The last major British novelist?

[sixsmith]

I was reading an interview with the British novelist Will Self where he was ruminating on which contemporary (post war) english language novelists will be read 100 years hence ;viz canonised i suppose. (he noted that literary forecasting is impossible but nevertheless thought it was important because it allows us to think about the virtue of our literary culture). He thought that, of the Americans, Bellow and Roth were likley starters and probably De Lillo. This seems about right to me. (with the addition of Cormac McCarthy) However when he got to the British novelists, he suggestions seemed a little less certain. He though Ballard and Grey might survive and possibly Martin Amis but was dismissive of McEwan, Rushdie, Swift.

It got me thinking about British fiction and the potential lack of a major British post war novelist. At first i thought i may be blinkered by an American-centric, Bloomian view of contemporary fiction (or the American tendency to self-aggrandizement). But then standing back a little, i honestly couldn't think of a British novel that i have read which stands up to the key works of their American counterparts. Personally i don't think any of the British authors Self mentions would even get a look in (with the possible exception of Ballard for flat out vision). Notwithstanding the supposed modern renaissance of the Amis/Rushdie/McEwan years, James Wood has said that the last major English novelists were Woolf, Lawrence and Green. (with the possible exception of Naipul who i haven't read). Just wondering if others had some broad thoughts on this topic.


(BTW i realise that English fiction isn't comprised solely of British and America novelists, it's just a comparison that peaked my interest. I'm also painting with a broad brush here, too broad most probably but again, it seemed a ripe topic )

[Lokasenna]

I suspect that history will consider J. R. R. Tolkein as THE author of the last century, and he's certainly going to survive. Evelyn Waugh will also endure. As for the post-war period... I can't honestly see any of them being read in a hundred years time.

[amarna]

Not really a broad thought, but what's about the Nobel Prize winners William Golding and Doris Lessing?

[LitNetIsGreat]

I think it is a fair point that James Wood makes when he says that Woolf, Lawrence and Green were the last great British novelists, though I can't help think that we must be missing someone obvious.

Not to go too much off track but do people really think Comac McCarthy will be read so far into the future? Based upon my experience with The Road I certainly don't think much of this writer, I felt his writing to be quite poor indeed. I must be missing something or more likely it is just a personal dislike, but even so I can usually stand back and appreciate something even if I don't like it personally. However this is not so with this writer based upon what I have seen of him, it my be going too far to say that I felt his writing to be amateurish, but he feels not too far off this mark to me.

[kelby_lake]

I suspect that history will consider J. R. R. Tolkein as THE author of the last century, and he's certainly going to survive. Evelyn Waugh will also endure. As for the post-war period... I can't honestly see any of them being read in a hundred years time.

All the really good writers seem to be dead :( At least, for the British.

[amarna]

Barbara Cartland. :banana:


:p

[sixsmith]

Not to go too much off track but do people really think Comac McCarthy will be read so far into the future? Based upon my experience with The Road I certainly don't think much of this writer, I felt his writing to be quite poor indeed. I must be missing something or more likely it is just a personal dislike, but even so I can usually stand back and appreciate something even if I don't like it personally. However this is not so with this writer based upon what I have seen of him, it my be going too far to say that I felt his writing to be amateurish, but he feels not too far off this mark to me.

McCarthy is one of my favourite authors but it took me a good while to reach that conclusion. When i first read "All the pretty horses" i was of a similar opinion to yourself. The florid prose and aversion to punctuation can be a bit much but he won me over with "Suttree". Definitely a guy whose work you could hate.


Not really a broad thought, but what's about the Nobel Prize winners William Golding and Doris Lessing?

Don't know much about Lessing. Golding is interesting because he seems almost the forgotten man though i think his reputation has suffered due to his propensity for unsophisticated allegory.

[DisPater]

Ian Mcewan, for sure.

[JCamilo]

Well, I would wonder if not having great novelists is not something to give credit instead of something bad. Kudos for however abandoned this format first...

[JBI]

The last outstanding one was probably Greene, unless you count Rushdie and Naipual, though I don't personally consider them "British Novelists", in the sense that their best work seems to be in the novels that have the least resemblance to the tradition of English novels, notably Midnights Children, and The Enigma of Arrival (though A Bend in the River is pretty good as well).

