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

From: turin <turin at hell.com>
Date: Mon, 29 Nov 2004 01:37:32 +0000

I am leery of message boards, considering they often turn into screaming matches which would probably happen less if the people talking could see each other face to face, but Urth seems like a decent place, except of course for the dying sun and the forces of Abaia, Erebus, etc.

Someone mentioned earlier that it has become a fashion lately to attack Lewis's work.  Despite my own problems with Lewis's particular worldview, I have read essay by Neil Gaiman, China Mieville, and Phillip Pullman which were written basically to "debunk" Lewiss and for Mieville Tolkien as well.  Charges of racism, nostalgia, cruelty, etc , I don't think you can psychoanalyze an author from her work, and I was particularly disappointed in Gaiman's reaction.  I mean, yes Narnia is less of an allegory than the Faerie Queene though much more of an allegory than Lord of the Rings, which Tolkien denied having any allegorical structure whatsoever.  

Allegory is a very nebulous concept, though, we can call Mieville work Marxist romanticism or captitalist dystopia if we want, and Pullman age of enlightenment identity myth, and Gaiman neo-pagan mall mythology. Lewis cannabilizes things in Theosophy or Voyage to Arcturus or Lord Dunsany, Gaiman cannabilizes Roger Zelazny etc.  Really we can replace cannibalize with "is paying attention to or concernwed with" or "is influenced by" and instead of saying "allegory" we can say it is similar to narratives with similar content and dynamics.   This is not what Gaiman et al. are doing.  They are merely drawing a line between what they consider to be "leftist" or "liberal" fantasy, and "conservative" fantasy like Tolkien and Lewis, more so with Lewis.  I find this appalling.  I am not a Christian, and my pride is not hurt that they would try to detract from what they feel is Tolkien and Lewis's hegemony of "fantasy" literature.  I do happen to think Tolkien and Lewis are more intelligent writers than their detractors, but this is besides the point.  What I find appaling is the open and deliberate politization of literature, is literature for its own sake or for furthuring ideology.  It is a serious problem whether you consider Narnia to be Christian propaganda or not; but I find it more difficult with the Science Fiction Trilogy or Till We Have Faces. What exactly is propaganda is another difficult problem.  I certainly did not feel like Lewis was trying to evangelize me.  The novel that is most often cited is The Last Battle, but as an eight year old I knew the Emperor from across the sea was probably some sort of God, but I just took the whole thing as story and that's how I still read it, and it never "softened" me up to Mere Christianity, so I dont understand what everyone's complaint is. Lewis's observations concerning human psychology seem very persuasive to me if not always the conclusions he draws from them.    

I want to contrast Narnia with Pullman's His Dark Materials. I absolutely loved the series, and waited the five years until the last book with bated breath.  The Amber Spyglass which turned out to be nothing more than a refuatation of Christianity.  I felt like he was preaching to me, and there are rumors he trashed the first manuscript, so I can only wonder what the book's first form was.  Why use magic or talking polar bears to promote rationalism?  Is it because he thought children will read them along with Lewis and create a politically balanced genre.  

To a certain degree I am biased, I will admit, because I think Wolfe, Lewis, Chesterton, Tolkien ask serious questions that Gaiman, Pullman, and Mievelle do not, other "fantacists", I am excluding "science fiction", do not.  Questions of metaphysics, epistemology, semantics, what it means to be human, what it means to be a nonhuman person, the problem of technology and how to use it, etc.  Mieville, Gaiman, and Pullman seem to address these issues, but it does not seem to me as if their attempts are anything other than cursory.  Despite how "liberal" I may be or how "Christian" Lewis is, the fact remains I think he is a better thinker than the rest of them.  I feel that this writers who just so happen to be Christian make serious commitments to this questions which means trying to answer them honestly and to a certain degree means revealing in part some of their Christian beliefs.  With Mieville and Pullman it seems as if they are only trying to further political agendas primarily, the stories come second, and because they pretend to be good humanists, it's okay to indulge in the same "escapist" fantasy they attribute to Tolkien and Lewiss, very hypocritical.  Gaiman seems not to want to commite to anything, and to this day, I have no idea what Gaiman thinks about anything, except that he probably voted for Kerry.  I do not understand why they started attacking Lewiss simultaneously, was it jealousy, the impending Lord of the Rings moview, which I can't stand, or some weird statistical nodal point.  That they were trying to debunk Lewis or steal his "throne" is ridiculous.  There is nothing to debunk or steal. I dont believe science fiction and fantasy are secretly plagued by Christianity and a conservative political agenda, and I find that kind of thinking supercilious and dissapointing.

I am of course open to debate on this subject and will try not to snap. I haven't gotten a chance to read "the problem of susan yet" but I've read an essay Gaiman wrote on his feelings towards Lewiss before he wrote the story and it feels very much like it would be a piece of propaganda to me. I dont know how Gaiman can hate Lewis and like Michael Moorcock.  He just doesn't seem to have good taste.    

 p.s. I am writing from  hell, of course, so it should be perfectly obvious I am not a sheep in wolf's clothing.

p.p.s. if you are looking to avoid a heated debate on Tolkien and Lewis's "racial agenda", do notr ask me if I think Lord of the Rings or Narnia is about the crusades or the Moors.

p.p.p.s If Barliman does not deliver this, I will roast him.

