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PaperclipPerfector  23d ago (text post)   31156 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 21, 2025

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I tried to read Jurgen once, because it was supposed to be this towering fantasy masterpiece, and the title of Heinlein's Job: A Comedy of Justice was a reference to it.

I bounced off it. Didn't care for it, didn't see what was so great about it. And I recall the language being too affectedly old-fashioned for a twentieth-century work.

Same here. I think part of its reputation was the perception of "he's talking about sex and this is driving the prudes nuts, tee-hee!" and part of it was "well ackshully proper fantasy is not that stupid black-and-white morality Tolkien nonsense, it's high-brow literary fantasy (that talks about sex and drives the prudes nuts, tee-hee!)".

If you want high brow literary fantasy you go for E.R.R. Eddison (who is frustrating and amazing at once). I think Cabell just hit the particular period (the 20s) that had a craze for historical/mythological, wry, satirical fantasy writing that sort of smirked at the reader in complicity ('you and I are both so smart, we know what's really going on don't we?') For example the Kai Lung novels of Ernest Bramah which are unreadable so far as I'm concerned (and which today would be excoriated for racism, which is unfair; Bramah was not trying to write about real China or real Chinese people, but the willow-pattern plate China version). They were wildly popular and all sorts of people loved them, Dorothy Sayers in at least one of her novels has Lord Peter and Harriet swapping quotations.

(Bramah also wrote the Max Carrados stories which are much better as Edwardian detective stories and still have a niche to this day).

But those who really disliked Tolkien (as, famously, Edmund Wilson in his essay Oo Those Awful Orcs hated it) loved Cabell instead:

As for me, if we must read about imaginary kingdoms, give me James Branch Cabell’s Poictesme. He at least writes for grown-up people, and he does not present the drama of life as a showdown between Good People and Goblins. He can cover more ground in an episode that lasts only three pages than Tolkien is able to in one of this twenty-page chapters, and he can create a more disquieting impression by a reference to something that is never described than Tolkien through his whole demonology.

Yeah, no. There's a reason we have a trilogy of movies based on The Lord of the Rings and nobody, to my knowledge, has ever tried making a movie out of Jurgen ("men like sexy women in theory as an ideal but can't live with real women, so they spend their lives chasing after the unattainable Perfect Woman happy in the knowledge there is no danger of them ever catching her, when they would then have to live an ordinary life with her, but it's the perfect excuse for ditching their wives and having a string of casual sex affairs" doesn't really make for a box office success).

I disagree vehemently with the late Ursula Le Guin on her politics and pretty much everything else, but she was a fine writer and she wasn't ashamed of "fantasy is only for kids not Real Serious Adults":

“Critics and academics have been trying for forty years to bury the greatest work of imaginative fiction in English. They ignore it, they condescend to it, they stand in large groups with their backs to it - because they're afraid of it. They're afraid of dragons. They have Smaugophobia. "Oh those awful Orcs," they bleat, flocking after Edmund Wilson. They know if they acknowledge Tolkien they'll have to admit that fantasy can be literature, and that therefore they'll have to redefine what literature is. And they're too damned lazy to do it.” ― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination

Tell me what you think about Wilson, Ursula:

“The genres” were ignored altogether and realistic fiction alone was left as literature, in the minds of the men who controlled criticism and teaching. Realism is of course a tremendous and wonderfully capacious literary genre, and it has dominated fiction since 1800 or before. But dominance isn’t the same thing as superiority. Fantasy is at least as immense as realism and much older — essentially coeval with literature itself. Yet fantasy was relegated for fifty years or sixty years to the nursery.

These days, I love to remember Edmund Wilson, king of the realist bigots, squealing “Ooh those awful Orcs!” and believing he’d made a witty and cogent critical point.

As you see, I bear some resentment and some scars from the years of anti-genre bigotry. My own fiction, which moves freely around among realism, magical realism, science fiction, fantasy of various kinds, historical fiction, young adult fiction, parable, and other subgenres, to the point where much of it is ungenrifiable, all got shoved into the Sci Fi wastebasket or labeled as kiddilit — subliterature.

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