Volley back to Mr. Slotman on the great Tolkien debate. Actually, it isn't much of a debate. Mr. Slotman reduced his point to the following:
I guess my point is --and now that I think of it, I don't think it's a very big deal-- is that I have no problem with literary people having complicated standards for judging which books they like, as long as those standards are the result of them reading a lot of books and genuinely loving books.
I have no problem either. In the case of whatever the hell his name was (I really think TNR must have screwed this one up), I happen to think his standards are silly.
I guess what bothers me is not the metrics per se, but that it feels to me as if the literati first decided that any book that's too accessible can't be any good, and then developed the standards that yield an appropriately obscure list. In fact I know many professors who I adamantly respect who judge books by carefully reasoned metrics, yielding many of the same results. . . but the funny think is, awfully few of them go around spouting about how awful it is that LOTR is everyone's favorite books. They can be heard to argue that other books are better -- but not that everyone has to hew to the same standard.
And when Megan says "But too, those lists of "The Greatest Books" weren't coming from English professors; they were coming from regular people. And those people didn't set up some complicated standard by which to judge greatness; they ranked their favorite books" --I mean, there's no reason to think regular people don't have their own complicated standards for judging greatness.
Mr. Slotman is absolutely right; they may. And in fact I'm sure they do -- but my experience in talking to book lovers of all types is that probably many of them didn't ever verbalize, to themselves or anyone else, why they love LOTR -- they just read it over and over.
Tolkien's achievement is that his great personal and heartfelt work happened to mirror the great internal workings of a whole lot of other people. . .
Well said.
I only want to disagree with Slotman on a few small points:
I still don't think you could figure out whether people were "stunted" by books they embraced early because first, you would have to find some objective definition of stunted; then you would have to find a way to measure it to a statistically significant degree; and then you would have to establish a causal link to a single book. It seems to me you'd almost certainly bog down at the first, but if you didn't, either the second or the third would stop you cold.
Starship Troopers the movie was an affront to human dignity and all freedom-loving peoples everywhere reject it at its core.
Mr. Slotman is not the first person to address me as Mrs. McArdle. I have no ideological opposition to a woman's using her husband's name; in fact, when my MacKinnonite college roommate told me that I wasn't allowed to take my husband's name, I resolved then and there not only to take it, but to insist on being addressed as "Mrs. John Doe". However, Mr. Doe hasn't arrived yet. The only Mr. McArdle in the house is my father, and I'm afraid he's taken. I have assiduously searched my posts for any reference to a husband which may have caused this confusion, and find none. I can only assume that the ubiquitous husbandry of other female bloggers has caused this error. Or that he's following the Romance language practice of promoting me to Mrs. in deference to my advanced age.
So anyone who's wondering can address me as Miss McArdle, or Ms. McArdle, or just McArdle, or even Megan. If you address me by some of the names I've been called by people who take issue with my position on the corporate tax, however, I won't respond.
SORRY ABOUT ALL THE ECONOMIST POSTS, but darn it, I just love the dang thing, and especially when the editors agree with me that the credit and asset bubble has not yet deflated. Of course, if you'd followed my advice you'd have gotten out of the market in '97, so caveat emptor.
THE GLOSS IS OFF THE AOL/TIME WARNER MERGER, says The Economist. I take a certain personal interest, since the merger was born during my abortive attempt to become an investment banker, and I was forced to memorize the most trivial details of the transaction (then pending) in order to impress interviewers with my deep knowledge of the industry.
And what was it based on? Synergies, those marvelous efficiencies that were going to make us all rich as soon as we'd done enough mergers. Well, it turns out the synergies aren't what they'd hoped. They almost never are; mergers usually cause the value of the company to decline, or so my finance professors told me. The Economist makes a half-hearted stab at the company line, plugging all the synergies that made Lord of The Rings so successful:
The most recent example was the release in December of “The Lord of the Rings”, the first of a trilogy of films, by New Line Cinema, part of the AOL Time Warner kingdom. This film has already taken $246m at the American box office, and was the fourth-biggest hit of 2001. Together, AOL and New Line created a “community” of fans who were offered a tantalising advance snippet of the film on the Internet in April 2000; this was downloaded over 1.7m times. To keep them coming back, the official website is continuously updated, and will feed visitors a steady supply of exclusive morsels throughout the life of the trilogy.
