Barbarism meets academia at College of St. Joseph in Vermont

Cross posted with the permission of Rob Roehm of the Robert E. Howard Foundation website, I thought the following too interesting not to share with readers of Black Gate and The Silver Key:

Enduring Barbarism: Heroic Fantasy from the Bronze Age to the Internet

College of St. Joseph Popular Culture Conference
Contact email:
Dr. Jonas Prida
jprida@csj.edu

The inaugural popular culture conference will be held at the College of St. Joseph, located in Rutland, Vermont, April 13th-14th, 2012.

Proposal deadline: Dec 15th, 2011.

We are looking for a wide range of topics, figures, panels and cultural studies methodologies to explore the enduring figure of the barbarian in Western popular culture. Graduate students, established faculty, and independent scholars are encouraged to submit ideas. Possible paper topics:

The multi-faceted use of the barbarian in popular culture

Rise and fall of heroic fantasy in the 1970s

Comic book barbarism

Heroic fantasy as a heavy metal trope

The gendered barbarian

Explorations of lesser-known sword and sorcery texts

Italian sword and sandal movies

The barbarian’s future

We are actively interested in innovative panel ideas as well.

Please send 250 word paper proposals, 400-500 word panel ideas, or general questions to Dr. Jonas Prida at jprida@csj.edu

If it only had Eric Adams as the keynote, this would be pitch-perfect.

But seriously, it does my heart good to see serious treatment of swords and sorcery. Now there’s a conference I’d love to attend. Get those proposals in!

There has never been a craps table described quite like this

I'm at the halfway mark of a book I've long had on my "to be read" list--the Harlan Ellison-edited anthology Dangerous Visions (1967). I'm enjoying it immensely so far. Even when I don't quite understand everything I'm reading the sheer artistry of the stories makes up for the opaqueness. You can lose yourself in these tales.

I just finished Fritz Leiber's Hugo and Nebula Award-winning short story "Gonna Roll the Bones," about a beaten-down lowlife miner named Joe Slattermill who likes to blow off steam by gambling, getting drunk, and picking up cheap hookers. On this particular evening's excursion he enters a ghostly casino named The Boneyard and finds himself seated across the pool table from either death, or perhaps the devil.

It's freaking awesome. The way Leiber describes Slattermill's opponent--a skeletal, hollow-eyed, black-hatted figure known as The Big Gambler--reminded me of Iron Maiden mascot Eddie from my favorite Somewhere in Time tapestry, only with more menace.

I've never read anything quite like this story. It's a marvel of style. Here's how Leiber describes the crap table, for instance:

Joe lowered his gaze to the crap table. It was almost as wide as a man is tall, at least twice as long, unusually deep, and lined with black, not green, felt, so that it looked like a giant's coffin. There was something familiar about its shape which he couldn't place. Its bottom, though not its sides or ends, had a twinkling iridescence, as if it had been lightly sprinkled with very tiny diamonds. As Joe lowered his gaze all the way and looked directly down, his eyes barely over the table, he got the crazy notion that it went down all the way through the world, so that the diamonds were the stars on the other side, visible despite the sunlight there, just as Joe was always able to see the stars by day up the shaft of the mine he worked in, and so that if a cleaned-out gambler, dizzy with defeat, toppled forward into it, he'd fall forever, toward the innermost bottom, be it Hell or some black galaxy. Joe's thoughts swirled and he felt the cold, hard-fingered clutch of fear at his crotch. Someone was crooning beside him, "Come on, Big Dick."

I don't always agree with Hugo selections and other award winners, but "Gonna Roll the Bones" deserves whatever accolodates were thrown at it for that paragraph alone. The menace and alien nature of the table and its association with death, the reference to Slattermill's job and the accompanying insight into his character, the depiction of the soul of the inveterate gambler, the fear mixed with sex... wow.

The Golden Apples of the Sun

Just finished this one, a collection of 22 stories ranging from science fiction to fantasy to mainstream and everything in between. Like all Bradbury it's hard to categorize, with fun little shockers in the tradition of EC Comics alongside stories like deep pools that leave you gasping at their magnificence when you rise back to the surface.

"Well," said the captain, sitting, eyes shut, sighing. "Well, where do we go now, eh, we are we all going?" He felt his men sitting or standing all about him, the terror dead in them, their breathing quiet. "When you've gone a long, long way down to the sun and touched it and lingered and jumped around and streaked away from it, where are you going then? When you go away from the heat and the noonday light and the laziness, where do you go?"

His men waited for him to say it out. They waited for him to gather all of the coolness and the whiteness and the welcome and refreshing climate of the word in his mind, and they saw him settle the word, like a bit of ice cream, in his mouth, rolling it gently.