[Lokasenna]

I think it is a fair point that James Wood makes when he says that Woolf, Lawrence and Green were the last great British novelists, though I can't help think that we must be missing someone obvious.

I'm not even sure about them, you know. I haven't read any Green, but I certainly don't rate Woolf or Lawrence highly. Somehow, I can't help but feel they are prolifically studied simply because they are the most controversial writers (which is not an indicator of quality) of a fairly dreadful period. I think history will neglect them relatively soon...

That said, I am a medievalist, so I probably would say that...

[LitNetIsGreat]

I'm not even sure about them, you know. I haven't read any Green, but I certainly don't rate Woolf or Lawrence highly. Somehow, I can't help but feel they are prolifically studied simply because they are the most controversial writers (which is not an indicator of quality) of a fairly dreadful period. I think history will neglect them relatively soon...

That said, I am a medievalist, so I probably would say that...

No, no. I have had little contact with Greene too, but Woolf is certainly much more than controversial. Her writing is highly intricate stuff which you have to delicately unravel to get to the heart of her work. She is actually quite a fascinating writer but you have to be able to gain the merit from her work very slowly, bit by bit. You have to have a lot of patience with Woolf and there is rarely much that "goes off" but she seems to concentrate on the little observations of daily live, but nevertheless they add up to a lot.

[wessexgirl]

I don't think Greene is a "heavyweight" in the sense of being controversial or difficult Lokasenna. He's very easy to read. There may be more substance to his straightforward style, but he's certainly not a hard read. He was a journalist and screenwriter after all, so the style is not at all longwinded. I've only read a few of his books, but they were enough to make me want to read more. I've read Lawrence too, although not for years, but he is readable, whereas for me Woolf definitely is not.

[Janine]

D.H.Lawrence is seeing a resurgance of interest, and I believe his work will indeed still be read 100 yrs from now, due to the sheer humanistic and complex aspect of it. Woolf is very intricate and complex, too and therefore, I believe she will be of interest years from now. Why wouldn't they be; but then again we can't predict what it will be like on earth 100 yrs from now, can we?

[stlukesguild]

I suspect that history will consider J. R. R. Tolkein as THE author of the last century...

Ha ha ha...:lol: Nothing like a good laugh after a day at work. (That was a joke... wasn't it?)

...and he's certainly going to survive.

He will survive for the foreseeable future in a manner not unlike Alexander Dumas (The Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte Cristo, etc...) as the writer of adventure tales that appeal especially to young readers and the unversed... but are barely recognized as "classics" by subsequent writers, critics, and the well-read.

I certainly don't rate Woolf or Lawrence highly. Somehow, I can't help but feel they are prolifically studied simply because they are the most controversial writers (which is not an indicator of quality) of a fairly dreadful period. I think history will neglect them relatively soon...

And I would have to respectfully disagree. Shock value rapidly dissipates. Almost no one is shocked by T.S. Eliot's Wasteland, Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, Impressionism, Cubism, or Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. The innovations that they wrought have all been so absorbed by the larger culture that if anything, we actually find it difficult to imagine what was so disturbing. Woolf and Lawrence undoubtedly deserve their reputation as writers of real merit. But then I thought we were discussing Post-WWII British literature. The suggestion that the whole of Modernist literature is a fairly dreadful period is absolutely absurd to me. Even if we are limited to British novels (and thus ignore Proust, Mann, Hesse, Faulkner, Genet, Camus, etc...) we find any number of marvelous writers who have certainly made a lasting mark upon literature... James Joyce being the most obvious, but also Woolf, Kipling, Lawrence, Henry Green, Joseph Conrad, Aldous Huxley, and Samuel Beckett.

The original question asked for ideas as to just who might be THE post-war British novelist. On this account I will have to admit that I am far more versed at poetry and I could throw out a number of names of post-war British poets of whom I am certain. The post-war British novel, however, is not so strong... at least from my reading. Graham Greene seems the most obvious contender... but I certainly wouldn't ignore Golding.

[Virgil]

I was reading an interview with the British novelist Will Self where he was ruminating on which contemporary (post war) english language novelists will be read 100 years hence ;viz canonised i suppose. (he noted that literary forecasting is impossible but nevertheless thought it was important because it allows us to think about the virtue of our literary culture). He thought that, of the Americans, Bellow and Roth were likley starters and probably De Lillo. This seems about right to me. (with the addition of Cormac McCarthy)
I haven't read Dilio so I can't say. Nor have I read Thomas Pynchon, though some might put him in this catagory. I can agree with Bellow and Roth and McCarthy and I would also add Tony Morrison. There were a few one novel writers who really had masterpieces: Ralph Elison's Invisible Man and Truman Capote's In Cold Blood should be worthy mentions.


