Interview with Michael Moorcock
newstatesman.com
newstatesman.com
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/currentstudents/u...
While there is an argument for the reactionary nature of the books, they are certainly deeply conservative and strongly anti-urban, which is what leads some to associate them with a kind of Wagnerish hitlerism. I don't think these books are 'fascist', but they certainly don't exactly argue with the 18th century enlightened Toryism with which the English comfort themselves so frequently in these upsetting times. They don't ask any questions of white men in grey clothing who somehow have a handle on what's best for us.
Google reveals a large number of people making similar points:
I love JRR Tolkien's work, but it is racist and fairly fascistic. Most of the good guys are tall white men of the north and west, simple country farmers, and the dunedain who remain supermen even though their quality has diminished by mingling with the "blood of lesser men." The dwarves and elves are also good races. The enemies are various swarming slave races, the cowardly Easterlings, the savage elephant riding painted Haradrim, the literally subhuman orcs. Those counseling peace are perfidious fools, cowards or traitors.
This won't keep me from rereading The Simirilian, The Hobbit, LOTR and the Children of Hurin. But Tolkien was a man of his time and place and we should appreciate his virtues without ignoring his vices.
Calling Tolkien himself a fascist is quite a few bridges too far for me.
{commenter at http://lorenrosson.blogspot.com/2006/06/tolkien-fascist.html}
I don't see how that's fascist. Tolkien books are basicaly Catholic mythology in different clothes. It's very conservative, "reactionary", and old-fashioned, true. But fascist philosophy was all about superhumans making their own laws and morality. Doesn't exactly go well with conservatism.
Also - after reading Moorcock books (runestaff cycle mostly) I don't think they were qualitatively different from other fantasy. I remember it as just regular pulp fantasy to be honest. Maybe I should reread it, last time I've read it I was a teenager.
And while I agree that the term might be a bit ill-used here, there's definitely a tie between reactionary conservatism (and fantastic romanticism) and some fascist regimes. So maybe one could call it "proto-fascism", although I'd generally try to avoid this particular f-word, as it does tend to Godwin discussions.
And, yes, Moorcock was definitely writing in the pulp tradition. He might be quite political, but his worked isn't fully steeped in it. Quite often it's traditional "sword & sorcery" (a term Moorcock helped to coin), maybe with a single trait that differentiates it from other fantasy or that he wants to delve in. Elric was a counter-Conan, and the runestaff saga presented Great Britain as the evil empire.
The "Nomad of the Time Streams" trilogy is probably one of the more obviously political of his works, but still, it's mostly about adventure.
It contains those reactionary conservative elements (organic community, national tradition, criticism of modernity as shallow - i.e. very Tolkein but found in many fascist and even Nazi authors - i.e. Junger, Schmitt) alongside hyper modernist ones (eugenics, mass industry). Fascism contains criticisms of capitalism alongside praise for the most aggressive market competition. See Ishay Landa's work on this.
Proto-fascism is probably the best term.
How is proto-fascism different from conservatism?
We can go the lazy route and say that if you're "conservative" and your current system isn't fascist, than you can't really promote or encourage fascism, because that would by definition be a change and change is bad. But I thin we can agree that this would be a type of conservatism that could only exist in a Moorcock novel about other planes, the Lords of Order or such things...
Also, one might not want to go too far back in the "inheritance" chain of fascism. I mean, to stay within the core topic, the Italian and German fascists certainly were quite "romantic" in the literary sense (a main point of Epic Poo), but I don't think we'd call Schiller or Byron proto-fascists...
So it probably comes down to having views who would touch fascist views in a big blurry Venn diagram, whereas crypto-fascists actually overlap in a more significant way.
But, again, this might be a fun topic for abstract discussion, but when it's tied to something more concrete it'll just prove to be needlessly divisive and incisive. I mean, just look up who popularized the term "crypto-fascist"...
This seems a very common British trait, by the way. Plenty of movies, books etc. about how nationalist and authoritarian you can get before you cross over into straight-forward 20th century fascism. Starting with the post-WW2 era and achieving a new high during the reign of the Wicked Witch.
He also wrote lots of progressive and experimental stuff. He also edited the SF quarterly New Worlds. It published works in that vein, but was not very successful financially. I read that when the need for money would grow too great, Moorcock would lock himself in with a bottle of spirit and a typewriter, and hack out a pulp novel to get back into the black. He could be much wealthier now if he was in it just for the money, so it seems there is some real artistic claim here.
This is kind of a weird comparison. Tolkien may not have been arguing for fascism in his world, but his world had a definite morality and order. A subset of the themes in this order—namely, hierarchical races—is uncomfortably close to the order espoused by Nazi-flavored fascist rhetoric.
So long as it's not prescriptive (as it is CLEARLY not—it is an extremely violent world, and not one better than our own), Tolkien should not be labeled a fascist. However, I wouldn't blame anyone who avoided reading the series because it is uncomfortably close to romantic ideals that are similar to romantic ideals held by racist fascists.
I might also point out that british and german culture weren't so terribly different than you might think, especially preceeding World War I. I would also argue that it's not Catholic mythology, it's British mythology, including subtle Christian flavors (divine hierarchies, christ patterns, prophets, rebel patterns) including racial mythology. There are deep, deep common roots of race in german culture.
And let's not forget, one of the main characteristics of fascism is systematic oppression, something that Tolkien is careful to avoid with humans in everything I've read.
