“It is great men, potential saints, not little men, who become merciless fanatics. Those who are readiest to die for a cause may easily become those who are readiest to kill for it. One sees the same principle at work in a field (comparatively) so unimportant as literary criticism; the most brutal work, the most rankling hatred of all other critics and of nearly all authors, may come from the most honest and disinterested critic, the man who cares most passionately and selflessly about literature. The higher the stakes, the greater the temptation to lose your temper over the game…Of all bad men religious bad men are the worst. Of all created beings the wickedest is one who originally stood in the immediate presence of God.” – C.S. Lewis, “The Cursings” in Reflections on the Psalms.
Tag: C.S. Lewis
BookTuber Tuesday – Lev Grossman on why Fantasy can answer questions Science Fiction can’t
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[“BLA and GB Gabbler” (really just a pen name – singular) are the Editor and Narrator behind THE AUTOMATION, vol. 1 of the Circo del Herrero series. They are on facebook, twitter, tumblr, goodreads, and Vulcan’s shit list.]
Critique My Critique: Lev Grossman and being “Subversive”
“Perhaps if one knows Lev Grossman they will understand the clever joke behind it all, but your reader shouldn’t have to know you in order to understand your intent.”
It has been pointed out that these critiques may suggest that I don’t understand what Lev Grossman was doing with The Magicians—that is, writing a “subversive” adult version of children’s high fantasy, in which the terrible realities of our world aren’t hidden, but rather that the “reality” of having magic and the world being magical, would actually not be so full of wonder and awe as it is in Narnia and Harry Potter.
Trust me, I understand. Grossman goes out of his way to hammer you over the head with how depressing and sad he thinks the world actually is. But let me be clear—simply because he was attempting to be subversive in fantasy, does not mean he succeeded. The main character being depressed and the reality of his dreams always being disappointing is not subversion—it’s a misunderstanding of the genre and it’s boring.
First, to be subversive in…
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Five Fascinating Facts about C. S. Lewis
Happy Birthday, C.S. Lewis:
C. S. Lewis was born on this day in 1898, so we’ve gathered together our five favourite interesting facts about Lewis and his work. Some of the interesting facts about C. S. Lewis that follow touch upon his friendship with J. R. R. Tolkien; these may be known to diehard fans of the ‘Inklings’ (of whom more below), but we hope that some facts will be news to even devoted fans of C. S. Lewis’s work.
1. C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien once went to a party dressed as polar bears. It wasn’t a fancy-dress party. According to Humphrey Carpenter in his biography of Tolkien, Tolkien went to a New Year’s party in the 1930s as a polar bear, wearing a sheepskin with his face painted white. Neil Heims, in a recent book on Tolkien, lists Lewis as his fellow party guest, similarly attired in ursine costume…
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On C.S. Lewis being an “Old Western Man”
“If we look at the various creative impulses that went into Lewis’ fantasies, we will see how they all come together in Perelandra. We can start with Lewis the self-confessed ‘dinosaur.’ As we have seen, he disliked modernity and its ‘goods’ – in particular the glorification of technology, the social ideal of equality and the liberalism of present-day theology – and turned, like his friend Tolkien, toward medieval cultural values; his description of William’s theology as ‘Nicene, hierarchical, severe,’ might equally apply to his own. He was particularly alienated from the humanist character of contemporary literature and criticism; and most of his own literary criticism is concerned rather with allegory or myth than the novel. In his inaugural lecture, De Descriptione Temporum, as Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English literature at Cambridge in 1954, he described himself as an ‘Old Western’ man, by which he meant that by preference he belonged to a culture which (as far as he was concerned) ended about 1830.”
[“BLA and GB Gabbler” (really just a pen name) are the Editor and Narrator behind THE AUTOMATION, vol. 1 of the Circo del Herrero series. They are on facebook, twitter, tumblr, and goodreads.]