The point of Grin's article was to argue that the fantasy genre, or at least the subgenres of High Fantasy and Sword-and-Sorcery, is in decline. From its birth in the writings of J.R.R. Tolkien and Robert E. Howard through its hey day with the game Dungeons & Dragons and movies like Excalibur, Clash of the Titans, and Conan the Barbarian, Grin's opinion is that the genre has lost its mojo.
Whereas Grin had fallen for
the elevated prose poetry, mythopoeic subcreation, and thematic richness that only the best fantasy achieves, and that echoes in important particulars the myths and fables of old.he now finds that
The mere trappings of the genre do nothing for me when wedded to the now-ubiquitous interminable soap-opera plots (a conservative friend of mine once accurately derided “fat fantasy” cycles such as Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time as “Lord of the Rings 90210″). Nor do they impress me in the least when placed into the hands of writers clearly bored with the classic mythic undertones of the genre, and who try to shake things up with what can best be described as postmodern blasphemies against our mythic heritage.Grin reserved special scorn for the work of Joe Abercrombie, an author I quite admire (although with some reservations). Writes Grin:
Take the latest novel by popular Brit author Joe Abercrombie (b. 1974), who regularly hits the UK bestseller lists with his self-described “edgy yet humorous un-heroic fantasy.” ... “Abercrombie takes the grand tradition of high fantasy, and drags it down into the gutter, in the best possible way,” gushed Time magazine about Best Served Cold, his previous book.I had problems with the ending of the First Law trilogy, too. But I loved the grittiness and the fact that the characters behaved like, well, "real people" with real weaknesses and real limitations. (Abercrombie's own thoughts on Grin are available on his blog).
Alas, I haven’t read it — Abercrombie’s freshman effort, the massive First Law trilogy (The Blade Itself, Before They Were Hanged, and Last Argument of Kings) was more than enough for me. Endless scenes of torture, treachery and bloodshed drenched in scatology and profanity concluded with a resolution worthy of M. Night Shyamalan at his worst, one that did its best to hurt, disappoint, and dishearten any lover of myths and their timeless truths. Think of a Lord of the Rings where, after stringing you along for thousands of pages, all of the hobbits end up dying of cancer contracted by their proximity to the Ring, Aragorn is revealed to be a buffoonish puppet-king of no honor and false might, and Gandalf no sooner celebrates the defeat of Sauron than he executes a long-held plot to become the new Dark Lord of Middle-earth, and you have some idea of what to expect should you descend into Abercrombie’s jaded literary sewer.
On various blogs you can find critics raving about this mythic bait-and-switch. “Gritty, violent, morally ambiguous and darkly funny fantasy with a streak of intelligent cynicism,” says Adam Whitehead of The Wertzone. “Dark, almost nihilistic, yet shot through with black humour,” writes Simon Appleby at Book Geeks, adding approvingly that, “[Abercrombie] writes about ordinary people thrust in to extraordinary situations who seldom, if ever, acquit themselves heroically.”
Grin has some choice words for Matthew Woodring Stover, Steven Erikson, and Michael Swanwick. For example:
The latest entry in Steven Erikson’s ten-volume Malazan Book of the Fallen, a series running many thousands of pages, is described by one exhausted fan as “pointlessly depressing. . . a lot of death that seems purely random and serving no purpose at all.” “Despair and fatalism dominate,” confirms another reader. (For those who haven’t gotten enough, Erikson recently announced that, with the help of another writer, he will now be expanding his opus from ten volumes to twenty-two — assuming both he and his fans live that long.)I have a lot of problems with Erikson and likely won't be tempted to finish the series (I stopped after three books, I think). But the occurrence of random and depressing deaths of major characters was not one of them. In fact, the willingness of these authors to confront the nasty dirty business of war provides, in my opinion, an important counterpoint to the glorifying and romanticization of warfare that has been a staple of the fantasy genre.
What amazes me is the level of affront claimed by Grin:
The other side thinks that their stuff is, at long last, turning the genre into something more original, thoughtful, and ultimately palatable to intelligent, mature audiences. They and their fans are welcome to that opinion. For my part — and I think Tolkien and Howard would have heartily agreed — I think they’ve done little more than become cheap purveyors of civilizational graffiti.Grin then resorts to reminding the reader that Tolkien wrote from the experience of warfare:
Soiling the building blocks and well-known tropes of our treasured modern myths is no different than other artists taking a crucifix and dipping it in urine, covering it in ants, or smearing it with feces. In the end, it’s just another small, pathetic chapter in the decades-long slide of Western civilization into suicidal self-loathing. It’s a well-worn road: bored middle-class creatives (almost all of them college-educated liberals) living lives devoid of any greater purpose inevitably reach out for anything deemed sacred by the conservatives populating any artistic field. They co-opt the language, the plots, the characters, the cliches, the marketing, and proceed to deconstruct it all like a mad doctor performing an autopsy. Then, using cynicism, profanity, scatology, dark humor, and nihilism, they put it back together into a Frankenstein’s monster designed to shock, outrage, offend, and dishearten.