AOL subscribers, however, were treated to more: a chance to enter a competition to be flown to the movie’s world première in New Zealand (where it was filmed)—if, that is, they upgraded to AOL 7.0. In two weeks, 800,000 community members signed up. Few corners of the AOL Time Warner empire have not been turned into marketing outlets for the film, from the WB network, which first aired the movie trailer, to Entertainment Weekly, part of the Time Inc stable, which ran a special competition to win “figurines”, little toys based on the film’s characters. Given that yet another of the group’s films, Warner Brothers’ “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone”, broke box-office records last year, and that both films have brought in lucrative merchandising and licensing deals, this might look like vindication of the AOL Time Warner synergy model.
Certainly, the cross-promotion of assets within a large media group can be potent, especially when exclusive offers are made to insiders, such as subscribers to AOL. The addition of the AOL distribution channel, after all, with its more than 30m subscribers, was part of what lured Time Warner’s Mr Levin into the merger in the first place.
Problem is, none of these things are particularly synergistic: all of these promotional things could have been done by the two companies perfectly easily without merging; in fact, all of these things are done by companies every day. Disney doesn't have to buy McDonalds in order to get action figures into our Happy Meals.
In fact, most mergers destroy rather than create value; acquiring companies overpay for assets, destroying value for their own shareholders (although, of course, they create an equal amount of value for the shareholders of the acquired company by compensating them more than they deserve); and the transaction costs associated with a merger are enormous: the investment bankers and lawyers to do the deal, the costs of merging the administrative and technological infrastructure, the lost efficiency during the merger -- and the costs savings from streamlining (read: layoffs) end up disappearing into severance packages and lawsuits.
There are only two situations in which merging makes sense: when there are massive economies of scale, it makes sense to merge smaller organizations; and when companies have what is called "co-specialized assets", mergers can overcome otherwise insurmountable barriers to trade. A co-specialized asset is one that is good only for making goods for a particular buyer. For example, an auto parts maker that has to refit his shop just to make a certain headlight for GM will be reluctant to do so, because once he has, he is totally dependant on GM. If GM goes out of business, or decides to stop using the parts, he's hosed. Moreover, this will give GM a disproportionate pricing power over him that will make the refit unprofitable. In this case, it makes sense for GM to buy the parts maker, because otherwise the parts won't get made.
Most mergers don't work on this principle; AOL Time Warner did not realize economies of scale, nor did it have co-specialized assets. So why did they merge? Beats me. But if you've got an investment banking job you want to give me, I can do a hell of a pitch on the synergies.
THIS ARTICLE ON the Gitmo prisoners reminded me of this fantastic quote from Mark Twain on the "committee of sappy women" petitioning the governor to pardon Tom Sawyer's Injun Joe:
"If he had been Satan himself there would have been plenty of weaklings ready to scribble their names to a pardon petition, and drip a tear on it from their permanently impaired and leaky waterworks."
THE ECONOMIST HAS A GOOD ARTICLE delineating the various legal options for dealing with the Al-Quaeda prisoners. It told me a couple of things I didn't know, including the fact that the outfits we're so up in arms about were only used for transportation (they're only shackled now to be moved). Here's the thing: European governments are saying that we should give them Geneva Convention treatment. They're also saying that we shouldn't try them with military tribunals or give them the death penalty. Well, it has to be one or the other. If they're combatants under the Geneva Convention then we'll be trying them for war crimes, under our own military law -- and I'm guessing that there's a death penalty in there somewhere for randomly executing civilians. If they're not -- well, who the hell knows, but it's a sure thing that Europe doesn't have any standing in the matter. I'm afraid they're going to have to make up their minds.
I'm sorry, I was overcome by irrational exuberance at the thought of a place with some decent weather. We will now resume our regularly scheduled program.