---

From: Dan'l Danehy-Oakes <danldo at gmail.com>
Date: Mon, 29 Nov 2004 12:16:41 +0000

Turin

Bravo! Bravissimo! 

(Gee ... I hope you're male under that name...)

Yes, Urth manages in general to maintain a certain amount of decorum,
not to say dulce, while debating some pretty hot points. It's small enough
that we can feel that we "know" each other - and even when responding 
to someone we don't know we know that friends are looking on, and so
we try not to behave like total asses.

> Someone mentioned earlier that it has become a fashion lately
> to attack Lewis's work. 

That would be me. I've seen it all over the place but especially in 
the "Gaiman generation."

> Despite my own problems with Lewis's particular worldview, I have read 
> essay by Neil Gaiman, China Mieville, and Phillip Pullman which were
> written basically to "debunk" Lewiss and for Mieville Tolkien as well. 

I would very much like a pointer to Gaiman's essay, as up to now I 
have only his fictions to base this on. (Not only "The Problem of 
Susan," but also the _Sandman_ arc "A Game of You," which has 
some details that have always seemed to me to be idle passing 
swipes at the Narnia books.)

In fairness, though, I don't think Gaiman, at least, can be painted as
simply being a Good Little Liberal in going after Lewis - after all,
he has shown huge admiration for Chesterton and, for that matter,
Wolfe, who is not exactly what I would call a screaming leftist. (As
a side note, I recently picked up a copy of Gaiman's and Wolfe's
collaboration, "A Walking Tour of the Shambles," and it's laugh
out loud funny.)

> Charges of racism, nostalgia, cruelty, etc , I don't think you can 
> psychoanalyze an author from her work, 

H'mmm. I think you can, to some extent, but only based on a large
body of work and only to the extent the work itself permits. A writer's
work, if it's at all serious, necessarily reflects what the writer thinks
and feels and believes (which are of course three aspects of one
process, "abstraction in a human nervous system as a whole in an
environment," but that's another discussion); anyone who could read
the Narnia books and _not_ figure out that the author was a Christian
must be as ignorant of Christian belief and symbolism as I was, in 
second grade, when I didn't get it  until I came to the end of _The 
Last Battle_. Duh!

> and I was particularly disappointed in Gaiman's reaction.  I mean,
> yes Narnia is less of an allegory than the Faerie Queene though
> much more of an allegory than Lord of the Rings, which Tolkien
> denied having any allegorical structure whatsoever.

H'mmm. I'm not sure what you mean by "less of an allegory" -  from 
context you seem to imply that its author's intent was less allegorical 
than Spenser's? Perhaps: but both seemed to have first and foremost 
in their minds the process of _telling a story_; it's when a writer fails 
to keep that f&f that you get what the late Ted Sturgeon called 
"selling your birthright for a pot of message." The late Robert Heinlein 
committed this sin once or twice - most notably in _Farnham's 
Freehold_, where he managed not only not to tell much of a story, 
but also to garble his message to the point where many people 
thought it was a racist, pro-war book, when his intent was exactly the 
opposite: to show that the "supremacy" of whites was a historical 
accident, and to show that even for the survivors, a nuclear war 
would be an unmitigated disaster.

> Allegory is a very nebulous concept, though, we can call Mieville work 
> Marxist romanticism or captitalist dystopia if we want, 

H'mm. Having just finished _The Scar_, I have to admit that I don't
get much of that. I don't actually get much serious political content
in his novels at all; mostly a sense of "Wow, look how grotesque this 
is!" which was enough to carry _Perdido Street Station_ but not a
second book, so that _The Scar_ stayed on my backburner until I
was well over halfway through it.

> and Pullman age of enlightenment identity myth, 

This is dead spot on.

> and Gaiman neo-pagan mall mythology. 

I am laughing. Can you hear me laughing? That's the best
description of everything that is weakest in Gaiman (a writer I 
generally admire) I've run across to date. I shall doubtless steal
it at some future date.

[...]

> They are merely drawing a line between what they consider
> to be "leftist" or "liberal" fantasy, and "conservative" fantasy
> like Tolkien and Lewis, more so with Lewis.  I find this appalling.

Well, of course, Lewis had his axes to grind quite as much as 
PG&M do. Tokien had a few, but (unlike PG&M and sometimes 
Lewis - viz _The Great Divorce_) he didn't write whole books as 
grindstones; his concerns about, for example, the evils of 
industrial capitalism were completely natural in the context of
_tLotR_, especially when voiced by Fangorn.

>  I am not a Christian, 

As I am, it is good to have a non-Christian see some of the same 
things I'm seeing in the PG&M anti-Lewis didactic. As I am also 
pretty much a card-carrying liberal, I find this kind of "correctthink" 
behavior on the part of my fellow liberals rather embarassing at
times...

