Tolkien, New Sincerity and My Little Pony ramblings

[Remember_Summer_Days]

Yeah I guess I'm gonna vent out a little. I've been listening to the audio book of Tolkien and the Great War and it's striking how the man managed to write such beautiful poetry in the middle of a certified Hell on Earth. I got the same impression when I read the Penguin book of First World War poetry (TM). Here is an excerpt from a poem Tolkien wrote while in the war.

O fading town upon a little hill, Old memory is waning in thine ancient gates,

Thy robe gone gray, thine old heart almost still; The castle only, frowning, ever waits

And ponders how among the towering elms

The Gliding Water leaves these inland realms And slips between long meadows to the western sea –

Still bearing downward over murmurous falls One year and then another to the sea;

And slowly thither have a many gone Since first the fairies built Kortirion.

How can you write such kino bro. Of course the poem is sad and melancholic, but it's deeply beautiful and innocent in an ineffable sort of way. I think you can clearly tell this was written from a man of another age, an age long and distant that it feels impossible to journey into. And perhaps this is my greatest frustration and aching sadness right now. Here we have men who were experiencing more horrors than we'll probably even experience in our lifetime and yet they managed to write such beautiful and hopeful prose stuff. You can call this sort of faith a cope, but really can you say that about someone that experienced the Somme? Nevermind that, John Garth makes a great defense of Tolkien's imagination:


But this was not the escapist urge it appears at first glance. The West of Tolkien's imagination was the heartland of a revolution of sorts: a cultural and spiritual revolution. (...) There he had written that it was from Kôr, west over the ocean, that 'the fairies came to teach men song and holiness'.

And

The overriding metaphor of the seasons also provides a note of consolation, suggesting not only loss and death but also renewal and rebirth. To similar effect, the fairies of faded Kortirion sing a 'wistful song of things that were, and could be yet'. Thus it is not sadness that finally prevails in 'Kortirion' but an acceptance of approaching contentment.

Of course not every modernist who experience WW1 came out with a curious whitepill. WW1 also produced the Hollow Men, and as far as I'm aware most modernist I've read feel 'black-pilled'. Though the fact still remains that this was the generation that produced the Inklings, that sprouted Christian Humanism. Now compare that to us zoomers, and zoomer writers especially. I can't imagine any of us producing anything as beautiful or with the vision of someone like Tolkien. As for me, I just feel like everything I write is hideous, not hideous in the proud 'omg I'm such a bad writer you guys', but rather in the sense that I feel like I can only write about vulgarity and disgusting and debauched stuff. There's a sense that if you want to be taken seriously, you have to write trashy, ironic, posmo, degen, unhinged, hentai stuff. When I write I sometimes feel disgusted at myself, I often find myself surprised by the things I write down in the moment like, Shit this really is inside of me huh. For example curse words. I don't use cursewords because I wanna write like a Big Boy or whatever, I just do it cause it's literally how my inner monologue works, I curse all the time, and how can you even hope to come back from that and towards a more beautified view of things? I say shit more than I say thank you, probably. You end up feeling cursed.

And you end up feeling especially like a pussy. Like fucking hell if men who went through literal war can write about the Higher Things why can't we if we haven't suffered for shit. Most of us anyways. Maybe that's why? Because we haven't suffered? But I don't think that's right either, in a way I feel like we zoomers suffer from a meaningless that previous generations could only fear and philosophize about, but we're the ones actually experiencing it. Though this view risks being perhaps too flattering and too meta-narrative focused for zoomers, it really feels like we've got a special kind of suffering that renders most of us incapable of producing beauty. And we're still a bunch of brats really, according to Jean Twenge, most of us don't know how to drive or have ever had a job. Reading about Tolkien and his Oxford buddies, a good amount of them died in the war btw, and they died very young, like at ages 20-22, then you realize how lowly you truly are. Men who died at age 21 (I'm 23) and already did more than you can probably ever hope to accomplish in your lifetime.

As for me, though I suspect this is a common sentiment, I suspect this is why some of us are so into My Little Pony. The early seasons managed to touch a sense of childhood, innocence, wonder, and moral imagination that feels lost in our modern world, it's a sort of refugee from modernity or postmodernity or metamodernity or whatever you wanna call it. Speaking of meta-modernity, in his memeable TV essay, DFW wrote the following copypasta:

The next real literary "rebels" in this country might wel emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gal actual y to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naïve, anachronistic. Maybe that'l be the point. Maybe that's why they'l be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today's risks are different. The new rebels might be artists wil ing to risk the yawn, the rol ed eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the "Oh how banal." To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness. Of wil ingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law. Who knows. Today's most engaged young fiction does seem like some kind of line's end's end. I guess that means we al get to draw our own conclusions. Have to. Are you immensely pleased.

The highlighted parts, that's all stuff Tolkien has been accused of. And I have to wonder, for all this talk about how to overcome le postmodernism, maybe the answer has always been in the literary sense of christian humanists like Tolkien. And Tolkien is a very serious author, the J.R.R Tolkien Encyclopedia: Scholarship and Critical assessment, is 800 pages long, the Blackwell companion to J.R.R Tolkien is 600 pages. That's a lot of scholarship. And it's not like Tolkien hid in his own wine cellar ignoring the philosophy of his day either. Tolkien scholars like Theresa Freda and Bradley Birzer have pointed out that The Lord of the Rings was very much an indirect response against modernism and modernist literature. And of course modernism sprouted postmodernism.

I don't feel confident in calling Tolkien proto new sincerity, that might be anachronistic, but the vision that Tolkien give us seems like a better antidote for postmodernity and etc than new sincerity with its My Little Pony, Star Wars prequels, Wes Anderson, and K-On. New Sincerity arguably gave us the Alt Right and the wokies too. That's what I think at least, but the problem still persists, how can such a nihilistic generation engage with the moral vision of someone like Tolkien? Perhaps this is the ultimate blackpill, how can we enter Faeri when it's way easier to enter hentai? My christian itching says that God works the greatest through the lowly. But who knows, my more cool zoomer self is yelling Coooope!

 

[dorgon]

I can't imagine any of us producing anything as beautiful or with the vision of someone like Tolkien. As for me, I just feel like everything I write is hideous, not hideous in the proud 'omg I'm such a bad writer you guys', but rather in the sense that I feel like I can only write about vulgarity and disgusting and debauched stuff. There's a sense that if you want to be taken seriously, you have to write trashy, ironic, posmo, degen, unhinged, hentai stuff.

You know, I myself feel pretty frustrated for my lack of creativity. Maybe it is the fact that I don't try enough or I don't read enough but nothing ever really pops up in my head when it comes to writing or drawing. It's like there's some sort of mental block in my brain which keeps me from imagining new things and creating new settings, etc.....