In the case of the fantasy genre, the result is a mockery and defilement of the mythopoeic splendor that true artists like Tolkien and Howard willed into being with their life’s blood. Honor is replaced with debasement, romance with filth, glory with defeat, and hope with despair. Edgy? Nah, just punk kids farting in class and getting some giggles from the other mouth-breathers.
It’s quite rich to see many of the guys writing fantasy today being praised for (to once again quote Publisher’s Weekly talking about Joe Abercrombie) successfully exposing the “madness, passion, and horror of war.” How soon we forget that some of the early work of J.R.R. Tolkien — the man who pioneered the selfsame High Fantasy now being dragged “down into the gutter” to make it suitably “edgy” — was penned while he sat in the trenches of World War I, even while most his closest friends were being killed. Tolkien later wrote the a sizable amount of The Lord of the Rings during the Second World War, while worrying about two of his sons as they headed off to do their part.Perhaps he did. But it did not come across in his writing. One rather suspects that Tolkien felt no need to revisit these horrors in his writing; his books were his escape from horror. The mistake is ours to think that Tolkien's caricatures are are literal representation of his wartime experience.
Call me humorless, call me old-fashioned, but I daresay the good professor had a much better idea of war and heroes than the nihilistic jokesters writing modern fantasy.
John C. Wright, also in an older post recently linked to, Postmodern Blasphemies against Myth, agrees with my analysis while supporting Grin:
Tolkien’s work was such an unparalleled success, in my opinion, precisely because of the cynical nihilism so popular in Europe between the wars and in America after: in the Twentieth Century all trace of the fantastic and supernal had been successfully erased from literature. In rebellion, the younger generation of lovable yet stinking hippies joined hands with their grandfather’s world of Roman Catholic old-school conservatism, the conservatism of that type that seeks conservation: because both rejected the fundamental falsehood and ugliness of a world both godless, drained of magic, paved, and industrialized. It was an odd and original alliance, as odd an original as Tolkien’s work itself.We disagree in the implications: I see Tolkien as an inevitable over-correction to the horrors of war; Wright sees a return to the proper way of things. As he writes:
Mr. Leo Grin in his essay makes clear that he upholds the right of those who adore such degraded things to write and read their chosen poison. He is more generous than I. It is my judgment, shared of many ancients, that there are certain proper emotional reactions and relations one ought to have, and improper ones one ought not. A child raised to curse and despise his parents, trample the crucifix, burn the flag, abhor kittens and Christmas scenes and motherhood but adore torture porn and satanism and deformity, that child’s tastes are objectively perverse and false-to-facts. He has been trained to spew his mother’s milk and drink venom. Fair to him is foul, and foul is fair. In the same way that to say A is not-A is an offense against logic, to hate the lovely and love the hateful is an offense against aesthetics, a disconnection from reality.I do share Wright's disdain for what I would describe as "secretly subversive" authors; that is, authors who write as though part of a given genre tradition only to dramatically depart from that tradition in the conclusion of the book. In my opinion, if you want to be subversive, you should be open about it in order to be fair to the reader.
However, I did wade through the unsanitary sewage of Mr. Michael Swanwick’s IRON DRAGON’S DAUGHTER for about half the book, before realizing than Mr. Swanwick was having a joke at my expense, and at the expense of all his readers, and a rather dark and bitter joke at that.The analogy to the book and movie versions of Starship Troopers is a fitting way to summarize my disagreement with Wright. Whereas I agree with Wright that the movie version betrayed the book version, I saw plenty of merit in it as an alternative work of art. I feel the same way about both traditional epic fantasy and the trend towards dirty and gritty modern fantasy, as long as the modern version is open about its intentions.
Stated as a ratio, IRON DRAGON’S DAUGHTER is to honest fairy stories with real magic to them as the movie version of STARSHIP TROOPERS is to that novel of the same name: an elaborate and obsessive long-drawn-out paean of hatred and contempt of a cramped and unlit soul crouched in a fen or cave against the sunny upland glades of some larger and more glorious thing he can neither understand nor adore: a harpy excreting the excess of diseased bowels on festal delicacies her digestion cannot accept, and elfin wines her tongue not savor.
No comments:
Post a Comment