13-08-2016, 20:01
[espacement][emphase]4. Guerre des camps, guerre au-dedans[/emphase]
Le titre original du Trône de Fer (A Song of Ice and Fire) a reçu de nombreuses interprétations. Melisandre, personnage du roman, en donne un aperçu à sa manière toute manichéenne de prêtresse du dieu du feu et de la lumière :
[citation=A Storm of Swords, Chapter 25, Davos III.]There is ice and there is fire. Hate and love. Bitter and sweet... Winter and summer. Evil and good. Death and life. Everywhere, opposites. Everywhere, the war.[/citation]
Si Martin avait à choisir un unique couple, ce serait la mort et la vie, qui sont au cœur de chaque bonne histoire de fantasy comme elles le sont aussi dans notre monde et notre vie :
[citation=23/04/2014, Rolling Stone]Truth is sometimes hard to hear. Two of the central phrases [of Ice and Fire] are true, but they are not truths that most human beings like to contemplate. Winter is coming and Valar morghulis – “all men must die”. Mortality is the inescapable truth of all life . . . and of all stories, too.[/citation]
Et en ce cœur, non pas l’harmonie, mais la guerre :
[citation=22/05/2012, BBC Radio 4]I do think war is one of the central issues of our time and perhaps one of the central issues of the all time. And it’s a very complicated subject that I try to explore in my books [since it’s] a central issue of all fantasy. Look at the all tradition of fantasy since Tolkien: it’s all about war, there’s war in every book.[/citation]
Si « tout n’est que guerre » en fantasy, c’est à Tolkien qu’on le doit.
Or, tous les éléments que les imitateurs de Tolkien ont annexés en abandonnant d’autres alors que ceux-ci, unis aux premiers, donnaient au récit une force imaginative exceptionnelle, peuvent être rassemblés sous l’expression manichéenne du
[citation=12/07/2011]fight between good and evil — which has been a hallmark of so much fantasy over the years, ever since Tolkien, and Tolkien did it brilliantly! But in the hands of his imitators, it’s become kind of a cliché where you have the dark lord, and he has his evil minions. And his evil minions are very evil — you know they’re evil: they dress in black, they’re very ugly, they have no redeeming qualities.[/citation]
Si le Seigneur des Anneaux voit se dérouler une guerre où se joue le destin de la Terre du Milieu, Tolkien y décrivait ([emphase]« brillamment ! »[/emphase]) non la guerre ni toutes les guerres mais une guerre possible. Pour Martin, Les auteurs de fantasy qui lui ont emboîté le pas, en se réduisant à l’imiter, ont réduit le combat à la guerre et la guerre à la guerre totale :
[citation=23/04/2013, Rolling Stone]The war that Tolkien wrote about was a war for the fate of civilization and the future of humanity, and that’s become the template. I’m not sure that it’s a good template, though. The Tolkien model led generations of fantasy writers to produce these endless series of dark lords and their evil minions who are all very ugly and wear black clothes. But the vast majority of wars throughout history are not like that.[/citation]
Martin jette moins la pierre sur Tolkien, l’homme du XIXe siècle (qui a connu les tranchées de la Première Guerre Mondiale, les angoisses de la Seconde Guerre Mondiale, est mort au début des années soixante-dix) que sur ses successeurs. Ceux-ci, tout comme Martin, étaient de la génération des enrôlés ou des opposants à la guerre du Vietnam – c’est-à-dire une guerre qui avait peu de rapport avec une civilisation à défendre et semblait reposer, comme la majorité des guerres depuis des millénaires, sur un prétexte aussi mince et fallacieux que l’enlèvement d’Hélène :
[citation=2012]The big question they would always ask you was “Would you would have fought in World War 2 against the Nazis?” Yes, I would have fought in WW2 against the Nazis... But the Vietcong where not the Nazis and I didn’t think America had any business and so forth – so I was objecting that particular war. […] I still think the Vietnam war is a terrible mistake for America – but I still would have fought against the Nazis.[/citation]
Si, tout comme Tolkien, Martin rejette toute interprétation allégorique de ses romans, il reconnaît l’influence dans son œuvre de la guerre du Vietnam :
[citation=08/2005, Sci-Fi.com]I think the attitude toward war is definitely shaped by my experiences with the controversies of the Vietnam War. War is central to a lot of fantasy, going back to Tolkien and beyond, but in most modern fantasy, it's very much the good guys fighting the bad guys. The Dark Lord is about to take over the Earth unless the guys in white cloaks stop him. I don't tend to think things are that simple—I think my generation was disabused of that notion by Vietnam—and the wars in my books are much more morally complex.[/citation]
Une telle guerre fut vécue par Martin comme une catastrophe morale nationale, dont les conséquences néfastes perdurent de générations en générations :