Of course not every modernist who experience WW1 came out with a curious whitepill. WW1 also produced the Hollow Men, and as far as I'm aware most modernist I've read feel 'black-pilled'. Though the fact still remains that this was the generation that produced the Inklings, that sprouted Christian Humanism. Now compare that to us zoomers, and zoomer writers especially. I can't imagine any of us producing anything as beautiful or with the vision of someone like Tolkien. As for me, I just feel like everything I write is hideous, not hideous in the proud 'omg I'm such a bad writer you guys', but rather in the sense that I feel like I can only write about vulgarity and disgusting and debauched stuff. There's a sense that if you want to be taken seriously, you have to write trashy, ironic, posmo, degen, unhinged, hentai stuff. When I write I sometimes feel disgusted at myself, I often find myself surprised by the things I write down in the moment like, Shit this really is inside of me huh. For example curse words. I don't use cursewords because I wanna write like a Big Boy or whatever, I just do it cause it's literally how my inner monologue works, I curse all the time, and how can you even hope to come back from that and towards a more beautified view of things? I say shit more than I say thank you, probably. You end up feeling cursed.

And you end up feeling especially like a pussy. Like fucking hell if men who went through literal war can write about the Higher Things why can't we if we haven't suffered for shit. Most of us anyways. Maybe that's why? Because we haven't suffered? But I don't think that's right either, in a way I feel like we zoomers suffer from a meaningless that previous generations could only fear and philosophize about, but we're the ones actually experiencing it. Though this view risks being perhaps too flattering and too meta-narrative focused for zoomers, it really feels like we've got a special kind of suffering that renders most of us incapable of producing beauty. And we're still a bunch of brats really, according to Jean Twenge, most of us don't know how to drive or have ever had a job. Reading about Tolkien and his Oxford buddies, a good amount of them died in the war btw, and they died very young, like at ages 20-22, then you realize how lowly you truly are. Men who died at age 21 (I'm 23) and already did more than you can probably ever hope to accomplish in your lifetime.

As for the rest of what you have said, I think it's because on average most young people back then in World War I used more of their time reading or talking with each other rather than doomscrolling or absorbing 30 second videos. I don't want to be that guy who says "le internet bad, book good!" but, as us zoomers are even more exposed to the internet than the previous generations, and especially the internet at its current state, there is not much to be inspired from. I mean, look all around us. I believe I can attribute much of this lack of meaning our generation has compared to the young men of world war I to demoralization. Not only do I mean demoralization in the Yuri Bezmenov sense, but also in the sense that there is so much information overload that zoomers become used to the little world we built with the algorithms of YouTube or the Tik Tok. All of this stuff, as well as the uncertain times of the 2020s (given COVID, shitty US government business, the Russia-Ukraine war, etc.) it really makes people want to take the blackpill. But, wait a second. Demoralization? Tik Tok? There's a problem, here. Both can be attributed to what I believe is a lack of experience in life. What the main difference between the young men of World War I and us zoomers is that, fundamentally, we are more shut-in than they are. Even when outside there is much less communication between people, as we are all in our own little algorithmic worlds. As compared to World War I, war changes people, for better or for worse. Send in a war hawk to the front-line trenches and he'll turn into a pacifist in a week! The reason why Tolkien was able to write such beautiful poetry and eventually the whole Middle Earth saga was because of a combination of a very good grip on life, if you may, as well as previous reading influences. My father always told me that if I read more, I would become a better writer. I can even see it in you that you are more articulate and well-detailed in your paragraphs then what I'd guess the average zoomer to be.

When it comes to writing, or creating things, there is an issue that has arisen when it comes to zoomer "literature": Irony. What I mean is the "irony" used humorous way, the "say-it-but-don't-mean-it-because-it's-actually-a-joke" way (basically, sarcasm with extra steps). What the problem with this irony is is that it blurs the line between serious and humor. Now, sincerity and humor are both needed in our world, no doubt. But when the lines are blurred, why try? Why try to be serious when you can point and laugh and make a joke about the whole thing? Irony is used as a guise to hide insecurities and feelings of meaninglessness. If you have the blues and write a poem about it, you get mocked for being an emo. If you open up your feelings, you get mocked. Someone will probably mock me for writing this much. It encourages a culture of not trying, just look at high school. If you try to hard on an assignment, you get mocked. If you try too hard in a game, you get mocked. While assignments and gym class games are meaningless in themselves, this mockery for trying starts a behavior that "trying = bad". And as a result, it snowballs to a point where zoomers communicate in memes and create memes as a replacement of long literature works. Not that there's anything wrong with creating memes themselves, but it poses a threat to sincere literature.

There is a special kind of suffering that we have, and it is nihilism. The advent of the Internet give so much way for us to fry our fucking brains out that we longer stop by the sidewalk to smell the flowers. Not enough dopamine. This nihilism breeds hedonism, because if nothing matters, then why try to create when you can consume? If nothing matters, and we will all die by the end of the day, then we might as well as pleasure ourselves into hell. There has been some of this in the previous generations, but the Internet and all the content it provides, instantly, accelerates this trend. Not to mention much (not all) of generation alpha being raised by the iPad instead of the parent, and the more broad break up of the nuclear family.
This combination of nihilism and demoralization, a loop which feeds into each other, is probably one of our generation's biggest obstacles. Art is still well and alive, but the meaning behind pictures just isn't the same from works of art 200 years ago. There are still books written in the last 20-30 years, but much of those books don't really have that same feeling and depth as novels in the past. Movies in the 2010s feel more linear than before. Maybe it's because we only chose the good novels, pictures, and movies of the past and are comparing them to what we have now, but I do think there is less depth in what we have now then in the past, and it's because no one cares anymore, and this lack of caring stems from nihilism, demoralization, irony-poisoning, and the need to consume.

 

[スーパー Meidoメイド]

Lain taught me that autistic people shouldn't use internet.

 

[Jade]

I was actually planning to make a thread similar to this about good and evil in Tolkien's works and why he gets away with a very black-and-white kind of morality in ways that would be frowned upon today, but I guess I can just post it here.

I've been seeing sentiments similar to this post more and more often in recent years, even in official LOTR media like the video games there are orcish characters who aren't strictly good or evil by the standards of Tolkien's world, but just trying to live their lives and acting as mercenaries to the highest bidder.

Relevant to @Remember_Summer_Days 's post, Tolkien modeled orcs after his experience with the soldiers in WW1. In LOTR, most orcs were farmers, living peacefully around the Sea of Nurnen in Mordor's heartland. Although this isn't shown much in the books, there is a notable scene in Return of the King where Frodo and Sam remark at how barren and lifeless Mordor seems, and how on earth Sauron is able to feed his armies considering just how many soldiers he has at his disposal. However, the land they're on is barren and lifeless only because the volcano Orodruin (I still can't believe he actually named it "Mt. Doom" in English) has become much more active recently, and a number of lava flows have scoured the land. However it is these same lava flows that make Mordor an incredibly fertile and rich land whenever the volcano is quiet. That's how the orcs made their living, Mordor is basically the equivalent of the Corn Belt in the USA.