> and my pride is not hurt that they would try to detract from what
> they feel is Tolkien and Lewis's hegemony of "fantasy" literature. 
> I do happen to think Tolkien and Lewis are more intelligent writers
> than their detractors, but this is besides the point.  What I find
> appaling is the open and deliberate politization of literature, is
> literature for its own sake or for furthuring ideology.  

As I said above, I think that a writer's beliefs - political or religious
or what-have-ye - can't help but influence what she writes. But 
there are good ways and bad ways to do it; Lewis provides examples
that range from very good (_Till We Have Faces_, which you could
read and never suspect the writer of being a devout Christian - though
if you know it it adds a great deal to the book) to mediocre (_The Last
Battle_, in which all the masks come off and even my dumb eight
year old self "got" it). 

Gaiman in his fiction generally doesn't make this sort of mistake; 
Pullman's trilogy descends from excellent to (as Rick Nielsen of
Cheap Trick once put it) "subtle like a mallet."  I can't say much 
about Mieville because I frankly haven't found much of the way 
of meaning-structure in the two books I've read.

> What exactly is propaganda is another difficult problem.  I
> certainly did not feel like Lewis was trying to evangelize me. 
> The novel that is most often cited is The Last Battle, but as
> an eight year old I knew the Emperor from across the sea was
> probably some sort of God, but I just took the whole thing as
> story and that's how I still read it, and it never "softened" me
> up to Mere Christianity, 

Interesting: I feel quite certain that, in my case, the Narnia books
_did_ help keep the Christian faith my family (and especially my
grandmother) had started in me going at times when I might
otherwise have "outgrown" it.  But that's quite a different thing 
from whether it would have "softened" me to Christianity if I had
not already been there.

> Lewis's observations concerning human psychology seem very
> persuasive to me if not always the conclusions he draws from
> them.

H'mmm. I'd like to agree with you, but the truth is I don't think he
wrote a decent adult female character until _Faces_. From the
Queen in _Perelandra_ to Jane Studdock and especially Fairy 
Hardcastle in _That Hideous Strength_, I come away with the
feeling that these characters were written by a man who'd never
actually _met_ a woman.

> I want to contrast Narnia with Pullman's His Dark Materials. I absolutely
> loved the series, and waited the five years until the last book with
> bated breath.  The Amber Spyglass which turned out to be nothing
> more than a refuatation of Christianity. 

Well, I think there was a _bit_ more to it than that, but certainly I 
have to agree that the series turns into fairly blatant Gnostic agitprop 
no later than the beginning of _TAS_. (Which makes it interesting
read to read it against - he said, desperately dragging Wolfe into a 
discussion on the Urth list - the _Long Sun_ series, which I have 
argued is an instantiation of a Gnostic cosmology within the larger 
context of a Christian cosmology.)  

> Why use magic or talking polar bears to promote rationalism?  

Because - as Lewis once put it - "Sometimes stories best say what
needs to be said."

> To a certain degree I am biased, I will admit, because I think Wolfe,
> Lewis, Chesterton, Tolkien ask serious questions that Gaiman,
> Pullman, and Mievelle do not, other "fantacists", I am excluding
> "science fiction", do not.  

May I suggest reading Delany's fantasy works, and especially the
"Neveryon" sequence? These are all about this kind of ...

> Questions of metaphysics, epistemology, semantics, what it
> means to be human, what it means to be a nonhuman person,
> the problem of technology and how to use it, etc.  

... well, not the question of "what it means to be a nonhuman
person," but all the others, and especially semantics and
epistemology. Plus a fairly intense economic dialectic.

> Mieville, Gaiman, and Pullman seem to address these
> issues, but it does not seem to me as if their attempts are
> anything other than cursory. 

I would love to hear someone describe how Mieville addresses 
them even cursorily. Perhaps I was too busy noticing the
grotesquery of Bas-Lag, but I honestly did not see any of this.

Pullman I think goes a bit deeper than "cursory," but I don't
think he really thinks things through very well - I get the feeling
that he sticks with the first idea that appeals to him without
subjecting it to very much scrutiny. 

Gaiman ... well, he's one of the deepest writers ever to write
comics. But in the company of Wolfe, Le Guin, Lewis, Tolkien,
Chesterton, Delany, etc., he's like a one-legged man in an 
arse-kicking contest.

> Despite how "liberal" I may be or how "Christian" Lewis is, the 
> fact remains I think he is a better thinker than the rest of them. 

Yes, I agree. His professional work, which is sometimes dismissed
because of his breezy writing style, is extraordinary: I highly recommend
_The Discarded Image_, one of the best works of Medieval Studies
to come out of the 20th Century.

> I feel that this writers who just so happen to be Christian make
> serious commitments to this questions which means trying to
> answer them honestly and to a certain degree means revealing
> in part some of their Christian beliefs.  