"There's only one direction in space from here on out," he said at last.

They waited. They waited as the ship moved swiftly into cold darkness away from the light.

"North," murmured the captain. "North."

And they all smiled, as if a wind had come up suddenly in the middle of a hot afternoon.

Where are we all going? Hard to say for sure, but in Bradbury's capable hands, always to good places.

Is The Lord of the Rings literature?

Part 2 of a 2-part series

Part 1 of this article set the stage for the question, Is The Lord of the Rings literature? Part II examines six criteria commonly used to define works of high literary quality and applies them to The Lord of the Rings.

1. Popular appeal

The argument against: The Lord of the Rings might be popular, but that doesn’t make it literature.

The counterargument: There’s popular, and then there’s an omnipresent, mammoth, overshadowing level of popularity.

How popular is The Lord of the Rings? At last count, it has been translated into 57 languages and is the second best-selling novel ever written, with over 150 million copies sold. Its also a repeat winner of multiple international contests for favorite novel (note the broad term novel, not just fantasy novel). For example:

In 1997 it topped a Waterstone’s poll for Top 100 Books of the Century.

In 2003 a survey (The Big Read) was conducted in the United Kingdom to determine the nation’s best-loved novel of all time. More than three quarters of a million votes were received, and the winner was The Lord of the Rings.

A 1999 Amazon poll administered to its customers yielded the same result.

In short, readers of all stripes, from all around the world, adore this book more than just about any other.

All that said, I will fully admit that this is the least convincing argument, because mass appeal is not necessarily a good indicator of quality. See Justin Bieber. So let’s look at some other criteria.

To view the rest of this post, visit The Black Gate website .

His Dark Materials: Good, but don’t expect any miracles

As you may recall I wrote about Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass, book one of the His Dark Materials trilogy, back in August. Recently I read The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass to complete the series.

The results were decidedly mixed. Some of His Dark Materials is excellent, bordering on brilliant, other aspects not so much.

There are a million and one summaries of these books floating around the internet so I won’t waste time writing another. That said, I have several thoughts on the series I’d like to share here. So in lieu of a traditional spoiler-free review, I’m weighing in with specific details on what I liked and did not like about the series.

A strong warning: Many spoilers follow after the book cover, as well as religious discussion.

First of all, do these books truly endorse atheism? Perhaps, but not what I would consider classic atheism, which argues against the existence of deities and the supernatural and posits that the universe is entirely explainable by science. While there apparently is no God in the universe of His Dark Materials, intelligent species like humans are inhabited by a substance called Dust, which apparently functions the same way as original sin in the Christian religion (it bestows knowledge of good and evil, etc). His Dark Materials includes elements beyond any physical explanation, such as angels, an compass-like item called an alethiometer that performs functions that can only be explained by magic, flying witches, incorporeal specters, and other monsters. Committed atheists believe that everything is physical and there is nothing beyond the grave; in The Amber Spyglass Lyra and Will travel to the underworld to visit spirits of the dead, and there are hints of some atomized afterlife of the spirit. In short, it’s is not a work of scientific rationalism. I’ve heard it described as gnosticism, which seems a far more apt comparison.

What Pullman’s books are is a rather damning indictment of organized religion, particularly the Catholic church. Now, I’m not a Catholic so I have no skin in the fire, but I found Pullman’s treatment rather unfair. He portrays the church as a caricature of evil, a uniformly monstrous, insidious, intolerant organization that mercilessly persecutes non-believers. So we get dialogue like this by one of the characters: “That's what the Church does, and every church is the same: control, destroy, obliterate every good feeling.”

Given that His Dark Materials is ostensibly set in a world with a timeline roughly equivalent to our own (not a time of 14-century witch-hunts and the like when some of this behavior was sadly practiced), it’s all faintly ridiculous. To describe the church as an evil comparable to Sauron is, well, childish in the extreme.

Pullman posits that there is no God as believers traditionally understand him, but only powerful angels. God is actually a decrepit old angelic figure called the Authority. Pullman inverts the story of Adam and Eve, making the Authority the bad guy and Satan the good. Original sin is all backwards; our bodies are wonderful and natural and the fruit of knowledge to be fully enjoyed. The heroine and hero of the story, Lyra and Will, become ciphers for the new Adam and Eve, ushering in a world free of the Christian God in exchange for a world of solid reality.