[citation=23/04/2014, Rolling Stone]I was, like many kids of my generation, a hawk. I accepted that America was the good guys, we had to be there. When I got into college, the more I learned about our involvement in Vietnam, the more it seemed wrong to me. Of course, the draft was happening, and I decided to ask for the conscientious-objector status. I wasn't a complete pacifist; I couldn't claim to be that. I was what they called an objector to a particular war. I would have been glad to fight in World War II. But Vietnam was the only war on the menu. So I applied for conscientious-objector status in full belief that I would be rejected, and that I would have a further decision to make: Army, jail or Canada. […] To my surprise, they gave me the status. […]
I don't think America has ever quite recovered from Vietnam. The divisions in our society still linger to this day. For my generation it was a deeply disillusioning experience, and it had a definite effect on me. The idealistic kid who graduated high school, a big believer in truth, justice and the American way, all these great values of superheroes of his youth, was certainly less idealistic by the time I got out of college.[/citation]
Précisons que Martin n’avait pas attendu la guerre du Vietnam pour être sensible aux situations tragiques et moralement inextricables. Ses lectures des comics (Avengers n°9, paru en 1964, qui voit l’apparition de Wonder Man revient souvent comme référence) ou de l’Iliade avait alimenté aussi bien son goût pour les personnages ambigus que pour les affrontements entre héros aux motivations opposées :
[citation=12/07/2011]I prefer gray characters. I prefer the philosophy that, you know, the hero is the villain of the other side. You know, […] the fight between Gandalf and the witch king of Angmar is a great moment, but the fight between Achilles and Hector also […] resonates for me and is something that I wanted to draw upon where you have two heroes fighting.[/citation]
En évoquant l’affrontement entre Achille et Hector, Martin rappelle que la fantasy a commencé avant Tolkien et que, puisant dans notre histoire et notre humanité, ses sources sont en réalité millénaires. Dès lors, tel un peintre qui doit connaître la palettes des couleurs à sa dispositions, l’auteur de fantasy moderne doit aussi bien se souvenir de Tolkien et du Seigneur des Anneaux que d’Homère et de l’Iliade :
[citation=07/10/2012]But Tolkien wasn’t a direct influence to me when I decided to write A Song of Ice and Fire although my books are in the fantasy canon that Tolkien improved. I mean, fantasy is very ancient. We can find it in the Iliad or in the Gilgamesh Poem, but Tolkien turned it into a modern genre, and A Song of Ice and Fire shares some of these patterns but not all of them. For example, I pretend to offer a dirty fantasy, more raw than Tolkien’s.[/citation]
Il faut donc distinguer, avec A Song of Ice and Fire, la réponse de Martin aux imitateurs de Tolkien (qui ne l’ont pas compris comme Martin l’a compris) et celle de Martin à Tolkien lui-même :
[citation=18/04/2011, Time]I mean, I loved Tolkien but I don’t think he was perfect. So I did want to do something that replied not only to Tolkien, but to all of the Tolkien successors who had followed that.[/citation]
[citation=11/08/2014, The Guardian]In some sense, when I started this saga I was replying to Tolkien, but even more to his modern imitators.[/citation]
La réponse de Martin à Tolkien est avant tout celle du disciple qui cherche à s’émanciper de la tutelle du [emphase]« maître de tous [les auteurs de fantasy] »[/emphase] (2011), voire celle du fils qui ressent le besoin de s’éloigner du [emphase]« père de toute la fantasy moderne »[/emphase] (2014) :
[citation=30/09/2001]I read Tolkien in high school, and it had an enormous effect on me. Certainly it was a book that I loved, I just fell into the world. So I wanted to do something of my own that might effect a new generation of readers in the same way. At the same time I wanted to make it different from Tolkien.[/citation]
Cette réponse est double, d’une part attentive et sensible à l’esprit du Seigneur des Anneaux, d’autre part critique et qui se veut émancipée de ses limites possibles ou supposées. Premièrement, pour Martin, venir après Tolkien nécessite de prendre comme référence non le merveilleux mais l’intime :
[citation=06/2016, entretien avec Stephen King]I love Tolkien. I’m the biggest fan on the world of The Lord of the Rings. But [in] Tolkien’s view of good and evil – evil is externalized: it comes from Sauron, or Morgoth before it, there are orcs who are absolutely irredeemable, the good people get together and stop the orcs. Most of the good people are good. I’ve always been more attracted to grey characters as I’ve said in many interviews. I do think that battle of good and evil is a great subject for a fiction but in my view the battle for good and evil is weighed forth through the individual, in human heart.[/citation]
Ce que les [emphase]« imitateurs »[/emphase] de Tolkien n’ont pas compris :
[citation=11/2000][…] to some extent, I was writing in reaction to other fantasies. It's always the question of the good vs. evil. Tolkien started it and did it quite masterfully, but others who followed didn't do as well. I think the battle between good and evil is certainly a valid one, but I think that the battle is much more interesting in real life than in fantasy. I am particularly irritated by fantasy where you can always tell the bad guys because they are ugly and wear black.[/citation]
