tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2239062544101975016.post155457941183451333..comments2024-03-27T21:39:23.192-07:00Comments on Sacnoth's Scriptorium: The Impossibility of Writing Fantasy in 1937John D. Rateliffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12324926298336489295noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2239062544101975016.post-55501150168281799302012-04-29T09:27:07.543-07:002012-04-29T09:27:07.543-07:00There's a great deal to chew on in this post.
...There's a great deal to chew on in this post.<br /><br />I would distrust - the same way I'd distrust someone urging with oozy reasonableness on the necessity of using the Ring - <i>anyone</i> who urges the totalitarian "necessity" of any artistic credo. They may intimidate a great many people at the time, but they're always wrong and they always look ridiculous afterwards. Anything that really is "necessary" will just happen. Why did the Elizabethans write like Elizabethans and the Augustans like Augustans? Not because someone like Upward told them to.<br /><br />Upward's credo reminds me awfully of Pierre Boulez's pronouncements on music after WW2, which intimidated even great composers like Stravinsky, and led directly to audiences rebelling against the very term "modern music" for fifty years. We're only slowly coming out of that miasma now.<br /><br />The other thing that strongly comes to mind is a piece by an author who was intimidated by the likes of Upward. In 1938, Robert Nathan published an omnibus of five of his 1920s novels. The title was <i>The Barly Fields</i>. Painfully aware that delicate fantasy of his kind had become unfashionable, Nathan affixes a brief preface as his apologia, and it's titled "Note to the Younger Generation," so you can see where his concern lies. He says he likes the muscular social realist fiction that's become fashionable, but defends his right to write something different.<br /><br />Two piquant follow-ups from this:<br />1) Nathan immediately turned around and wrote <i>Portrait of Jennie</i>, his most lasting work, published the next year, so he wasn't about to change;<br />2) the preface is dated December 1937, the very month a professor in England sat down and wrote the opening words of a novel that would be denounced more than any other as irrelevant, escapist, unmeaningful and inappropriate to modern life.<br /><br />In fact, of course, <i>The Lord of the Rings</i> is the most searingly social realist and relevant of all modern secondary-world fantasy novels, with its theme of the desire for Power and the necessity of moral behavior in its face.<br /><br />So that in itself is an adequate reply to the Upwards, even before you get to Dunsany's Wildean dictum that the artist is the creator of beauty in the face of ugliness.David Bratmanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08090662884600828582noreply@blogger.com