Kyngatin, it's seemed appropriate, particularly in some philosophical-type discussions here at ED over the past couple of months, for me to be forthright about my being a Christian.
I think, though, that understanding, enjoyment, and evaluation of artistic works (literature, fine arts, etc.) can to a considerable degree be independent of agreement with someone's religious beliefs or lack thereof. I think you agree.
In case ED folk are interested, here's the situation to which Knygatin refers:
The Chronicles Forums thread that I started on Sept. 15 was a variation on one started this week by a Chronster called Rumi_fan. Rumi_fan's thread asked, "Do all fantasy books fans like The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit?" I thought the variation was worth asking too: "Do 'all' people who like Hobbit and Lord of the Rings like the fantasy genre?"
The answers to Rumi_fan's question and to mine were both "No." There are people who read a lot of fantasy who don't like Tolkien's books, and there are people who like the Tolkien books but aren't interested in most fantasy. I belong to the latter category, although I listed a number of fantasy books not by Tolkien that I like, including Lewis's Narnian books, Alexander's Prydain quintet (The Book of Three, The Black Cauldron, etc.), Garner's Weirdstone of Brisingamen, Le Guin's first three Earthsea books, and William Morris's Water of the Wondrous Isles etc. I said further that some fantasy I used to like doesn't seem to appeal to me now, mentioning Lord Dunsany (meaning his familiar "dreams") and Leiber's Fafhrd and Mouser stories.
I used to like Dunsany's dream-world fantasies and Leiber's sword-and-sorcery stories quite a lot, but these mostly seem to have lost their charm when I have revisited them. I've already commented here at The Eldritch Dark about Dunsany -- reserving for the future a possible return to books such as The Charwoman's Shadow. I don't remember saying anything here or at Chrons about the Fafhrd and Mouser stories other than that I used to like them, don't care for them now. I revisited two or three of them, I think, within the past ten years. This was in library books. The only title I'm pretty sure of was "The Bleak Shore," in an anthology of stories taken from Unknown, the short-lived magazine. I admit that my thoughts on the F & M stories, then, aren't worth much -- I was reading and rereading them mostly in the 1970s, when I read an enormous amount of fantasy.
What can I say in general?
The type of fantasy in which it seems the author has an ironic attitude towards his stories doesn't appeal to me. I think that's true of Dunsany's typical fantasy (take the one about Thangobrand the thief as an example). That would include James Branch Cabell's writing, I assume, though even when I was reading fantasy all the time I never took to Cabell. I don't suppose I have read The Swords of Lankhmar since the 1970s, but I know I read it once or twice. I seem to remember that Leiber writes there in a Dunsanian manner about the world of Nehwon (no-when) as a sort of soap bubble or something like that. But whether or not my memory there is right, I think it's probably true that, when I read Leiber's sword-and-sorcery, I feel that the author is trying to be clever. He is trying to seem sophisticated.
It's as if he's defending himself from anyone taking him to be a Robert E. Howard type of author. I know that Leiber liked Howard's Conan stories (as I can too, although they get terribly repetitive and really do often seem slapdash), but Conan and his world are not depicted from a pervasively ironic point of view. But (as I recall) everything in the F & M stories is depicted from an ironic point of view. To me, this is reminiscent of the attitude often seen in bright adolescents who aren't very happy with life. They wrap an
easy, unearned protective irony around themselves, and they can be very good at being "clever."
Don't misunderstand me. Irony can be used to great effect in fiction. Two of my favorite novels are Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent and Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust. These are magnificent works that show how irony can be used in a truly mature and justified way. (Neither of them, by the way, is by a Christian. I don't think Conrad ever was one, and Waugh was not yet a Roman Catholic when he wrote this book.) I have sometimes felt that The Secret Agent is a book I wish I had written. I admire it very, very much. I won't launch a discussion of it here. But trust me: it is a master class in the right use of irony. So is Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, by the way.
De Camp was another author who had the ironic, "clever" habit, as I recall. I used to like his writing. I even wrote him fan letters (to which he replied -- what a real gentleman). But when I took up The Tritonian Ring a while ago, as I recall it didn't hold my interest and I didn't finish rereading it.
OK -- that's one point about why I might not like a fair bit of fantasy. (By the way, I did reread The Dying Earth and The Eyes of the Overworld within the past 10 years or so. As I recall it took a certain amount of determination to reread DE, but I enjoyed Eyes a fair bit once again, on this third reading.)
Here I want to pause, before I forget, to mention that William Morris was not a Christian author. (Nor were Garner and Le Guin, and I don't know one way or the other about Lloyd Alexander.)
I used to specialize in reading fantasy. Now I usually stick to some favorites, among which are several of the books I love the most.
Tolkien and Lewis shared not only the same faith, but a receptiveness to the natural world that is vitally important also to me. Their stories have real mountains, real weather, real sunlight on leaves, real mist rising at morning from riverbanks. This sense of the real "outdoors" world is (as I recall) something Leiber never evokes. I'm not saying he ought to try to drum it up if he doesn't experience it and it's not needed for the story he wants to write. But that quality is one of the things that brings me back to these favorites of mine again and again.
It's there in some of the best of Algernon Blackwood. Read the opening pages of one of the John Silence stories, "The Camp of the Dog," set in Swedish islands -- do you know it, Knygatin?
So these authors whom I love refresh that sense of wonder that we should feel
about the real world.
If this long posting by me interests anyone, I wish he or she would read my "Sort of Like Tolkien" article here:
[
efanzines.com]
It goes into even more detail, for example, about why I, a Tolkien fan, might enjoy a travel book a lot more than a fantasy book even though The Lord of the Rings is a fantasy.
Edited 10 time(s). Last edit at 16 Sep 21 | 07:46PM by Dale Nelson.