Notre Joe préféré y déplore, avec son ironie désormais familière, la tristesse et l'amertume qui ont dû envahir Leo, et qui expliqueraient l'écriture de son article (dans lequel il fait l'éloge de ceux qu'il appelle "les grands du genre" et de l'époque révolue de la qualité littéraire de la Fantasy, et où, au passage, il critique ses contemporains, Abercrombie en tête). Mais il aimerait également comprendre les arguments qu'il emploie, et que l'auteur de La Première Loi trouve peu clairs :
La suite et plus de détails ici , et pour mieux comprendre, l'article de Leo Grin est disponible ici“The mere trappings of the genre do nothing for me … when placed into the hands of writers clearly bored with the classic mythic undertones of the genre, and who try to shake things up with what can best be described as postmodern blasphemies against our mythic heritage.”
It’s a very simple argument he advances, really. A kind of literary battle of good against evil, you might say. On one side are the towering mythic geniuses of Tolkien and Howard, who wrote “in blood and lighting” according to Leo, although presumably on extremely hardwearing paper. On the other side are, well, me, Steve Erikson, Michael Swanwick, and Matthew Woodring Stover, apparently. I’ve never met those guys, or read any of their work, I must admit. But that doesn’t mean they’re not down here with me in the evil postmodern myth-destruction bunker. It’s a big old bunker we’ve got, and there’s lots of us down here. Though I’m not entirely sure who.
I’m a little suspicious, I must say, of any argument that lumps Tolkien and Howard together as one thing, although Leo has made the photos of them in his piece point towards each other in a very complimentary fashion. I think of them as polar opposites in many ways, and the originators (or at least key practitioners) of, to some extent, opposed traditions within sword-based fantasy. Tolkien, the father of high fantasy, Howard the father of low. Howard’s work, written by a man who died at thirty, tends to the short and pulpy (as you’d expect from stories written for pulp magazines). Tolkien’s work, published on the whole when he was advanced in years, is very long and literary (as you’d expect from a professor of English). Tolkien is more focused on setting, I’d say, Howard on character. Leo’s point is that they both celebrate a moral simplicity, a triumph of heroism, but I see that too as a massive over-simplification. Howard celebrates the individual, is deeply cynical (could one even say nihilistic) about civilisation. Tolkien seems broadly to celebrate order, structure, duty and tradition. And I celebrate, well …