[citation=09/2000]I have no qualms with the way that Tolkien handled Sauron, but in some ways The Lord of the Rings set an unfortunate example for the writers who were to follow. I did not want to write another version of the War Between Good and Evil, where the antagonist is called the Foul King or the Demon Lord or Prince Rotten, and his minions are slavering subhumans dressed all in black (I dressed my Night's Watch, who are basically good guys, all in black in part to undermine that annoying convention). Before you can fight the war between good and evil, you need to determine which is which, and that's not always as easy as some Fantasists would have you believe.[/citation]
Dès lors, Martin développe dans son œuvre ce qu’il estime le plus digne d’être repris dans l’écriture tolkienienne :
[citation=14/03/2014, Vanity Fair]I try to create these fully fleshed, gray characters that have ambiguities and conflicts within themselves, so they’re not heroes and they’re not villains. One of my favorite characters – and I love Lord of the Rings; don’t make it sound like I’m bashing Tolkien here, ‘cause it’s like my favorite book of all time – but my favorite Tolkien character in Lord of the Rings is Boromir, because he’s the grayest of the characters, and he’s the one who really struggles with the ring and ultimately succumbs to it, but then dies heroically. You see, he has both good and evil in him.[/citation]
Ce faisant, Martin lit correctement les intentions de Tolkien mais doit sans cesse lutter contre l’image à laquelle a été réduit (et à laquelle lui-même réduit) le Seigneur des Anneaux :
[citation=18/04/2011, Time]The battle between good and evil is a theme of much of fantasy. But I think the battle between good and evil is thought largely within the individual human heart, by the decisions that we make. It’s not like evil dresses up in black clothing and you know, they’re really ugly. These are some of the things that Tolkien did; he made them work fabulously, but in the hands of his imitators, they become total clichés. I mean the orc-like creatures who always do dress in black and … they’re really ugly and they’ve got facial deformities or something. You can tell that if somebody’s ugly, he must be evil. And then Tolkien’s heroes are all very attractive people and all that, of course, again this become cliché in the hands of the Tolkien imitators.
You know what I’m saying, I love Tolkien. I want to stress that here because I don’t want to come across like I’m slamming him. But I am responding to him. One of my favorite characters in Lord of the Rings is Boromir. Boromir is a traditional hero in many ways. He’s the Prince, he’s the heir to the great kingdom he’s very brave, he’s a great warrior and all of that, but ultimately he succumbs to the temptation of the ring. But then he dies heroically, protecting innocents. He has that wonderful sense of greatness about him.
Saruman is another interesting character the White Wizard whose been on the side of good literally hundreds, if not thousands of years, as the wizards are not men, they’re Maiar, they’re very long-lived. And yet he too, at the end you know succumbs. These are two characters where the human heart is in conflict.[/citation]
Quant à l’aspect critique de la réponse de Martin à Tolkien, il concerne le traitement des figures féminines et des rapports amoureux :
[citation=12/2000]I admire J.R.R. Tolkien vastly, I think all modern fantasy derives from Tolkien, and Lord of the Rings is one of the great works of this century. Nonetheless, it does have flaws, and I think its almost complete absence of women, and of anything even approaching sex and/or romantic love – it reflects its time and its place, but it's certainly not something I wanted to do.[/citation]
Mais aussi le traitement du pouvoir :
[citation=18/04/2011, Time]But I also want to respond — I’ve read a lot of history about feudal history and Roman history and so forth, about politics in those days. I follow contemporary politics. And you know, what strikes me is that these issues are horrid. And a lot of fantasy makes it seem simply: a good man will be a good king. Well, a good man is not always a good king. And a bad man is not always a bad king. You know, it’s much more complicated than that.[/citation]
Cette critique revient avec des arguments connus et sérieux (qui ont été abordés en ces lieux, autrefois ou récemment) :
[citation=23/04/2014, Rolling Stone]Ruling is hard. This was maybe my answer to Tolkien, whom, as much as I admire him, I do quibble with. Lord of the Rings had a very medieval philosophy: that if the king was a good man, the land would prosper. We look at real history and it’s not that simple. Tolkien can say that Aragorn became king and reigned for a hundred years, and he was wise and good. But Tolkien doesn’t ask the question: What was Aragorn’s tax policy? Did he maintain a standing army? What did he do in times of flood and famine? And what about all these orcs? By the end of the war, Sauron is gone but all of the orcs aren’t gone – they’re in the mountains. Did Aragorn pursue a policy of systematic genocide and kill them? Even the little baby orcs, in their little orc cradles?
