[Morthoron]

Originally Posted by tumhalad2

This is not all based on my own thoughts on the "ethics of reading", and I'm not even sure where you came up with that. Let me set this out:

1. Mieville makes claims about the values inherent in the text
2. Mieville claims these values are retrograde, reactive and backward looking
It follows, therefore, that if a reader engages with the text without criticising the values Mieville says are there, then the reader is morally complicit with them, in Mieville's eyes. This does not mean we are necessarily conciously complicit; indeed that is the point. That we do not recognise these backward values and seek to deconstruct them is evidence of our complicity; we are ideologically blinded.

Miéville makes faulty assumptions based on the self-imposed limits of his intellect. Just because someone makes specious pronouncements about a book neither implies moral complicity on the reader's part, nor that Tolkien even wrote in the manner Miéville or Moorcock claim. Let's look at what was said by Miéville (and by inference, Moorcock):

Michael Moorcock has written brilliantly on this in his book Wizardry and Wild Romance (1987):

The little hills and woods of that Surrey of the mind, the Shire [where the protagonist 'hobbits' live], are 'safe' but the wild landscapes everywhere beyond the Shire are 'dangerous'... Lord of the Rings is a pernicious confirmation of the values of a morally bankrupt middle class... If the Shire is a suburban garden, Sauron [the 'evil' dark lord] and his henchmen are that old bourgeois bugaboo, the mob--mindless football supporters throwing their beer bottles over the fence--the worst aspect of modern urban society represented as the whole by the a fearful, backward-yearning class.

That Miéville considers Moorcock's venomous and unfounded mud-slinging "brilliant" indicates an undue level of bias, magnifying and distorting a single aspect of the book with tendentious partisanship. Should I say that Moorcock is a sexually deviant lecher who advocates genocide based on the subjects of some his books? No, that would be absurd, wouldn't it? But using phrases like "pernicious confirmation of the values of a morally bankrupt middle class" or "mindless football supporters throwing their beer bottles over the fence" is shocking in the unscholarly nature of the broadside. That one should consider the other brilliant for such a juvenile attack confirms my low opinion of both.

Then we have davem's timely quote of Miéville in an utterly different and confounding context:

Whatever we see as the drive behind Tolkien's tragic vision, and however we relate to its politics and aesthetics, the tragedy of the creeping tawdry quotidian gives Middle Earth a powerful melancholia lamentably missing from too much of what followed. It deserves celebrating and reclaiming.

As I stated previously, Miéville is a hypocrite of the first order and deserves censure and condescension. I have nothing further to add to this conversation.