While trolling Matt Welch's fine blog I stumbled across this quote from Michael Barone that perfectly captures what I hate about literary snobbery of the kind that I claim to have found in that TNR LOTR review:
The culture wars are not about conventional politics. They are about the politics of moral aesthetics. In conventional politics, an opponent is someone who is wrong in his choice of party, or on a particular issue, and this is something that can be argued about. But the politics of moral aesthetics are about taste; and about taste, there is no arguing. An opponent is not just wrong in his views; he is wrong as a person. He is wrong on an existential basis: It is not the fact of what he espouses that is appalling; it is the fact of himself.
Excellent post by Natalie Solent on the Northern Irish troubles, pointing out a fact of which I was only dimly, innumerately aware: the Catholic death toll is much higher than the Protestant death toll because the Republicans kill so many of their own (Catholics, that is).
Of course, I'd want to be sure that the site is not run by and for some Protestant leaning organisation, but I have no reason to suspect that it is.
Slotman's comments won't fit in the comment window, so I'm putting them here, because they're fair and I want to respond. Slotman's comments are in the clear; mine are in italics.
OH MY GOOD GOSH --I have comments on your comments.
MM: Nor can Soskis hang on me the charge he makes that those who really love the books read them as adolescents; I just read them last week. As I say, I found his prose uneven, but his imagination. . . that soars. . .
JS: He can't hang it on you maybe, but that doesn't mean he's wrong in general. If he can somehow prove the majority of Tolkien fans haven't moved past Tolkien in the years since they first discovered them --and if that discovery usually happened when they were in their teens-- then he'd be on to something with the Tolkien-stunts-your-growth-as-a-reader argument.
I meant only that I don't have a longstanding emotional attachment to the books the way those who've been reading them for years do. If he could prove such a thing. . . I don't see how you could. I was a Robert Heinlein baby and continue to re-read his books regularly. . . when I saw what they'd done to Starship Troopers in the movie, I wanted to sob. But that doesn't mean that I am unable to appreciate the intricate prose of William Faulkner, or the emotional landscape of Jonathan Cheever, merely because these are not his charms. I find it hard to believe that people are stuck on Tolkien like some sort of arrested literary development. I think the fact that Tolkien speaks to all ages speaks well, rather than ill, for the book. I read Huck Finn at 15 and loved it. . . and at 22 and loved it for utterly different things. . . and the next time I read it, I am sure that I will find it has changed again. Not all great books are able to speak to us before we have done the work to ready our intellect and literary palates for them, but many are -- and I would argue that all great books continue to speak to us throughout our lives, or they are not great.
MM: I would argue, on the contrary, that any book that doesn't get decent circulation in the literate (not literary) community of its time is doomed to obscurity unless hauled out by some ethnic studies group of the year 2200.
JS: What about Moby Dick? Nobody read that at the time, I think.
It wasn't The Old Curiosity Shop. But it wasn't Gravity's Rainbow either.
MM: Soskis undercuts his argument thoroughly in the final paragraphs, where he tells us why he is so hard on Tolkien: because he doesn't deserve to top the list of best book of all times. My question: why on earth should Soskis care?
JS: Most likely because Andy Shippey wrote a book saying that Tolkien was the greatest author of the 20th century, a perfectly controversial position that Soskis could not suffer silently. So he critiqued Shippey. Soskis probably likes other books better. You know? Maybe he could have helped himself by saying what they were --but maybe he doesn't want to generate debate like that. That's his point: that Shippey's "'take no prisoners' policy--you are either with Middle-earth or you are with the poncey eggheads--polarizes the debate too much." That's what he's on about: Tolkien fans telling him how great Tolkien is when he just can't see it --though he's willing to give Tolkien his due as he sees it.
