There is a common belief among superstitious people (and nearly all modern people are superstitious, for they persist in believing in newspapers and advertisements) that we are continuously watched by spy satellites that can make out the numbers on the licence plate of our cars. No point of this claim is quite false, but it adds up to a gigantic untruth. [Read more…]
Michel de Montaigne, back in the 16th century, was the first writer to call his short, informal pieces by the name ‘essai’. The French word means ‘trial’ or ‘attempt’; Montaigne’s essays represented no set body of knowledge, but his own attempts to work out his thoughts in writing. The pieces collected here are in the same rambling and experimental tradition. I sometimes use the French spelling ‘essai’, not because I am terribly pretentious, but to remind me of the original meaning of the word. Nothing posted here should be taken too seriously. —T. S.
Ad effigiem
The strawman fallacy in Utopian fiction
Of all the habitual fallacies and prejudices that have poisoned the wells of reason in our time, none, perhaps, has been so destructive as what Owen Barfield christened ‘chronological snobbery’. This is the strange belief that modern ideas and habits, simply because they are modern, are inherently superior to those of former times. This belief has become so prevalent that it is now recognized as a category of informal fallacy in itself. [Read more…]
The road less travelled by goes ever on
Long ago, I have read, Irving Berlin offered the young and struggling George Gershwin a job as his musical secretary, for the then princely wage of a hundred dollars a week. ‘But don’t take the job,’ said Berlin. ‘If you do, you may develop into a second-rate Berlin. But if you insist on being yourself, someday you’ll become a first-rate Gershwin.’
In the five years since Peter Jackson’s film adaptation of The Lord of the Rings began to be released, there has been a fresh outpouring of critical, academic, and fannish writing dissecting, rehashing, and expanding upon every facet of Tolkien’s work. Probably no other author since Joyce has been subjected to such torrential inquiry; perhaps none since Dickens. If the flow continues a few years longer, Tolkienology may end up second in volume only to the endless study of Shakespeare.
Not all of this outpouring is wasted ink, and some of it is work of exceptional brilliance and inspirational value. I had a flash of insight — even I get flashes of insight from time to time — when I read Tom Shippey’s excellent and audacious Tolkien: Author of the Century. The Afterword on ‘The Followers and the Critics’ changed the whole focus of my thinking with respect to my own work specifically and fantasy in general. [Read more…]
Genesis 3
Reality, responsibility, and ‘The Eye of the Maker’
To admit the fact that contradicts all one’s assumptions is the mark of an honest man.
—David Warren
Whatever you may think of the Hebrew Scriptures as theology or history, they are certainly sound as psychology: far sounder, in fact, than we parochial moderns (who like to believe that the study of the human mind began only with Freud) can admit without considerable abashment.
Eve, then Adam, ate the forbidden fruit: that, we are told, was the first sin. The second sin, which followed immediately, was trying to shift the blame. ‘Eve made me do it,’ said Adam, and ‘The serpent made me do it,’ said Eve. The serpent seems not to have been available for questioning, but if God did in fact track it down and ask for its account of the story, it probably said: ‘I just told them about the fruit. I didn’t pick it.’ There was enough blame to go round, but none of the three guilty parties would accept a proper share of it. So instead there was enough blame to go round . . . and round . . . and round — and it is going round still. [Read more…]
The problem of being Susan
Religious experience and the will to disbelieve
In the very long and interesting (and tangled) skein of comments to R. J. Anderson’s essay ‘The Problem of Susan’, several people expressed their frank disbelief that Susan Pevensie could ever forget her time in Narnia to the point of thinking it had all been a silly childhood game. Actually this is the most grimly plausible of the suppositions behind Lewis’s treatment of Susan in The Last Battle. I can say this from personal experience: I have suffered something very like it myself. [Read more…]
Moorcock, Saruman, and the Dragon’s Tail
This essay can also be found in the collection Writing Down the Dragon.
The journalist and historian Paul Johnson has divided all serious writers and critics into two camps, ‘intellectuals’ and ‘men of letters’. Intellectuals are those who, like Shelley, conceive themselves to be ‘the unacknowledged legislators of the world’; they are the Utopians, the revolutionists, the Angry Young Men; they involve themselves in politics, usually radical, readily form claques, and have a disturbing tendency to write manifestos. Men of letters (the term dates back to less literal-minded times, when ‘men’ could be understood to refer to both sexes) just read things, and write things, and write about what they read. They do not even have a strong tendency to read about what they write: the Platonically ideal man of letters is too comfortable in his ivory tower to care much about reviews and Press clippings. Karl Marx could well stand for the purest form of intellectual, and Emily Dickinson, if you will pardon the Irish bull, was a perfect man of letters.
