Michael Moorcock's essay has cropped up here before and I don't have anything to add to what I said about it in
The Inklings' Challenge. To describe it as 'brilliant' is to suggest that being strongly worded and including neat little sound-bites like 'Surrey of the mind' marks a work with the stamp of genius. As you've probably gathered, I don't agree.
Morthoron and a couple of the commenters on the Omnivoracious article have noted China Miéville's apparent change of stance. I hope that the reason for this discrepancy is a maturing of his opinions over time - a realisation that politics isn't the be-all and end-all of literature; maybe the epiphany that his own success isn't dependent on slaughtering sacred cows or attacking other writers. Whatever the reason, I'm going to assume that he wasn't just being sarcastic in that entire article at Omnivoracious, where in several places he seems to be talking down to his audience. The painful populisms, such as "Tolkien rocks" or "Dude. That totally was cool. I mean, say what you like about him, Tolk gives good monster" are unnecessary, and he sounds like a teacher trying to be cool. It doesn't work. Don't try. All the same, I'm not going to attack someone for changing their opinion about something: I've done the same thing myself more than once.
The article we're discussing, however, is the interview report from the
International Socialism Journal, and particularly the idea of fantasy literature as consolation. Now, his opinion would carry some weight, since he quotes - or rather paraphrases - Tolkien's old 1939 Andrew Lang lecture, which clearly states that very thing. The only problem with that statement is that it doesn't state anything of the sort. Firstly, the lecture, later published in
Essays Presented to Charles Williams isn't called
On Fairy Tales, it's called
On Fairy-Stories, and Tolkien's careful description of what a fairy story is specifically excludes a lot of fantasy fiction, including
The Hobbit and
The Lord of the Rings. These more adequately fit his definition of travellers' tales.
Quote:
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[Travellers' tales] report many marvels, but they are marvels to be seen in this mortal world in some region of our own time and space; distance alone conceals them. The tales of Gulliver have no more right of entry [into a book of fairy-stories] than the yarns of Baron Munchausen; or than, say, The First Men in the Moon or The Time Machine. Indeed, for the Eloi and Morlocks there is be a better claim than for the Lilliputians. Lilliputians are merely men peered down at, sardonically, from just above the house-tops. Eloi and Morlocks live far away in an abyss of time so deep as to work an enchantment upon them; and if they are descended from ourselves, it may be remembered that an ancient English thinker once derived the ylfe, the very elves, through Cain from Adam.
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Tolkien believed that distance, particularly great distances of time, could give a work the flavour of a fairy-story, but only those stories that take place in faerie, the Perilous Realm itself, are the subject of his comments on Escape, Consolation and Recovery.
The Lord of the Rings, his most influential work of fiction, is placed in the deep past of our own world by his use of the lost manuscript topos; he even drops quite a broad hint by setting his story in Middle Earth, midden-erd, Middangeard: the human world. It does not take place in, and is not concerned with, faerie, and is therefore not a fairy-story. Tolkien's comments in his lecture about that genre of fantastic fiction may occasionally shed light on his own work, but they are not, nor were they ever intended to be, a blueprint for the writing of fantasy. Small wonder, then, that there is very little consolation to be had in
The Lord of the Rings or
The Silmarillion. The world they portray is destined to become our own; the elves are leaving, never to return; much of what makes that world magical and desirable is destroyed along with Sauron's power, and all things are in decline from their epic greatness to the present day; we even discover in Appendix F that we read the whole of
LR without learning the chief characters' real names. Middle Earth is not some fairyland you can escape into to avoid the world's troubles because it no longer exists except in the form of the primary reality, the real world. China Miéville's comments about fantasy as coddling consolation are therefore irrelevant.
That said, I would argue that although a world filled with noble kings and princes might be consolation for an arch-monarchist, it stands as a direct challenge to a committed socialist. Surely for someone who believes that all kings are bad, a consoling fantasy story would be set in a socialist republic or a communist ideal state.
LR in particular obviously challenges some readers a great deal, to judge by their vitriolic responses to it. What China Miéville seems to want from fantasy is the consolation of a lot of books that confirm his politics; or at least that's what he wants the readership of the
International Socialism Journal to believe. All four of them. I would argue that Tolkien believed the consolation and escape of fairy-stories should reclaim the world for their readers, so in a way the desire for such consolation might well benefit the Global Revolution in the end. Such a pity for them, then, that the same process can also strengthen Bakuninite anarchists and both upper and lower-case conservatives.