In real life, real-life kings had real-life problems to deal with. Just being a good guy was not the answer. You had to make hard, hard decisions. Sometimes what seemed to be a good decision turned around and bit you in the ass; it was the law of unintended consequences. I’ve tried to get at some of these in my books. My people who are trying to rule don’t have an easy time of it. Just having good intentions doesn’t make you a wise king.[/citation]
Cependant, le second aspect de la réponse de Martin à Tolkien, quoique sévère, ne masque jamais l’admiration accordée au [emphase]« maître de tous [les auteurs de fantasy] »[/emphase] :
[citation=02/06/2012, entretien avec Isabel Berwick, Food & Drink]Tolkien was a 19th-century guy, a world war one veteran, and the fact that his books still speak to the modern reader, and are enjoyed by millions of people today, is a sign of his brilliance. I think he will continue to be read for centuries to come.[/citation]
Car, pour un auteur de fantasy venu après Tolkien, la réduction (évitable) de la nature de la fantasy à un affrontement entre le parti de la lumière et celui des ténèbres s’accompagne d’une une réduction (inévitable) de la consistance du légendaire associé.
Si Martin est plus que protégé de la première (aussi bien par son goût pour l’histoire et des violents effets de surprise comme par son penchant pour la complexité des situations et des psychologies), il avoue sans honte ne rien pouvoir faire contre la seconde. Aucun écrivain désireux de vivre de sa plume ne peut consacrer sa vie à construire un monde comme Tolkien a pu le faire, façonnant un royaume et une histoire qui conviennent aux langues qu’il aurait inventées pour son unique plaisir. Pour Martin, la fantasy tolkienienne est à la fois une source inévitable de toute fantasy moderne mais aussi une référence indépassable dans son genre, une croix à porter pour qui voudrait en imiter la substance :
[citation=08/04/2012]Sometimes I have sometimes so much fun creating world that I have to smack myself around and stop from putting all the stuff in the stories where it doesn’t necessarily belong. But it’s nice to know it’s there. It keeps the world the more grounding and there are occasions where it would come up in dialogue or in storytelling and if you know what it is you can handle it more elegantly.
People ask me about world-building sometimes. One of the crosses that all modern fantasy writers have to bear is that they all laboring in the tremendous shadow of J.R.R. Tolkien and Lord of the Rings. And Tolkien was a brilliant man and a very unique sort of writer. He was not a professional writer in the same sense that I am: he was a linguist, he was an Oxford don, he was an expert on Old Norse and languages – he made up imaginary languages for fun! And he made up genealogies and histories of his kingdom for fun.
I remember the first time I read Lord of the Rings back up when I was in junior high school. I’m reading the books, now I’m on the Return of the King’s last book – and I was loving this book so much that I didn’t want it to end. And I’m saying: “I don’t have to worry, I don’t have to worry, I still have a lot of pages, a big hunk of pages here…” And then suddenly it’s over! “Hey! Wait a minute! Oh… it’s all appendices!” And pages and pages and pages of appendices! And it wasn’t till later that I read all the appendices, that I got to really appreciate all off its contents.
But Tolkien, with the Silmarillion which he started to working on in the WWI and the tranches, and were still working on when he died in the early seventies without ever completing it, and the all background of Númenor and Valinor and all the different kings and gods and kingdoms that have risen and fallen, he developed that all in an enormous detail.
So he sort of set a very difficult part for all of us fantasists who would follow to live up to this.
Plus I think a lot of fantasy writers think all fantasies are like Tolkien’s: it’s like the iceberg when they said nine tenth of the iceberg is below the surface. That’s true in Tolkien : nine tenth of the iceberg is below the surface; he has the all Silmarillion thing that lies underneath the stories of the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, and all the histories and so forth. For people like me (and I think the vast majority of our contemporaries) what we have is a little ice on a raft! And we’re trying to make you think that there is an enormous iceberg under the surface here – but there isn’t! We haven’t invented entirely imaginary languages! We don’t have thousands of pages of world-building […] There, maybe a few people do – but they do it wrong in that case ; they’re not Tolkien…[/citation]
[espacement]S.
