The Inklings: W.H. Auden and the Inklings (oxfordinklings.blogspot.com)
I don’t think I’ve ever felt so free since I decided to criticize The Lord of the Rings, to be honest. There’s really a lot I think is wrong with it and a lot wrong with the fantasy genre that came out of it. The main thing I think is wrong with fantasy is that it encourages people not to live in the real world, and to the extent it does encourage people to live in the real world, it encourages people to re-create medieval societies and be lazy. While Star Trek might be space communism, and I think that’s a lot of why it’s generally seen as dorkier in general than Star Wars or superheroes (though still not something that automatically makes everyone who likes it into a huge dork, I think lots of people do know many popular and cool celebrities were on it or into it, just that Star Trek fans are seen as dorkier than Star Wars fans in general but people still don’t seem to project this onto every individual Star Trek fan) at least it inspires people to make technology, go to space, etc. even if it largely portrays a world that’s sort of levelled out and where the government controls everything and no one earns a lot of money like Bruce Wayne or Tony Stark, or even a little money like Luke Skywalker, so people who like “capitalism” (which is really a communist slur anyway) don’t fantasize about living in it wholesale even if they might find parts of it fun or interesting.
What does Lord of the Rings and most fantasy fiction inspire people to do? Tolkien really did want to live in the Lord of the Rings world, and interestingly, the only reason the Lord of the Rings series even exists is because C. S. Lewis actually came up with a plot for him, otherwise everything he wrote would’ve just been weird heretical Gnostic fanfiction and descriptions of hobbits eating multiple breakfasts and smoking all day long. Even then, I don’t think Lord of the Rings is that great. Chronicles of Narnia I think is also very mediocre, but at least the magical world of Narnia is something people travel between, the kids aren’t just living out their lives in the Middle Ages, nor is the talking animal world all that much of a recreation of the Middle Ages in the first place. The talking animal world is probably fine to live in if you’re a talking animal, and fun to visit if you’re a human being, though I still tend to think that series is fairly mediocre as well even if I heretically think it’s a lot better. It’s also a lot shorter, seriously, all seven Narnia books combined are shorter than one of the longer Harry Potter books, whereas Lord of the Rings is this sort of maniacally long, rambling thing that took Tolkien decades of his life to write and often takes people years to read, and for what? Even with someone like George R. R. Martin, he wrote a whole lot of other things besides A Song of Ice and Fire which he published to his name, it’s actually finished, and you can read. He didn’t spend his life on a trilogy which I think Michael Moorcock rightfully said sounds like it’s still for children despite being explicitly aimed at adults plus an actual children’s book plus a bunch of unpublished fantasizing about Gnosticism and second breakfast that I’m sure C. S. Lewis discouraged because yeah, all that stuff is really heretical and very boring.
As you can see from the top of this article and if you’ve been reading the other articles I’ve been writing inspired by Tolkien recently, W. H. Auden, one of the stereotypical modernists who was a poet, was actually a marginal member of the Inklings. This plus the fact I have started to think of the core modern fantasy genre (but not everything that’s included in what I’ve heard called “the fuzzy set of fantasy”) as basically just some books people read when they were young and/or stoned and think too fondly of. The modernist conception of art is art for art’s sake.
Art for Art's Sake - Modern Art Terms and Concepts | TheArtStory
Taken from the French, the term "l'art pour l'art," (Art for Art's Sake) expresses the idea that art has an inherent value independent of its subject-matter, or of any social, political, or ethical significance. By contrast, art should be judged purely on its own terms: according to whether or not it is beautiful, capable of inducing ecstasy or revery in the viewer through its formal qualities (its use of line, color, pattern, and so on). The concept became a rallying cry across nineteenth-century Britain and France, partly as a reaction against the stifling moralism of much academic art and wider society, with the writer Oscar Wilde perhaps its most famous champion. Although the phrase has been little used since the early twentieth century, its legacy lived on in many twentieth-century ideas concerning the autonomy of art, notably in various strains of formalism.
When you think about it, core modern fantasy fiction is essentially formalism taken to its extreme. It doesn’t really inspire anything positive in anyone. People will definitely protest, “It inspires people to do good and resist evil! It inspires heroism and moral clarity!” but I don’t agree at all. When I see people who get really into fantasy as a genre, it’s generally people just sort of sitting around, cosplaying or LARPing, refusing to do anything that you wouldn’t find in a fantasy world, only working jobs grudgingly if they have to, and not buying much anything except fantasy merchandise and thereby not really stimulating the economy. You don’t really see general fantasy fans running headlong into a burning building or joining the military or things like that very much. Additionally, too many people don’t even see why the bad guys are supposed to be so bad in many of the fantasy novels out there, since it often just amounts to “the bad guys wear black hats, the good guys wear white hats, and the bad guys engage in a lot more violence!” when none of that is really a sure-fire indicator of good or evil since most people are not complete pacifists and lots of people enjoy wearing black without believing it makes them evil in real life. The point of purported moral values in most fantasy fiction is further undermined by all the Gnostic heresy kinds of things that are baked into it being things that look like they would be quite evil in real life. If, for example, Melkor is like the Demiurge in Gnosticism, but the Demiurge is basically propaganda against God of the Bible, then you might as well say the depiction of Melkor is actually propaganda against God and Eru Iluvatar is the Devil or something, so it leads to a huge confusion. The Bible is kind of the most subversive thing ever written, at least in my experience, after all, so just saying “fantasy fiction isn’t subversive and has good family values except for George R. R. Martin’s corrupted stuff!” puts you diametrically at odds with real religion in many ways. The Bible has actually been banned from some school libraries due to all the sex and violence and basically all the characters in it are a bunch of antiheroes, even (perhaps especially) Jesus Christ himself, who was crucified for opposing the Roman Empire after all and broke what the Pharisees saw as basically all of the religious commandments, and all the good guys in the Bible are very much framed in direct opposition to prototypical heroes such as Gilgamesh.
Fantasy is just not very inspiring, which is why I think it’s probably not a coincidence that it seems to align with the ideas of l’art pour l’art and formalism. However, I also don’t think l’art pour l’art results in very good art. Art is always interpreted through the lens of people who are living their lives. I don’t want to read a ton of Tolkien’s descriptions of trees for hundreds of pages when I can read botanical descriptions of trees. In fact I’m actually writing stuff where there are lots of botanical descriptions of trees in fiction, which I think is actually one very major reason I find Tolkien really aesthetically unsatisfactory at this point in my life. I’m not just sitting here being a critic while Tolkien is out on the field, to paraphrase that quote, much like Michael Moorcock and George R. R. Martin aren’t just idly being critics from the safety of not doing things. That’s a good note to wrap this up on so I don’t just end up distracted with more criticism when I have lots of other things I should work on but I’ve still never ever felt more free since I decided to criticize most of the modern fantasy genre as just being basically the result of modern Western excess, which makes people trying to turn to it for traditional values or whatever seem extra ironic to me, not that I’d self describe as “a traditionalist” by any stretch, though I’m not diametrically anti-tradition either.