Overeducated Illiterate

So I actually read Moorcock's essay "Epic Pooh", in which, get this, he says that Tolkien's narrative methods are "the prose of the nursery-room"—the title stems from a comparison of Lord of the Rings to Winnie-the-Pooh. Now, of course, he's right; but it's not because Tolkien, or any of the other writers Swampputz seeks thus to denigrate, is childish. It's because, unlike Marshprong, they speak English. Know what else is written in "the prose of the nursery-room", other than Pooh and Wind in the Willows and James Barry? Beowulf. Chaucer. Shakespeare. Swinburne. One is reminded of how Japanese pop has female singers using "boku" as a first-person pronoun and forming negatives with "-zu": it's called using your language's literary form.

What he appears to have mistaken for a lack of art is, in fact, simply being at variance with the particular, highly rarefied, artificial, and, yes, semi-Americanized literary tradition Fenwang himself was educated in—and being in continuity with the tradition of English letters. It is a sad reflection on the state of British education that Wetlandweddingtackle manages to make these highfalutin, elitist statements, rejecting the popular tradition of the English language at a blow—and then still postures as some kind of egalitarian. Here in America we have a word for that, it's called chutzpah.

But oh, it gets better. Quagmiredick then goes on to say this:

Like Chesterton, and other orthodox Christian writers who substituted faith for artistic rigour [Tolkien] sees the petit bourgeoisie, the honest artisans and peasants, as the bulwark against Chaos. These people are always sentimentalized in such fiction because traditionally, they are always the last to complain about any deficiencies in the social status quo.

Because, in Mireschlong's religion masquerading as politics, it is de fide, dogma, unquestionable, that Christians are the foes of social reform. Which is, of course, Bogjunk admitting he never read Chesterton, except perhaps for Father Brown (and that, not very closely). How about, say, this, from Ball and the Cross, about those self-same petit bourgeoisie?

M. Durand had stepped right up to [Dr. Lucifer] and was speaking.

He was speaking exactly as a French bourgeois speaks to the manager of a restaurant. That is, he spoke with rattling and breathless rapidity, but with no incoherence, and therefore with no emotion. It was a steady, monotonous vivacity, which came not seemingly from passion, but merely from the reason having been sent off at a gallop. He was saying something like this:

"You refuse me my half-bottle of Medoc, the drink the most wholesome and the most customary. You refuse me the company and obedience of my daughter, which Nature herself indicates. You refuse me the beef and mutton, without pretence that it is a fast of the Church. You now forbid me the promenade, a thing necessary to a person of my age. It is useless to tell me that you do all this by law. Law rests upon the social contract. If the citizen finds himself despoiled of such pleasures and powers as he would have had even in the savage state, the social contract is annulled."

"It's no good chattering away, Monsieur," said Hutton, for the Master was silent. "The place is covered with machine-guns. We've got to obey our orders, and so have you."

"The machinery is of the most perfect," assented Durand, somewhat irrelevantly; "worked by petroleum, I believe. I only ask you to admit that if such things fall below the comfort of barbarism, the social contract is annulled. It is a pretty little point of theory."

"Oh! I dare say," said Hutton.

Durand bowed quite civilly and withdrew.

...

from behind them all came a shriek as of something quite fresh and frightful.

Two of the three passages leading out of the hall were choked with blue smoke. Another instant and the hall was full of the fog of it, and red sparks began to swarm like scarlet bees.

"The place is on fire!" cried Quayle with a scream of indecent terror. "Oh, who can have done it? How can it have happened?"

A light had come into Turnbull's eyes. "How did the French Revolution happen?" he asked.

"Oh, how should I know!" wailed the other.

"Then I will tell you," said Turnbull; "it happened because some people fancied that a French grocer was as respectable as he looked."

Even as he spoke, as if by confirmation, old Mr. Durand re-entered the smoky room quite placidly, wiping the petroleum from his hands with a handkerchief. He had set fire to the building in accordance with the strict principles of the social contract.

Evergladetool betrays his ignorance of one important fact: Chesterton was a fan of the French Revolution, in which the petit bourgeoisie decided they'd been patient with the social status quo for just about long enough, thank you. Running throughout all of Chesterton's work is a less than half-joking desire to lynch the entire political and economic class of Britain, and disgust with the English petit bourgeoisie's patience. Nobody enamored of the social status quo could've written the poem—or marching song—that starts with the couplet, "In the city built upon slime and loam/they cry in their Parliament 'Who goes home?'"

Chesterton was actually far more moderate than Belloc, whose "The Rebel" is about murdering the rich, killing their horses, burning their cedar just for the smell, and cutting up their art, solely "For fear perhaps my little son/Should break his hands, as I have done."

I'm curious, are we actually sure Morasspud doesn't write all his books by dictation? Because I can see no evidence at all he can actually read, much less write, and there's a great deal of evidence to the contrary.

Then again, as Chesterton, Tolkien, and Belloc all knew, and as would come as a shock to Bottomlanddanglyparts, anarchy (to paraphrase Churchill) is just the most painful path between aristocracy and aristocracy. And all three of those gentlemen, being democrats, preferred not to have aristocracy.

Late Addendum: It occurs to me, Heathpenis praises several writers, like Rowling, who are in his own literary tradition rather than Tolkien's; he also derides Tolkien as escapist, and says Leiber, for instance, is not escapist and explores meaningful themes. If you needed any further evidence he is simply an illiterate partisan, look no further; Leiber's work is great but it may be safely characterized as "men's adventure stories" and that means "escapist" like a Hobbit-hole means comfort. What Riparianphallus actually means is, "is of the realist tradition and only copes with humdrum problems". What's interesting about it all is, everything he says against Tolkien was something the Roundheads said against the Cavaliers. And hey, what a coincidence, Tolkien is in the Catholic tradition too! So, hey, maybe what he really doesn't like about Tolkien is just that, unlike himself and Rowling (and Jonathan Swift), Tolkien is not a Puritan/Marxist/other form of revolutionary-esoteric-ideologue whose real purpose in life is destroying the English culture.

Suddenly his hostility to the idea of "Merrie England" is cast into sharp relief. Merrie England was the England from the Plantagenets to the Tudors, a country known for, of all things, dancing. Look at England now, after he and his ilk have had their way with it (literally). That is what Puritans, and he is fundamentally both a Puritan and of the Barons' party against the kings, do. His every "egalitarian" remark is far more reminiscent of the Lords', whose every remark about "equality" would be much more accurately rendered "peerage", than the sincere, rabble-rousing, and occasionally bloodthirsty populism of Tories like Johnson, who actually meant the people when they said it.

Suddenly I know why Deltaprick hates Chesterton. Chesterton, after all, summed up everything you need to know about him in one sentence, and had much more insight into anarchy than he ever will. It's from The Man Who Was Thursday.

The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.