Case (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
case) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
fandomsecrets2011-04-26 07:50 pm
case) wrote in fandomsecrets2011-04-26 07:50 pm
[ SECRET POST #1575 ]
Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.
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TRIGGER WARNING FOR SEXUAL/EMOTIONAL ABUSE
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TRIGGER WARNING FOR INCEST, RAPE
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Notes:
Secrets Left to Post: 06 pages, 132 secrets from Secret Submission Post #225.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 1 - not!secrets ], [ 1 - not!fandom ], [ 1 - too big ], [ 0 - repeats ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments and concerns should go here.
no subject
??????????
What entire series?
Like The Hobbit and The Silmarillion? Lord of the Rings is one book. :/
Especially since the form is often what is criticized and complained about.
Also, this is not at all true. Like, in pop culture people whine about the form a lot, but in literary circles where people care about Fantasy as a legitimate genre and additionally in academic circles, the form is certainly not "complained" about. Actually, it's usually praised, heatedly debated, strenuously deconstructed and palely emulated by authors who get teary eyed at the beauty of it all. Like, have you ever heard published authors or Lit Profs talk about LotR? The fact that Tolkien is an insurmountable monolith in the genre is a source of constant angst in the industry.
It's okay that you don't like it, but that doesn't make it badly written. I don't like Jane Austen, but I recognize that she is one of the greats of English Literature and has contributed a lot to the Western canon, especially as a trail-blazing female novelist. So. Yeah.
"Series" issue
(Anonymous) 2011-04-27 09:42 pm (UTC)(link)Like The Hobbit and The Silmarillion? Lord of the Rings is one book. :/
Oh, that is fucking rich, I just love that comment. The "series" issue is always thrown around by Tolkien's fans... and to what end? Does it matter? Are their religious feelings hurt somehow? It is most often printed in three volumes, therefore a common, lowly peasant of a reader WILL consider it a series. Arguing that it isn't is, for me, on the same level as being offended about what did Han Solo use for shaving.
tl;dr IT DOESN'T MATTER, IT IS NOT RELEVANT IN ANY WAY TO THE TOPIC
And just to chime in, I consider Tolkien's writing to be boring and bad - too purple, too flowery, you can read the sentiment a thousand times over in this thread. Mind you: I liked the beginning, I liked the scenes in Shire - the opening depiction of rural, simple life was great, as was the return to Shire. The stuff in between? Didn't care for it at all.
And let's not even go into plotting, which was just crude.
Re: "Series" issue
I was confused because she said "LotR is one of the best selling books of all time" and then immediately followed it up with "however the entire series is not" and I honestly had no idea what she was talking about. I guess now that I've slept on it, it's possible that she meant as a single volume it's sold a lot of copies, but as three volumes it's sold considerably less which is probably true but I don't really get the point being made?
I'm sorry that people wanting the book to be referred to as a single volume is a pet peeve of yours but that's not actually what I was saying.
no subject
You just said it was heatedly debated, which means there is criticism so...
As for Lit. Prof arguing over Tolkien? I find that I don't quite trust Lit. Profs views on popular works since they have reputations to maintain. Academics are an enclave like no other and Tolkien was one of them. Pop culture, though cliquey itself although I think less so, is frankly a better gauge of whether the form was effective. That's the audience. That's who he was writing to. If there is significant angst over form, then it was fairly ineffective. You shouldn't have to have a degree to understand the intricacies of a novel.
You don't have say that Jane Austen is a good writer though. You can say her characters are one note, or that she rehashes the same themes with little variation or that she is derivative of Elizabethan comedy of error plays. That doesn't lessen her impact or her place as a English or overall classic. But classic doesn't mean expert.
Being able to write evocative prose doesn't mean that that very prose didn't flaw his plot significantly, although in other areas it enhanced it. That doesn't mean that he didn't violate the writer's rule of never writing a word more than is needed. Those flaws are significant flaws to me, ones that either suggest that the writer is self-congratulatory or is in the wrong form or lacks the ability to adapt properly. You don't find that there are those flaws at all, and that's fine. I know that I have my opinion and you have yours. I think easy of reading and uninterrupted momentum is of primary importance in prose epic (not poetry) and that not formulating it accordingly is not technically skillful. Wanting to skip over a significant number of portions of the book is a flaw of the writing in my opinion.
no subject
Noooo, Lord of the Rings is one book that is sometimes sold in a format of three volumes (and occasionally in six volumes) and the single volume version of the book is the one that is the best seller. The first book in the three volume version of the story is Fellowship of the Ring, I think you're getting a little confused?
Pop culture, though cliquey itself although I think less so, is frankly a better gauge of whether the form was effective.