Yes, to be fair, Soskis/Jenkyns is critiquing Shippey's book, and it's a perfectly fair target. But I am not quarreling with the fact that the reviewer doesn't like the book -- he's perfectly free not to -- or even with the idea that if there were some sort of objective, platonic ideal of a best books list, Tolkien would not be on it. (I'll quarrel with that later) Rather I am quarreling with the reasons he ennumerates for not liking the book, which I think aren't particularly valid; and the fact that Jenkyns/Soskis thinks that all those people shouldn't have LOTR as their favorite book. He doesn't offer any candidates for what should be there, or even any criteria, though I will give you that he has offered lack of sex, religion, and verbal craft as the putative reasons LOTR shouldn't be there, so perhaps the inverse would be appropriate decision factors. It seems to me (and this is just an impression) that there is more than a little of the "literature as medicine approach" -- books as signals of, or agents of, spiritual and intellectual health.
And Shippey probably wants people like Soskis replying to him thoughtfully and telling him where he's wrong and where he's nuts. The whole point of ranking somebody number one --especially a controversial choice like Tolkien-- is to get people talking. And Shippey has done that. But Soskis has every right to respond. You can ask Shippey the same question: why on Earth should he care? Because he loves the books, and so does Soskis --just not the same books.
I am in no way questioning the reviewer's right to quarrel with the criteria by which Shippey asserts that LOTR is the greatest book ever. I just disagree with most of the points on which he chose to base his quarrel. I think you will find it hard to deny, however, that there is a healthy dose of unjustified elitism in the reviewer's position that is not found in the Shippey stand.
And RE: Freud: He has a point. The 20th century was the century of Freud; Tolkien wrote as if he had no idea Freud existed or if he wanted a world where Freud did not exist; an author who could not acknowledge Freud cannot be the greatest of the century that was Freud's. Unless the 20th century actually was the century of Tolkien. Or of neither of them. That's all I got.
I respectfully disagree. You could make the same argument of Karl Marx or Darwin, but whoops! There goes Dickens, James, Thackeray, Austen, Melville, Hawthorne, Eliot, all three Brontes. . . if currency with the fad ideas of the century is all that counts, H.G. Wells was the 19th century's greatest novelist, and George Bernard Shaw its greatest playwright. I'm awfully fond of both of them, but the greatest authors of their times? I'm not saying LOTR is the greatest book ever; I have my own candidates. But too, those lists of "The Greatest Books" weren't coming from English professors; they were coming from regular people. And those people didn't set up some complicated standard by which to judge greatness; they ranked their favorite books. Lord of the Rings, for good or bad, was the one that the largest number of people read and re-read and enjoyed. So what Soskis/Jenkyns is saying when he says that it shouldn't be at the top is, in some way, that all those people shouldn't be allowed to have a book like Lord of the Rings as their favorite. I find that deeply objectionable, for reasons that I ennumerated in the original piece, but will restate thus: the qualities that the literary establishment values in a book are no more of an objective, perfect standard than are the qualities that the masses who love LOTR value. When Jenkyns/Soskis asserts that people shouldn't value LOTR the most, he is asserting, a priori that these standards are superior.
The Blogs of War points out that the Lord of the Rings article was written by Richard Jenkyns, not Benjamin Soskis. But I swear I'm not stupid enough to pull Soskis' name out of a hat and pin it on the review. I can think of only two explanations: either Soskis' name was on another piece near the LOTR piece on the web site, and I randomly fixed on it; or TNR screwed up, has fixed the error, and is now pretending it never happened in a nefarious effort to make me look bad.
IT LOOKS LIKE the former Vice-Chairman of Enron, who stepped down in May, has killed himself. This could be coincidence, but I think it likely means that there are more and worse revelations to be made about Enron.
I just had a thought -- does this mean the lefty nuts are going to start their own version of the Clinton Death List?
The Megan McArdle Certified Wing-Nut Hermes Tax, Part II
Seems that confiscatory taxation is gathering a following, although their solution is much less creative than mine.
On the same site, Evil Princetonian Dave Tepper has awarded me "Favorite MBA". . . I'm stunned. . . it's all so sudden. . . I'd like to thank my parents, my financial aid officer, and all the little people -- Tattoo, Mickey Mouse. . .
I just wish I knew how tough the field was. But I'm pretty impressed that I managed to snag it even without putting provocative pictures up a la Nataljia Radic.
