(urth) Re: urth-urth.net Digest, Vol 3, Issue 8

[Dan'l Danehy-Oakes]

> <(Gee ... I hope you're male under that name...)
> 
> What if I'm a girl?  
[...]
> I do think bodies are important, but in text we are genderless.

Ah. Well, gender doesn't _generally_ matter in text - my parenthetical
remark  was a sort of grammatical joke. I'd just greeted you with a 
"Bravo! Bravissimo!" and if you were female, "Brava! Bravissima!" 
would have been the correct form. Nothing more, honest; no intent
that the Urth list should be a "he-man woman hater's club" or any
such - that would exclude a few of our most valued contributors.


> I can't remember but I don't think Gaiman wrote an article on
> Lewis but he talks about him at length (for Gaiman) in the live
> journal, which I read for about a year when American Gods
> came out and when I decided that Gaiman really wasn't a very
> good novelist. 

I'll have to go check out his webjournal - I hope that bit is still
on line. And I agree that NG is not a "very good" novelist - he
has written some good prose fiction but he's very uneven, and
he's too busy avoiding commitment to anything in a sort of 
postpostmodern-ironic way for my taste.


[...]

> <That much is clearly true. In fact, there are times when he comes
> <parlously close to Poughkeepsie, to borrow Le Guin's trope.
> 
> What is poughkeepsie??? 

A town in New York where (if I recall correctly) IBM has or used to
have its main offices or somesuch. Le Guin wrote an essay back
in the '70s called "From Elfland to Poughkeepsie," in which she
basically trashed Katherine Kurtz's "Deryni" novels as an example
of commercial "fantasy" that wasn't really fantasy - basically on the
grounds that, though there was magic and whatnot, the concerns
of the plot and characters was fundamentally mundane, and the
book could as easily have taken place in Poughkeepsie as in a
fantasy world. For a number of fantasy fans and critics, as a 
result of this essay, "Poughkeepsie" has come to be something of
a shorthand for mundane pseudo-fantasy, especially of a kind 
that concentrates heavily on political pragmatism.


> Le Guin is a very interesting person with a very interesting family
> history.

... yes, and?


> I'm kind of repeating myself, butt... I do think military sci-fi is very
> conservative, a lot of it is also Cold War. 

Grin. Absolutely. And that's because almost all of it is written by
people who grew up thinking that _Starship Trooper_ was just
the very bestest book ever written - people like J*rr* P**n*ll* and 
D*v*d Dr*k* and so on.


> And yes sci-fi does have a big conservative vein, but I dont think
> it dominates the genre or that Christian writers should just be
> labeled conservative in the fundamentalist, spooky way American
> like to define conservative now,

That drives me absolutely batshit. These people are _not_
conservatives; they are "neoconservatives," followers of a radical
political programme (laid out by the "New American Century"
document, our own homegorwn _Mein Kampf_) and standing in
almost diametrical opposition to the great conservative tradition.

Grumble, growl.

> which has nothing to do with small government or tight budgets,
> even for the Republicans.  

(I'd like to give the Republicans a tight budget.)

[...]

> I can't remember if Wolfe was in a war 

Korea.

> but I think he was in the military, and Tolkien was at the Somme,
> and most of his friends died in the war.  I think that informs his
> work more than anything, with his relationship with his wife a
> close second.

I'd put these third and fourth, after his linguistic obsessions and
his desire for a "truly British" mythology. Also somewhere in the
mix is his Catholicism, possibly even before his relationship with
his "Luthien."

> I don't want to get into a long discussion on what allegory is, but
> I think it is unavoidable.  My idea of allegory is very limited, it
> must be didactic, 100% translatable into an ideology, and
> ultimately robs the narrative as being able to take place in a
> possible world.  That is, it steals the story from the text.

H'mmm. I think that's too limiting; it seems to me that both the 
Narnia books and Tolkien's own "Leaf by Niggle" are both quite
clearly allegorical. (One could I suppose argue that neither 
Narnia nor the world in which "LbN" takes place are "possible,"
but I think that's limiting "possibility" far too much.)

> I don't think Spenser cared very much about story in the Faerie
> Queene. I think Tolkien cared more about story than Lewis. But
> I think story is entangled with how much you *believe* in the
> construction, how much complexity you assign it. 

This, and the rest of the paragraph (which I'm cutting for brevity),
seems to me to suggest that "story" to you is primarily a matter of
world-building? Whereas to me it is a matter of relating events 
that matter to the audient (whether reader, listener, or viewer).
The most common, but not the only, way of making them matter is
by narrating them through the eyes of _characters_ who matter to
the audient, and having the events matter to those characters.