However when he got to the British novelists, he suggestions seemed a little less certain. He though Ballard and Grey might survive and possibly Martin Amis but was dismissive of McEwan, Rushdie, Swift.

It got me thinking about British fiction and the potential lack of a major British post war novelist. At first i thought i may be blinkered by an American-centric, Bloomian view of contemporary fiction (or the American tendency to self-aggrandizement). But then standing back a little, i honestly couldn't think of a British novel that i have read which stands up to the key works of their American counterparts. Personally i don't think any of the British authors Self mentions would even get a look in (with the possible exception of Ballard for flat out vision). Notwithstanding the supposed modern renaissance of the Amis/Rushdie/McEwan years, James Wood has said that the last major English novelists were Woolf, Lawrence and Green. (with the possible exception of Naipul who i haven't read). Just wondering if others had some broad thoughts on this topic.


(BTW i realise that English fiction isn't comprised solely of British and America novelists, it's just a comparison that peaked my interest. I'm also painting with a broad brush here, too broad most probably but again, it seemed a ripe topic )
As to the pre-WWII British novelists, yes, Woolf, Lawrence, Conrad, Waugh, E.M. Forster. I'm not including the Irish writers.

I ashamed to say that my lack of knowledge of post WWII British writers is sparse. Martin Aimis's Lucky Jim is hilarious. David Lodge is sometimes mentioned, though I don't think he has the depth. Based on reputation (I just haven't read them) Rushdie, McWEan, Naipal (is he British or other?), Anthony Powell, Iris Murdoch, and A.S. Byatt. I just can't personally vouch for them.

[stlukesguild]

Not to go too much off track but do people really think Comac McCarthy will be read so far into the future? Based upon my experience with The Road I certainly don't think much of this writer, I felt his writing to be quite poor indeed.

Personally, I find McCarthy to be one of the strongest living writers in the English language. Suttree, Child of God, and Blood Meridian are especially powerful... and Blood Meridian may just be the most harrowing book I've ever read... a marvelous merger of the most horrific violence and a visionary prose that often reminds me of some of the strongest passages in Moby Dick.

[LitNetIsGreat]

Not to go too much off track but do people really think Comac McCarthy will be read so far into the future? Based upon my experience with The Road I certainly don't think much of this writer, I felt his writing to be quite poor indeed.

Personally, I find McCarthy to be one of the strongest living writers in the English language. Suttree, Child of God, and Blood Meridian are especially powerful... and Blood Meridian may just be the most harrowing book I've ever read... a marvelous merger of the most horrific violence and a visionary prose that often reminds me of some of the strongest passages in Moby Dick.

Yes you see a few people say similar things whom I trust, but based upon The Road I don't personally see it. However I have had no experience with the books you mention so I don't want to jump to too much of an unnecessary conclusion. Certainly when you say "I find McCarthy to be one of the strongest living writers in the English language" it is quite a dramatic claim.

[mortalterror]

Personally, I find McCarthy to be one of the strongest living writers in the English language. Suttree, Child of God, and Blood Meridian are especially powerful... and Blood Meridian may just be the most harrowing book I've ever read... a marvelous merger of the most horrific violence and a visionary prose that often reminds me of some of the strongest passages in Moby Dick.

I've read Moby Dick and it's something else. I read Blood Meridian a couple of years ago and didn't think much of it. Nothing really stood out to me, besides the ending which I found comically amusing. When No Country For Old Men came out and won the Academy Award, suddenly literary people got an immense hard on for McCarthy's work; so I re-read the first chapter, and I still didn't see anything special there. I think of this surge in interest to be on a par with what happened to Tolkien's reputation when The Lord of the Rings movies came out. You get guys like Lokasenna drastically overrating their novels, calling also rans THE writer of the last century.

I figured I might not be fair judging McCarthy on just one book; so I read a bit of The Road. Didn't do anything for me. Again, it's not bad. It's just not great. Chalk this up as one more example of StLukes and me disagreeing along with Catch-22, On the Road, 1984, Borges Fictiones, In Search of Lost Time, and Ulysses.

