This is not the right crowd and you know it

[sovay]

Okay, so my physical health has imploded along with my plans for the day and I am in a terrible mood, but I think I would still be disagreeing with David Eddings.

skygiants recently re-read The Belgariad. The comments section is appropriate-ironically epic. In the course of pursuing a theory proposed by pedanther—who seems to have been totally right—I found an interview with Eddings. I am not sure when exactly it was conducted; his remarks about prequels suggest sometime between 1991 and 1995, but honestly I don't feel that knowing the year would make much difference to how impressively I disagree with almost everything he says that is not a fact of his personal history and maybe even a couple of those (you cannot cite your intellectual differences with a female parakeet as reasonable scaffolding for your difficulties in writing human women, my dude, or at least you cannot do it without sounding like a dick). For whatever reason, though, this particular glaring ignorance is sticking with me:

"You can have a character say, 'Gee, they bounced one of my cheques' in a contemporary story and everybody will know what they're talking about. But in fantasy you have to invent the entire banking system. You have to invent the theology, sociology and everything else. And when you begin as I did, by dropping three or four aeons of western European culture into a blender—when you throw in peoples who are essentially ancient Romans, French and Spanish noblemen, Vikings and Muslims—when you put all that together and press the 'on' button you get a very strange mix of anachronisms. It gets you thinking about what sort of world it would be with Romans and Arabs living next to each other, for instance."

DUDE IT WOULD LOOK LIKE OUR ACTUAL HISTORY. SO WOULD THE INTERACTION OF VIKINGS AND MUSLIMS. ALSO PLEASE TELL ME THE ISLAMIC WORLD WAS NOT YOUR MODEL FOR THE ANGARAKS BECAUSE IF SO THE ORIENTALISM IN THESE BOOKS JUST WENT SO FAR PAST ELEVEN IT EXCEEDED ESCAPE VELOCITY AND BLASTED OFF INTO THE STARS AND THE STARS REALLY DID NOT DESERVE THAT.

I am sure someone yelled at Eddings in his lifetime about his conceptions of history and anachronism. I don't see how you could not. But I just found them and I am beginning to feel that Santayana should be revised: those who cannot remember the past are not only condemned to repeat it, they are condemned to reinvent it and believe they have created something totally unprecedented—strange enough for high fantasy—when in fact it was just people's lives. Even in high-gloss extruded fantasy product, that annoys me. The end, no moral. Just, seriously, don't do that.

Comments

[pameladean]

I haven't even got to the parakeet. I am still hung up on, "Reed, a rather prestigious college in Oregon." I mean, it is, rather prestigious, I mean, and also in Oregon to the best of my knowledge, but you just don't put it like that. I just.

Also also his weird remarks about bachelor's degrees. I mean, it's true that many colleges do not require a thesis for graduation, but what is this about handing out blank diplomas and letting people just put in their names? What? What what what? ALSO ALSO ALSO holy crap, Hemingway, Faulkner, Steinbeck, well THAT explains a lot.

These things in isolation don't sound so awful, but there's something about the ineffable smugness and naivete combined that makes me want to punch him, not an impulse I have often, and I still haven't reached the parakeet.

P.

[pameladean]

WHAT IS THIS ABOUT THE SOCIAL WORKER IN THE NOVEL THE LOSERS, SOME GIRL WHO MAJORED IN BOYFRIENDS AND HAD THE OBLIGATORY ABORTION WHAT WHAT WHAT

Okay, I will stop now. Never mind the parakeet. The social worker is enough for me.


P.

[sovay]

Okay, I will stop now. Never mind the parakeet. The social worker is enough for me.

That's fair. I do not blame you for getting out while the going is awful. I just had to keep reading because I was looking for particular information and therefore the whole thing is now in my head.

(The Steinbeck thing came up at skygiants' and I concluded that the only thing he took from Steinbeck was the extremely demotic American register of speech and thought, because Steinbeck unlike Eddings could (a) write (b) women. I'm not even sure what Faulkner is doing in there. I think Eddings may have mistaken being bad at numinous for realism.)

[pameladean]

I keep thinking about whether I want to read the rest of it.

And yes, I suspect that in all cases of the authors cited he has mistaken something for something else -- I don't think actual Steinbeck was an influence and Faulkner boggles me. He's got the equivalent of "everybody else just gives you a blank diploma form and lets you fill it in in crayon" going on about each author, I tell you what.

I will not fulminate at you should I read the rest; if I do that at this point it is ENTIRELY on me.

P.

[starlady]

This will sound like hyperbole, but Reed definitely does its best to indoctrinate its students about how they worked so much harder than all other undergraduates and are therefore more worthy. (Which, they do work like dogs! They do the work of graduate students but without having done undergrad as a preparation.) But part of the reason Reed goes so hard on this ideology is so that people will believe all the trauma and pain was worth it.

[ethelmay]

From everything I have heard about it, Reed occupies pretty much exactly the same ecological niche as the college you and I went to, and I cannot type "a rather prestigious college in Minnesota" without laughing and slapping my nose back down where it belongs.

The bit that makes me blench is "Eddings admires Tolkien greatly, as evidenced by his affectionate use of the term "Poppa" in reference to him..." Okay, that's the interviewer's prose, not to mention spelling, but UGH.