We just got our blood test results. No one's got dangerous levels of Lead or Mercury in their blood. Whoopee! I'm going to go out right now and celebrate by eating a thermometer.
IT SEEMS THAT unemployed techies (a category into which I almost fall,) have taken up spamming as another creative way to get that resume out there. And it's certainly catching people's eye: one enterprising recipient, who got two copies of a resume, set up a webpage called "Bernard Shifman Is a Moron Spammer", reachable through this link, to tell the world all about the spammer.
But all is not lost, Mr. Shifman. Surely some direct marketers are hiring?
I'm finally catching up on my backlog of email (you'd be absolutely amazed at how many people are interested in the subject of corporate taxation) and wanted to point out the Fritz Schrank has an interesting rejoinder to my attack on Richard Cohen:
I'm not challenging the strength of McArdle's arguments about corporate taxation. I just can't help noticing that Cohen's points are far more broadly stated than the question of whether or how to tax business entities.
I take Cohen at his word when he says he resents "anyone who manages not to" pay federal, state, or local taxes. The term "anyone" is not usually limited to corporations. I also take Cohen seriously when he says,
Most people pay taxes, but some don't -- and the ones who pay subsidize the ones who don't.
(Emphasis supplied.)
Actually, the interesting thing is that most people don't pay income tax. I'm trying to find the damn chart on the web, but 55% of taxes are paid by either the top 5% (I think this is right) or possibly the top 10% of all earners.
But I'm no rich guy and 40% of my check is gone before I get it, you say? First of all, it don't take much to make the top 5% -- ca. 52K per annum. And second of all, a great deal of that is FICA, which isn't a tax, it's a Ponzi scheme. . . excuse me, social insurance. The bottom quartile pays about 5% of the nation's income tax, far less than their share of national income.
Ted Kennedy doesn't pay that much either, relative to his share of the nation's income. Why? Because he inherited it, and there's a lot of it, so he can afford to structure his income to avoid taxes, much like the evil Enron. It's the Upper Middle Class that's caught between a rock and a hard place -- my parents pay about 60% (that's right, 60% after you include property, sel-employment, and sales taxes) of their income, which is far more as a percentage of annual income than the Kennedys will ever pay).
Roberts’ taxpayer/voter data more than proves Cohen’s point that the current income tax code is
a reflection of a society in which the rules you think apply to everyone actually don't.
So let’s come up with an income tax system in which everyone pays. Shall we?
Couldn't agree more. Actually, I'm not against the progressive income tax per se (I hear a gasp from my libertarian companions, but come on -- the guy who was born with a 90 IQ to a 15-year old mother can't be expected to turn over the same share of his meager income as folks like me who had all the advantages of birth, plus brains, beauty and charm.) I have even been known to advocate, when in my cups, what became known among my friend's as "The Megan McArdle Certified Wing-Nut Hermes Tax" which goes like this: Hermes sells a handbag for $10,000. I think that if you buy that handbag, the government should take half your assets and give them to [Insert political cause of the week: it's currently Enron employees]. Why? Because the only reason to buy that handbag is to show how much money you have. It has absolutely no utility whatsoever above a $1,000, $250 or $100 handbag. And if you have so much money that you can spend $10,000 to show people how much you have, you have too much and it should be taken away, because you don't appreciate, in the words of Ayn Rand, "the living value that money represents." [Before you whip out the rusty quill with which to verbally lacerate me, I'm kidding, OK? Although I do find $10,000 handbags ethically and aesthetically repulsive] So I'm not the Uber-Capitalist you might think. Like economists, I am less concerned with the tax code's progressivity than with its complexity, which is ridiculous and detrimental to the economy.
However, I see significant problems with it as it's currently enacted, the greatest of those being that most people in the United States don't currently pay any income tax, and therefore don't do even the most elementary cost-benefit analysis (as in "Politician A is going to raise my taxes to pay for all this crap he's promising") on the goodies they demand from government, because to them it's free. No nation, so constituted, can long endure.