I'm not an expert on post-ww2 literature, but the only two writers which I'm sure are the equals of the modernists are Marquez and Bellow. One thing I do know, Self and Amis aren't in that league.

[Jozanny]

It got me thinking about British fiction and the potential lack of a major British post war novelist. At first i thought i may be blinkered by an American-centric, Bloomian view of contemporary fiction (or the American tendency to self-aggrandizement). But then standing back a little, i honestly couldn't think of a British novel that i have read which stands up to the key works of their American counterparts. Personally i don't think any of the British authors Self mentions would even get a look in (with the possible exception of Ballard for flat out vision). Notwithstanding the supposed modern renaissance of the Amis/Rushdie/McEwan years, James Wood has said that the last major English novelists were Woolf, Lawrence and Green. (with the possible exception of Naipul who i haven't read). Just wondering if others had some broad thoughts on this topic.

Even though I have not read her major novels, I think A.S. Byatt will meet that hundred year mark sixsmith. Her short story collections are breath-taking, as near perfect as any fiction style I can imagine. She is able to take the modern idiom, like the loss of identity through Alzheimer's, and turn it into a modern myth with a power that resonates beyond contemporary concerns, similar to Doris Lessing, but we can quibble whether Lessing is British or African.

I kneel to them both, as I could never match either woman, even in their weaker works, but if forced, my money is on Byatt. I am less lavish in my awe of Cormac (gasp). Yes, he has taken the best that minimalism has to offer, stolen well from some others I won't mention, but I don't know that his nuke porn (The Road) really amounts to great literature, and I think The Road may sour me on Blood Meridian, when I start it, which is perhaps unfortunate.

But Byatt trumps not only British voices; she is up there with the best of American modernism.

[Virgil]

But Byatt trumps not only British voices; she is up there with the best of American modernism.

Actually I'm not overwhelmed with American novelists post WWII. Some are noteworthy, but really from a vacuum of great writers. Bellow I think will stand the test of time. And every so often a single novel by a writer is great, like Invisible Man and In Cold Blood. Perhaps William Faulkner just set so high a standard that no one can reach it.

[sixsmith]

I ashamed to say that my lack of knowledge of post WWII British writers is sparse. Martin Aimis's Lucky Jim is hilarious. David Lodge is sometimes mentioned, though I don't think he has the depth. Based on reputation (I just haven't read them) Rushdie, McWEan, Naipal (is he British or other?), Anthony Powell, Iris Murdoch, and A.S. Byatt. I just can't personally vouch for them.


Powell is one that i thought might have been overlooked though i have not read "A Dance to the music of time". Murdoch is pretty dreadful from where i sit.


Personally, I find McCarthy to be one of the strongest living writers in the English language. Suttree, Child of God, and Blood Meridian are especially powerful... and Blood Meridian may just be the most harrowing book I've ever read... a marvelous merger of the most horrific violence and a visionary prose that often reminds me of some of the strongest passages in Moby Dick.

Agreed. In Suttree and Blood Meridian we have two of the greatest prose masterpieces of the last 30 years.

[JBI]

Meh, who cares how they fair against the American novel; first of all, the novel as a form has become a soiled convention; the novelists today, who will probably be remembered are the ones who write books that seem the least like novels, or at least British novels (on the model popularized by Scott, and lasting until the present). Generally, after the nihilistic gimmicks of basic post-modernism (Pynchon, Delillo, etc.), we have two dominant movements left; post-post-modernism, where instead of questioning boundaries, the boundaries simply do not exist: I think here of some of Michael Ondaatje's work, notably In the skin of a Lion, certainly Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red, McCarthy's Blood Meridian (which doesn't follow standard novel conventions) amongst other works, and on the other side, these post-colonial works that use metaphorical elements and blend different narrative styles, Like Naipaul, Rushdie, Austin Clarke, Achebe, and others.

From my experience, the British aesthetic right now seems dominated by a sense of mediocre, pseudo-comedic satire. The popularity of Terry Pratchett, for instance, attests to that; but when you try reading Pratchett, you run into a lack of any real substance beyond a few almost funny jokes. I'm looking for a voice that really says something in British fiction, but so far I've run into nothing that particularly inspires. I am told Doris Lessing's Golden Notebook is good, but I have yet to read it (perhaps that is where I should look). Angela Carter was a good voice when she was alive, but ultimately, her skill sits better in short story than novel, and perhaps only The Bloody Chamber or perhaps Fireworks is worthy of being called Great.