In which case it was still effective since LotR has one of the biggest fandoms of all time and is the second best selling book of all time and there are professional artists who do nothing except paint pictures based on Tolkien's work and every successful fantasy author since Tolkien venerates his work and some of his characters are household names and this isn't all because of the movies.
Some people don't like reading old books.
Some people don't like the way certain books are written.
This does not mean that the book was written in a way that is "wrong".
Also I don't actually think LotR is perfect. I think it most certainly drags in some parts because it's got it's feet half in the modern era and half in the Victorian era. The thing is it was very experimental. You can only write something perfect if you are not doing something new. I know you apparently don't think what Tolkien was doing was new, but the fact is that fairy stories for adults and fairy story/myth fushions were a new thing in the Edwardian/Postwar West and other comparable works of the time were also hot messes. The reason I'm having this debate at all is that you seem to be denigrating the cultural value of Tolkien by saying that his chosen format made the book inaccessible to general audiences and that if he had written it differently it would somehow be "better" or have more value. He might agree with you were he alive today since he was infamous for constant rewriting, cutting, editing, reformatting to the extent that it's a marvel the book even got published at all. The thing is, he didn't know what we know now and we know what we know now is HUGELY thanks to both his successes and his mistakes. That's how culture works. If he had written it differently, it likely wouldn't have had the memenetic impact that it did.
And tbh very few truly important novels follow the "writer's rule" of never writing a word more than needed. That is a very new cultural meme and one that's not exactly actively followed in the literary community as a whole. :/
no subject
However, you're still associating popularity with technical ability to write. To go to an extreme point, Twilight is a household name, as well as the characters, but the writing ability is crap. Not even flawed, crap. Again, his world-building and characters are what make Tolkien popular. However, if something is criticized, it's the digressions, which is a writing flaw.
I think what is experimental about his work is that he essentially made up an entire world, without having to make it a parallel to his own, as many authors did. I think what is innovative is that it is a fairly modern epic. However, since we're talking about writing, the style is incredibly similar to and derivative of classical epics, such as the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid, where is fact it's quite common to spend half of a book (chapter) on funeral games. In poetry, this works much better since the focus is on the language to begin with. As a Oxford philologist, I'm sure he was quite aware of this. In prose, you're simply interrupting the plot. It's not like no one had ever written a series of books before so that plot writing was unknown to him. Whether it was experimental is irrelevant to his ability to write plot.
Frankly, whether it would have more value or would be better or would have had the same impact is debatable. We really can't assume or denote what literary void he filled to determine if changes would have lessened or augmented the impact. However, if you think someone saying that they think the writing is flawed is a denigration of cultural impact, that's your cultural assumption. I will freely admit that technical ability is not the only, nor sole way books become or deserve to be classics. I would say that it was simply the way people wrote at the time, except for the fact that almost certainly well-versed enough to know what he was attempting.
no subject
B-but it's not a series? You don't go "oh man, we can't actually compare the success of Dracula to the success of Anne Rice's books because fans have to buy it as a single volume". LotR used to be split up sometimes because it was originally published in six parts as novels often were and the idea of it as a "series" was popularized by the movie. For all intents and purposes it is a single novel, so...?
However, you're still associating popularity with technical ability to write.
Okay so scholars and published authors and all kinds of people who professionally critique and write fiction think it's well written but that doesn't count because pop culture/fandom is a better gauge of things, but you can't trust it's popularity because pop culture/fandom like bad things. Which is it?
Really, we should have agreed to disagree a long time ago, but your arguments are kind of contradictory and I'm just trying to get to the root of what you're saying here because all I'm trying to say is that you not liking LotR doesn't make it poorly or inadvisedly written and you're trying to say that it should have been a 1069 page poem. I'm sorry I accused you of attempting to denigrate it's cultural impact but I'm really just boggling at the fact that you really seem to believe there is some way this book could have accomplished its goal better and that it is somehow inherently a failed work despite the fact that in terms of accomplishing what the author wanted, it's gotta be one of the most successful works of fiction ever written (even if not necessarily in the shape he imagined).
no subject
I don't think what I'm saying is contradictory so much as you're conflating what I'm saying. I said you can trust the criticisms of pop culture better, not popularity in general. They tend to be more blunt about what doesn't work in something than reasonable about what is great about something.
I don't think Tolkien is a bad writer. I actually think The Hobbit is brilliantly written, but also very different from LOTR, and frankly how he wrote there was more suited to prose. What I'm saying more that there are poetic concepts that do not work in prose. And that sometimes his need to work it all in stagnates the plot. If his goal was to be successful, then yes he succeeded. If his goal was to reform epic poetry into prose, I give it a C.