So what does the world of His Dark Materials offer for consolation? Perhaps that there are other worlds, parallel to our own, that science or the mind of mankind can open. Pullman’s constructed world is not amoral or about living only for life’s sake. It also includes a strong component of responsibility. When the armored bear Iorek tells Lyra not to put herself in harm’s way (“While you are alive, your business is with life”) she lectures him otherwise: “No, Iorek,” she said gently, “our business is to keep promises, no matter how difficult they are.” This is a fine lesson.

There are some great scenes in the books that alone make it worth reading for fantasy fans. Perhaps most memorable was Will and Lyra’s journey into the land of the dead, complete with an implacable boatman and foul harpies right out of Greek mythology. It’s terrifying and wonderful at once.

Will and Lyra’s journey into the land of the dead demonstrates what happens to the “souls” of the dead in a godless world. Freed from a purgatory-like underworld, they are atomized, entirely gone. Death itself (and all our fears and superstitions built up around it) dies too. In Pullman’s world, at death a person becomes a part of everything. “You’ll drift apart, it’s true, but you’ll be out in the open, part of everything alive again.” Life is fine and good, and death is simply the End. Pullman portrays death as tranquil, for example when the explorer Lee Scoresby dies. Unfortunately this explanation provides no solace for those left behind, as there is seemingly no possibility of reuniting in an afterlife. Heaven is a lie. Explains an ex-nun: “That’s what led some of us to give our lives, and others to spend years in solitary prayer, while all the joy of life was going to waste around us and we never knew.”

The Amber Spyglass packs an emotional and satisfying ending that I found quite moving and well-done. Some of the best writing in the series can be found here.

All that said…

There are problems with the series, both plot-wise and in its execution, and some are major. Not the least of which is the series’ tendency to tell rather than show as it progresses, and delivering its underlying messages with an iron-booted didacticism. The best book of the series is without question The Golden Compass, which is refreshingly agenda-free and so tells a pretty good imaginative story. I’ve read a lot of complaints over the years about C.S. Lewis’ Narnia, detractors of which point out (not unreasonably) that it’s too dogmatic, or black and white in its conclusions. The same can certainly be said for His Dark Materials, and then some.

There are other problems with the series, too. Some of these include:

• Characters that float in and out without adequate ends, or explanation. For example Ama, a serving girl that Pullman spends considerable time introducing at the outset of The Amber Spyglass, simply drops out of the story without explanation. I never figured out the purpose of the scientist Mary and her encounters on another planet with a sentient race of elephant-like creatures called the mulefa. This entire sub-plot could have been safely excised, in my opinion, and any point that Pullman was attempting to convey here (perhaps showing the mulefa as an ideal natural race, without the interference of organized religion) woven into the main story.
  
  
  
• Lyra’s mother and father fight a angel enforcer named Metatron, whose name sounds suspiciously like a transformer and acts like the worst of the Decepticons. Lame.
  
  
  
• The great and powerful Church, with centuries of experience of scheming and corruption and power wielded behind the scenes, decides to send one man with a rifle to kill Lyra and end the biggest threat it has ever known. Really?
  
  
  
• Dust is mumbo-jumbo and a wholly unsatisfying explanation for what invests us with our humanity. Pullman’s explanation for homo sapiens’ divergence from our ape ancestors some 30,000 years ago is an invisible, floating, sentient, substance from the cosmos. Got that? I don’t either. Pullman tries to invest Dust (in our fleeting, occasional glimpses of it) with a holiness or mystery, but I found it all rather uninspired.

Again, if intended as atheism, His Dark Materials fails because it offers an easy out. Who wouldn’t accept a world(s) with angels and witches and alethiometers as a consolation prize for godlessness? And its treatment of organized religion is grossly unfair, utterly without thought or complexity. If I were a member of the Catholic church I’d be pretty pissed, too.

In short, His Dark Materials is certainly worth reading, though you (literally and figuratively) shouldn’t expect a miracle. It doesn’t live up to the hype.

Urge to scream... rising

What is it with the annoying Tolkien posts this week? Here's the latest, an interview with actress Evangeline Lilly on her role in The Hobbit, courtesy of SFX :

Tauriel is a new character in the mythology so as a book purist yourself that must be frightening to ponder how fans will react to your part?

“Yeah! I am very concerned to this day that people will watch the film and I’ll be the black mark on the film. I know how adamant the purists are and I’m one of them! That said, upon reading The Hobbit again, as an adult, I can see why additional characters were needed to round out the story as an adaptation – especially female characters! The Hobbit didn’t include female characters at all and was a very linear story, a book for children, really. What Peter, Fran (Walsh) and Philippa (Boyens) have done is all in perfect keeping with Tolkien’s world, while adding a third dimension to an otherwise very two-dimensional story.”