Le titre original du Trône de Fer (A Song of Ice and Fire) a reçu de nombreuses interprétations. Melisandre, personnage du roman, en donne un aperçu à sa manière toute manichéenne de prêtresse du dieu du feu et de la lumière :
[citation=A Storm of Swords, Chapter 25, Davos III.]There is ice and there is fire. Hate and love. Bitter and sweet... Winter and summer. Evil and good. Death and life. Everywhere, opposites. Everywhere, the war.[/citation]
Si Martin avait à choisir un unique couple, ce serait la mort et la vie, qui sont au cœur de chaque bonne histoire de fantasy comme elles le sont aussi dans notre monde et notre vie :
[citation=23/04/2014, Rolling Stone]Truth is sometimes hard to hear. Two of the central phrases [of Ice and Fire] are true, but they are not truths that most human beings like to contemplate. Winter is coming and Valar morghulis – “all men must die”. Mortality is the inescapable truth of all life . . . and of all stories, too.[/citation]
Et en ce cœur, non pas l’harmonie, mais la guerre :
[citation=22/05/2012, BBC Radio 4]I do think war is one of the central issues of our time and perhaps one of the central issues of the all time. And it’s a very complicated subject that I try to explore in my books [since it’s] a central issue of all fantasy. Look at the all tradition of fantasy since Tolkien: it’s all about war, there’s war in every book.[/citation]
Si « tout n’est que guerre » en fantasy, c’est à Tolkien qu’on le doit.
Or, tous les éléments que les imitateurs de Tolkien ont annexés en abandonnant d’autres alors que ceux-ci, unis aux premiers, donnaient au récit une force imaginative exceptionnelle, peuvent être rassemblés sous l’expression manichéenne du
[citation=12/07/2011]fight between good and evil — which has been a hallmark of so much fantasy over the years, ever since Tolkien, and Tolkien did it brilliantly! But in the hands of his imitators, it’s become kind of a cliché where you have the dark lord, and he has his evil minions. And his evil minions are very evil — you know they’re evil: they dress in black, they’re very ugly, they have no redeeming qualities.[/citation]
Si le Seigneur des Anneaux voit se dérouler une guerre où se joue le destin de la Terre du Milieu, Tolkien y décrivait ([emphase]« brillamment ! »[/emphase]) non la guerre ni toutes les guerres mais une guerre possible. Pour Martin, Les auteurs de fantasy qui lui ont emboîté le pas, en se réduisant à l’imiter, ont réduit le combat à la guerre et la guerre à la guerre totale :
[citation=23/04/2013, Rolling Stone]The war that Tolkien wrote about was a war for the fate of civilization and the future of humanity, and that’s become the template. I’m not sure that it’s a good template, though. The Tolkien model led generations of fantasy writers to produce these endless series of dark lords and their evil minions who are all very ugly and wear black clothes. But the vast majority of wars throughout history are not like that.[/citation]
Martin jette moins la pierre sur Tolkien, l’homme du XIXe siècle (qui a connu les tranchées de la Première Guerre Mondiale, les angoisses de la Seconde Guerre Mondiale, est mort au début des années soixante-dix) que sur ses successeurs. Ceux-ci, tout comme Martin, étaient de la génération des enrôlés ou des opposants à la guerre du Vietnam – c’est-à-dire une guerre qui avait peu de rapport avec une civilisation à défendre et semblait reposer, comme la majorité des guerres depuis des millénaires, sur un prétexte aussi mince et fallacieux que l’enlèvement d’Hélène :
[citation=2012]The big question they would always ask you was “Would you would have fought in World War 2 against the Nazis?” Yes, I would have fought in WW2 against the Nazis... But the Vietcong where not the Nazis and I didn’t think America had any business and so forth – so I was objecting that particular war. […] I still think the Vietnam war is a terrible mistake for America – but I still would have fought against the Nazis.[/citation]
Si, tout comme Tolkien, Martin rejette toute interprétation allégorique de ses romans, il reconnaît l’influence dans son œuvre de la guerre du Vietnam :
[citation=08/2005, Sci-Fi.com]I think the attitude toward war is definitely shaped by my experiences with the controversies of the Vietnam War. War is central to a lot of fantasy, going back to Tolkien and beyond, but in most modern fantasy, it's very much the good guys fighting the bad guys. The Dark Lord is about to take over the Earth unless the guys in white cloaks stop him. I don't tend to think things are that simple—I think my generation was disabused of that notion by Vietnam—and the wars in my books are much more morally complex.[/citation]
Une telle guerre fut vécue par Martin comme une catastrophe morale nationale, dont les conséquences néfastes perdurent de générations en générations :