I think that total tax burden should be capped at 25% of income, for a number of economic reasons, but mainly because of fairness. Why? Think about it in terms of time instead of money. Every extra percentage of income you demand is an extra percentage of the taxpayer's life spent providing it. Does the government have the right to demand that 50% of someone's life be spent supporting it?
This article from Fox News highlights the transfer costs of taxes, and illustrates why it is that people are able to say such stupid things about government spending "creating jobs": because they can see the jobs the government creates right there, while the jobs the government destroys through taxation are invisible.
Think of it this way: we can all agree that the money spent to transfer tax dollars from people to the government are lost, destroyed. They replace other economic activity we'd rather have. So in order to justify spending, there either has to be some phenomenally important task we need to complete, such as repelling the Invading Hun and Making the World Safe for Democracy, or the government investment has to get radically better returns on its investments than the private sector. In a few cases this may be true, but does anyone who's stood on line at McDonalds, and then stood on line at the DMV, think that it's true most of the time?
PatrickRuffini says we're no longer allowed to use the word "take down", which forces me to new creative heights in describing in hilarious indictment of Marion Berry's totalitarian tactics (tee-hee! I love alliteration):
Berry's whole existence seems increasingly like an audition for a position as minister of information for a regime that sends people to forced labor camps. Fortunately, if she ever got the job, it's likely that her subjects wouldn't have to endure her for very long. Any regime that would countenance her and her shoddy comic-book tactics would likely be swatted away in a military coup within weeks.
AintNoBadDude thinks that Bush's connections to Enron are worse than Clinton's shady associations: "Look at Rand's list. Other than Web Hubbell and the McDougals, do you recognize anyone?" Problem is, I don't recognize anyone on the Bush list either, except Otto Reich, and as far as I can tell he hasn't done anything scummy except disagree with some Democrats.
He also makes reference to Neil Bush. Now, I think Neil Bush should be hung out of the window by his ankles until his brains fall back into his head, but I don't think that the Democrats want to get into a brawl about which presidential brothers have the scummiest connections. So far as I've heard, Neil Bush hasn't yet tried to sell the Bin Laden family a pardon. But maybe I'm just testy because Linse has a piece on corporate taxes that clearly indicates that he has not read my brilliant work on the subject.
The Enron collapse had nothing to do with its campaign contributions. That's why it proves how urgently we need campaign reform, says Jonathan Chait.
No, really, that's the argument. It's clear to me, anyway, that this is a fairly cynical strategy to keep repeating Enron and Bush together and hope that the peepul are too dim to apprehend the difference. Not one of the things that Chait mentions has anything to do with the Enron collapse -- except the ones that don't have anything to do with campaign finance. The pretext he uses to hang them all together:
Granted, these Bush administration favors didn't contribute to Enron's downfall. But that's almost certainly because this oh-so-friendly administration has held office for only a year.
For one so certain, Chait is mysteriously silent as to what sorts of things the evil Bush administration would have done to facilitate Enron's collapse, if only they'd had the time.
Meanwhile, Noam Scheiber delivers a blistering diatribeon campaign finance rings largely true to my (non-political-operator) ears, but curious from a reformer, since it basically concludes that until we reform men's souls -- or the state withers away and true communism arrives, whichever comes first -- nothing we do is going to make much difference.
They've arrested some guy for carrying a knife on a plane. Seems this yahoo, who allegedly discovered that he had mistakenly carried a hunting knife on a plane while in mid-flight, called a radio station from the plane to tell them about it. A cop heard the broadcast, they searched all the passengers when the plane landed, and they arrested him. Bail is set at half a million dollars.
Half a million dollars. They let murderers out on less bail.
Okay, is it just me or is this insane? I think the idiot probably did this for the publicity, but what of it? It seems to me that the person that we should be arresting is the security person who let him on the plane -- or have we forgotten that the reason we don't want people to carry weapons on planes is to prevent them from hijacking the plane, not to keep them from phoning into radio programs and thereby embarassing our crack federal security service.
The question of whether they are books for adolescents or adults. I would argue that the question is a little anachronistic -- Tolkien, the medievalist, strikes me as thoroughly Victorian, and the Victorians did not delineate adolescent and adult literature the way we do. That Benjamin Soskis doesn't seem to grasp this is particularly apparent in the reason he chooses to illustrate why he doesn't consider them adult books: sex.
