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The two of us are going to start a Colin Wilson revival right here, I can feel it (through occult precognitive abilities).

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Regarding the amorphousness between far left and far right, I’ve always thought that ex lefties make the best conservatives, not just because you actually have to have a certain amount of intellectual vigor on the far left, but because the real enemy of the American academic left has always been the middle classes and the left-liberal part of the middle class is exactly whom the majority of conservative rage (absent any notable racial or gendered controversy in any given moment) is directed towards. Wilson I’ve never read, maybe I’ll have to. I’m always a bit skeptical of the line (Leavis thought this too iirc) that only a narrow vein (of course no longer in production) of fiction constitutes the true novel. Agree with you about sci-fi and avant garde elements being necessary to represent reality now, but we’ve talked about that before.

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Yes, exactly. I think I said on Tumblr once that going from the lower-middle-class suburbs to academic literary studies in the '90s/'00s didn't involve much culture shock because everybody in both locales agreed that "liberals" were the enemy. (BTW, Armstrong's later stuff—on "the network novel," for example—is warmer and more what I would call "liberal.")

In defense of the Leavisite "true novel" position, high culture in all its narrowness tends to be what survives. But at least since the '60 high vs. low has been a different question from realism vs. genre. E.g., Dune isn't actually any easier to read than a "literary" novel—Herbert is in fact probably harder to read than Updike or Franzen. With science fictional otherness, the realist novel's assumed common ground, character and reader sharing the same space, doesn't exist. The common ground really doesn't exist anymore, though—we are, as some ultra-right-winger on Twitter put it, now "speciating" in online conditions—so the realist novel now has to be written like science fiction.

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Re: Herbert the same thing in prose is true of Tolkien, who I would be interested to see your thoughts on-the books are very different than the films whilst telling basically the same story. That said though in adulthood I very much suspect the LOTR is one of those things you need to be either currently 13 or a bit more in tune with one’s inner 13 year old to fully “get.” (I feel broadly the same way about Stephen King.) As far as Leavis, I read The Great Tradition and enjoyed it, although that specific strain of aesthetic high priesthood he embodied- the step beyond the dividing of the wheat and the chaff to only partake of the truly transcendent, the barely human perfection-is not for me, I like my big messy imperfect texts.

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Even at 13, I didn't like fantasy (while liking SF, superheroes, and horror) except the urban/modern/dark variety à la Bradbury, Ellison, or Gaiman. No elves need apply, basically. Agreed on Leavis: excluding Dickens and the Brontës from the great tradition says it all, really, even if his Arnoldian cultural politics aren't as easily dismissed as Marxists/Foucauldians think.

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Ironically, it sounds from the description in this post like Wilson would despise Tolkien, who is invested almost solely in aesthetics and is as far from a Dostoyevskian writer of ideas as they come — his project AIUI was basically to revive Wagner's mythic Romanticism for a post-WWII mass public, and as a veteran of the Great War and a scholar of Beowulf he was pretty much perfectly positioned to circumvent the two great obstacles to that project, the minor one of the experience of war having changed irrevocably and the major one of anything with a whiff of Germany about it being destined for the bonfire. Neither ideas nor individual psychology really come into the whole matter at all, except as ambient anarcho-reactionary Catholicism (a typical ideology for an aesthete) and the sort of operatic bursts of emotion that are appropriate to that kind of not-really-"novelistic" story.

Personally, I find the LOTR books to be monumental aesthetic works, which can afford great pleasure on a purely textual level, but it seems quite appropriate that academic literary criticism would have little to say to them given the lack of any deep or interesting thematic or psychological angles.

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