Worldbuilding is fascinating in its own right. It places the 
characters and events in a context in which they can matter -
but (again) that's not the only way to do it. Classic fairy-stories
like "Red Riding Hood" and "Cinderella" take place in a world
that's so generic it hardly exists at all; their events matter to
the audient (if they do) because the audient is able to identify
to some extent with the character. In this case, the vagueness 
of the world-construct is actually a help - it has allowed the 
stories to remain accessible to audients in a wide variety of 
cultural matrices (though not all), rather the way a more 
abstract and "cartoony" style of rendering often makes it
easier for audients to identify with characters in comics and
animation.

(Incidentally, your comment that "In this sense all known 
worlds are virtual worlds" strikes me as very close to what I 
most dislike in postmodernism, its willful rejection of the 
concept of _reality_.)

I certainly agree with your point about Tolkien and nonhuman
persons ... he seemed to be hungry for contact with something
other-than-human. (If he'd been born a bit later and a bit less
intelligent I suspect he might have made a good UFO cultist.)


> I think Tolkien did think about the socio-political though not as
> much the economic situation in Middle-Earth during the Third
> Age in depth. 

H'mmm. I think I agree here; the problem is that people seem to
accuse him of giving _no_ thought to the economics of Middle-
earth, and that's blatantly false. There are farms, merchants, and
so on sneaking around the edges of the War of the Ring. 

It's truer of the _Silmarillion_, I must admit, but the _S_ is written
on a stylistically elevated level where I wouldn't really expect 
economics to enter the picture - or perhaps it does, but Elvish
economics are so alien that we can't recognize them? (It's hard
to imagine Elves farming!)

Your point about the similarity of "Sauron's human soldiers," to

> Zulus, English privateers, Indians (of India), and Mongols

has some merit, but is I suspect less a deliberate analogy or
allegory than simply a failure of Tolkien's imagination (horrible 
though this is to say) to exceed the ethnoracial stereotypes he'd 
absorbed in the boy's books of writers like Wilkie Collins as, 
well, a boy. 

> ... just as the Quenya language was supposed to be to a certain
> degree an imaginary reconstruction of Indo-european. 

Ummm, no, not really. Quenya and Sindarin were patterned after
Finnish and Welsh, though I can never seem to remember which 
was which. It is the root language for all the Elvish and High Human
(i.e., Numenorian and related) tongues of Middle-earth. As such it
bears a relationship to those tongues similar to that which the
hypothesized and hypostasized Indo-European tongue that so 
fascinated philologists of Tolkien's generation must bear to the
modern languages of the I-E family - except, of course, that 
Quenya was still a living spoken language among the Eldar 
of Middle-earth, and the Elves and Ainur of the True West. 

> Tolkien is not a luddite though, in several essays he distinguishes
> between two "magics" which also apply to culture and technology,

Tolkien's distinction reflects  the medieval (and Catholic) distinction 
between _magia_ and _goetia_, one of which was the summoning 
and binding of demonic  (or other spiritual) entities to gain power, 
while the other, which would include such studies as astrology and
alchemy, was the manipulation of natural "influences" to achieve
desirable results. The one was inherently evil; the other was good
or evil depending on the results sought and the means used.

> Art and the Machine, and I don't know what else to call magic
> but benign technology which works with rather than against natural
> forms. 

Pretty much, yeah. And you know that Saruman has really fallen
because he's stepped beyond this, from magic into sorcery, so to
speak, in his desire for power (reified in the Ring and in his evil
con/de/structions).

Comments on _Perdido Street Station_ skipped; I would have to 
reread the damn thin to really follow them, and I'm not prepared to 
do so at this time.

> I dont know if I want to read anymore of his work, not because of
> his ideology, but just how heterogenous and manic his style is of
> writing is.  

Oh my goodness, yes. 

> I think he might be churning out books too quickly.  I am biased
> towards books that take longer to write, but I dont think that's always
> the case, but for instead.  Wolfe is an exception for me. So far Ive
> liked everything Ive read, and he is very prolific. 

Well, it helps to keep in mind that he's been publishing for over 
thirty years now. He seems to average about a book a year, plus
short stories; but he also writes full-time, and definitely takes the
time to do multiple, careful drafts of his work. 

> Some people can get away with it I guess. He is a very patient
> writer, and I like writing that is subtle and restrained and often
> leaves out the most dramatic bits.  That is a convention of
> romance, of obscuring the most important parts, because they
> are inexpressable.

Yes, I agree - it's something that (for example) Cabell did a
great deal. And both Cabell and Wolfe occasionally go just
a bit too far for my taste, refusing to narrate key points of the
narrative - but for very different reasons. Cabell, for example,
seems to have avoided a description of Dom Manuel's 
"blasphemous communion" precisely because it would have
been unpublishable under the Comstock laws that were in 
effect when he wrote. Wolfe seems to be censoring what his
narrators cannot bear to look at.

--Dan'l 

-- 
www.livejournal.com/users/sturgeonslawyer
"Saddam would still be in power if he were the President
of the United States, and the world would be a lot better off."
     -- The Forty-Third President, 10/8/04