Moorcock blasts Tolkien

[Ripzerai]

Moorcock subsequently mellowed about Tolkien quite a bit, including him in his list of 100 best fantasy books (though not near the top). His "Epic Pooh" was more a personal manifesto than anything else; his own writing and particularly his work as an editor tends to be very political, and he tended, especially when he was younger, to judge other works based on their politics.

Note, however, that I haven't bothered to read this thread, as I'm so fervently in Moorcock's camp on this one (I didn't like Lord of the Rings, but I love Moorcock's stuff) that I'd probably be needlessly argumentative.

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

Comments like this:

Moorcock accuses these authors of espousing a form of "corrupted Romance", which he identifies with Anglican Toryism.

are what turned me off to studying literature (that and four years of honors English). I mean, so what? As far as I'm concerned, I either enjoy the story and writing style, or I don't. I give a rat's rear end about the political leanings of the author or the sub-sub-genre of a writing style. Moorcock, IMO, could better have used his 500 words starting another Elric story.

 

[comrade raoul]

One has to separate the issues at hand.

First, it's really important to leave Moorcock's abilities as a writer aside when criticizing his arguments. You don't have to be able to write good novels to say important and insightful things about literature; nor do you have to be a capable literary critic to be an excellent novelist. That's like saying you have to know a lot about human physiology to be an excellent runner. I mean, everyone has a few favorite examples of people who are really good at both (mine is probably A. S. Byatt), and one certainly might help with the other, but the vast majority of excellent critics do not write fiction, and vice versa.

Seriously, even if we assume he's right, why would it be bad that works are different from each other? If every book was intended solely to be "challenging" (or solely "comforting" or solely anything else), literature would be awfully boring.

I think a more charitable interpretation of Moorcock might be that comforting books aren't necessarily bad, at all, and there's nothing wrong with enjoying comforting books once in a while. It's only a problem if we hold up the comforting books as great literature--remember the statistic that The Lord of the Rings are the popular choice for the greatest work of twentieth-century literature--and don't even try to challenge ourselves. (And it's also the case that Moorcock's claim about Tolkien's books--that they're primitive and stultifying in philosophical and literary terms--is completely compatible with their also being amazing achievements in world-building and, to some extent, wonderful exercises for the imagination.)

Note too that this claim is logically independent of (although related to) the other claims that Moorcock makes--that the Tolkien books are really badly written, and that their implicit politics are reactionary in a very harmful way.

 

[taliesin15]

I do agree with Moorcock's macro-point that too much fantasy fiction is safe and predictable and is mostly a bad regurgitation of better works. QUOTE]
that's another reason I recommend Frye's Secular Scripture (and Bloom for that matter) on Tolkien--Frye points out, quite rightly, that Tolkien is working within a particular tradition

in any case, this thread is pretty pointless to me--we'd be much more productive here discussing some authors hardly anyone brings up--anyone out there read the works of John Crowley? Or how about Keith Roberts? Roberts' novel Pavane is one of the great works of the fantasy genre.

 

[JohnSnow]

Tolkien puts forward a racist Victorian worldview in his books with which I disagree. But his romantic attachment to premodern lifeways is not exclusive to racist Victorians;

This is PC crap. People are always pointing out the racial or sexual characteristics of heroes or villains and drawing conclusions about the author's own racism, sexism, or lack thereof.

"In Tolkien's books, the good guys are white, and the bad guys are dark, so he must be a racist!"
"There are no strong female characters, so he must be a sexist."
"Frodo and Sam are too friendly. Tolkien must have been gay."

Ad absurdum. PLEASE!!! You're seeing what you choose to see. That's all.

This is as absurd as the guy in Chasing Amy casting the "racist" epithet at Star Wars because Darth Vader represented "black power" until he was revealed to be an old white man. Or the people who heard the bad Count Dracula accents on aliens in Phantom Menace and decided it was in some way "anti-Asian." If you see those accents as Asian, that's YOUR problem.