Now the orcs are supposed to be evil in LOTR, there's no doubt about that. But they're not evil for the reasons most people think they're evil. As I said, orcs were inspired by Tolkien's experience in the trenches. The people he fought with were simple peasants yanked from the homes by the draft and transfromed into cruel, heartless killing machines by the pressures of war and the willingness of their commanders to ruthlessly exploit them and throw away their lives like they were nothing, all in the pursuit of power for their own sake. That's why the orcs are seemingly so devoid of anything resembling kindness or brotherhood. That's also why the orcs are portrayed as ugly, it's because of how ugly WW1 made people who were otherwise kindly. In another ROTK scene, Frodo and Sam observe two orcs get into a fight over something petty, and suspect that without Sauron or some similar overarching power, the orcs couldn't function together as a single army, and would fight among themselves as much as the enemy. This, too, has its roots in WW1 - if not for fear of their commanders executing them if they tried to desert, the massive armies of WW1 would quickly have splintered and evaporated due to infighting.

However, while I do think Tolkien's portrayal of evil is very interesting and has a lot more depth than people give it credit for, it's in his portrayal of the "good" races that I think he falls a bit flat, because the "good" races in LOTR are anything but noble by the standards of Tolkien's universe, despite frequently being treated as if they were. I'll expand upon all this in a bit, but before that, I wanna talk about elves. I know it's a meme that elves are "knife-eared bastards" who hypocritically lord their superiority over other races despite being massive fuck-ups themselves, but that meme comes from LOTR. It's not even a joke. Despite being the ultimate "good" race in the setting, nearly every major catastrophe that happens in LOTR is unambiguously the elves' fault, especially the Noldor. Now a lot of people will point to the Hobbit movies, where the wood-elves abandon their allies in their time of need and allow them to be slaughtered, since it's not really their problem, but lemme tell you, Thranduin's clan has nothing on the Noldor. Please, allow me to regale you with a heavily abridged version of their history. This is even beyond Russian Baltic Fleet levels of comedy gold.

(1/3)

 

[Jade]

>Be Feanor, prince of the Noldor
>Most beautiful and charismatic elven-king to ever live
>Live in a hallowed paradise called Valinor at the edge of the world with your kin
>Morgoth, ultimate enemy of your gods, is released from prison after 3000 years
>Claims to be repentant, but immediately starts stirring up trouble among your clan and subtly manipulating them
>See no problem with this and ignore this disaster waiting to happen in favor of showing off the light-gems (silmarils) your father Finwe made
>Be surprised when Morgoth kills your father and steals said light-gems, fleeing to his fortress across the ocean in Middle-Earth
>Get so pissed off that you and your seven sons swear a collective oath to wage eternal war against anyone who possesses the silmarils, except yourselves, and make the oath binding with magic and invocation of the gods
>Take your entire clan and start making preparations to head to Middle-Earth
>Suddenly realize that you have no actual way of crossing the ocean to get to Middle-Earth
>Beg another Elvish clan called the Teleri to borrow their entire fleet for transport across the ocean
>Get so pissed off when they refuse that you and your clan end up slaughtering them all and stealing the boats, resulting in your clan's permanent exile from paradise.
>Your clan is so incredibly shit at sailing that half the boats are wrecked on the voyage before even making it to the open ocean
>Now there aren't enough boats or supplies to make the journey
>Decide that it would be a good idea to betray your brother and permanently sunder your clan by taking the families most loyal to you, stealing the ships again, and abandoning the families most loyal to your brother, leaving them to trudge over a glacial hellscape called the Helcaraxe to reach Middle-Earth
>By some miracle manage to sail to Middle-Earth without further incident
>Morgoth notices your arrival and sends a host of orcs and balrogs after you
>Actually manage to fight them off and force them to retreat into the mountains, but get so arrogant over this victory that you decide it would be a good idea to chase after the fleeing host into unknown terrain despite not having set up camp or surveyed the land or done anything yet
>A balrog gets the better of you in the mountains and you die like a little bitch
>Your half of the clan throws a pity party over this for the next 500 years
>Be Fingolfin, brother of Feanor
>Your half of the clan finally makes it over the Helcaraxe, greatly diminished and starving
>Want to get revenge on Feanor and his half of the clan and decide it would be a good idea to start a civil war inside of the already existing war against a literal god
>Only just barely talked out of it by the quick thinking of your nephew Fingon, who manages to convince Maedhros, your competition to the title of High King, to step down, leaving you with de facto rulership over all of the Noldor
>Set up various kingdoms all over the north of Middle-Earth, pissing off the elvish clans already living there who had never been to Valinor and who were already pissed at them after hearing about what they did to the Teleri, who they were distantly related to.
>Fight a stalemate against Morgoth for the next 450 years and make zero progress
>Then one day some random dwarves show up on your doorstep with a crazy story
>The local elvish tribes actually managed to get one of the Silmarils
>WTF, how?
>Apparently, a human fell in love with an elvish princess and, as a joke, her father (Elu Thingol) told him that he could marry her if he brought him one of the Silmarils.
>The absolute madman actually does it
>This guy, with only the help of his lover and a talking dog, literally did all by themselves in the span of a few years what the entire Noldor clan combined failed to do over the course of CENTURIES of constant warfare and scheming
>Thingol hired the dwarves to make him a necklace for it so he could show it off, but supposedly he tried to stiff them
>The dwarves tried to kill him, but failed, and so they fled north
>Send spies to confirm this info
>It's actually fucking true
>Shit
>You are now oath-bound to sack the place and kill everyone there
>March on i, kill Thingol, and burn his entire woodland kingdom to the ground
>STILL FUCKING FAIL TO GET THE SILMARIL
>Beren manages to hide it on the secret river-isle of Tol Galen where you will never ever find it
>Fuck
>Very soon after this Morgoth gets the better of your kin at the Dagor Bragollach, and your own personal fiefdom is under siege
>Decide it would be a good idea to challenge him to single combat, despite the fact that he is a god, and you aren't, because you have about a gazillion hours of playtime in Dark Souls and Elden Ring
(I'm not shitting you, this is actually how the fight goes, Fingolfin just dodge rolls everywhere while Morgoth swings his giant mace again and again)
>Finally you start to tire and realize that maybe this wasn't such a good idea after all
>Morgoth kills you by stepping on your neck George Floyd style
>But hey, at least you managed to stab him in the heel before you went
>Your entire clan throws another pity party over your death
>Pity parties aren't enough to stop Morgoth though
>Be Fingon, successor to Fingolfin
>Fuck up big time at the Battle of Unnumbered Tears
>A Balrog kills all your guards and splits your head with an axe
>Morgoth burns the entire north of Middle-Earth to the ground with his dragons and all of your lands are destroyed
>The remnants of your clan crawl back to Valinor like the bitches they are and beg for help from the same people they slaughtered and betrayed over a bunch of sailboats
>They hate you so much it takes the interference of your gods for the Valinorian elves to agree to help you
>They send a huge army against Morgoth and the resulting war is so huge the entire north of Middle-Earth is destroyed and sinks beneath the waves
>But they win, Morgoth is imprisoned forever, hooray!
>Except wait a minute
>Remember how you swore to declare eternal war against anyone who held the silmarils that wasn't a descendant of Finwe?
>Well guess what, now the elves who you betrayed, and yet helped you anyway, have the silmarils
>Decide you have no choice but to steal the stones back from them and the gods
>Royally fuck it up because the stones recognize you as "evil" and start burning your flesh whenever you touch them
>Commit mass suicide because of how much it hurts, and two of the stones are lost to the bottom of the sea and the depths of the earth
>The remainder of your clan stays in Middle-Earth while the rest return to Valinor due to sheer embarrassment and because in spite of everything they've grown to like Middle-Earth
>Your descendants are the population of Rivendell