I'm glad to know that after 75 years of near universal acclaim, adding a female character has dramatically improved The Hobbit (which is after all just a flawed, silly book for children ).

Middle-Earth has always felt so flat and two dimensional in The Hobbit, but I guess I never realized it ... until now. I frankly don't know how I've been enjoying it all these years. Thanks for setting the record straight, Lilly!

Why Tolkien needs defending: A classic Camp 3-er at work

Is The Lord of the Rings any good? I just came across this provocatively-titled article by Martin Turner, and felt compelled to comment, as it dovetails with the two-part article I’m currently writing about whether The Lord of the Rings qualifies as literature.

Harkening back to Part I of my article, it’s apparent that Turner falls squarely into Camp 3, with a dash of Camp 1. He seems to like Tolkien quite a bit and his article begins with some compelling reasons why The Lord of the Rings deserves a place among the very great works of this or any age. But as it progresses Turner hedges his bets, and seems to conclude that LOTR, while a terrific read, isn’t literature, or at best is a deeply flawed example.

Turner starts out strong. He pleads the case that critics should treat imaginative literature just like realistic novels. He takes some stuffing out of the literary elite and the notion that literature must meet certain, pre-defined criteria:

Like Ruskin’s ‘pathetic fallacy’, which appears to account for a large number of the visits to this website, this critical perspective grows from the supremely arrogant position that there is just one true purpose of literature, and this, despite the evidence of preceding centuries, has been discovered by the critic and his cadre.

This is a great point, and quite correct. Literature has many functions and purposes. But from here on out, the article quickly goes downhill in its evaluation of Tolkien.

First, Martin (half-heartedly) criticizes Tolkien for not meeting with his own particular definition of literature:

I promised to deal with the first group of criticisms second. These are to do with the technical literary merits of the books. At this point we must recognise that, as a novel, the Lord of the Rings has substantial flaws … Essentially a novel is not so much an adventure story as a story about how character grows and changes as it responds to events and the world around it. Robinson Crusoe is not a foundational novel because of the desert island, but because of the exploration of Crusoe’s character and how it changes. War and Peace is not a great novel because of its sweep of history, which is merely the backdrop, but because of its profound analysis of the character of Pierre Bezukhov and Prince Bolkonsky. We need to recognise that there is no real character development in the Lord of the Rings.

So immediately after telling us that it’s “supremely arrogant” to posit that there is just one true purpose of literature, Turner says that all the great novels are great because of their character development. And with its lack of character development, The Lord of the Rings is therefore substantially flawed.

I won’t argue that LOTR has a deep, sweeping character arc to any of its characters; it does not (though Gollum/Smeagol arguably does, and Frodo is certainly substantially changed from his journey). But I’d also argue that its entire cast and crew of characters adds up to the sum of the human condition. Aragorn is nobility of the spirit, Sam is loyalty, Frodo dogged determination, Gollum lust, Denethor despair, Boromir pride, etc. Taken together as a whole, this panoply of characters depicts us, and offers a profound picture of what it means to be human.

And deep characterization is not the only function of literature. It’s a function, no more or less. Martin doesn’t seem convinced by his argument, either:

This, of course, is only a flaw if we assume that the Lord of the Rings is supposed to be a novel. It almost certainly is not, at least, not in the sense of the evolution of the novel as but forward by Leavis and others. Tolkien described it as a ‘tale’. In medieval terms we would describe it as a Romance.

So is The Lord of the Rings’ lack of characterization a flaw, or not? It's quite unclear. Either way, the argument is full of holes and equivocation and is entirely unconvincing.

Next he goes on to criticize the structure of LOTR:

The structure unravels rapidly in The Two Towers, though. The first part, the adventures of the majority of the company in Rohan, is compelling and magical adventure fiction. In its own terms, it is as good as or better than anything in the Fellowship of the Ring. However, as we read, we are aware that this is merely a side-show. The main story, the overriding need to destroy the ring, is taking place at the same time but elsewhere. This is the subject of the second part of the Two Towers. However, this part is unremittingly bitter, grim and unpleasant. It has none of the bright adventure of books I-III, and even its moral dilemma is painful and uncomfortable. It could be argued that this is essential to the overall conception of the cycle, but the choice to write book IV at the same length as book III simply does not work as fiction. Under close questioning, most re-readers admit that they tend to ‘hurry through’ (ie, skip-read) book IV, in order to get on to the Return of the King as quickly as possible.…Nonetheless, in terms of the conscious structural strait-jacket thrust on it, the Lord of the Rings must be regarded as flawed.

