the problem with gaiman, mieville, and pullman

Lisa Schaffer-Doggett · 30 Nov 2004, 11:29 · from 2004-November.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: harlekin at earthlink.net (Lisa Schaffer-Doggett)
Date: Tue Nov 30 11:29:17 2004
Subject: (urth) the problem with gaiman, mieville, and pullman
In-Reply-To: <BAY14-F150BE25CAE4B23ECC5CEDDF4BE0 at phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <5CA857B9-430E-11D9-971B-0003939CE29C at earthlink.net>


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.

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net