And that is the tale of the Silmaril Shuffle.

This was all the doing of one (1) elvish clan, and not even the most powerful of them. Don't even get me started on the forging of the rings and the relations with Numenor.

(2/3)

 

[Jade]

So LOTR lore is crazy - what does this have to do with the themes of good and evil in Tolkien's work?

The problem comes from how the elves are juxtaposed against the orcs and against men. In the Silmarillion, it's stated that orcs were originally elves who were kidnapped my Morgoth and dysgenically bred in fucked-up genetic experiments to create the perfect slave race. This matters, because it's through temptation and deception that Morgoth, and later Sauron, convert people to his side. LOTR proper is all about how the One Ring represents the corruption of power and how strong a hold it has over people. That's why Frodo was able to resist it for so long, because hobbits live very simple lives and don't have much need for power, and it only got the better of him at the very end by playing into his secret pride at being special enough to be the ring-bearer.

Furthermore, in the Silmarillion, when it describes the events of the Second Age it's stated that in the Last Battle of Elves and Men, that some of every living creature fought on either side in that war, even birds and beasts, except for the elves, because "Sauron had nothing to offer or tempt them with"

What this shows is that the elves are meant to be an almost angelic race, purely good, even if they weren't so in the past, they won't ever fall to temptation again. But even in LOTR elves are clearly shown to be every bit as arrogant, short-sighted, and prideful as their ancestors, harboring ancient grudges that shorter-lived races have long since moved on from, and generally acting very snooty and holier-than-thou. Of course I already mentioned Thranduil, but even the Sindarin elves force the Fellowship to walk blindfolded through their territory because they don't trust them due to old grudges with the dwarves of Moria, and it takes the command of Galadriel to rescind this. By the standards of Tolkien's world, the elves CLEARLY have enough "bad" traits to be tempted and deceived by godly beings such as Sauron.

This double standard goes further. Did you know Men used to be immortal, like the elves? That's right! Men were given the gift of death, unlike elves, but the gift was to die at will. They never aged, and could only be killed by force, or by choosing to die. But after Morgoth managed to turn early Men away from the worship of the god Eru Iluvatar, this gift was turned into a curse, where men aged and death took them by force after a certain point. This punishment was not retracted even after the worship of Eru was reinstated among the Numenoreans, although their lifespan was increased. Yet their deaths are still called "gifts", something that the elves are supposed to be jealous of men over. Maybe in it's original form, but not as it ended up. It's like if your father gave you a toy, but then you screwed up and did something wrong so he punishes you by breaking it, and then forcing you to play with it anyway and demands you be grateful for it, even after you apologize.

No such punishment was ever given to the elves, despite their crimes being far, far greater.

The orcs get an even worse deal. They were never tricked or deceived. They were taken from their homes by force, tortured, mutilated, and treated like cattle, the survivors of hte War of Wrath given no possible path to redemption, and their descendants are uniformly called "evil" and driven into the most inhospitable corners of the world, able to live in fertile places like Mordor only through the protection of godly beings like Sauron, who also treats them like cattle, but at least doesn't actively genocide them like Men and Elves do.

And all this I have stated here, only applies to the mortal races. Talking about the actions of the gods, and whether or not they're noble, is an entirely different story and one that would take even longer to go over than what I've already typed out. This is why I think people oversimplify Tolkien's themes of good and evil and don't give them the credit they're due. The elves are wanked over. Tolkien treats them as nearly pure, angelic beings even though they're clearly anything but. They have plot armor the other races don't. And the effects of this on how people perceive elves is strikingly obvious when you look at other major fantasy series like DnD, The Elder Scrolls, Warhammer, or even in manga like Dungeon Meshi. In all of these series, elves have the stereotype of being very snooty and holier-than-thou, holding their magical talents above the heads of other races.

That's how the elves come off in LOTR: As holier-than-thou hypocrites. You don't need to pour over the Silmarillion and all the supplementary works, either. Even a casual reader enjoying the Hobbit and LOTR might notice this. And I think it's why lesser authors (looking at you, G.R.R. Martin) are sometimes overly critical of LOTR. The elves very much harm the validity of Tolkien's themes. When a race this insufferable is made out to be the ultimate good guys, and an example of what men might have been, if they had not "fallen" - what does that say?

Tolkien was a very conservative man. When the Anglican church switched to English chants over Latin chants, he would loudly answer the congregation in Latin. He was also very superstitious - according to one story he received a hand-carved goblet from one of his fans, with the ring-poem written on it in black speech. However, he was disturbed by this, and felt uncomfortable using it to drink, instead using it only as an ashtray. And I think that plays a bit into how he wrote good and evil in his books. He was very religious, and held strong notions that things could be purely righteous and purely evil. One of his most famous quotes is "the shadow cannot create, only mock". However, even by his time, this line of thought was starting to die out. Tolkien was born over 200 years after Thomas Paine published The Age of Reason, and Thus Spake Zarathustra was an old book by the time The Hobbit went to print. Famously nihilistic authors like Lovecraft were his contemporaries.

I think one of the reasons people early on in LOTR's printing liked to compare it to WW2 was because of how WW2 was then, like now, portrayed as a battle of ultimate good against the ultimate evil of the nazis. But by the 50's the notion of pure good vs. pure evil had decayed in literature to the point that few authors were still willing to write that way. This goes double in the modern day. Look at the new Puss in Boots, a movie that broke the trend of morally grey villains and brought in a truly despicable character to serve as the bad guy. People loved him. Everyone was laughing at his antics and felt drawn to him. I can't imagine the same attitude being taken towards Morgoth or Sauron.