[citation=23/04/2014, Rolling Stone]I was, like many kids of my generation, a hawk. I accepted that America was the good guys, we had to be there. When I got into college, the more I learned about our involvement in Vietnam, the more it seemed wrong to me. Of course, the draft was happening, and I decided to ask for the conscientious-objector status. I wasn't a complete pacifist; I couldn't claim to be that. I was what they called an objector to a particular war. I would have been glad to fight in World War II. But Vietnam was the only war on the menu. So I applied for conscientious-objector status in full belief that I would be rejected, and that I would have a further decision to make: Army, jail or Canada. […] To my surprise, they gave me the status. […]
I don't think America has ever quite recovered from Vietnam. The divisions in our society still linger to this day. For my generation it was a deeply disillusioning experience, and it had a definite effect on me. The idealistic kid who graduated high school, a big believer in truth, justice and the American way, all these great values of superheroes of his youth, was certainly less idealistic by the time I got out of college.[/citation]
Précisons que Martin n’avait pas attendu la guerre du Vietnam pour être sensible aux situations tragiques et moralement inextricables. Ses lectures des comics (Avengers n°9, paru en 1964, qui voit l’apparition de Wonder Man revient souvent comme référence) ou de l’Iliade avait alimenté aussi bien son goût pour les personnages ambigus que pour les affrontements entre héros aux motivations opposées :
[citation=12/07/2011]I prefer gray characters. I prefer the philosophy that, you know, the hero is the villain of the other side. You know, […] the fight between Gandalf and the witch king of Angmar is a great moment, but the fight between Achilles and Hector also […] resonates for me and is something that I wanted to draw upon where you have two heroes fighting.[/citation]
En évoquant l’affrontement entre Achille et Hector, Martin rappelle que la fantasy a commencé avant Tolkien et que, puisant dans notre histoire et notre humanité, ses sources sont en réalité millénaires. Dès lors, tel un peintre qui doit connaître la palettes des couleurs à sa dispositions, l’auteur de fantasy moderne doit aussi bien se souvenir de Tolkien et du Seigneur des Anneaux que d’Homère et de l’Iliade :
[citation=07/10/2012]But Tolkien wasn’t a direct influence to me when I decided to write A Song of Ice and Fire although my books are in the fantasy canon that Tolkien improved. I mean, fantasy is very ancient. We can find it in the Iliad or in the Gilgamesh Poem, but Tolkien turned it into a modern genre, and A Song of Ice and Fire shares some of these patterns but not all of them. For example, I pretend to offer a dirty fantasy, more raw than Tolkien’s.[/citation]
Il faut donc distinguer, avec A Song of Ice and Fire, la réponse de Martin aux imitateurs de Tolkien (qui ne l’ont pas compris comme Martin l’a compris) et celle de Martin à Tolkien lui-même :
[citation=18/04/2011, Time]I mean, I loved Tolkien but I don’t think he was perfect. So I did want to do something that replied not only to Tolkien, but to all of the Tolkien successors who had followed that.[/citation]
[citation=11/08/2014, The Guardian]In some sense, when I started this saga I was replying to Tolkien, but even more to his modern imitators.[/citation]
La réponse de Martin à Tolkien est avant tout celle du disciple qui cherche à s’émanciper de la tutelle du [emphase]« maître de tous [les auteurs de fantasy] »[/emphase] (2011), voire celle du fils qui ressent le besoin de s’éloigner du [emphase]« père de toute la fantasy moderne »[/emphase] (2014) :
[citation=30/09/2001]I read Tolkien in high school, and it had an enormous effect on me. Certainly it was a book that I loved, I just fell into the world. So I wanted to do something of my own that might effect a new generation of readers in the same way. At the same time I wanted to make it different from Tolkien.[/citation]
Cette réponse est double, d’une part attentive et sensible à l’esprit du Seigneur des Anneaux, d’autre part critique et qui se veut émancipée de ses limites possibles ou supposées. Premièrement, pour Martin, venir après Tolkien nécessite de prendre comme référence non le merveilleux mais l’intime :
[citation=06/2016, entretien avec Stephen King]I love Tolkien. I’m the biggest fan on the world of The Lord of the Rings. But [in] Tolkien’s view of good and evil – evil is externalized: it comes from Sauron, or Morgoth before it, there are orcs who are absolutely irredeemable, the good people get together and stop the orcs. Most of the good people are good. I’ve always been more attracted to grey characters as I’ve said in many interviews. I do think that battle of good and evil is a great subject for a fiction but in my view the battle for good and evil is weighed forth through the individual, in human heart.[/citation]
Ce que les [emphase]« imitateurs »[/emphase] de Tolkien n’ont pas compris :
[citation=11/2000][…] to some extent, I was writing in reaction to other fantasies. It's always the question of the good vs. evil. Tolkien started it and did it quite masterfully, but others who followed didn't do as well. I think the battle between good and evil is certainly a valid one, but I think that the battle is much more interesting in real life than in fantasy. I am particularly irritated by fantasy where you can always tell the bad guys because they are ugly and wear black.[/citation]