I would go a step further: to be a Christian and an honest thinker in
the modern era _requires_ a degree of looking at hard questions
that isn't necessary for humanists, because the scientific episteme 
offers (or appears to offer) so many challenges to the Christian 
episteme that the only other option, which many Christians (alas!)
settle for, is a retreat into the "God said it, I believe it, that settles 
it!" brand of fundamentalism-literalism. This is a pity because a 
Christian committed to dealing with the hard questions finds in the
end that the "challenges" mostly vanish when you learn to think in
both epistemes: indeed, to do so leaves one with a larger episteme
that covers more of the world than either does separately.

But anyway.

> I have no idea what Gaiman thinks about anything, except that
> he probably voted for Kerry.  

Probably not; I believe that he's still a British subject.

> I dont believe science fiction and fantasy are secretly plagued by
> Christianity and a conservative political agenda, and I find that
> kind of thinking supercilious and dissapointing.

H'mmm. I tend to agree, though there is a strong conservative streak
in SF - particularly in military SF. Perhaps more importantly, and this
is why I would have expected Mieville to be an extreme liberal even
if I hadn't read anything outside of his novels, is something I picked
up from Delany's criticism. He puts it this way: "To fail to challenge
something is to maintain it." That is, in writing of an imaginary
culture, whether in the future, on an alien world, or in an imagined
fantastic world, any social structure  that remains as it is in the "real" 
world tends to support that structure in the "real" world. Take, for
example, the nuclear family: if you posit a culture radically different
from our own, but leave the nuclear family untouched, you've 
reinforced our societal assumption that the nuclear family is just
"how things are." Obviously no writer can challenge everything - if
you did, you would leave the reader with nothing to grasp - but the
more a writer "challenges" in her fiction the more I suspect her of
being politically leftist. Mieville "challenges" a great deal of our
assumptions about reality, but doesn't really provide much in the way
of "wouldn't it be better if...?"

> I dont know how Gaiman can hate Lewis and like Michael Moorcock.
> He just doesn't seem to have good taste.

Well ... that is interesting because Gaiman _does_ seem to like 
an awful lot of the same writers Lewis did: Chesterton, Lindsay, and
MacDonald have all had their tributes in his work. I would very much 
like to read what Gaiman has to say about CSL!

> I am not a sheep in wolf's clothing.

?

> p.p.s. if you are looking to avoid a heated debate on Tolkien
> and Lewis's "racial agenda", do notr ask me if I think Lord of
> the Rings or Narnia is about the crusades or the Moors.

You seem to be asking to be asked, so I'll ask ...

(For me, I think that there's an obvious Moorishness, or perhaps
Turkishness, to the Calormenes. I suspect you could make a case
for the "swarthy" Easterlings in LotR, but I also suspect that that
case would always remain somewhat problematic.)

> p.p.p.s If Barliman does not deliver this, I will roast him.

Well, _someone_ delivered it!

--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

---

From: Nathan Spears <spearofsolomon at yahoo.com>
Date: Mon, 29 Nov 2004 13:11:19 +0000

> was well over halfway through it.

I just wanted to interject a quick comment.  Having read several interviews with
Mieville, I think that he is very interested in how his worlds function, and
specifically, how the politics work.  Now, I might be getting myself in trouble,
because I can't remember how much intelligent discussion of M's work I've actually
read on this list, but here's what I remember:

He doesn't like the fantasy tradition of having an aristocratic society living on
air; for instance, in Tolkien, he would be wary of the inhabitants of Minas Tirath. 
What do they do?  How do they get food, support an economy, etc?  I think I remember
reading about how he laid out a whole economic and political (ecopolitical?)
foundation for his world before he started setting the story.  In fact, I read some
comments which made a pretty strong case for the idea that M's world, and the
creatures that inhabit it, are more interesting/important that the stories he tells
there.  I have a feeling someone said that on this list.

Personally, I didn't care much for Perdido, and I haven't made time for The Scar
yet.  I just wanted to get the idea out there that the person you were responding to
is (might be) pretty close to the mark with his summary of Mieville, especially from
Mieville's own viewpoint.

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From: Dan'l Danehy-Oakes <danldo at gmail.com>
Date: Mon, 29 Nov 2004 15:08:47 +0000

On Mon, 29 Nov 2004 13:11:17 -0800 (PST), Nathan Spears
<spearofsolomon at yahoo.com> wrote:

> I just wanted to interject a quick comment.  Having read several
> interviews with Mieville, I think that he is very interested in how
> his worlds function, and specifically, how the politics work.  

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

> I might be getting myself in trouble, because I can't remember
> how much intelligent discussion of M's work I've actually read
> on this list, but here's what I remember:
> 
> He doesn't like the fantasy tradition of having an aristocratic
> society living on air; for instance, in Tolkien, he would be wary
> of the inhabitants of Minas Tirath. What do they do?  How do
> they get food, support an economy, etc?  