Standard novel writing is out of fashion. Henry James style narrative, or the model popularized by Romantic and Victorian writers no longer holds any real power. The movie, in such a case, acts too similarly, and there really is no point in standard narration. We read James now, not for his plot and social critique, but more for his prose, and his style, something which, if emulated today, would probably not grip us.

Lets be honest, is Atonement really a superb work? It's a rather silly story, written in a terribly boring omniscient voice, loaded with all the typical clichés, yet still is held as perhaps the greatest work in the vein of "British novel" in the last little while.

But lets be honest - McCarthy, Pythchon, Roth, Delillo, etc. are all old authors right now. Naipaul, Lessing, Rushdie, and others are also old Authors now.

On a whole, I'd say the novel is on its way out, in the sense of the conventional form, and has been for a while. The concept of a "Novelist" has become all screwy, with either labels of post-modernist, post-colonialist, or mediocre being the only options, with most from the first two categories falling into the third. Traditional narrative practices hold no real weight anymore, and are only flings to be read once and discarded - the form is exhausted, and built on a set of clichés.

Perhaps magical realism did it a favor, but magical realism also destroyed the former concept of the novel. Marquez, for instance, who seems the archetypal Magical Realist novel (outside of Latin America), broke the trend of the novel completely, and opened it up to, what are essentially oral forms, and a series of symbols and metaphors (he described 100 Years as "not a history, but a metaphor for a history"). Rushdie too tried something similar, but how long can Rushdie go? Midnight's Children seems indebted to the fact that it deals with India, and the emergence of a nation. At a time when the concept of Nation feels somewhat dated, and most places have already "emerged", the only thing that is left to do is jump into historiographic metafiction (see Linda Hutcheon, The Canadian Postmodern), something which exhausts itself quite easily. The Concept of "a good read" no longer really exists, as there are enough good reads out there, and to be relevant, you must be relevant, and stay relevant, and not just be a piece of pulp entertainment. To do that, you need to be a little bit crazy, yet at the same time, make a lot of sense. That's been the goal of good novelists all this time: Zola was a little bit nuts, and decided he'd make a "science" out of Balzac. Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, McCarthy, etc. all did the same thing. The typical form has long suffered from lack of creative play within it, or from too much focus on stupid topics like current affairs and politics, as popularized by the Beat Generation, and their essential pollution of American prose.

Right now, it feels like England has exhausted itself. Larkin and Auden picked up on this exhaustion decades ago, and England has never recovered. America has exhausted itself too, it would seem, but it's a large enough country, all speaking the same language, so it is still able to produce good works, just not as freshly and dominantly as before.

There are very few English writers who I like. Perhaps the one I most revere is the poet Geoffrey Hill. Likewise, there are very few current, and by current I mean emerging or just established, mainstream American writers I like. In the same sense, the bulk of my liking for contemporary prose seems to be written by expats, rather than natives.



I'm not an expert on post-ww2 literature, but the only two writers which I'm sure are the equals of the modernists are Marquez and Bellow. One thing I do know, Self and Amis aren't in that league.

Amis is to the novel, what Christopher Hitchens is to political commentary and criticism - they are both essentially the same sort of personality. They have a sense of resentment against them by many, and yet a strong following by others, yet at the same time, seem to be saying what other people have already said, in a misconstructed, sort of misinterpreted way, which makes them sound smart, and everyone else stupid.


Oh, and edit; don't think I'm just trying to put forth other traditions, notably the Canadian one, over Britain and the U.S.; the Canadian novel generally has always been second to the short story, and the short story has been on par with poetry; short fiction and short novels seem the dominant prose form - novels, not so much.


Generally though, in terms of novels right now, we'd probably need to turn to India to find a country that really is putting out novels in the sense that we are looking for.

[Jozanny]

Actually I'm not overwhelmed with American novelists post WWII. Some are noteworthy, but really from a vacuum of great writers. Bellow I think will stand the test of time. And every so often a single novel by a writer is great, like Invisible Man and In Cold Blood. Perhaps William Faulkner just set so high a standard that no one can reach it.

