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Originally Posted by Nerwen
*cough**cough* I believe Miéville's a feller, Morth.
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To be honest, having never read Miéville's work, I just naturally thought he was a woman, what with the name China, the dress and high heels and all. I should have realized by the five o'clock shadow. But given the skewed agenda of the article, I am even less inclined to read his or her work.
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Originally Posted by tumhalad2
I'm interested in this notion of consolation. Does Tolkien's literature merely console? Should it challenge us (read: challenge notions of capitalist hegemony) or are we complicit in some exploitative bourgeois idyll?
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I don't take from Tolkien any bourgeois complicity or capitalist exploitation, anymore more than I take Christian allegory. Folks tend to carry their baggage with them when reading novels. Miéville's stance is a load of rubbish he obviously totes along, ready to dump when a work does not fit his rhetoric. I am sure Dickens or Austen would be anathema to him as well. Oh well, his loss.
Tolkien skewers stupid, complacent Hobbits even if he has a fondness for their agrarian lifestyle. And in many cases, Tolkien's points are on the money (if I may use such a capitalist sentiment). His conservative stance on the environment and distrust of heavy industry is actually well-founded, given global warming and several hundred mile-wide oil slicks in the Gulf of Mexico. Personally, I am more interested in the mythos, the language and the ties with pre-Christian folklore, but then I am not on a search and destroy mission to hunt down Marxist bug-a-boos. What I do know is that Tolkien utterly rejects totalitarianism, which is what has happened with every Marxist state ever created. Perhaps that is why Miéville and Moorcock despise Tolkien: he merely points out that totalitarianism is evil and destroys individual freedom, which is not the rosy picture leftists wish to paint of their pie-in-the-sky proletarian paradises which somehow evaporate when put into practice. Stalin and Mao are merely Sauron without the fiery, red eye.
But as far as I can see, there is very little capitalism involved in the story, as a monetary system, trade or commerce of any sort is very little developed, particularly since Tolkien is not offering any modernity in the tale whatsoever, save for a few anachronistic anomalies. A dead give away would be folks riding about on horses, fighting with swords and wearing mail. But you see, I read the story, not read
into the story.
You ask, does Tolkien's literature merely console? Well, you just spent an inordinate amount of time in another thread trying to point out that Tolkien did the complete opposite in
Children of Hurin. So you tell me. Does the story challenge me to -- what? Suddenly decide that Mao Tse-tung's Great Leap Forward that killed 20 million Chinese was a good thing? That Stalin's Great Purge and Five-Year Plans killing 30 million Russians were triumphs for Marxism? What exactly is the challenge I am missing when reading a fantasy set in Middle-earth that covers creation and three complete Ages of the world, has 10 or so distinct languages and several more dialects, and has a 12 volume compendium of ancillary information?
I'll tell you what is challenging, reading the last three books of Moorcock's
Elric Sequence without mental fatigue. Getting through them at all could be construed as a triumph.