In response to Joe Abercrombie on the benefits of 'grit' in fantasy

From the previously linked posts:
"George RR Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire, surely the gold standard of gritty epic fantasy, is also rapidly becoming the most successful epic fantasy of this era, and he its definitive living writer.  There are still plenty of writers and publishers very successfully putting out more traditional stuff if you really need another righteous hero endlessly prevailing against the odds.

...So, yeah, shitty gritty books are no better than shitty shiny books.  But I proudly and unapologetically assert that there’s a great deal more to grit than a capacity to shock and titillate.  Although I must equally proudly and unapologetically assert that I do sometimes quite enjoy being shocked and titillated."

(UPDATED: Another link, this one something of a polemic against 'splatter fantasy,' though I enjoy his calling out of Terry Goodkind for 'pornographic [&S&M] fantasy'http://bondwine.com/2013/01/28/a-song-of-gore-and-slaughter/)
I'm going to cut through the false dichotomy fallacy in Abecrombie's assertion of a choice between the 'shitty-gritty' and 'more traditional stuff' about 'another righteous hero endlessly prevailing' (obviously, good fantasy need be neither that nor gritty the gritty stuff some have a problem with, and presumably, Abercrombie is aware of such work himself if he glances at the trade magazine now and then), and note that Martin is certainly not the genre's 'definitive living writer.' Not after writing volumes four and five of his series--books characterized by a) the continued unnecessary slaughter of characters, b) the unnecessary introduction of new plotlines because Martin evidently can't stand to finish his book, and so complicates further, and c) really mostly nothing at all happening for nine-hundred or so pages each. The TV series is going to be in serious shit when it comes time to do a season for them, which I suspect is part of the reason they've split the third book in two, to buy themselves time.

Beyond that, yes, Abercrombie argues effectively that grit can add depth and realism, beyond shocking and titillating--he does not, however, contradict the observation that the 'shocking and titillating' part of grimdark is a phenomenon of diminishing returns unless one keeps increasing the level of violence/titillation, nor does he provide much, in that section of his argument, to justify grimdark by its own lights other than essentially noting that it can be fun, fun, which, unfortunately applies to a lot of bad things, and which (am I really the one forced to make the prudish argument, here?) can be problematic when measured against the potential social cost of the dissemination of continually increasing quantities and graphic of rape and murder (especially when, as with R. Scott Bakker, though not Abercrombie himself, to his credit, everything besides the demon-rapes is ungodly boring and also a straight rip-off of either Tolkien or 'Dune'). So congrats to Abercrombie for his intellectual honesty, here and elsewhere, but his argument that this type of writer are doing the best of work is not, in all cases, a particularly tight one: it should be noted that: 'I like being titillated' doesn't necessarily quite have the rhetorical consequence or throughput to get you to 'these are good books, worth the writing and the reading.' For that you have to measure the rest of his argument carefully, and think how well the bits about realism, thematic and character development apply to the human mind and world, and to the material currently being produced (hint: even the demon rape scene in R. Scott Bakker, which I desperately wanted to enjoy, considering how much effort I was putting into paying attention to the damned thousand page Dune-God-Emperor-of-Dune-LOTR rehash, was fairly boring and possibly out of place. Oops, spoiler; don't worry, Bakker is clearly a talented guy but his time is clearly better spent elsewhere, possibly in the field of fantasy criticism or editing or in hand-illustrating editions of 'Dune' for collectors who want each page illustrated with the David Llynch version of the characters).

For what it's worth, I have always been a supporter of some level of grittiness beyond that found in Lewis, Tolkien, and Lloyd Alexander being included in fantasy lit (and believe the novel as a form climaxed, if anywhere, with late nineteenth-century gritty realism rather than the silliness that followed), so I do not consider myself particularly in opposition to Abercrombie's overall position (though his position is much more developed and perhaps darker than mine).

I also wonder....Abercrombie states in his post that he dislikes high-falutin old-timey language. Does this mean he also dislikes the flabby, Anglo-saxon-influenced prose (and mildly ghastly poetry) of good old JRR, too? For what it's worth, I think a position at least as regards Tolkien's later works, would be both consistent and legitimate ('The Hobbit's' language is lighter and more targeted to its audience, and the poetry probably better and more selectively and effectively deployed)

I'll close with the moneyquote from Tom Simon, above (which predates the latest and most extreme development in grimdark fantasy): 'We need to recognize that splatterporn is a beast that will devour our souls if we let it; and we need to stop feeding the beast, and instead feed our souls on something that will sustain them. We shall need such sustenance in an age where the obsessive description of acts of despicable evil is routinely mistaken for art.'

As applied to George R. R. Martin, at least the first three volumes, I'm going to call this inaccurate hyperbole. But is there something to it, after all, especially as Westeros darkens and Terry Goodkind churns out the same warmed over S&M porn horror dressed up with wizards, not to mention these newfangled authors, Morgan, Erickson, Abercrombie (who some say improves as a writer as he's aged)?