This is … just wrong. The structure of LOTR works just fine. When the gates slam shut on Sam with a clang at the end of book IV, we don’t know what happened to Frodo (it’s hard to imagine what readers must have felt back in 1954 when The Two Towers was first published). Though much maligned by Martin, this obviously creates tension in the reader. On top of which, Martin uses anecdotal evidence to support his claim. His statement that Most re-readers admit that they tend to ‘hurry through’ (ie, skip-read) book IV, in order to get on to the Return of the King as quickly as possible is obviously flimsy, to say the least. I don’t ‘hurry through’ book IV, and have never heard anyone admit to doing the same, so I guess my unsubstantiated counter-argument is just as valid.

Also, and at the risk of nit-picking, the action in Rohan is most definitely not a “side-show.” The Lord of the Rings is about war and quest. The actions of the small hobbits are critical, but so are the ramifications of the larger conflict. If Rohan didn’t come to the aid of Minas Tirith, and if Minas Tirith failed to hold, than the destruction of the One Ring is a moot point. What would it accomplish, if all the peoples of the free worlds were already annihilated by Sauron’s hordes? Secondly, one of the book’s central tenets is that different cultures and peoples must set aside their differences and work together to confront evil. This is demonstrated in Book III with Rohan and Gondor, two former allies grown cold with suspicion and grievances large and small. Finally, as a plot-point it’s critical that Sauron’s forces are defeated at the Pelennor Fields so that a later sally may be made to the Black Gate, a feint that allows Sam and Frodo to pass through the otherwise orc infested plains of Gorgoroth to Mount Doom. Sauron’s attention must be drawn elsewhere and his forces vacated from the interior. This couldn’t happen without Helm’s Deep and the critical events begun in Book III. So Turner is wrong on several levels, thematic and plot-wise.

As far as the length of book IV being an issue, or its “unremittingly bitter, grim and unpleasant” nature; again, there’s nothing to substantiate his argument. It’s supposed to get more bitter, and grim, as our heroes press into the heart of Mordor.

Finally, Turner offers an entirely unconvincing argument that the plot of The Lord of the Rings is flawed. In so doing he completely misreads the Scouring of the Shire, which is one of the most important (some would say the central lesson—I don’t know if I’d go that far) of the novel. Martin complains that the Scouring of the Shire is not as “adventurous” compared to what came before and so seems anticlimactic. That’s the point, of course. The long arm of war reaches all the way back into our own farms and fields homes. The enemy is us, if we let our guard down and engage in closed-minded parochialism. This point would have been lost with Balrogs and wizards running around the Shire, as Turner seems to want.

Turner doesn’t like the last line of the book and calls it “trite and unsatisfying”; others like Tom Shippey and Peter Beagle in Meditations on Middle-earth argue with far more conviction that “Well, I’m back” is brilliant, laden with multiple levels of meaning. Turner says there’s no end to The Lord of the Rings, to which I counter, Huh? When Frodo sails into the west on full ship and magic leaves the world, ushering in an entirely new age, that’s not end enough? When the Hobbits finally grow up and become men, and are able to save the Shire without the help of the Maiar Gandalf, this isn’t a satisfying end for him? He implies that there should be some big death at the end to wrap it all up, like all the real sagas:

There is a reason why most sagas end with the death of the hero, or, as in Brennu Njallssaga, with the consequences of his death: it is a logical and satisfying place to stop.

This criticism is an utter head-scratcher: Frodo is dying, he has for all intents and purposes gone off to die. Sam has gone back and now must cope with the consequences of losing his best friend and master. Did Turner somehow miss this? And for that matter, in what way is Chapter 2 “The Shadow of the Past,” in which Tolkien deftly sums up the history of the One Ring and what is at stake with its destruction—laying out both the inherent danger of the Ring and the broad strokes of the quest—not a “real beginning?” This is incredibly silly.

He concludes with a final patronizing jab:

Tolkien fans may consider this to be heresy, but it seems to me there is little point in defending the Lord of the Rings by denying the self-evident flaws.

Self-evident to whom? To Turner, yes. To readers with more familiarity with the novel—not so much.

I will say that the article ends with a far more interesting observation:

On the other hand, the Lord of the Rings is not a novel, in the technical sense, at all. It is a tale, a romance, a cycle, a work of major creation, perhaps something unique. It is the inspiration for a generation of video games, a cultural phenomenon, the beginning, and perhaps the end, of a literary genre.

I completely agree: The Lord of the Rings is not a traditional novel. It’s very difficult to classify, perhaps because it is (despite its many imitations) a one of a kind work. But that is a completely different argument than whether succeeds or fails as literature.