On Right Wing Fantasist Reactionism

[Priscilla]

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.

Extrait :

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to remember that this sort of wistfulness about the imagined past and its simpler "morality" goes hand and hand with outdated and abhorrent cultural norms of class, race and gender.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]

Cet article de Leo Grin fait décidemment parler de lui. Après Joe Abercrombie et cet article de Wetasphalt.com que nous venons de voir, c'est au tour deJohn H. Stevens de publier sur le site Apexbookcompany.com un article intitulé "No redemption no arcadia : the morality debate in epic/heroic fantasy", dans lequel l'auteur y propose un débat réel pour savoir exactement ce que Fantasy et Fantastique signifient, non seulement de nos jours, mais surtout pour les personnes comme Leo Grin, qui semblent s'attacher à certaines valeurs du genre sans pour autant parvenir à les définir.

Extrait :

“Fantasy doesn’t have to serve a purpose, really, any more than any kind of fiction. It’s often “just” deep exploration of what it means to be human, what our world is like, to try to capture some kind of truth about the world, I guess. And to entertain, which is often the same thing. Art and entertainment aren’t actually in opposition to one another.”-Jeff VanderMeer

“The morally confused anti-hero who alternates between conventionally good and conventionally evil behavior may be interesting and well-written, but when every character exhibits the same moral relativism and behaves in the same morally nebulous manner, it readily becomes apparent that the writer is constitutionally incapable of observing actual human behavior much less creating psychologically credible characters that are not stand-ins for his own confused moral sensibilities.” -”Theo“

If you follow the online chatter about fantasy literature, you have likely stumbled upon the recent wordstorm that has erupted over “nihilism” and moral problems in fantasy started by Leo Grin as he valorized J. R. R. Tolkien and Robert E. Howard as bygone exemplars of a lost age of wonder. His piece created a whirlwind of responses both in support of and against Grin’s particular thesis and the wider implications of his argument. One of the most recent responses, which built upon Grin’s ideas, was posted to Black Gate on Sunday and written by “Theo,” who is better known as Vox Day, a conservative blogger. It was a response to an earlier post by John O’Neill, and Matthew David Suridge posted a response to Theo on Black Gate the same day. All three posts have had vigorous discussions taking place in the comments.
Other commenters have done a good job of discussing specifics, so what I want to engage is Theo’s (and to the extent it intersects with his ideas, Grin’s) concept of what fantastic literature should contain, and the implications for considering morality in such literature. Theo’s piece in particular hammers away at the problems of morality (as the quotation above demonstrates), and he frequently complains about a lack of moral structure in modern fantasy writing and how that links to, essentially, a social fall from grace that cuts across “Western civilization” and stems from its separation from Christianity. As Theo puts it:

“Western civilization is a synonym for European Christendom and it stands, by definition, in contradiction to the cultural and religious traditions of the East. Indeed, the central concept of “balance”, which now serves as a substitute for good and evil in much fantasy fiction, is a fundamentally Eastern philosophical concept and is foreign to all four primary elements of Western civilization, Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, medieval/Renaissance Christianity, and the Enlightenment.”

Not only is fantasy fiction emblematic of a “fall,” it has embraced the moral tenets of its opposite. Fantasy is thus faulted for being a practice of imagination, one of a number of highly problematic ideas in this formulation. From the history of civilizations to the parameters of fantasy, the critique is riddled with inflexible assumptions, hyperbolic characterizations, and definitional (and sometimes logical) fallacies. We are to believe that the entirety of the genres being discussed are the way Theo claims they are based on the invocation of exactly three writers (all male) and using very few specifics from even that tiny sample. Of course, we are also supposed to believe in the monolithic nature of “Western civilization” and its explicit Christianity, and that the dearth of authors embracing the traditional moral structure from that source in every fantasy work penned from the death of Robert E. Howard to the publication of Joe Abercrombie’s latest novel demonstrates an identical sad slide into perdition.

La suite et plus de détails ici