(urth) the problem with gaiman, mieville, and pullman

[Lisa Schaffer-Doggett]

On Tuesday, November 30, 2004, at 10:53 AM, Eric Mattingly wrote:

> Hi.  I am new to this site.  This discussion interests me and I will 
> toss in my own "two cents" (as the kids are saying these days).
>
> Harold Bloom spends a lot of time discussing the intertextual "agons" 
> or battles of artistic superiority that each writer must undergo.  I 
> think his theory is more or less obtuse depending on the author, but I 
> think that we can see something by the Bloomian book here with 
> Mieville, Gaiman, Pullman, etc.
>
> In my own opinion, Pullman is the best author of the three.  Gaiman is 
> a good, though undistinguished, author, and (again, in my opinion) 
> Mieville is little more than a slightly above average hack attempting 
> something out of his depth.  In all three of these, however, one can 
> find an impassioned-- even embittered-- agon with Tolkien and Lewis, 
> especially Tolkien.  It is the old Freudian story of the sons 
> murdering the father in order to possess the mother and limit his 
> influence (i.e. Totem and Taboo).  The irony is that they fail on both 
> counts and make even stronger (though now with a neurotic dimension) 
> the influence Tolkien has over them.  I agree with Turin that we 
> cannot over-psychoanalyze an author based on their work, but maybe an 
> author's commentary on other works is fair game.
>
> Now, to aid in the desperate struggle of bringing Wolfe back into 
> this.  Wolfe freely admits love and admiration for his precursor but, 
> in the end, provides the strongest agon against him possible-- he 
> moves speculative (for want of a better word) fiction into the realm 
> of genuine mythical and psychological conflict.  And, I would argue, 
> in the end swallows up his precursors (Tolkien, of course, but Lewis 
> too among others) and displaces them.  That is of course contingent 
> upon whether or not you consider Wolfe the best sci-fi and fantasy 
> writer (which I do).  The three writers in question do not, I believe, 
> have any hope of surviving an agon with Wolfe.  Pullman is cool, 
> though.  Only he has the potential to survive the agon with Tolkien 
> and Lewis (though HDM does not, in the end because of its ending).
>

Don (who's still a kid I suppose) tosses in his coppers:

I like this a lot.  Ahab vs the white whale.  Quinn vs the shark.  
Maybe they should've stayed on shore and opened a bait shop. . .  I 
mean there's a reason the stories are called by the name of the 
behemoths and not by their stalkers.