That's a common and rather false criticism of Tolkien and _tLotR_. 
It isn't emphasized, but Tolkien does in fact mention the farming 
communities of Gondor in several places. Minas Tirith supports 
itself much the way, say, Imperial Rome or medieval Paris did - 
by being a center of trade and governance, and a military capital.

> I think I remember reading about how he laid out a whole 
> economic and political (ecopolitical?)

Politico-economic, usually...

> foundation for his world before he started setting the story.  In
> fact, I read some comments which made a pretty strong case for
> the idea that M's world, and the creatures that inhabit it, are
> more interesting/important that the stories he tells there.  
> I have a feeling someone said that on this list.

It probably wasn't me, but I agree with whoever said it. The
stories are actually fairly kludgey. Reading _PSS_ I remember
thinking "There isn't a single character in this book I like, let
alone identify with." While this is not true of _The Scar_, it's 
badly imbalanced in terms of pacing - the first half of the book 
drags on, the second half rips along; it took me less time to read
the entire last half than any fifty pages of the first half. The first
hundred pages or so could easily (and imio should have) been
cut by a sympathetic editor to about twenty, as much of it is just
moody stage setting; in fact, the first part could have been done
away with easily, and the few bits that remained significant for
the rest of the book worked in as flashbacks. Mieville is a
relentlessly _linear_ storyteller; I don't recall a significant 
flashback in either of the two books I've read.

> [...] the person you were responding to is (might be) pretty
> close to the mark with his summary of Mieville, especially from

He might well. I'm not saying that there is no serious political
content; I'm saying that I'm not finding it. The internal politics
of Bas-Lag seem sufficiently alien that I don't find much, as 
Tolkien called it, _applicability_ - let alone allegory! - to the
"real" world. 

--Dan'l

---

From: stilskin <acronus at yahoo.com>
Date: Mon, 29 Nov 2004 16:42:34 +0000

Mieville's new novel almost suffocates under all the
political baggage, and it is constructed as a series
of flashbacks . . .

Paul

--- Dan'l Danehy-Oakes <danldo at gmail.com> wrote:

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From: Dan'l Danehy-Oakes <danldo at gmail.com>
Date: Mon, 29 Nov 2004 17:20:05 +0000

Oh. Oh, well, so much for that theory...

---

From: Lisa Schaffer-Doggett <harlekin at earthlink.net>
Date: Mon, 29 Nov 2004 19:13:45 +0000

> by being a center of trade and governance, and a military capital.
Don pipes in:

Yes, I think an argument can be made that LotR isn't even fantasy in 
the way it's understood now.  You might as well ask about the system of 
grain distribution in Camelot or Geatland as expect that sort of thing 
from Tolkien.  Not Important To The STORY.  But what's that, anyway?  
Besides, Tolkien's passion was philology, not politics, and I'm sure if 
the tables were turned, Mieville would fall short there.  (no good 
saying language is less important than politics or economics.  It might 
be more important)

---

From: Lisa Schaffer-Doggett <harlekin at earthlink.net>
Date: Mon, 29 Nov 2004 19:27:27 +0000

> context of a Christian cosmology.)
Having just started the Wizard and having just read Pullman's trilogy I 
feel I can safely say that, as much as I dug the characters in HDM,  
Wolfe could have fit the entire story into two chapters of Long Sun.  
Of course he would have scattered it across four books, in pieces and 
allusions,  and we'd never be entirely sure who Lyra's parents were or 
that Iorek Byrnison was indeed a bear, but . . .   Well, never mind.

Don

---

From: Thomas Bitterman <tom at bitterman.net>
Date: Tue, 30 Nov 2004 10:23:45 +0000

>case would always remain somewhat problematic.)
I have a dim recollection that Tolkien mentioned (in a letter to a 
potential publisher) that the
Easterlings were meant to resemble Eastern Europeans.

>--Dan'l
Enamel

---

From: Eric Mattingly <eric_mattingly at hotmail.com>
Date: Tue, 30 Nov 2004 10:54:10 +0000

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).

Thanks,

eric

A heretic is a man who sees with his own eyes.

-- Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

>From: turin <turin at HELL.COM>
>Reply-To: turin at HELL.COM,The Urth Mailing List 
><urth-urth.net at lists.urth.net>
>To: urth-urth.net at lists.urth.net
>Subject: (urth) the problem with gaiman, mieville, and pullman
>Date: Mon, 29 Nov 2004 01:37:29 -0800 (PST)
>
>
>I am leery of message boards, considering they often turn into screaming 
>matches which would probably happen less if the people talking could see 
>each other face to face, but Urth seems like a decent place, except of 
>course for the dying sun and the forces of Abaia, Erebus, etc.
>
>Someone mentioned earlier that it has become a fashion lately to attack 
>Lewis's work.  Despite my own problems with Lewis's particular worldview, I 
>have read essay by Neil Gaiman, China Mieville, and Phillip Pullman which 
>were written basically to "debunk" Lewiss and for Mieville Tolkien as well. 
>psychoanalyze an author from her work, and I was particularly disappointed 
>in Gaiman's reaction.  I mean, yes Narnia is less of an allegory than the 
>Faerie Queene though much more of an allegory than Lord of the Rings, which 
>Tolkien denied having any allegorical structure whatsoever.
>
>Marxist romanticism or captitalist dystopia if we want, and Pullman age of 
>enlightenment identity myth, and Gaiman neo-pagan mall mythology. Lewis 
>cannabilizes things in Theosophy or Voyage to Arcturus or Lord Dunsany, 
>Gaiman cannabilizes Roger Zelazny etc.  Really we can replace cannibalize 
>with "is paying attention to or concernwed with" or "is influenced by" and 
>instead of saying "allegory" we can say it is similar to narratives with 
>similar content and dynamics.   This is not what Gaiman et al. are doing.  
>They are merely drawing a line between what they consider to be "leftist" 
>or "liberal" fantasy, and "conservative" fantasy like Tolkien and Lewis, 
>more so with Lewis.  I find this appalling.  I am not a Christian, and my 
>pride is not hurt that they would try to detract from what they feel is 
>Tolkien and Lewis's hegemony of "fantasy" literature.  I do happen to think 
>Tolkien and Lewis are more intelligent writers than their detractors, but 
>this is besides the point.  What I find appaling is the open and deliberate 
>politization of literature, is literature for its own sake or for 
>furthuring ideology.  It is a serious problem whether you consider Narnia 
>to be Christian propaganda or not; but I find it more difficult with the 
>Science Fiction Trilogy or Till We Have Faces. What exactly is propaganda 
>is another difficult problem.  I certainly did not feel like Lewis was 
>trying to evangelize me.  The novel that is most often cited is The Last 
>Battle, but as an eight year old I knew the Emperor from across the sea was 
>probably some sort of God, but I just took the whole thing as story and 
>that's how I still read it, and it never "softened" me up to Mere 
>Christianity, so I dont understand what everyone's complaint is. Lewis's 
>observations concerning human psychology seem very persuasive to me if not 
>always the conclusions he draws from them.
>
>loved the series, and waited the five years until the last book with bated 
>breath.  The Amber Spyglass which turned out to be nothing more than a 
>refuatation of Christianity.  I felt like he was preaching to me, and there 
>are rumors he trashed the first manuscript, so I can only wonder what the 
>book's first form was.  Why use magic or talking polar bears to promote 
>rationalism?  Is it because he thought children will read them along with 
>Lewis and create a politically balanced genre.
>
>Lewis, Chesterton, Tolkien ask serious questions that Gaiman, Pullman, and 
>Mievelle do not, other "fantacists", I am excluding "science fiction", do 
>not.  Questions of metaphysics, epistemology, semantics, what it means to 
>be human, what it means to be a nonhuman person, the problem of technology 
>and how to use it, etc.  Mieville, Gaiman, and Pullman seem to address 
>these issues, but it does not seem to me as if their attempts are anything 
>other than cursory.  Despite how "liberal" I may be or how "Christian" 
>Lewis is, the fact remains I think he is a better thinker than the rest of 
>them.  I feel that this writers who just so happen to be Christian make 
>serious commitments to this questions which means trying to answer them 
>honestly and to a certain degree means revealing in part some of their 
>Christian beliefs.  With Mieville and Pullman it seems as if they are only 
>trying to further political agendas primarily, the stories come second, and 
>because they pretend to be good humanists, it's okay to indulge in the same 
>"escapist" fantasy they attribute to Tolkien and Lewiss, very hypocritical. 
>  Gaiman seems not to want to commite to anything, and to this day, I have 
>no idea what Gaiman thinks about anything, except that he probably voted 
>for Kerry.  I do not understand why they started attacking Lewiss 
>simultaneously, was it jealousy, the impending Lord of the Rings moview, 
>which I can't stand, or some weird statistical nodal point.  That they were 
>trying to debunk Lewis or steal his "throne" is ridiculous.  There is 
>nothing to debunk or steal. I dont believe science fiction and fantasy are 
>secretly plagued by Christianity and a conservative political agenda, and I 
>find that kind of thinking supercilious and dissapointing.
>
>I am of course open to debate on this subject and will try not to snap. I 
>haven't gotten a chance to read "the problem of susan yet" but I've read an 
>essay Gaiman wrote on his feelings towards Lewiss before he wrote the story 
>and it feels very much like it would be a piece of propaganda to me. I dont 
>know how Gaiman can hate Lewis and like Michael Moorcock.  He just doesn't 
>seem to have good taste.
>
>  p.s. I am writing from  hell, of course, so it should be perfectly 
>obvious I am not a sheep in wolf's clothing.
>
>p.p.s. if you are looking to avoid a heated debate on Tolkien and Lewis's 
>"racial agenda", do notr ask me if I think Lord of the Rings or Narnia is 
>about the crusades or the Moors.
>

_________________________________________________________________
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---

From: James Wynn <thewynns at earthlink.net>
Date: Tue, 30 Nov 2004 11:05:50 +0000

Crush is giddy about learning a new useful word:

ag?on    ( P )  Pronunciation Key  (gn, -n, ?-gn)
n. pl. a?gon?es (-gnz)
  1.. A conflict, especially between the protagonist and antagonist in a
work of literature.
  2.. The part of an ancient Greek drama, especially a comedy, in which two
characters engage in verbal dispute.
  3.. A test of will; a conflict: "Freud's originality stemmed from his
aggression and ambition in his agon with biology" (Harold Bloom).
  4.. A contest in ancient Greece, as in athletics or music, in which prizes
were awarded.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----
[Greek agn. See agony.]