Of course these extremes are only the endpoints of a continuous line, but most authors show a definite tendency to drift towards one end or the other. Tolstoy was an intellectual, and developed the points of that breed, so to speak, more and more strongly as he grew older, until he gave up imaginative writing altogether in favour of his own weird form of political messianism. Shakespeare was a man of letters, so very much so that it is still hotly disputed what his political opinions were, or whether he ever troubled to form any. Intellectuals have often been quick to dismiss men of letters as reactionary toadies or commercial hacks, and in fact Tolstoy attacked Shakespeare as both in his pamphlet, Shakespeare and the Drama. But for all the fame of both the attacker and the target, that pamphlet would be utterly forgotten today, had it not been preserved by George Orwell’s much more famous rebuttal, ‘Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool’. On the whole Orwell was an intellectual, but he had a very strong streak of the man of letters in him, and his sympathies were very much with Shakespeare.
In our own time, Michael Moorcock could well be described as an intellectual who sometimes masquerades as a man of letters. In The Way the Future Was, Frederik Pohl says that if the Futurians had conquered all of science-fiction fandom, the mere world would have been an anticlimax; and the same quality is distinctly present in Moorcock’s characteristic literary polemics. He takes literature as his battleground, but his weapons and his enmities are drawn from an almost purely political ideology. He seems very much concerned that Utopian writers shall write about the correct kind of Utopia, and his fury with dissenters knows no bounds. J.R.R. Tolkien, on the other hand, was so very much a man of letters that he did not even attempt to publish any of his fiction until a reader at Allen and Unwin chanced to hear of The Hobbit and pried the typescript out of his hands. And while Tolkien seems not to have heard of Moorcock any more than Shakespeare could have heard of Tolstoy, the same kind of bitter one-way enmity has grown between them.
I have before me an essay of Moorcock’s, called ‘Wit and Humour in Fantasy’, first published in 1979. It is ostensibly an argument for the natural and necessary alliance between humour and fantasy (something nobody ever remarked upon before Moorcock); but he makes his argument very badly, partly because it is poppycock, but chiefly because his real purpose is to attack his arch-enemy, Tolkien. In consequence it makes for interesting reading, and I would nominate it for a place of honour beside Shakespeare and the Drama in the canon of foolish diatribes.
The Emperor’s new depth
Sherwood Smith inquires into the matter of ‘writing deep’, and there is evident puzzlement on all hands about what ‘deep’ means. As you might guess from the title of this essai, I am not much taken with the idea of ‘deep’ writing in fiction. I therefore propose to examine the Emperor’s garments one by one, until I find a windcheater that actually, you know, cheats the wind. This turns out to be a longish task, so I shall take it one heading at a time. To begin with:
1. Armchair philosophizing as a substitute for character development.
This, I suspect, is what most adolescents (and nearly all college students) are likely to mean when they call a book ‘deep’. As in: ‘Who-o-o-a . . . that’s, like, so deep.’ Ayn Rand is so deep, and so are Camus and Vonnegut, and various other hardy campus perennials. Adolescence and early adulthood are naturally given to a kind of ill-focused antinomianism, which, having been trained to do so by its elders in the media and academe, readily expresses itself in scorn poured out upon ‘the metaphysics of savages’, as one of those elders notoriously called what other people call ‘common sense’. We are taught early in life that the earth is really round, though ‘obviously’ flat, and that it is really in motion, though ‘obviously’ stationary, and that ‘obviously’ solid matter is really mostly empty space between atoms. All of these teachings are half-truths, and the short half of the truth at that. [Read more…]
Superversive
The failure of subversion in imaginative literature
‘Do you believe in God, Winston?’
‘No.’
‘Then what is it, this principle that will defeat us?’
‘I don’t know. The spirit of Man.’
Sturgeon’s Law School
Or, Why do people with good taste create bad art?
Theodore Sturgeon is the sort of unfortunate author who is far better known for a single pithy aphorism than for all his books and stories combined. His brilliant science fiction is seldom reprinted nowadays, as it requires a certain sensibility and flexibility from the reader, and this is an investment that the big reading public just doesn’t want to make. (It doesn’t help that the publishing industry in general is doggedly averse to reprinting old books, but that’s another rant.) The average sf reader today has never read ‘Microcosmic God’ or More Than Human. If he knows Sturgeon at all, it’s likely to be in the context of Sturgeon’s Law:
Ninety percent of science fiction is crud, but then ninety percent of everything is crud.
Many people nowadays say that Sturgeon was being charitable. And that 90 percent figure leaves out all the vast mountains of unpublished fiction, the stuff that is simply too cruddy for anyone to print. But the crud gets written, and some of it gets published, and hardly any of the perpetrators are aware that the stuff they’re trying to inflict on the world is crud.
Crud happens. Why can’t the crudsters tell? [Read more…]
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