It's almost as ridiculous as the people who attacked Peter Jackson claiming he was capitalizing on the Trade Center attacks by naming the second LotR movie The Two Towers. People just need to get a clue and stop trying to read so much agenda into everything.

Sheesh.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

The story is...well...there's only so many stories to tell.

I know this is an English 101 cliche, and I've certainly been hearing it since high school English at the very least, but I think it's bunk, unless we reduce the plots to an absurd degree, which, of course, is the whole basis of literary criticism, one could argue.

As an aside, you're aware the "good parts" thing is something Goldman made up out of whole cloth, right?

Please avoid the temptation to get condescending.

But the problem is you're criticizing his style because it's not what you would do. You call his choices self-indulgent and momentum-killing, but to say that it's "inarguable" is, absurd.

And so are the people on this thread who are saying his style is clearly good because people have ripped off his plots and world-building for years. (Although notably, no one's tripping over themselves to rip off his style.)

You can choose not to enjoy Tolkien's style, but to argue it should have been different is to make it a different book by a different author. If you don't like it, fine, that's your right. But it's awfully presumptuous of you to make claims about how books "ought" to be written.

And vice-versa on all the folks holding it up as a paragon work, both on this thread and countless others here on ENWorld.

But honestly, authors have survived readers and critics saying how books "ought" to be for years. I suspect we could find 100 examples of that on threads here about D20 books on the first page of the main General board alone.

If JRRT could survive Rankin/Bass and Ralph Bakshi, he can survive me thinking his book is too flabby.

 

[Mark Hope]

Finally, to address one thing Mark said:

But simply by writing the essay, he was drawing attention to himself. Saying, basically, "Look at what I have to say" and, oh, by the way, I'm a writer too. I can't blame him for it, but I'm sure he wasn't oblivious to the buzz the article would generate. And the resulting potential interest in his works liable to come out of it.

Not to say he didn't agree with it, but being controversial IS usually a good way to get people's attention.

I see what you are saying here, and there is no real way to know if Moorcock was being controversial to court attention. Of course the publication of the essay draws attention to his other works, but that is a truism and I don't see how you can convincingly argue that any publication is designed to have that as its primary effect.

That assertion is rendered even less likely when you consider the fact that, by 1978, Moorcock had already won eight prestigious awards for his writing (including the Nebula award, British Fantasy award, Guardian fiction award and 4 August Derleth Awards). So I doubt that he needed to rely upon something like Epic Pooh to garner additional attention. Don't forget that Epic Pooh was initially only released as a pamphlet and didn't enjoy widespread circulation - hardly the kind of choice of publication that you would make if you are attempting to court publicity through controversy. In fact, it wasn't until 9 years later that the essay was released as part of a the Wizardry and Wild Romance collection.

Again, I do see the point that you are trying to make, but I don't feel that it is supported by the facts of the essay's publication, or Moorcock's own career achievements to date.

 

[comrade raoul]

If JRRT could survive Rankin/Bass and Ralph Bakshi, he can survive me thinking his book is too flabby.

[size=-2](I really loved those Rankin/Bass movies.)[/size]

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Or the people who heard the bad Count Dracula accents on aliens in Phantom Menace and decided it was in some way "anti-Asian." If you see those accents as Asian, that's YOUR problem.

Yeah, because it's impossible that someone who created something we loved as children could turn out to make some really strange artistic choices later on, including using ridiculous caricature voices for multiple characters including, most infamously, Jar-Jar Binks.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

[size=-2](I really loved those Rankin/Bass movies.)[/size]

At least you're properly ashamed of it.

Actually, I love, love, love John Huston as Gandalf and that was my biggest hurdle to overcome with the Peter Jackson movies. But watching the Hobbit on DVD today, I cringe at some of the shortcuts they used in production, like the "ZOOOOOOOM IN on a still picture" technique for combat.

Hell, I even like "The Greatest Adventure" song and would buy it from iTunes, were it available.

(I know people will stone me for that.)