All roads do not lead to Faulkner:yawnb:. He is a great regionalist my friend, so great that he transcends regionalism, but other authors can and do surpass him. European modernism (minus Joyce) and maybe my love of Henry James, gives me a more nuanced view. Faulkner is nearly always dealing with the paranoia of the Other in the closed feedback loop of a broken agrarian culture--but there are competing voices to this, the urban novel, in particular.

[JBI]

All roads do not lead to Faulkner:yawnb:. He is a great regionalist my friend, so great that he transcends regionalism, but other authors can and do surpass him. European modernism (minus Joyce) and maybe my love of Henry James, gives me a more nuanced view. Faulkner is nearly always dealing with the paranoia of the Other in the closed feedback loop of a broken agrarian culture--but there are competing voices to this, the urban novel, in particular.

The current novel, in general, seems a Prufrockian fixation. Certainly Delillo and Pynchon seem rooted in an Eliotic plane, even if they don't admit it. The Unreal City seems to have fused with Dickens' London, and the New York City of the Regan days (and now mixed with tinges of 9/11 syndrome) to create the new archetypal American novel setting. In truth, McCarthy seems one of the few who is fully chasing Faulkner, instead of Eliot.

[Virgil]

All roads do not lead to Faulkner:yawnb:. He is a great regionalist my friend, so great that he transcends regionalism, but other authors can and do surpass him. European modernism (minus Joyce) and maybe my love of Henry James, gives me a more nuanced view. Faulkner is nearly always dealing with the paranoia of the Other in the closed feedback loop of a broken agrarian culture--but there are competing voices to this, the urban novel, in particular.

:lol: We'll have to disagree. Yes, Faulkner is regional, but he really transcends into a plane close to Shakespeare. And not just any Shakespeare, but the very tops of Shakespeare. The surface is regional, but the conflicts and themes and emotions he taps into are universal.

Hey I do think Henry James at his best is up there.

[sixsmith]

Amis is to the novel, what Christopher Hitchens is to political commentary and criticism - they are both essentially the same sort of personality. They have a sense of resentment against them by many, and yet a strong following by others, yet at the same time, seem to be saying what other people have already said, in a misconstructed, sort of misinterpreted way, which makes them sound smart, and everyone else stupid.

:D

Yes, but a least Amis has a turn of phrase. Hitchens is the poorer, decidedly less witty, cousin.


Perhaps magical realism did it a favor, but magical realism also destroyed the former concept of the novel. Marquez, for instance, who seems the archetypal Magical Realist novel (outside of Latin America), broke the trend of the novel completely, and opened it up to, what are essentially oral forms, and a series of symbols and metaphors (he described 100 Years as "not a history, but a metaphor for a history"). Rushdie too tried something similar, but how long can Rushdie go? Midnight's Children seems indebted to the fact that it deals with India, and the emergence of a nation.

I love Marquez but i think Magic Realism has a lot to answer for. Certainly it has to answer partly for Rushdie's lesser novels which is no small burden. More broadly though, i think it, along with the Pynchon - De Lillo zeitgeist, has created template for many novelists who otherwise wouldn't have a great deal to say.

[meh!]

Gray would is definitely one for me. The only problem I think is that a lot of his views can go out of fashion and come back every easily. The writing its self has been excellent but he's an old Scottish Socialist and, especially in the 90s, they weren't exactly valued in Britain. All that could be coming back in the next few years, but I doubt it. However, the personal aspects (though this is vague, the personal and the political are always interlinked in Gray) will remain current, I suppose.

That said, I think the quality of the writing will out.

Ballard? I like some of his books and I think he's a decent writer but I can't see him being one of the ones to last.

I'm trying to think who else...

[Jozanny]

The current novel, in general, seems a Prufrockian fixation. Certainly Delillo and Pynchon seem rooted in an Eliotic plane, even if they don't admit it. The Unreal City seems to have fused with Dickens' London, and the New York City of the Regan days (and now mixed with tinges of 9/11 syndrome) to create the new archetypal American novel setting. In truth, McCarthy seems one of the few who is fully chasing Faulkner, instead of Eliot.

