Black Gate

Literary traditions are useful things. They’re constructions of literary critics, sure, but useful constructions. A well-articulated tradition can show how different writers deal with the same idea or theme, demonstrating different approaches to a given problem or artistic ideal. It can show affinities between writers, sometimes bringing out resemblences between different figures in such a way as to cast new light on everyone involved. At the grandest level, the whole history of writing in a given language or from a given nation can be seen to be part of a tradition, showing the evolution of a language or the concerns of a people.

The problem with the idea of a tradition is that it can also lead to ossified thinking. A set of writers can be fixed as a canon not to be questioned, examplars of an ideal that can only degenerate. Or a critic might focus on works written within one tradition alone, ignoring works from beyond that tradition. And, as a result, ignoring the existence of other traditions entirely.

I’ve been thinking along these lines since I recently stumbled across an article at the Atlantic website. Written a few months ago by Joe Fassler, it tries to explain why ‘literary’ fiction is suddenly full of ‘genre’ elements (Fassler takes the distinction between ‘literary’ and ‘genre’ for granted; I’m less sure). I thought the piece failed to establish its premises and then failed to make a convicing argument based on those premises. And those failures, I think, come from a limited idea not only of what literature is, but of the existence of the muliplicity of literary traditions within the Anglophone world.

…

Read More Read More

What follows may well be total coincidence.

J.R.R. Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings over the course of many years of his life, a life shaped in part by his experience as a young man fighting in the trenches of World War One against the Germans. Or, as they were sometimes called at the time, the Hun.

The Germans had been equated with Huns for over forty years by then. It had begun as a term of abuse in French newspapers, but some Germans adopted the comparison with pride. Kaiser Wilhelm II notoriously inspired his soldiers by linking them to the historical Huns and their great leader, Attila.

Now so far as I know Tolkien made few direct references to Attila in his writing. He refers in a letter to attending a lecture his son Christopher gave about Attila, and to being thrilled by a reference to the etymology of the name — from ‘Atta,’ ‘father,’ so meaning something like ‘little father.’ And I understand in The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun, Attila makes an appearance, as he did in the original poems on which Tolkien based his story. But I’ve begun to wonder if the idea of the Huns didn’t have a bit more of an influence on Tolkien than that.

I want to be clear in what follows that I’m not talking about conscious influence. I don’t think that Tolkien had the history of the Huns actively on his mind at any point as he wrote. What I’m wondering is whether that history unconsciously suggested certain plot patterns to him that manifested in his writings.

…

Read More Read More

My Black Gate post this week is not a review, nor an essay proper, but a question: Is it possible for fantasy to move beyond the political? Or because it is written by authors of a particular time and place, must fantasy—however fantastic its subject matter—forever remain trapped within the circles of our own world?

China Mieville and others say that no, you cannot read fantasy except through the lens of politics, and that there is no escape. In this interview from 2000, Mieville says:

The problem with escapism is that when you read or write a book society is in the chair with you. You can’t escape your history or your culture. So the idea that because fantasy books aren’t about the real world they therefore ‘escape’ is ridiculous. Fantasy is still written and read through the filters of social reality. That’s why some fantasies (like Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels) are so directly allegorical–but even the most surreal and bizarre fantasy can’t help but reverberate around the reader’s awareness of their own reality, even if in a confusing and unclear way.

I think that as we’ve grown more secular and rational fantasy is following suit. Led by writers like George R.R. Martin and Joe Abercrombie, fantasy has become less whimsical and more historical, less hopeful and more gritty and pessimistic. Many “fantasies” now actively grapple with issues like racism and misogyny, or conservatism vs. liberalism, which lurk beneath the veneer of strange secondary worlds that in other fundamental ways closely resemble our own.

…

Read More Read More