Pynchon Ref in the Village Voice (June 12, 2001)

[Dave Monroe]

Favorite moments here (and keep in mind, I'm a fan,
but I do know what's what) ...

"Back in the days when Tolkien was still alive and in
the habit of referring to his shaggy, puff-sleeved
fans as 'my deplorable cultus' (he was a straitlaced,
archconservative Catholic himself) ..."

"But when übercritic Edmund Wilson published a
bruising smackdown in The Nation ('Oo, Those Awful
Orcs,' April 14, 1956) ..."

"Just a few weeks ago critic Judith Shulevitz went to
the trouble of reminding us all, in the pages of The
New York Times Book Review, that no modern work of
fiction in which people say things like 'There lie the
woods of Lóthlrien! ... Let us hasten!' can be
anything less than 'death to literature itself.'"

"Tolkien's theory of evil? Well, orcs are, our heroes
aren't, and that about sums it up. Tolkien's take on
"human existence"? A hard gig, certainly, full of
danger and tough decisions, but fortunately not enough
to threaten the wise Gandalf, the noble Aragorn, the
sly Saruman, or any of Tolkien's other characters with
more than the occasional moment of psychological
complexity. And as for 'cultural relativity,' hoo boy.
By the time you have read your third or fourth
description of the orcs as 'swarthy' and 'slant-eyed'
you will either have checked your late-modern
political sensitivities at the door or thrown the book
at the  wall."

Thanks for mentioning this, will pick up Shippey's
book.  Hell, I might just even read it, counting down
teh days to those Peter Jackson (!) films ...

--- davemarc <davemarc at panix.com> wrote:
> On p. 47, Julian Dibbell refers to a work by Old
> English professor T.
> Shippey:
> 
> "But while his indignation gets a little out of
> hand, his argument is a
> sober one, aimed at setting Tolkien alongside such
> epic poets of the
> 20th-century condition as Orwell, Joyce, and
> Pynchon."
> 
>
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0123/dibbell.shtml
> 
> d.
> 


__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Get personalized email addresses from Yahoo! Mail - only $35 
a year!  http://personal.mail.yahoo.com/