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Il y a quelques temps, nous lisions une critique de Joe Abercrombie à propos d'un article de Leo Grin intitulé 'The bankrupt nihilism of our fallen fantasists' dans lequel ce dernier regrettait l'époque merveilleuse de Tolkien et Cie, car il considérait notre contemporanéité littéraire comme pauvre et décevante, en matière de fantasy et de fantastique.
Cet article a donné matière à d'autres critiques ; en effet, le site Wetasphalt.com publie une critique de ce texte, en rappelant que le manichéisme n'a pas que des avantages, et ne reflète plus tellement l'esprit de notre époque.

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The latest hubbub in the nerdosphere is an absurdly stupid article from Leo Grin that basically says that fantasy was much better in the good-old days when JRR Tolkien and Robert E. Howard (Conan the Barbarian) walked the Earth, and that since then fantasy has succumbed to liberal elite moral relativism to give us gritty, "nihilistic" fantasy writers like Joe Abercrombie, who naturally, by extension, represent the Decline of Western Civilization. Forget that Conan was an amoral figure who basically killed anyone who got in his way and took any woman he saw, and was in turn a send-up of what Howard saw as the namby-pamby chivalric knights that were popular in historical writings at the time. And forget that the morals in Tolkien's work have (pretty deliberately) the complexity of a fairy tale. But then that may be the point; the author wants to see beautiful, noble good up against ugly, traitorous evil and anything more subtle, more realistic than that is somehow the End of Civilization. In other words, he wants the kind of shoehorning of everything into a reductionist, black-and-white worldview typical of right-wing ideology in general. It's important to remember that this sort of wistfulness about the imagined past and its simpler "morality" goes hand and hand with outdated and abhorrent cultural norms of class, race and gender. Howard's work is unrelentingly sexist in its portrayal of women and racist in its portrayal of minorities, and the peasant Hobbits in the end go back to their simple agrarian lifestyles while leaving the business of running the world to the aristocratic king-hero and his lily-white magical princess trophy wife. And both worlds have the troubling problem of all monsters being brown-skinned, with the race-anxiety that represents. (None of this analysis, I should point out, is anything new.) The problem here is clearly highlighted when the author creates an example of what a modern author would do with The Lord of the Rings: Think of a Lord of the Rings where, after stringing you along for thousands of pages, all of the hobbits end up dying of cancer contracted by their proximity to the Ring, Aragorn is revealed to be a buffoonish puppet-king of no honor and false might, and Gandalf no sooner celebrates the defeat of Sauron than he executes a long-held plot to become the new Dark Lord of Middle-earth, and you have some idea of what to expect should you descend into Abercrombie’s jaded literary sewer. Frankly, I don't think I'm alone in thinking that I'd much rather read that series then what Tolkien actually wrote.

La suite et plus de détails ici

Priscilla Duran-Mulas