China Mieville on Tolkien and Epic/High Fantasy

[Umbran]

Just to say that an entertaining, epic story had better have some moral relevance, or it won't be very entertaining OR epic.

Good show here, and I thoroughly agree.

Ideas of "messages" and "meanings" are naive. Literature doesn't "mean" things. It says things. It tells us things, things more than just the events of the story.

Is it naive, or semantics? I'd counter that you cannot "say" a thing unless your words have meaning. You cannot "tell" me something without delivering some message. It need not be the message you intended, but if I don't get a message from you, I'd hardly say you told me anything.

Words without meaning or messages are sound. Noise. Phonic-music. Call it what you will. But if there really is no meaning, then Beowulf is equivalent to you writing down "Gooble dingthor corthollop" and then claiming you told me something.

 

[Atridis]

The industry may be coming up with some innovative settings, but I'll bet that most of the gamers out there are running campaigns that bear more resemblence to Middle Earth than anything else.

Well, of course much of D&D is straight out of Middle Earth, so to a certain extent it's unavoidable. But otherwise, I'd be inclined to bet against you on that. The magic system, for one thing, bears no resemblance to Tolkien's, and many of what I see as typical "D&D-isms" aren't to be found in the LOTR. My own campaign, and general style of play, owes far more to Mieville, "Thieves' World" and Gibson than to Tolkien.

More on the topic, though: I once heard a priest on the radio, I forget which denomination he was, who said that Tolkien's stories strongly reflect Christian values. I'm not Christian, so I have no idea if this is true, but I thought it was interesting. If it is true, it suggests that D&D has strayed badly from the core ethos of its own greatest inspiration. And that's without even trying to address all the Christians over the years who have bashed D&D on specifically religious grounds.

Myself, I enjoyed Meiville's books in part because they were so un-Tolkien-like, and because they didn't adhere to a genre. I find the scifi-v-fantasy debate itself limiting, forcing those who take part to think along rigid lines. I was a little disappointed that he wrote this essay at all, because I had assumed that he was somewhat above the fray.

 

[Olive]

It had wealthy families who owned a lot of land. This is a hierarchy? Simple elements of traditional polite deference in friendly business relationships (the Frodo-Sam "master-servant" thing) don't constitute a "hierarchy" to me.

Taditional polite deffernce? you must be reading a different book. But regardless the whole thing is about returning 'rightful' heirarchies to power over 'bad' heirarchies. The last book is called the return of the king for ghod's sake.

Regardless, here's dictionary.com's first 2 definitions of heirarchy:

1. A body of persons having authority.

2. a) Categorization of a group of people according to ability or status.
b) The group so categorized.

Feudalism is herarchical. The main relationships in Tolkein are feudal. Nice and fair heirarchy is still a heirarchy. All Meville is saying is that the books are based upon the elevation of a heirarchy, as opposed to a more democratic tradition. He doesn't like that. I don't care myself, but I don't feel the need to say it doesn't exist simply because I like Tolkein.

It was the Great War (World War I) in which Tolkien served in the trenches, though he may have lost a son in World War II, and may have been in England during the Blitz. As to education - well, Mieville's writing is well-executed technically, but I don't think I'd consider any modern liberal-arts education comparable to what you could get from Oxford in its glory days, which is what Tolkien had. Nor is the young Mieville's education yet leavened by the years of life experience Tolkien had before writing LotR.

My thesis is on "Representations of Race in the British Media of the Great War" so I know what the Great war is. My mistake about which war he served in tho. Personally I'd consider most liberal arts educations as being better than the classical hidebound tradition of 'glory days' Oxford, but there you go.

As the old saying goes, "Art with a message is not art - it is propaganda." There's a reason MGM's logo contains the words ars gratia artis - art for art's sake.

I thinkt he point is that Tolkein has a message. Intentional maybe not but if Tolkein didn't realise that he was evoking certain cultural and societal norms then he was showing a remarkable lack of self-perception. That'sa ll I mean by message.