Tolkien invented his own mythological world, but it lacks the dignity and the sinew of a real mythology, for it is without religion and essentially without sex. Hobbits may have fur at the bottom of their legs, but they have seem to have no balls at the top; and that pretty much goes for the rest of Middle-earth, too. The women in The Lord of the Rings are few and pallid. . . what disturbs is not so much the absence of women, perhaps explicable in an adventure story of this kind, as the absence of desire. In this work that presents itself as the representation of a whole world, there is hardly any awareness that we are sexual beings.
In the post-Freudian world, it is impossible for us to imagine that one could write a book for adults without layer upon layer of sexual tension, but in fact before those licentious Edwardians got in, there was a booming school in exactly that. The women are few and pallid? One could say the same of Mark Twain. There is a total absence of desire? No awareness that we are sexual beings? That describes 90% of novels written before 1900, and a good many written after. . . the fact that contemporary English departments enjoy savoring the fraught sexual atmosphere of a Henry James or Kate Chopin (who, in my humble opinion, has been elevated to canonical status on the basis of this rather than, say, writing talent) does not mean that one cannot write a novel for adults without sexual themes; it is merely that no one does any more, because we are all Freudians now -- and because most "literary" writers imagine themselves to be writing for posterity, and so consider their market to be the English departments of America. There is no sex in Lord of the Rings because it is a family novel, and because it isn't important to the plot. Not that I'm against sex, but I think it would be nice if we saw more of this diversity in the literary world.
When he says the books are religionless I suppose he means that a struggle for good isn't religious -- only religious rituals count. Don't tell the Unitarians.
Actually, I agree that few of Tolkien's characters have any deep emotional life -- they're rather like characters in a medieval epic, with a few grand passions rather than complex emotional lives. But if we are to argue that you need characters to have complex emotional lives in order to have an adult novel, you'll have to knock out a great deal of contemporary literature from Waiting for Godot on. Contrast this with the indubitably for children Anne of Green Gables series, where the characters often have extremely complex emotional lives -- just read this passage about the death of a childhood friend (no, men, it won't cause you to lose your facial hair and take up needlepoint) if you don't believe me. But then I suppose there isn't any sex, so it doesn't count. Emotions are only complex if they involve sex somehow.
The symbolism is flawed. Having told us that the emotions in the book are insufficiently complex, he immediately turns around and complains that another problem with the series is that
the moral economy of the work is radically flawed--that there is a confusion between whether the corrupting ring symbolizes sinful desire (the lust for power, or whatever) or should be seen as a magical object that acts upon the wearer as an external force
That's what I would call intricate, nuanced symbolism, but once again it doesn't involve sex, so I'm probably confused. Soskis might prefer it if Tolkien just told us in an appendix exactly what the symbolism was so we wouldn't have to wonder.
I shouldn't make fun of Soskis. His criticism is interesting and well written. But I am struck, while reading this, by how entirely modern criticism has come to view everything through the prism of sex. We expect to find subtle and nuanced evocations of sexual themes, yet everything else is supposed to be right out there, unambiguous and unexplored in any but the most superficial way. It strikes me also that this may be why so much modern "literature" has degenerated into increasingly violent and bizarre sexual themes coupled with increasingly dull political ones, laminated together with a thin veneer of verbal scrimshaw.
The prose isn't particularly artistic. Soskis's criticisms of Tolkien's style, on the other hand, are right on target; his dialogue is wooden, his prose redolent of the Victorian schoolboy's history compositions. Yet I doubt that those who love Tolkien would disagree, much, with this verdict; his prose is hard going, and does not later reward you, as does James or Austen, with an appreciation of its subtle artistry. It is not to Tolkien's prose that we respond; it is to his fecund, delighted, heroic imagination, his unerring moral compass, his hold to the idea of the timeless struggle between good and evil which gave birth to an entire genre. But these are not the stuff of modern literature; for all their flirtation with magical realism, vivid imagination is not what the modern literary establishment truly values, and they are certainly not interested in absolutes of good and evil. They delight in exploring all the varations in shading in the grey areas, and while I find Tolkien's moral universe quite complex, it doesn't have a lot of grey in it.