But what really is good - what really is evil? Tolkien definitely considered the latter, and even regretted not showing more of the tragic side to the orcs in his books, but I'm not sure he ever really considered the former as deeply, leading to the elves, and massive reverberations as to how they've been portrayed in the public consciousness and unconsciousness. In ancient times Elves were depicted as more like the house-elves from harry potter, or the hidden folk from scandinavian folklore - short, and not particularly attractive. It's in a large part through Tolkien's influence that Elves came to be seen as ethereally beautiful - but it seems that, willingly or not, he ended up keeping the mischeviousness and impulsiveness ancient elves were also known for.

(3/3)

 

[zalaz alaza]

love you bros. put yr heart on the page. back for more later

 

[zalaz alaza]

I don't feel confident in calling Tolkien proto new sincerity, that might be anachronistic, but the vision that Tolkien give us seems like a better antidote for postmodernity and etc than new sincerity with its My Little Pony, Star Wars prequels, Wes Anderson, and K-On. New Sincerity arguably gave us the Alt Right and the wokies too. That's what I think at least, but the problem still persists, how can such a nihilistic generation engage with the moral vision of someone like Tolkien? Perhaps this is the ultimate blackpill, how can we enter Faeri when it's way easier to enter hentai? My christian itching says that God works the greatest through the lowly. But who knows, my more cool zoomer self is yelling Coooope

@Remember_Summer_Days , totally hear what you are saying here but I think we need to clarify something. To me, as a Gen Xer new sincerity was something that happened in the 90s, around the time DFW started commenting on it. I think the term was initially used to describe the music scene in Austin TX that Daniel Johnston came out of. As a fan of these vibes for a long time,I can assure you that "new-sincerity" is likely a separate phenomenon than the zoomers reinterpretation of it. Perhaps we could the MLP sincerity "nostalgic sincerity" or something?
In regards to Tolkien, the man was a true master. In a book he saved my childhood from its external horrors and gave me a place to set my mind in that has only grown more comforting as I have gotten older. Was he sincere? Yes he was but he was so much more as well. To me, this is what is lacking now also. We hear that Tolkien hated allegory and so we figure that meant there was no deeper meaning to his writing, that sincerity simply means to lay something bare.This is not the case though. There is deliberate depth and mystery in the writing of Tolkien, there is seemingly endless discovery. Allegory, that which he disliked, is a specific literary tradition and its opposite does not simply mean bare bones writing.
I think this is an error many people make in their writing with the intent to be sincere, though to be clear I am not saying that is the case for anyone in this thread. They believe that DFW meant people would write the literary equivalent of a nudist colony. What I think he meant is that people should not fear to wear their heart on their sleeve or put it on the page when it is necessary but they also should not fear the deliberate intent of adding mystery. Can irony be sincere? I think it can.
If there is one message that I take the most from tolkiens writing that i see lacking in zoomers, though notably not lacking from most agorans, it is that humility as a virtue is a spring and not a well. If we can approach the things we do with humility instead of desire or avarice or some degen interpretation of the "will to power" then we create growth around us and become sincere by nature. honestly, i already think yr plenty humble and i cant imagine anything you approach as such doesnt add goodness to the world and i mean it, sincerely

 

[Remember_Summer_Days]

So LOTR lore is crazy - what does this have to do with the themes of good and evil in Tolkien's work?

The problem comes from how the elves are juxtaposed against the orcs and against men. In the Silmarillion, it's stated that orcs were originally elves who were kidnapped my Morgoth and dysgenically bred in fucked-up genetic experiments to create the perfect slave race. This matters, because it's through temptation and deception that Morgoth, and later Sauron, convert people to his side. LOTR proper is all about how the One Ring represents the corruption of power and how strong a hold it has over people. That's why Frodo was able to resist it for so long, because hobbits live very simple lives and don't have much need for power, and it only got the better of him at the very end by playing into his secret pride at being special enough to be the ring-bearer.

Furthermore, in the Silmarillion, when it describes the events of the Second Age it's stated that in the Last Battle of Elves and Men, that some of every living creature fought on either side in that war, even birds and beasts, except for the elves, because "Sauron had nothing to offer or tempt them with"

What this shows is that the elves are meant to be an almost angelic race, purely good, even if they weren't so in the past, they won't ever fall to temptation again. But even in LOTR elves are clearly shown to be every bit as arrogant, short-sighted, and prideful as their ancestors, harboring ancient grudges that shorter-lived races have long since moved on from, and generally acting very snooty and holier-than-thou. Of course I already mentioned Thranduil, but even the Sindarin elves force the Fellowship to walk blindfolded through their territory because they don't trust them due to old grudges with the dwarves of Moria, and it takes the command of Galadriel to rescind this. By the standards of Tolkien's world, the elves CLEARLY have enough "bad" traits to be tempted and deceived by godly beings such as Sauron.

This double standard goes further. Did you know Men used to be immortal, like the elves? That's right! Men were given the gift of death, unlike elves, but the gift was to die at will. They never aged, and could only be killed by force, or by choosing to die. But after Morgoth managed to turn early Men away from the worship of the god Eru Iluvatar, this gift was turned into a curse, where men aged and death took them by force after a certain point. This punishment was not retracted even after the worship of Eru was reinstated among the Numenoreans, although their lifespan was increased. Yet their deaths are still called "gifts", something that the elves are supposed to be jealous of men over. Maybe in it's original form, but not as it ended up. It's like if your father gave you a toy, but then you screwed up and did something wrong so he punishes you by breaking it, and then forcing you to play with it anyway and demands you be grateful for it, even after you apologize.

No such punishment was ever given to the elves, despite their crimes being far, far greater.

The orcs get an even worse deal. They were never tricked or deceived. They were taken from their homes by force, tortured, mutilated, and treated like cattle, the survivors of hte War of Wrath given no possible path to redemption, and their descendants are uniformly called "evil" and driven into the most inhospitable corners of the world, able to live in fertile places like Mordor only through the protection of godly beings like Sauron, who also treats them like cattle, but at least doesn't actively genocide them like Men and Elves do.

And all this I have stated here, only applies to the mortal races. Talking about the actions of the gods, and whether or not they're noble, is an entirely different story and one that would take even longer to go over than what I've already typed out. This is why I think people oversimplify Tolkien's themes of good and evil and don't give them the credit they're due. The elves are wanked over. Tolkien treats them as nearly pure, angelic beings even though they're clearly anything but. They have plot armor the other races don't. And the effects of this on how people perceive elves is strikingly obvious when you look at other major fantasy series like DnD, The Elder Scrolls, Warhammer, or even in manga like Dungeon Meshi. In all of these series, elves have the stereotype of being very snooty and holier-than-thou, holding their magical talents above the heads of other races.

That's how the elves come off in LOTR: As holier-than-thou hypocrites. You don't need to pour over the Silmarillion and all the supplementary works, either. Even a casual reader enjoying the Hobbit and LOTR might notice this. And I think it's why lesser authors (looking at you, G.R.R. Martin) are sometimes overly critical of LOTR. The elves very much harm the validity of Tolkien's themes. When a race this insufferable is made out to be the ultimate good guys, and an example of what men might have been, if they had not "fallen" - what does that say?