[citation=09/2000]I have no qualms with the way that Tolkien handled Sauron, but in some ways The Lord of the Rings set an unfortunate example for the writers who were to follow. I did not want to write another version of the War Between Good and Evil, where the antagonist is called the Foul King or the Demon Lord or Prince Rotten, and his minions are slavering subhumans dressed all in black (I dressed my Night's Watch, who are basically good guys, all in black in part to undermine that annoying convention). Before you can fight the war between good and evil, you need to determine which is which, and that's not always as easy as some Fantasists would have you believe.[/citation]
Dès lors, Martin développe dans son œuvre ce qu’il estime le plus digne d’être repris dans l’écriture tolkienienne :
[citation=14/03/2014, Vanity Fair]I try to create these fully fleshed, gray characters that have ambiguities and conflicts within themselves, so they’re not heroes and they’re not villains. One of my favorite characters – and I love Lord of the Rings; don’t make it sound like I’m bashing Tolkien here, ‘cause it’s like my favorite book of all time – but my favorite Tolkien character in Lord of the Rings is Boromir, because he’s the grayest of the characters, and he’s the one who really struggles with the ring and ultimately succumbs to it, but then dies heroically. You see, he has both good and evil in him.[/citation]
Ce faisant, Martin lit correctement les intentions de Tolkien mais doit sans cesse lutter contre l’image à laquelle a été réduit (et à laquelle lui-même réduit) le Seigneur des Anneaux :
[citation=18/04/2011, Time]The battle between good and evil is a theme of much of fantasy. But I think the battle between good and evil is thought largely within the individual human heart, by the decisions that we make. It’s not like evil dresses up in black clothing and you know, they’re really ugly. These are some of the things that Tolkien did; he made them work fabulously, but in the hands of his imitators, they become total clichés. I mean the orc-like creatures who always do dress in black and … they’re really ugly and they’ve got facial deformities or something. You can tell that if somebody’s ugly, he must be evil. And then Tolkien’s heroes are all very attractive people and all that, of course, again this become cliché in the hands of the Tolkien imitators.
You know what I’m saying, I love Tolkien. I want to stress that here because I don’t want to come across like I’m slamming him. But I am responding to him. One of my favorite characters in Lord of the Rings is Boromir. Boromir is a traditional hero in many ways. He’s the Prince, he’s the heir to the great kingdom he’s very brave, he’s a great warrior and all of that, but ultimately he succumbs to the temptation of the ring. But then he dies heroically, protecting innocents. He has that wonderful sense of greatness about him.
Saruman is another interesting character the White Wizard whose been on the side of good literally hundreds, if not thousands of years, as the wizards are not men, they’re Maiar, they’re very long-lived. And yet he too, at the end you know succumbs. These are two characters where the human heart is in conflict.[/citation]
Quant à l’aspect critique de la réponse de Martin à Tolkien, il concerne le traitement des figures féminines et des rapports amoureux :
[citation=12/2000]I admire J.R.R. Tolkien vastly, I think all modern fantasy derives from Tolkien, and Lord of the Rings is one of the great works of this century. Nonetheless, it does have flaws, and I think its almost complete absence of women, and of anything even approaching sex and/or romantic love – it reflects its time and its place, but it's certainly not something I wanted to do.[/citation]
Mais aussi le traitement du pouvoir :
[citation=18/04/2011, Time]But I also want to respond — I’ve read a lot of history about feudal history and Roman history and so forth, about politics in those days. I follow contemporary politics. And you know, what strikes me is that these issues are horrid. And a lot of fantasy makes it seem simply: a good man will be a good king. Well, a good man is not always a good king. And a bad man is not always a bad king. You know, it’s much more complicated than that.[/citation]
Cette critique revient avec des arguments connus et sérieux (qui ont été abordés en ces lieux, autrefois ou récemment) :
[citation=23/04/2014, Rolling Stone]Ruling is hard. This was maybe my answer to Tolkien, whom, as much as I admire him, I do quibble with. Lord of the Rings had a very medieval philosophy: that if the king was a good man, the land would prosper. We look at real history and it’s not that simple. Tolkien can say that Aragorn became king and reigned for a hundred years, and he was wise and good. But Tolkien doesn’t ask the question: What was Aragorn’s tax policy? Did he maintain a standing army? What did he do in times of flood and famine? And what about all these orcs? By the end of the war, Sauron is gone but all of the orcs aren’t gone – they’re in the mountains. Did Aragorn pursue a policy of systematic genocide and kill them? Even the little baby orcs, in their little orc cradles?
