Diapadion linked me to this response to the previously linked rant against some of the fantasy genre's (sexist, racist) excesses. I haven't read it completely, yet, and to some extent it seems to be a response to the previous critique, but so far it's reintroduced me to the idea that post 1990 'gritty realism' in fantasy is not necessarily a good thing that lends itself to social criticism and a more accurate reflection of reality. The discussion seems to still be in progress:
http://www.joeabercrombie.com/2013/02/25/the-value-of-grit/
"Grimdark is a phrase I’m hearing quite a lot, which seems by definition
to be pejorative – excessively and unnecessarily dark, cynical,
violent, brutal without purpose and beyond the point of ridiculousness. There’s often what seems to me a slightly weird double standard applied
of, ‘I find this thoroughly horrible and disgusting therefore the
author must have intended me to be titillated and entertained!’"
Hmm. I'd welcome any further commentary here, including on the treatment of women and races in the previous linked post (I've always found it a bit odd that Tolkien, in particular, got away in a recently post-Nazi age in writing of a beautiful high civilization of the medieval type, currently fading away for lack of genetic purity and characterized by very white men who have genetically distinctive grey eyes (and tend to sport 5 day shaves all the time, according to Peter Jackson's version. I think they must carry around those clippers, with the 4/16" shield and pouches full of AAA batteries, since I'm assuming the watchtower of Amon Sul, even back in the day, didn't have 110v power).
But I digress. So, yeah, 'grimdark.' More of a problem than a benefit to the genre? The debate has raged several years, now, it seems.
Question: is there a way George Martin's books are not equivalent to the development of 'gritty' Realist technique that still dominates English-language fiction writing to a significant extent, the art-house market partially aside, in the separate genre of 'fantasy' that developed from multiple sources but took something like its modern form around the 1980s with imitators of Tolkien, CS Lewis and Lloyd Alexander? Is Martin different from David Eddings, who began inserting realistic prose and modernish characters and describing women below the neckline, all in contrast to Tolkien? Is it not good that fantasy no longer limits itself aesthetically to the range of content acceptable to Alfred Lord Tennyson, an accusation Eddings made about Tolkien's limitations of material (hint: he also couldn't write women). David Eddings himselfwas rather a mix of generic and an innovative, story-focused writing when he first started out, a widely popular writer of the 80s and early 90s, who turned evil at the same time as George Lucas, producing more and more horrible tracts filled with trite characterizations, lazy prose self-satisfied storylines, slow pacing and myriad other sins, just because publishing houses from the mid-90s had decided to throw vast amounts of money at him to produce anything that could be sandwiched between two covers. He got even more if it could be tied back in some way to his original Belgariad, no matter how shockingly self-satisfied and trite and--by the way, contradictory to the original legends he'd set up--it was. Sigh. It should be admitted that some have nothing good to say even about Eddings' early work, but by 1998 or so, Eddings was evidently at the point in his career where he lacked the self-awarness to know what would happen if he just indulged himself. Maybe that's what happens....you grow a bit cynical when Del Rey is giving you three million a book to flatulate your way through four-hundred pages of predictable, tv-trope-filled conventionality and insults to teenage (i.e his presumed readership at that point? I don't know who else, man) intelligence--I am referring, of course to the late Eddings series 'The Tamuli,' which a good friend of mine once described, memorably and accurately as 'an offense against all human language.'
But I digress from grimdark into fantasy's 90s excesses (which all this bloody 'realism' is perhaps in part a reaction to?). Let us restart the discussion by noting that, while Tolkien is wrongly credited as the inventor of fantasy, it's true that he influenced a generation of writers to react, either in favor of his model and also in opposition to a sort of Tennyson-style aesthetic of acceptable material (i.e. the model of the widely read, influential Arthurian fantasy poems of the 19th century: 'Idylls of the King,' which rolled through major parts of the Matter of Britain in the rolling iambic pentameter that Tennyson perfected perhaps beyond any other poet (and rather specialized in) in English). Self-censorship probably occurred as a result of his, Lewis and Tolkien's visions, with widely varying results in terms of quality of material produced (Just as Tolkien's own incorporation of previous innovations yielded mixed results: Lord Dunsany's innovations in the field was mainly successful, if unacknowledged, but his and CS Lewis' use of William Morris's secondary worlds and Germanicism (explicitly acknowledged) yielded perhaps more mixed results, and Tolkien's incorporation of Morris's talent for poetry in-context went steadily downhill (i.e., it worked fairly well in 'The Hobbit,' but the less he thought of himself as producing a modern novel, and the more he thought of creating a quasi-Anglo-saxon epic complete with 'Battle of Brunanburh' type legions of dead captains listed, the less effectively his poetic interludes seemed to be (but the innovation of using poetry was Morris's, not Tolkien's; Morris was just a better poet than Tolkien, and made sure the context was more appropriate.