Tolkien was a very conservative man. When the Anglican church switched to English chants over Latin chants, he would loudly answer the congregation in Latin. He was also very superstitious - according to one story he received a hand-carved goblet from one of his fans, with the ring-poem written on it in black speech. However, he was disturbed by this, and felt uncomfortable using it to drink, instead using it only as an ashtray. And I think that plays a bit into how he wrote good and evil in his books. He was very religious, and held strong notions that things could be purely righteous and purely evil. One of his most famous quotes is "the shadow cannot create, only mock". However, even by his time, this line of thought was starting to die out. Tolkien was born over 200 years after Thomas Paine published The Age of Reason, and Thus Spake Zarathustra was an old book by the time The Hobbit went to print. Famously nihilistic authors like Lovecraft were his contemporaries.

I think one of the reasons people early on in LOTR's printing liked to compare it to WW2 was because of how WW2 was then, like now, portrayed as a battle of ultimate good against the ultimate evil of the nazis. But by the 50's the notion of pure good vs. pure evil had decayed in literature to the point that few authors were still willing to write that way. This goes double in the modern day. Look at the new Puss in Boots, a movie that broke the trend of morally grey villains and brought in a truly despicable character to serve as the bad guy. People loved him. Everyone was laughing at his antics and felt drawn to him. I can't imagine the same attitude being taken towards Morgoth or Sauron.

But what really is good - what really is evil? Tolkien definitely considered the latter, and even regretted not showing more of the tragic side to the orcs in his books, but I'm not sure he ever really considered the former as deeply, leading to the elves, and massive reverberations as to how they've been portrayed in the public consciousness and unconsciousness. In ancient times Elves were depicted as more like the house-elves from harry potter, or the hidden folk from scandinavian folklore - short, and not particularly attractive. It's in a large part through Tolkien's influence that Elves came to be seen as ethereally beautiful - but it seems that, willingly or not, he ended up keeping the mischeviousness and impulsiveness ancient elves were also known for.

(3/3)

Thanks for the long comment lol. I wish I could say something insightful, or anything really. I'm just not well acquainted with LoTR's actual lore to say anything useful. I know the Fall of Numenor, which you touch upon, is a big point of analysis within the Tolkien scholars that I've read, but that's the most I can say rn I think. Maybe I'll go and check up on my sources to see if I get any insights in regards to your OP lol

 

[zalaz alaza]

Thanks for the long comment lol. I wish I could say something insightful, or anything really. I'm just not well acquainted with LoTR's actual lore to say anything useful. I know the Fall of Numenor, which you touch upon, is a big point of analysis within the Tolkien scholars that I've read, but that's the most I can say rn I think. Maybe I'll go and check up on my sources to see if I get any insights in regards to your OP lol

lets read it!

 

[Remember_Summer_Days]

totally hear what you are saying here but I think we need to clarify something. To me, as a Gen Xer new sincerity was something that happened in the 90s, around the time DFW started commenting on it.

Perhaps true New Sincerity has been lost, however, by reading DFW's comments on it from E Pluribus Unum, he seems to be talking about it as if it was something that hadn't yet arrived. Though the term New Sincerity is never a term DFW used (As far as I'm aware), and there is a good case that his later work, Brief Interviews, and Oblivion, is an attack against sincerity in fact. It seems to me that New Sincerity is a term and imagination attributed to DFW when he seemed to be really hesitant against it. Even in his E Pluribus Unum paragraph everyone quotes when the conversation of New Sincerity comes around, he seems to be suggesting some hesitancy towards the idea. But yeah it's not clear to me that DFW originated this idea or even advocated it, though it's a topic I want to read more about.

As a fan of these vibes for a long time,I can assure you that "new-sincerity" is likely a separate phenomenon than the zoomers reinterpretation of it. Perhaps we could the MLP sincerity "nostalgic sincerity" or something?

I know several video essayists will disagree with you that MLP and co aren't New Sincerity, but fair enough. I don't think nostalgic sincerity is a good descriptor for MLP, I don't think the original generation of bronies got into it for nostalgia's sake, and MLP hasn't gotten a nostalgia revival yet. Nostalgic sincerity could be a term applied to vaporware actually, but like some youtube essayists have pointed out, it should just be considered as part of New Sincerity regardless, since you're being self-aware and sincerely nostalgic for, let's say, 90's videogames.

as he sincere? Yes he was but he was so much more as well. To me, this is what is lacking now also. We hear that Tolkien hated allegory and so we figure that meant there was no deeper meaning to his writing, that sincerity simply means to lay something bare.This is not the case though. There is deliberate depth and mystery in the writing of Tolkien, there is seemingly endless discovery. Allegory, that which he disliked, is a specific literary tradition and its opposite does not simply mean bare bones writing.

Yeah, perhaps I didn't word this in my OP. But I don't think New Sincerity or New Sincerity-esque ideas are the way to go forward for literary art, I think it might be more fruitful to take a step back and look at someone like Tolkien or Elliot instead. Though I still have to argue why sincerity is overrated in the first place, but that requires a post of its own lol.

I think this is an error many people make in their writing with the intent to be sincere, though to be clear I am not saying that is the case for anyone in this thread. They believe that DFW meant people would write the literary equivalent of a nudist colony. What I think he meant is that people should not fear to wear their heart on their sleeve or put it on the page when it is necessary but they also should not fear the deliberate intent of adding mystery. Can irony be sincere? I think it can.

DFW further talks about his idea of sincerity in his Dostoevsky Biography essay,
Can you imagine any of our own major novelists allowing a character to say stuff like this (not, mind you, just as hypocritical bombast so that some ironic hero can stick a pin in it, but as part of a ten-page monologue by somebody trying to decide whether to commit suicide)? The reason you can't is the reason he wouldn't: such a novelist would be, by our lights, pretentious and overwrought and silly. The straight presentation of such a speech in a Serious Novel today would provoke not outrage or invective, but worse—one raised eyebrow and a very cool smile. Maybe, if the novelist was really major, a dry bit of mockery in The New Yorker. The novelist would be (and this is our own age's truest vision of hell) laughed out of town.

I think his concern had to do about not being afraid to sincerely talk about the issues that wrench the human soul, to tackle serious issues without layers of detachment and obscurity that he accuses postmodern writers of doing. I actually tried my hand at writing the literal 10-page monologue short story about whatever to commit suicide or not, which was eventually published by /lit/'s &amp lol. Though I don't think DFW would like something like that since I think it's sort of ironic tbh.

Anyways, here are some other quotes from DFW I think are relevant :

"Serious Novels after Joyce tend to be valued and studied mainly for their formal ingenuity. Such is the modernist legacy that we now presume as a matter of course that "serious" literature will be aesthetically distanced from real lived life."

and

"writers have to either make jokes of [the serious topics] or else try to work them in under cover of some formal trick like intertextual quotation or incongruous juxtaposition, sticking the really urgent stuff inside asterisks as part of some multivalent defamiliarization-flourish or some such shit."