Mmm. What can I say? The Road is not a bad novel JBI, but I think it gets lost in all the nuclear holocaust conceits that it toys with, even if one pushes a little further, like Virgil did, in seeing it as a Treasure Island trope. Survivalist literature goes back a long way, but Cormac just seems too conscious of this to me, nearly flippant. A skilled and polished story teller? Yes. Faulkner's ethos? Maybe a pale imitation of it. Luke always raps me with Bloom's anxiety of influence--but Cormac seems too full of influences, a full house here, three aces there, but no royal flush for me. Mind, I ordered BM with The Road and read the latter first for our book club, and I started the first page of BM then, but changed my mind, deciding to wait.

David Mitchell's grantedly showy brilliance has more emotional impact for me than McCarthy. Mitchell is flawed, but he's brilliant, to the point I weep in frustration and should smash the damn television and just write, no matter what--but McCarthy's bag of tricks, those I were taught, and I see them as plotted points, well-placed, but not entirely enlightening. Maybe BM will alter my view.

[sixsmith]

David Mitchell's grantedly showy brilliance has more emotional impact for me than McCarthy. Mitchell is flawed, but he's brilliant, to the point I weep in frustration and should smash the damn television and just write, no matter what--but McCarthy's bag of tricks, those I were taught, and I see them as plotted points, well-placed, but not entirely enlightening. Maybe BM will alter my view.

Mitchell is a something else. I was astonished by the things he pulled off in Cloud Atlas and frequently moved. (Every time he nailed another genre i wanted to stab him in envy). Yet somehow the whole doesn't equal the sum of its parts (that is such a lame and lazy way of putting it). The back half does not quite fulfill the promise of the front. However, given his relative youth, it's scary to think what he may produce.

[mortalterror]

Viable Literary Trends
1.Novels
2.Epics
3.Books people like
4.Books JBI likes

Although he is right about Atonement.

[sixsmith]

:lol:to the above

[stlukesguild]

I'm not an expert on post-ww2 literature, but the only two writers which I'm sure are the equals of the modernists are Marquez and Bellow. One thing I do know, Self and Amis aren't in that league.

While we may disagree on McCarthy (among other things) I won't dispute you here.

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3301/3599572932_5a417692f9_o.jpg

Hahahahahaha!:lol:

Yes indeed. More than a few times it seems as if JBI has his head stuck too deeply into his academic theorists (or elsewhere) so that he completely forgets the reality that artists and authors largely couldn't give a rat's a$$ about what some PhD. theorist thinks about what is or is not viable in art today and in the future.

Right now, it feels like England has exhausted itself. Larkin and Auden picked up on this exhaustion decades ago, and England has never recovered. America has exhausted itself too...

And where will the next wave of brilliant literature come from? No... let me guess... Canada? (Or perhaps China):D. Seriously, this reminds me of the same sort of theoretical dribble that was thrown around some 25 years ago concerning the imminent "death of painting"... and yet the old boy still seems to be going strong. Perhaps he will never hold the position he once had before the days of photography and film, but he still hasn't quite given up the ghost. If anything seems to be petering out it is the sort of dry conceptualism that was imagined would replace painting.

[Jozanny]

mortal writes:


Originally Posted by JBI
Viable Literary Trends
1.Novels
2.Epics
3.Books people like
4.Books JBI likes

Bravo mortal:lol: I thought if I ran in this direction Sche would have scolded me, so I blithely went my merry way, but we all got a collective chuckle. However, I think that it leads to the problem of our over-education. When I was a kid I could enjoy something like a John Jakes narrative. Now I read for hermeneutics, for learning how to steal, for judging x against y. I never read just to enjoy a damn book, and I'm not really sure I could, which is exactly my problem with a novel like The Road; it plays against too many traditions.

[kilted exile]

However, I think that it leads to the problem of our over-education. When I was a kid I could enjoy something like a John Jakes narrative. Now I read for hermeneutics, for learning how to steal, for judging x against y. I never read just to enjoy a damn book, and I'm not really sure I could, which is exactly my problem with a novel like The Road; it plays against too many traditions.

I am in the very lucky position in this regard that I have never studied lit at all. I read constantly but do so only for the sake of reading


erm that doesnt read right: lucky is not the word I mean.

[JBI]

Although he is right about Atonement.

I'm yet to see someone name a particularly memorable "English Novelist" (note, if you count Rushdie in here, and Naipaul, perhaps that makes sense, though I hardly see them as English Novelists, in the sense that their best work has nothing to do with England, and stylistically is very unenglish).

