often do. Few lessons are taught more clearly in them than the burden of that kind of immortality, or rather endless serial living, to which the “fugitive” would fly. For the fairy-story is specially apt to teach such things, of old and still today. Death is the theme that most inspired George MacDonald. But the “consolation” of fairy-tales has another aspect than the imaginative satisfaction of ancient desires. Far more important is the Consolation of the Happy Ending. Almost I would venture to assert that all complete fairy-stories must have it. At least I would say that Tragedy is the true form of Drama, its highest function; but the opposite is true of Fairy-story. Since we do not appear to possess a word that expresses this opposite—I will call it Eucatastrophe. The eucatastrophic tale is the true form of fairy-tale, and its highest function. The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous “turn” (for there is no true end to any fairy-tale): this joy, which is one of the things which fairy-stories can produce supremely well, is not essentially “escapist,” nor “fugitive.” In its fairy-tale—or otherworld—setting, it is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.

First of all this is a comment on fairy-tales not modern fantasy as it came to be known after Tolkien. Second, trying to sum that up as mollycoddling misses the point entirely. Tolkien is deeply influenced by the Norse myths, which celebrate the necessity of the good fight even though you are going to lose. At the end of the LOTR the world is saved, and the elves still leave the world with much of their magic. Frodo got the ring to the fiery pit, and was not strong enough to cast it in. He succeeded in his mission and was so damaged that he could not ultimately stay in the world he wanted to save. “Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.”

LOTR is not structured like a proper novel, important characters not developed, too repetitive, opening too slow, ending too short, great deal of talk, long stretches of no action, Council of Elrond is 15,000 words of a badly chaired committee meeting, including much talk from characters who haven’t been properly introduced to the reader.

The idea that Tolkien was not writing a novel is completely correct. But that is not because he was a poor writer. He was writing a fictional history in the form of historical narratives. An old tradition, much like the oral tradition of hero stories told by bards to use up the long winter nights in unending winter months. Not a novel indeed. But there you are. The badly chaired committee comment is especially silly. Ever read the wills in 18th and 19th century novels? Why are they there?

Now more from Fran Walsh (half of the adapting team for the book-to-film) and (I think it’s Shippey again?) on the oddity of the narrative structure of The Two Towers. As a narrative it’s two books, almost artificially made one.

This almost made me laugh. You know that it really was two book artificially made one by the publishers…right? Or to be completely correct it was six books meant to be considered one codex which was artificially divided into three books by the publisher. But I got caught up in the Tolkien side of things. Miéville is a fun writer. His Remade are fascinating. I really enjoyed Perdido St. Station and Scar. But I’m not sure he has broken very far from the fantasy structures he claims to dislike. His changes are more in setting than anything else.