Of course, ironically, or self-aware ironically, Wallace was probably talking about himself in these last quotes lol. This is a common criticism against DFW, he didn't seem to write in the style that he preached others should write. For me though, the biggest 'issue', as you said, is that one can be ironically sincere. And in fact, zoomers and more importantly, zoomer counter-culture have become masters of this, probably as a reaction to wokism, which I think it's very likely a sort of monkey's pawn of New Sincerity (Same as the alt-right tbh) .

I rambled for a bit, but I agree 100% with what you said.

If there is one message that I take the most from tolkiens writing that i see lacking in zoomers, though notably not lacking from most agorans, it is that humility as a virtue is a spring and not a well. If we can approach the things we do with humility instead of desire or avarice or some degen interpretation of the "will to power" then we create growth around us and become sincere by nature.

Amen. The mystery is the way to go when it comes to literature, which is why I greatly admire and feel influenced by the Christian realism of writers like Flannery O'Connor. And if you write humbly, you'll be sincere. I don't think you can honestly be sincere if you write consciously trying to be sincere, that is just pride and it will show on the page.

i already think yr plenty humble and i cant imagine anything you approach as such doesnt add goodness to the world and i mean it, sincerely

You're too kind bro. Thanks for your kind words. I think pride is one of my biggest struggles, so I consciously try to tamper it down as much as possible, but it's good to know I'm becoming more humble, even if a bit. I worry that when I write I become too cynical and ironic, because ultimately when I write I really want my writing to have a positive impact on people, and that's a gift that can only come from grace I believe.

 

[Remember_Summer_Days]

lets read it!

Is the Fall of Numenor a single tale? Isn't it part of the Silmarillion? You guys could do a thread about it or a Tolkien General. Though idk if I would read it rn, it's def something I want to read in the future.

 

[Jade]

Is the Fall of Numenor a single tale? Isn't it part of the Silmarillion? You guys could do a thread about it or a Tolkien General. Though idk if I would read it rn, it's def something I want to read in the future.

It was originally part of the silmarillion but it was later published as a standalone book by Chris Tolkien with a bunch of extra info and larger narrative

The Fall of Númenor (book)

The Fall of Númenor is a volume published by HarperCollins, primarily presenting J.R.R. Tolkien's account of the momentous demise of Númenor in the Second Age of Middle-earth. Edited by Brian Sibley and featuring illustrations by Alan Lee, it was published on November 15, 2022. Unlike The Fall...

lotr.fandom.com

 

[zalaz alaza]

totally support a tolkien general, i think it is obvious @Jade should be its author

 

[zalaz alaza]

Of course, ironically, or self-aware ironically, Wallace was probably talking about himself in these last quotes lol. This is a common criticism against DFW, he didn't seem to write in the style that he preached others should write. For me though, the biggest 'issue', as you said, is that one can be ironically sincere. And in fact, zoomers and more importantly, zoomer counter-culture have become masters of this, probably as a reaction to wokism, which I think it's very likely a sort of monkey's pawn of New Sincerity (Same as the alt-right tbh) .

I just want to note, that IMO most of the essays in "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" feel pretty darn sincere, maybe excluding E Unibus Plurum.

 

[Jade]

totally support a tolkien general, i think it is obvious should be @Jade as author

Anything specific you'd like to see in the OP?

 

[stonehead]

As for me, I just feel like everything I write is hideous, not hideous in the proud 'omg I'm such a bad writer you guys', but rather in the sense that I feel like I can only write about vulgarity and disgusting and debauched stuff. There's a sense that if you want to be taken seriously, you have to write trashy, ironic, posmo, degen, unhinged, hentai stuff. When I write I sometimes feel disgusted at myself, I often find myself surprised by the things I write down in the moment like, Shit this really is inside of me huh

I've never read any of your non-forum posting writing (send me a link, now I'm curious) but if it is ugly, there's still an important place for that. All Quiet on the Western Front, could in a way be described as a hideous book, because it's full of nihilism and pointless deaths, and people shitting themselves. But it's a very important piece of impactful literature that convinced a generation of people that war is bad.

The next real literary "rebels" in this country might wel emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gal actual y to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles.

God I hope so. I've been thinking a lot recently about how hard it is to interact with reality directly. I'm sick of everything I say being filtered through a dozen layers of irony before it leaves my mouth, only to be filtered through another dozen layers after being heard by the listener. I'm sick of media always being self-aware parodies. I want to just engage with things I like genuinely.

As for me, though I suspect this is a common sentiment, I suspect this is why some of us are so into My Little Pony. The early seasons managed to touch a sense of childhood, innocence, wonder, and moral imagination that feels lost in our modern world, it's a sort of refugee from modernity or postmodernity or metamodernity or whatever you wanna call it.

I never got into My Little Pony, but I was the right age, and I had a brony friend who tried desperately to get me into the show. I can't really say what it was like from the inside. It's incredibly sad that for a generation of young adults, the only place to find sincerity was a cartoon for young children. I don't mean that it's sad that they found it there, I have nothing against the show really. I mean it's sad that no other media was being made sincerely.

Perhaps true New Sincerity has been lost, however, by reading DFW's comments on it from E Pluribus Unum, he seems to be talking about it as if it was something that hadn't yet arrived. Though the term New Sincerity is never a term DFW used (As far as I'm aware), and there is a good case that his later work, Brief Interviews, and Oblivion, is an attack against sincerity in fact. It seems to me that New Sincerity is a term and imagination attributed to DFW when he seemed to be really hesitant against it. Even in his E Pluribus Unum paragraph everyone quotes when the conversation of New Sincerity comes around, he seems to be suggesting some hesitancy towards the idea. But yeah it's not clear to me that DFW originated this idea or even advocated it, though it's a topic I want to read more about.


I know several video essayists will disagree with you that MLP and co aren't New Sincerity, but fair enough. I don't think nostalgic sincerity is a good descriptor for MLP, I don't think the original generation of bronies got into it for nostalgia's sake, and MLP hasn't gotten a nostalgia revival yet. Nostalgic sincerity could be a term applied to vaporware actually, but like some youtube essayists have pointed out, it should just be considered as part of New Sincerity regardless, since you're being self-aware and sincerely nostalgic for, let's say, 90's videogames.

Yeah, perhaps I didn't word this in my OP. But I don't think New Sincerity or New Sincerity-esque ideas are the way to go forward for literary art, I think it might be more fruitful to take a step back and look at someone like Tolkien or Elliot instead. Though I still have to argue why sincerity is overrated in the first place, but that requires a post of its own lol.