~ Crush

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---

From: Lisa Schaffer-Doggett <harlekin at earthlink.net>
Date: Tue, 30 Nov 2004 11:29:17 +0000

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.

---

From: Matthew Malthouse <matthew.malthouse at ntlworld.com>
Date: Tue, 30 Nov 2004 12:17:44 +0000

At 23:07 29/11/2004, Dan'l wrote:

[On Mi?ville's viewpoint and politics]
>Tolkien called it, _applicability_ - let alone allegory! - to the

I wonder if this might be because Mi?ville's political activity is in a 
minor left-wing British party that simply isn't recognisable (or even 
recognisable as politics) divorced from it's context.  The printing of 
subversive pamphlets and broad sheets, the workers movements and conflict 
that appear both in Perdido and Iron Council scream (simplistic and 
quasi-violent) politics to my English sensibilities.  They're the idiots I 
went to college with who'd swallowed the implausible logic of the party 
leaders wholesale.

A couple of months ago, immediately before I read Iron Council, I attended 
a bookshop reading where Mi?ville answered questions.  Two things he said 
stay with me.  First that he said of himself that he's a literary 
kleptomaniac, coming across an idea or thing he fancies he'll work it 
in.  Basilisk? Nice, have some of them. Golem? Spider? space warp? memory 
drug? mechanical intelligence? thow 'em all in.  And you can see it, pick 
out the "cute ideas" if you want to.

The other was that he wrote Iron Council because he wanted to write a 
western (cowboys and indians) but as a fantasy because verisimilitude 
wasn't his thing - the myth of the Wild West was something he wanted to use 
but not a genre he wanted to enter directly.

Having heard that I recognised it.  But I don't know if I would have done 
otherwise.  The religious impetus of the builder to drive across Bas-Lag in 
place of the capitalist expansion only makes a good metaphor if you agree 
with his political position that capitalism is inherently destructive.  The 
Lone Ranger subverted is a twist, if an implausible one, on the myth.  The 
hero against all odds shouldn't lose.  The uprising doesn't have a 
place.  The mayoralty of New Crobuzon is an inadequate allegory of East 
Coast politics unless your own view places you so far outside of that 
politics that you can't examine its detail so fall back on defining it as 
evil without explication.

I like Mi?ville; I like what he writes albeit Iron Council was rather less 
fun than either Perdido Street Station or The Scar.  But they are fun 
rather than great.  He isn't nearly such a good writer as he'd like to 
think he is and extending his kleptomania to Tolkein or Peake isn't 
sufficient to put him in their league.

Matthew

---

From: Charles Reed <cmreed at link.com>
Date: Mon, 06 Dec 2004 11:23:44 +0000

Dan'l Danehy-Oakes wrote:

><snip>

It had been quite a while since I last read A GAME OF YOU, but I 
couldn't recall any "swipes" at the Narnia books, so I took the 
opportunity to re-read it, and still couldn't find anything I would call 
classify as being derogatory toward Narnia.  Do you recall anything 
specific that made you think so?

There are some obvious Narnia references (as well as plenty Oz and 
Middle-Earth references), with the most obvious being the sequence 
toward the end where Barbie's dream world comes to an end.  This is very 
much an echo of Narnia's end in THE LAST BATTLE, but I couldn't detect 
any Narnia references in the writing that would not be considered an homage.

I did a little googling on the web, and came across a speech that Gaiman 
gave at Mythcon 35 (the Mythopoeic Society's big shindig) in 2004, in 
which he says some very complimentary things regarding C. S. Lewis.  I 
hope I'm not violating any copyright by quoting the entire Narnia passage:

------------------------------

I was six years old when I saw an episode of The Lion, The Witch and the 
Wardrobe in black and white on television at my grandmother's house in 
Portsmouth. I remember the beavers, and the first appearance of Aslan, 
an actor in an unconvincing lion costume, standing on his hind legs, 
from which I deduce that this was probably episode two or three. I went 
home to Sussex and saved my meagre pocket money until I was able to buy 
a copy of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe of my own. I read it, and 
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the other book I could find, over and 
over, and when my seventh birthday arrived I had dropped enough hints 
that my birthday present was a boxed set of the complete Narnia books. 
And I remember what I did on my seventh birthday -- I lay on my bed and 
I read the books all through, from the first to the last.