Either that or he's perfectly well aware that Toklien was no kind of fascist and is using the term as a goad. If he said he thought that Tokien was a conservative, nobody would pay any attention and we wouldn't be having this debate. But now we are and I think that was probably his aim, to provoke people into thinking about the differences between their work.
Calling Tolkien a crypto fascist is a bit much — I doubt Tolkien had a fascist agenda — but Tolkien's tacitly assumed worldview is pretty disturbing upon examination.
“My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning the abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs) — or to ‘unconstitutional’ Monarchy. I would arrest anybody who uses the word State (in any sense other than the inaminate real of England and its inhabitants, a thing that has neither power, rights nor mind); and after a chance of recantation, execute them if they remained obstinate! If we could go back to personal names, it would do a lot of good.
Government is an abstract noun meaning the art and process of governing and it should be an offence to write it with a capital G or so to refer to people … The most improper job of any many, even saints (who at any rate were at least unwilling to take it on), is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity …
There is only one bright spot and that is the growing habit of disgruntled men of dynamating factories and power-stations; I hope that, encouraged now as ‘patriotism’, may remain a habit! But it won’t do any good, if it is not universal.”
– J.R.R. Tolkien, letter to his son, 1943 (from The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien).
Not exactly what I would call fascist.
source:
Apparently his copy of Return of the King had all the pages after Aragorn's coronation torn out? I wouldn't go as far as to say something along the lines of "you can't go home again" is the main theme of the book, but it's a pretty strong one (and based on Tolkien's experience in and after WWI). "Nothing ever changes" is about the opposite of what happens.
Moorcock on the other hand I really enjoyed, just because he throws his 'hero' around like a out of control puppet. It's really like a 'game of throne' before it was trendy. Poor hero will get to kill his favourite elf queen just because his sword is evil, AND will keep him alive because of it; twisted :-)
It's alway good to know where people talking about fascism actually live - it gives a sense of perspective about their opinions (jodhpurs: nasty and evil / state run by nutcase defending dildo bans and religious commandments in front of state capitol: totally ok).
> “In Tolkien, everyone’s in their place and happy to be there. We go there and back, to where we started. There’s no escape, nothing will ever change and nobody will ever break out of this well-ordered world.”
Has he even read the books? Nothing changes? I'll give him that the manichean world Tolkien created is certainly somewhat uncomfortable to anyone with a worldview that includes shades of gray (although I don't think that the Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit are as black and white as they are made out to be) - but calling someone a crypto-fascist is really harsh.
> Science fiction/fantasy author Michael Moorcock has suggested that the Gor novels should be placed on the top shelves of bookstores, saying, "I’m not for censorship but I am for strategies which marginalize stuff that works to objectify women and suggests women enjoy being beaten."
I want to hear him on Fifty Shades of Grey...
Dwarves and Elves openly hate each other, throwing racists epithets like daggers whenever they meet - think of Thranduil in the Hobbit, or Gimli confronting the elves on the borders of Lothlorien. Yet both are supposed to be goodly races that we empathise with easily.
Then there are the orcs. Some of them, particularly those that Sam and Frodo cross as they enter Mordor, are quite sympathetic characters.
There is definitely racism displayed by characters in Tolkein's writing, but I don't feel that there was any special racism demonstrated by the author himself - indeed he seemed almost to want to underline the idea that people should be judged by their acts, not by their appearance.
And nothing (or rather no one) really changes in Tolkiens books. I think that is a fair point. People ARE (good, evil, shadowy, treacherous, wise) they don't become or evolve and are not typically multifaceted.
- Tolkien was a linguist, not necessarily well-versed in the craft of literature. Writing good believable characters is extremely hard; moving stick puppets around (Dan Brown comes to mind) is practicaly the default-state, entry-level of writing.
- the books were his answer to the edda. I can't find a sources on this but I believe part of what he wanted was England to have a set of epic myths commensurable with those in the edda - this motivation certainly influenced the overall style of the stories.
I wouldn't call the analysis necessarily wrong or completely unconvincing (the pdf linked here shows his ideas much better), but I would call tendentious in that it looks like everything that doesn't fit conveniently is left out.
Social and ethical equivalent of 2nd law of thermodynamics basicaly, and loses are converted into stories instead of temperature
First, he mistakes having a coherent universe and story with "bland".
I prefer Moorcock than any Tolkiens in the world but make no mistake he is definitly a much inferior writer than Tolkien was. His universe is totally chaos, the narrative are erratic, it's like an open world that doesn't give much and pretend to be mysterious while the truth is that it just shows the lack of talent that has Moorcock as a storyteller. his heroes have pub philosophy and psychology 101 mindsets, his stories have no beginning no end and plus if he has never been adapted it is because overall his books make no sense at all. that does not mean he is not a much more imaginative writer than most other heroic fantasy writers. he is.
also saying that heinlen (probably the only one who was a real facist) and asimov were wrong and k . dick right. they are not just the same kind of writers and i'll go as far to say that those three writers were all right and we re now leaving in worlds were their books have influenced not only the popular culture but mankind, envisionning where we are aiming at as a species. those things. Moorcock - a much much more inferior artist than asimov, dick, heinlein and tolkien - will never accomplish.
Philip K Dick, though, was right about so many aspects of modern culture - the changing perception towards rights, humanity, drugs, and classes. The massive shift from nationalism to corporatism (which we're continuing to see become more like Paycheck), and the alarming trend of humanity being more driven by a handful of people than any flavor of democracy.
Moorcock is a good writer, but he is definitely much more of a Robert Jordan or RA Salvatore than a Tolkien or Asimov.