In real life, real-life kings had real-life problems to deal with. Just being a good guy was not the answer. You had to make hard, hard decisions. Sometimes what seemed to be a good decision turned around and bit you in the ass; it was the law of unintended consequences. I’ve tried to get at some of these in my books. My people who are trying to rule don’t have an easy time of it. Just having good intentions doesn’t make you a wise king.[/citation]
Cependant, le second aspect de la réponse de Martin à Tolkien, quoique sévère, ne masque jamais l’admiration accordée au [emphase]« maître de tous [les auteurs de fantasy] »[/emphase] :
[citation=02/06/2012, entretien avec Isabel Berwick, Food & Drink]Tolkien was a 19th-century guy, a world war one veteran, and the fact that his books still speak to the modern reader, and are enjoyed by millions of people today, is a sign of his brilliance. I think he will continue to be read for centuries to come.[/citation]
Car, pour un auteur de fantasy venu après Tolkien, la réduction (évitable) de la nature de la fantasy à un affrontement entre le parti de la lumière et celui des ténèbres s’accompagne d’une une réduction (inévitable) de la consistance du légendaire associé.
Si Martin est plus que protégé de la première (aussi bien par son goût pour l’histoire et des violents effets de surprise comme par son penchant pour la complexité des situations et des psychologies), il avoue sans honte ne rien pouvoir faire contre la seconde. Aucun écrivain désireux de vivre de sa plume ne peut consacrer sa vie à construire un monde comme Tolkien a pu le faire, façonnant un royaume et une histoire qui conviennent aux langues qu’il aurait inventées pour son unique plaisir. Pour Martin, la fantasy tolkienienne est à la fois une source inévitable de toute fantasy moderne mais aussi une référence indépassable dans son genre, une croix à porter pour qui voudrait en imiter la substance :
[citation=08/04/2012]Sometimes I have sometimes so much fun creating world that I have to smack myself around and stop from putting all the stuff in the stories where it doesn’t necessarily belong. But it’s nice to know it’s there. It keeps the world the more grounding and there are occasions where it would come up in dialogue or in storytelling and if you know what it is you can handle it more elegantly.
People ask me about world-building sometimes. One of the crosses that all modern fantasy writers have to bear is that they all laboring in the tremendous shadow of J.R.R. Tolkien and Lord of the Rings. And Tolkien was a brilliant man and a very unique sort of writer. He was not a professional writer in the same sense that I am: he was a linguist, he was an Oxford don, he was an expert on Old Norse and languages – he made up imaginary languages for fun! And he made up genealogies and histories of his kingdom for fun.
I remember the first time I read Lord of the Rings back up when I was in junior high school. I’m reading the books, now I’m on the Return of the King’s last book – and I was loving this book so much that I didn’t want it to end. And I’m saying: “I don’t have to worry, I don’t have to worry, I still have a lot of pages, a big hunk of pages here…” And then suddenly it’s over! “Hey! Wait a minute! Oh… it’s all appendices!” And pages and pages and pages of appendices! And it wasn’t till later that I read all the appendices, that I got to really appreciate all off its contents.
But Tolkien, with the Silmarillion which he started to working on in the WWI and the tranches, and were still working on when he died in the early seventies without ever completing it, and the all background of Númenor and Valinor and all the different kings and gods and kingdoms that have risen and fallen, he developed that all in an enormous detail.
So he sort of set a very difficult part for all of us fantasists who would follow to live up to this.
Plus I think a lot of fantasy writers think all fantasies are like Tolkien’s: it’s like the iceberg when they said nine tenth of the iceberg is below the surface. That’s true in Tolkien : nine tenth of the iceberg is below the surface; he has the all Silmarillion thing that lies underneath the stories of the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, and all the histories and so forth. For people like me (and I think the vast majority of our contemporaries) what we have is a little ice on a raft! And we’re trying to make you think that there is an enormous iceberg under the surface here – but there isn’t! We haven’t invented entirely imaginary languages! We don’t have thousands of pages of world-building […] There, maybe a few people do – but they do it wrong in that case ; they’re not Tolkien…[/citation]
[espacement]S.