For the next four or five years I continued to read them. I would read 
other books, of course, but in my heart I knew that I read them only 
because there wasn't an infinite number of Narnia books to read.

For good or ill the religious allegory, such as it was, went entirely 
over my head, and it was not until I was about twelve that I found 
myself realising that there were Certain Parallels. Most people get it 
at the Stone Table; I got it when it suddenly occurred to me that the 
story of the events that occurred to Saint Paul on the road to Damascus 
was the dragoning of Eustace Scrubb all over again. I was personally 
offended: I felt that an author, whom I had trusted, had had a hidden 
agenda. I had nothing against religion, or religion in fiction -- I had 
bought (in the school bookshop) and loved The Screwtape Letters, and was 
already dedicated to G.K. Chesterton. My upset was, I think, that it 
made less of Narnia for me, it made it less interesting a thing, less 
interesting a place. Still, the lessons of Narnia sank deep. Aslan 
telling the Tash worshippers that the prayers he had given to Tash were 
actually prayers to Him was something I believed then, and ultimately 
still believe.

The Pauline Baynes map of Narnia poster stayed up on my bedroom wall 
through my teenage years.

I didn't return to Narnia until I was a parent, first in 1988, then in 
1999, each time reading all the books aloud to my children. I found that 
the things that I loved, I still loved -- sometimes loved more -- while 
the things that I had thought odd as a child (the awkwardness of the 
structure of Prince Caspian, and my dislike for most of The Last Battle, 
for example) had intensified; there were also some new things that made 
me really uncomfortable -- for example the role of women in the Narnia 
books, culminating in the disposition of Susan. But what I found more 
interesting was how much of the Narnia books had crept inside me: as I 
would write there would be moment after moment of realising that I'd 
borrowed phrases, rhythms, the way that words were put together; for 
example, that I had a hedgehog and a hare, in The Books of Magic, 
speaking and agreeing with each other much as the Dufflepuds do.

C.S. Lewis was the first person to make me want to be a writer. He made 
me aware of the writer, that there was someone standing behind the 
words, that there was someone telling the story. I fell in love with the 
way he used parentheses -- the auctorial asides that were both wise and 
chatty, and I rejoiced in using such brackets in my own essays and 
compositions through the rest of my childhood.

I think, perhaps, the genius of Lewis was that he made a world that was 
more real to me than the one I lived in; and if authors got to write the 
tales of Narnia, then I wanted to be an author.

------------------------------

The rest of the speech is worth reading (mainly about Tolkien and 
Chesterton), so if you want to read the entire speech, here's the link:  
http://www.mythsoc.org/gaiman.htm

Charles

---

From: Dan'l Danehy-Oakes <danldo at gmail.com>
Date: Mon, 06 Dec 2004 12:14:40 +0000

H'mmmm.

Well, it seems very unlikely to me that Gaiman would say much
uncomplimentary about CSL (or JRRT) as the invited guest of the 
Mythopoeic Society, an organization created specifically for the
study of the works of the Inklings: it would be akin to accepting a 
dinner invitation and getting up after the appetizer and starting 
to make rude remarks about your host's mother. 

That he says as much as he does (about being "personally 
offended," about feeling that CSL had violated his trust, about 
the "awkwardness" of the structure of _Prince Caspian_) in such 
a context leads me to believe that he might have quite a bit more 
to say in a less Lewicentric forum.

Still, what he _does_ say makes it clear that he loves, or at some
point loved, those books, and that's worth knowing.

Thanks.

--Dan'l

Freedom has no barcode.
     --J.G. Ballard

---

From: Charles Reed <cmreed at link.com>
Date: Mon, 06 Dec 2004 12:22:04 +0000

I also thought it to be quite telling that he (Gaiman) chose to read the 
Narnia books to his two children.  If a person is virulently against the 
message conveyed in a certain book, there's no way in the world they're 
going to be reading those books to the most precious people in their lives.

Charles

---

From: Fred Kiesche <godel2escher2bach at yahoo.com>
Date: Mon, 06 Dec 2004 12:44:51 +0000

When I read Gaiman's "Coraline" (I think that's how he
spelled it), I was reminded very much of C.S. Lewis.

The same with Pullman and the "Dark Materials" books.
I was reminded of Lewis.

Given some of the comments reported here from those
authors about Lewis, et al, it's kind of interesting
that I got that reaction (I read the books before I
read those comments).

=====
Fred Kiesche (FPK3)
 
My books are water; those of great geniuses are wine. Everybody drinks water. (Mark Twain, "Notebook")
 
Science, science fiction and more. See The Eternal Golden Braid. (http://theeternalgoldenbraid.blogspot.com/)

__________________________________ 
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---

From: Tony Ellis <tonyellis69 at btopenworld.com>
Date: Tue, 07 Dec 2004 11:52:02 +0000

Thank you for that Gaiman quote, Charles.

I found it very interesting - but then I would, since Gaiman's take on
Lewis and Narnia seems to be an exact match for mine. But I also think
it shines a useful light on what has been posted here previously.