There is really nothing more to discuss. I believe Tolkien told a tale because he liked to tell tales. Either you like his story or you don't.

I DO LIKE TOLKEIN!!! How many times do I have to say it! I just thinkt hat every thing that Meiville says about it is correct. I like the psuedo Wagnarian pomposity and the war stuff.

Tolkien based alot of his world on Norse Myth. He is faithful to the material while adding more than a touch of originality. This debate is pointless and Tolkien's work is criticized because it is the most popular. If his work had done nothing and fallen into obscurity, then I guess pseudo-intellectuals like China wouldn't have anything to rail against.

Of course it's being discussed because it's popular. So, interestingly enough is (though obviously not on Tolkein's level) Philip Pullman who Meiville regards as one of the best fantesy writers ever.

If it was obscure none of us would be discussing it.

Just for the record, I think that Gibson and Meiville have vey little in common, except that they are both urban and have unfamiliar tech. Cthulhu's Librarian described the things that Meiville evokes for me as well.

Interestingly enough, I've never seen any writer evoke the level of passion and debateabout his work that Meiville does from fantasy/sci fi fans, except probably Tolkein.

And one more time for the hope someone will notice: I LIKE TOLKEIN AS A WRITER!!!

 

[barsoomcore]

Is it naive, or semantics? I'd counter that you cannot "say" a thing unless your words have meaning.

snip

Words without meaning or messages are sound. Noise. Phonic-music. Call it what you will. But if there really is no meaning, then Beowulf is equivalent to you writing down "Gooble dingthor corthollop" and then claiming you told me something.

Well, yeah, okay. But there's a big difference between claiming that the words Beowulf is built out of have meaning (which I'm more than prepared to say they do), and claiming that Beowulf itself means some particular thing. It doesn't, and any claims that it does are at best naive.

Disproving me should be simple, if I'm wrong. State the meaning of Beowulf.

The very idea seems absurd, doesn't it? The idea of saying, "Beowulf means such and such," is patently nonsense. Beowulf does no such thing. Or at least, Beowulf doesn't ONLY do such a thing. Would anybody seriously entertain the possibility that one could conceivable come to an end of the debate on what the meaning of Beowulf is? That at some point, some Medieval Studies professor is going to jump up and cry, "My goodness! It's so obvious! Beowulf means XXX!" and that will be an end to the debate?

The fact that we endlessly debate what these things mean indicates that they don't in fact mean anything that we can usefully define. They tell us stuff, they hint at things and offer parallels to things, but they don't deliver an unambiguous message that we can neatly sum up and thus contain the entire power of the work itself.

I am not, as you seem to think, arguing that meaning is impossible in a general, semantic sense. I am arguing that art does not offer meaning -- that it offers thought, investigation, and points of view. It offers theories, asks questions and maybe even provides explanations -- but it does not mean.

 

[barsoomcore]

Hey Olive, how come you hate Tolkien so much? Give the guy a break, why don't you?

 

[Aaron L]

Actually, Tolkein wrote his story so he could have a place for his constructed languages. The Lord of the Rings is a vehicle for Quenya and Sindarin. He also wanted to make something to fill the place of an English national legend following the model of a Norse epic.

 

[Umbran]

Disproving me should be simple, if I'm wrong. State the meaning of Beowulf.

The very idea seems absurd, doesn't it?

Yes, but not for the reason you suggest. You now seem to contend that the thing is binary. Either the work has absolutely no meaning, or it has one unique, clear, and unambiguous meaning. That completely ignores the possibility that the work can have many meanings - some placed there intentionally by the author, some placed unintentionally by the author, and some read into it by the reader.

Humans are not computers, and our literature is not in C++. We have text and subtext. We have denotation and connotation. We have interpretation and implication without direct statement. Our language is ambiguous. But that doesn't result in our literature having no meaning. It instead results in our literature having multiple meanings.

 

[Desdichado]

Of course Tolkien doesn't have "meaning." But there are several messages that ring through quite strongly. The importance of blood (ancestry), the value of heroism and sacrifice, the importance of loyalty and friendship (or the master servant relationship; however you want to interpret that exactly), the nature of evil.