Arguably, Tolkien got more right than wrong, and his and Lewis and Morris' medievalising were a powerful force in the genre, and seem to have permanently changed it, though there's as much or more focus on the high and late medieval as Tolkien's beloved Anglosaxon-influenced stuff.
But back to the present topic:
"Realism, people. Lots of those who praise gritty
writing talk about its realism. Lots of people who criticise it assert
there’s nothing realistic about splatter and crushing cynicism. You’re
both right! Realism is an interesting concept in fantasy. If we were
aiming at the uncompromisingly real we probably wouldn’t be writing in
made up worlds with forces that don’t actually exist. So things are
often exaggerated for effect, twisted, larger than life. But we can
still aim at something that approximates real life in all kinds of
different ways. Where the people and their behaviour and the outcomes
of their actions are believable."
Hmm. I'll buy it--yet it seems pretty incomplete as a defense of most of the Grimdark stuff out there, starting with Driz'zt and moving to Martin and into the present (as it were)...
PS - I don't knov where exactly my sympathies lie, though I will say that Lois McMaster Bujold's 'Chalion/Fivefold Pathway of the Soul' seem to me to have done as much to advance the quality of the fantasy genre as the more widely disseminated Martin. So perhaps we're focusing too much on style and form at the expense of content (I'm sorry, but this Mark Lawrence fellow kind of sounds like he just writes bad, incredibly violent books. About a sociopath. Gory details or no, that seems to be the fundamental content and I'm not convinced that the trail of blood blazes its way through to a worthwhile psychological insight. Sorry).
PPS - Here's another link, which effectively describes the escalating stages in the publication of 'grimdark' material in fantasy, and offers a pretty coherent argument as to when it ought to be considered good material (i.e. there has to be a reason for it regarding the world/characters/aesthetic developed). He doesn't pass judgment on specific work.
http://www.nerds-feather.com/2013/02/grimmy-grimmy-dark-dark.html#
I can rarely tell whether "realism" in discussions of literature is meant as the trait of being realistic, or whether it refers to the stylistic movement, which was more about cynicism and "toughness of mind" than verisimilitude, per se.
ReplyDeleteI looked through this issue a bit more, and found, in a comment (from Feb 6th, 2011, by blog author Michal) on this blog post about modern 'realist' (i.e. violent and rape-filled) fantasy, a fuller--and broadly differing--discussion of what people are using 'Realism' to mean.
Deletehttp://onelastsketch.wordpress.com/2011/01/28/adult-fantasy/
See the comments below. Feb 6th 2011. Michal is certainly right that a fantasy novel cannot be a 'modernist realist' novel, but I find the whole discussion odd, since I generally think of modernism as being fundamentally opposed to realism the 19th century literary movement; certainly people followed George Eliot and Henry James in trying to make their characters more psychologically realistic in the early 20th century, but this is not quite the same as the Modernist movement or the Structuralist ideas Michal also references. So there are nuances I'm not getting, here, but I also think that some of these folk may be using the term 'Realism' in a way that doesn't reflect its traditional literary usage, and perhaps focus too much on certain 'modernist' developments which are not wings of Realism, but rather developed in opposition to it. Anyway, you'd probably like the entire blog post.
That was a very interesting post and comment thread. Thanks, Bear.
DeleteVery glad you appreciated it! People seem to have been discussing this profitably the last year or two!
DeleteToo late to reply fully, but neither, really. To some extent it was about naturalism and an irreligious realistic view of the human mind, but it was also just about the dust and grit of the world filling in the flow of human reality, such detail used to create a flowing narrative that more closely approached, yes, verisimilitude. It's still the basic style that's the basis for most written literature (which is a deviation, in large or small ways, from its template of prose and storytelling). In a way we're just talking the fully developed novel: more description, more realism, more intimate psychology, and less reliance on fake letters to tell the story. Robert E. Howard used its basic format, for instance, if he expressed different values in his prose and content. But your average fiction novel is some version of plain old realism, most of the technique taken for granted, and the rest spruced up with vampires or whatever as the author desires.
ReplyDeletenot 'irreligious' view of the human mind: 'areligious.' Sorry.
DeleteAnyway, everything that's not trying to be modernist or 'postmodern' or whatever, is basically some evolution of 19th century realist prose. That's all.