I do want to defend Tolkien's dialogue a little bit, not because I like it, but because Soskis is so savage: "This is writing that aspires to be noble and philosophical, but its nobility seems to me gimcrack" Its nobility sounds to me a lot like medieval epics, and their later Victorian interpretations, to me. Given that Tolkien was a medievalist, I think he just wrote that way because he actually enjoyed it. Medievalists are very strange people. I dated one who used to wake me at three in the morning shouting things like "Hwaet we garde na in geardagum þeodcyninga!"
Nor can Soskis hang on me the charge he makes that those who really love the books read them as adolescents; I just read them last week. As I say, I found his prose uneven, but his imagination. . . that soars. . .
Soskis complains that Middle Earth is basically just Europe. It is. He doesn't say what is wrong with this. Presumably, the thing stands on its own, and I'm just too dim to see it.
Tolkien's popularity doesn't mean he's a great writer. Horsefeathers. I would argue, on the contrary, that any book that doesn't get decent circulation in the literate (not literary) community of its time is doomed to obscurity unless hauled out by some ethnic studies group of the year 2200. As exhibit one, I offer you William Dean Howells. William who? I hear you cry. Why, the most famous and successful literary author of post civil war America, that's who. Mark Twain, on the other hand, was considered a vulgar popular figure, the Dave Barry of his time. Making predictions this early about which works will stand the test of time is a sucker's game -- but I'll go ahead anyway and say that anything made deliberately difficult, like James Joyce, will go away because as the language changes in a hundred years it will be just too damn difficult to read.
I suspect Soskis' verdict about the book is much influenced by the fact that apparently any old person can read and enjoy it -- which he backs up by rejoindering the claim that readership equals greatness with the example of Danielle Steele. I would argue that the cases aren't the same, because Steele's readers are prolific readers who will consume anything as long as the plot is sufficiently romantic and the prose sufficiently simple; they rarely re-read her books, and easily substitute other books for hers. Tolkien fans pore over his books repeatedly. I am willing to state that any book that a lot of people buy as a "lifetime" book -- one that goes on the shelf instead of getting thrown away, so that you can read it again 5, 10 and 20 years from now; a book that people look forward to passing onto their children -- any book that meets those criterion is a candidate for being a classic.
Soskis says that the literati don't dislike Lord of the Rings because it is popular: "think of the cartloads of highbrow praise justly heaped upon jazz or Elvis or The Simpsons". Disagree. The literati like jazz because it is black, don't particularly like Elvis but tolerate him because he is poor, and like the Simpsons because it makes fun of the middle class, and many of them have a lingering horror of their roots in the bedroom communities of New York and Los Angeles. They aren't rebelling against popular culture; they're rebelling against pole lamps and Mom's book club. They do not like things that the vast middle class, middlebrow population likes. LOTR falls into this category.
Soskis undercuts his argument thoroughly in the final paragraphs, where he tells us why he is so hard on Tolkien: because he doesn't deserve to top the list of best book of all times. My question: why on earth should Soskis care? And what hill was he standing on when God handed him the list of the best books of all times?
This attitude is the reason that so many people hate reading, including people who teach and study it. They've been told that there's a list of books that they should like, and if they don't, then they don't like reading. I recall vividly an English class at Penn where I managed to shock into silence 40 sensitive suburban types merely by saying that I didn't like Wordsworth, and I thought his poetry was bad. (I've revised this opinion somewhat since then. But only somewhat.) The idea that one could challenge the canon for any but political reasons was entirely alien to them. Little wonder that so few of them evinced any genuine love of books or words -- they were far too busy trying to figure out what books they should like, to ever discover which ones they did. Saying that you're not allowed to like Tolkien, or like Tolkien better than other authors, because he doesn't add up well on the hierarchy of literary traits that Soskis has assigned is no better than declaring that you like a writer merely because he does.