Despite your ability to latch on to one phrase in the forward, those messages don't go away. In fact, Tolkien himself explores them to some detail in the History of Middle-earth papers, in part giving the lie to his own statement of lack of meaning or message.

 

[Olive]

Hey Olive, how come you hate Tolkien so much? Give the guy a break, why don't you?

I think it's his fans that turn me off him...

 

[Tratyn Runewind]

Hi again,

Posted by barsoomcore:
I've said it before and I'll say it again: Steven Brust. Brust is doing more daring, more innovative things with the fantasy genre than a hundred China Mievilles. He's actually pushing at the boundaries of what is or isn't fantastic fiction.

Haven't read any Brust myself, alas, but I'll throw Tim Powers' name into the discussion at this point. I don't know that I'd say he's pushing fantasy boundaries, but he certainly is blurring them in interesting ways with other branches of genre fiction. It's certainly debatable whether much of his stuff is "fantasy" at all. "Weird Fiction" is actually a pretty good tag for his blends. He seems to have a better handle on his ideas than Mieville did in Perdido Street Station, he does his homework, and he's a competent artist and technician with the English language.

Posted by Cthulhu's Librarian:
I wouldn't compare him to Gibson, he doesn't even come to mind for me.

Since I've also compared Mieville to Gibson, I'll just say here that the writing style of Perdido Street Station reminded me of The Difference Engine and the attitude reminded me of the "Sprawl" stuff.

Posted by Olive:
Regardless, here's dictionary.com's first 2 definitions of heirarchy:

1. A body of persons having authority.

2. a) Categorization of a group of people according to ability or status.
b) The group so categorized.

Such broad definitions of "hierarchy" given would take in Frodo and Sam's master-servant interaction, but they'd also encompass pretty much any form of government or leadership, democratic or not. Does anyone think Tolkien's nations should have been leaderless? I doubt even Mieville believes that. That would have been even less believable than the elves, dwarves, and magic.

Posted by Olive:
Feudalism is herarchical. The main relationships in Tolkein are feudal. Nice and fair heirarchy is still a heirarchy. All Meville is saying is that the books are based upon the elevation of a heirarchy, as opposed to a more democratic tradition.

I'd call the leadership of Tolkien's heroic nations far more tribal than feudal. The Rohirrim are explicitly a barbaric tribe, and the leadership of the Dunedain is about the same, except with a few more generations between Aragorn and Beren and the other tribal chiefs of the Edain. Of the major marks of feudalism, land tenure for regular military service is implicit at most, and serfs bound to the land are nowhere to be seen.

Posted by Olive:
I DO LIKE TOLKEIN!!! How many times do I have to say it!

I believe you. I actually didn't outright dislike Perdido Street Station, though my previous description of it was far from a ringing endorsement. It was vastly overhyped, though that can hardly be blamed entirely on the author. Mostly I was frustrated with it, since Mieville's skill with the language strongly indicates that he could have done a better job with his ideas - instead, we get a very "hey, this sounds cool, let's throw it in the mix" hodgepodge worthy of August Derleth. And the self-consciously cutting-edge-hip attitude, subtle as he is with it at times, starts to grate very quickly when half or more of the oh-so-cool concepts are ones I (and probably millions of other gamers) have seen around in one form or another for years.

Posted by Umbran:
You now seem to contend that the thing is binary. Either the work has absolutely no meaning, or it has one unique, clear, and unambiguous meaning.
[...snip...]
Humans are not computers, and our literature is not in C++.

Somehow this makes me wonder how much C++ programming you've done...especially dealing with virtual functions in code written by other people...

For now, I'll finish up with Tolkien's likely reaction to Mieville's article, taken again from the Foreword to LotR:

"Some who have read the book, or at any rate have reviewed it, have found it boring, absurd, or contemptible; and I have no cause to complain, since I have similar opinions of their works, or of the kinds of writing they evidently prefer."

Hope this helps!