DFW further talks about his idea of sincerity in his Dostoevsky Biography essay,
Can you imagine any of our own major novelists allowing a character to say stuff like this (not, mind you, just as hypocritical bombast so that some ironic hero can stick a pin in it, but as part of a ten-page monologue by somebody trying to decide whether to commit suicide)? The reason you can't is the reason he wouldn't: such a novelist would be, by our lights, pretentious and overwrought and silly. The straight presentation of such a speech in a Serious Novel today would provoke not outrage or invective, but worse—one raised eyebrow and a very cool smile. Maybe, if the novelist was really major, a dry bit of mockery in The New Yorker. The novelist would be (and this is our own age's truest vision of hell) laughed out of town.

I think his concern had to do about not being afraid to sincerely talk about the issues that wrench the human soul, to tackle serious issues without layers of detachment and obscurity that he accuses postmodern writers of doing. I actually tried my hand at writing the literal 10-page monologue short story about whatever to commit suicide or not, which was eventually published by /lit/'s &amp lol. Though I don't think DFW would like something like that since I think it's sort of ironic tbh.

Anyways, here are some other quotes from DFW I think are relevant :

"Serious Novels after Joyce tend to be valued and studied mainly for their formal ingenuity. Such is the modernist legacy that we now presume as a matter of course that "serious" literature will be aesthetically distanced from real lived life."

and

"writers have to either make jokes of [the serious topics] or else try to work them in under cover of some formal trick like intertextual quotation or incongruous juxtaposition, sticking the really urgent stuff inside asterisks as part of some multivalent defamiliarization-flourish or some such shit."

Of course, ironically, or self-aware ironically, Wallace was probably talking about himself in these last quotes lol. This is a common criticism against DFW, he didn't seem to write in the style that he preached others should write. For me though, the biggest 'issue', as you said, is that one can be ironically sincere. And in fact, zoomers and more importantly, zoomer counter-culture have become masters of this, probably as a reaction to wokism, which I think it's very likely a sort of monkey's pawn of New Sincerity (Same as the alt-right tbh) .

I rambled for a bit, but I agree 100% with what you said.



Amen. The mystery is the way to go when it comes to literature, which is why I greatly admire and feel influenced by the Christian realism of writers like Flannery O'Connor. And if you write humbly, you'll be sincere. I don't think you can honestly be sincere if you write consciously trying to be sincere, that is just pride and it will show on the page.


You're too kind bro. Thanks for your kind words. I think pride is one of my biggest struggles, so I consciously try to tamper it down as much as possible, but it's good to know I'm becoming more humble, even if a bit. I worry that when I write I become too cynical and ironic, because ultimately when I write I really want my writing to have a positive impact on people, and that's a gift that can only come from grace I believe.

Irony is in a way safer than sincerity, which makes it appealing to a lot of new authors. If you actually try your hardest, and write something that genuinely resonates with you, you make yourself a target for mockery. Especially with how prevelant media criticism is. How many Youtube videos have you seen about "The worst movie/book EVAR" that have orders of magnitude more views than the original piece? It seems that there's just a bigger market for meta-analysis and criticism than there is for actual content to criticize. If instead you write some self-aware meta-commentary on some existing piece of media, you can deflect criticism behind several layers of irony. "That's the point, it's supposed to be bad" you can say.

Part of that may be because of how absurdly competitive the media landscape is. You could be the best saxophone player in your entire city, and it'd still be basically impossible to make a living on it. Because recordings can be infinitely copied without loss, everyone in the country can listen to just the top 10 musicians in the entire world, and they'll probably lose interest before the 10th one. Those recordings can also replace live musicians, drastically reducing the amount of possible jobs. It's like live music has become a favor to the musician instead of a favor to the event. We ask "Hey, can I perform at your bar tonight?" instead of "Hey, can you perform at my bar tonight?"

It's the same thing with writing. If you're the best writer in your city, you'll still be compared to the best writers in the world, because that's what your audience is used to reading. Authors ask their friends to read their works as a favor, instead of readers asking authors to let them read their work.

With that kind of environment, it kind of makes sense that ironic commentary has replaced genuine sincerity, as much as I may hate it. Even this mini rant is me "commenting" on media trends I don't like, instead of praising things I actually do like, (the original point of the thread) or God forbid, actually creating something myself.

Still though, I don't want to delete anything, so I'll post it and you'll just have to deal with the consequences because it's how I actually feel.

 

[zalaz alaza]

Anything specific you'd like to see in the OP?

excerpts from the ley of luthien!

 

[Remember_Summer_Days]

I just want to note, that IMO most of the essays in "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" feel pretty darn sincere, maybe excluding E Unibus Plurum.

Yeah, the essays there are great, and I think they come off as sincere and true. Perhaps I should've clarified, his fiction, especially Infinite Jest, doesn't come off as sincere at all (Though the defense is that IJ is insincere precisely because it's trying to critique insincerity on its terms, and there's some merit to that), his latter short story collections are weird when it comes to sincerity. Like there's this story, Ocquet I think it was, about a dude who can't be sincere, and then the author breaks the 4th wall out of nowhere to comment on how he can't be sincere either. Is that sincerity? Maybe, but at parts, it also feels like a meta-commentary on sincerity itself. They're smart stories that leave you with a lot to think about.

There's also Good Old Neon, which should get a thread of its won at some point lol. But it has that same technique of suddenly breaking the 4th wall, the 4th wall break feels heartfelt, especially when you realize that DFW was talking about someone he knew, but it has that self-aware meta feel that makes me question the emphasis on sincerity after all.

At the end of the day, DFW tried to be sophisticated with his use of sincerity, IE his sincere 4th wall breaks, but it might make it feel that in trying to write smartly it could generate the opposite effect.

 

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I think subjectivity is actually a huge benefit to the whole new sincerity movement. By subjectivity I mean understanding something on personal terms. I.e building the idea and conclusion using your own rational thought and perception. Solipsism is really a black void when it comes to philosophy. In my own view, I actually do not care about what people specifically believe or think. I wish for everyone to be as unique and different as they can possibly be. More people should trust themselves and their intuition and personal beliefs - provided they have the mental fortitude to be constantly questioning and improving their understanding and view. I don't actually think that anything is necessarily true or false. You can basically construct a framework through which you can prove everything.

The trouble of course, comes from understanding this relativism, and still maintaining some absolute objective belief for oneself. Something which I think is fascinating is Kierkegaard's conception of Faith. Which is basically that Faith is exactly where Reason leaves off. A lot of people roll their eyes at this kind of stuff, but that's precisely the point. Faith precisely because reason cannot access it, and it must be grasped entirely on the absurdity of the situation. That kind of existential angst from not being able to know fully, but requiring a full surrender to it.

I just wish more people would trust themselves in their thoughts and beliefs, even if (actually especially if) its naive. I didn't sleep at all last night so I can't really formulate my thoughts very well but I'll probably come back to this thread later. Good shit fellas, I think these kinds of open conversations are really important to new sincerity.