As for books I like, well, yeah, perhaps. I don't think the novel is out, I think the English novel, and its concept of narrative are out, in the sense that the Nouveau Roman completely recreated the French novel. There was no such coherent movement in English prose, things sort of just started to melt (without the general readership knowing or caring).

The concept of the Occidental Novel has been exhausted. Lets Face It, it has. Besides which, it is impossible to judge anything on what is liked, as books tend to sell quickly, and disappear quickly. I don't see you championing the next bodice ripper, which, by the way, outsell virtually everything.

In that sense, Dan Brown has essentially faded from literary history, JK Rowling is disappearing quickly, Twilight will soon go, Romances change weekly, Grisham seems to have quieted a bit, though Stephen King seems to be going strong.

The novel, moreso than any form, is the least prosperous, yet the most read - novels matter little, yet sell many. The general reason for this, is that essentially it has suffered becoming the dominant commercial mode of writing outside of journalism. You can't get rich writing short stories, poems, drama, or non-fiction (unless you write some bigoted rubbish, or some stupidity without footnotes or any purpose), but you can get rich writing novels if you are very, very, very lucky, and you can make a decent living even if you aren't lucky (romance writers make decent salaries - not fantastic ones, but enough to get buy). As a poet, even if you are T. S. Eliot, you can't make a living. As a playwright, you pretty much can't make a living either. As a scholar, your job relies on institution for support, rather than sales. As a novelist though, there is always that opportunity, and therefore, there is always that yielding to the potential of sales over the potential of freedom. A novel reader won't take an author the same way as a poetry reader, and because of it, novels have, and will suffer, always.

Eco is perhaps the person who realized this the best. He even writes with two separate audiences in mind, giving a sample flavor on one hand to the average reader, with content aimed at them, yet on another level, he has a completely ironic set of jokes that only a specialist in the field would completely get, and perhaps the well read person would pick up on some of them. That's why his novel Baudolino didn't do as well as The Name of the Rose; Eco took the academic audience over the popular one, and set the book in a time when the common reader wouldn't be able to get any of the jokes, which are numerous, very ironic, yet reliant on so much manuscript history as to make getting all of them impossible (I found that I stumbled upon many of them by chance - for instance, I got the references to the Arch Poet by the chance of having read through the lyrics booklet of my CD of Carmina Burana by Carl Orff, and others in similar, unlikely ways). The point is though, that Eco realized this, and perhaps bent over slightly to the popular. On the other hand, he is a skilled novelist, so he made up for it.


That is just really one problem though. There is also the problem of the form as being just a form. Poetry is not just a form, therefore it has adapted well over time, whereas the novel is a form, and hasn't really morphed into its next shape completely yet. The novel is similar in a sense, to epic poetry, in that it is merely one facet of literature. It certainly is not the be all and end all that it is made out to be by most readers (academic and common). I see no reason why it can't be suggested that it should either move forward or die. In most cases, I see no justification why the text should be read, and not just a movie made with the plot. In such cases, I ask myself why even bother read the text.

The novel needs freshness, and, unless some genius comes from somewhere, I hardly doubt it will come from England. Like I said, it is hard to find a novelist from England worth real mention right now, despite my trying. In that sense, we can only just wait and see. Generally though, if something great is to come, it won't be in the past traditions, that is for sure, it will completely redefine the "English novel" in the sense that Wordsworth redefined poetry, and Whitman redefined poetry after him.


Right now, it feels like England has exhausted itself. Larkin and Auden picked up on this exhaustion decades ago, and England has never recovered. America has exhausted itself too...

And where will the next wave of brilliant literature come from? No... let me guess... Canada? (Or perhaps China):D. Seriously, this reminds me of the same sort of theoretical dribble that was thrown around some 25 years ago concerning the imminent "death of painting"... and yet the old boy still seems to be going strong. Perhaps he will never hold the position he once had before the days of photography and film, but he still hasn't quite given up the ghost. If anything seems to be petering out it is the sort of dry conceptualism that was imagined would replace painting.

Perhaps in the US, there are many immigrants writing great stuff there right now. I doubt novels from Canada, as the novel, as a form, isn't as important as the Short Story. India certainly - China won't get many translations for a while, so probably not there, besides which, they have their own stuff to work out first, so I am told - perhaps some more from Africa - I bet we get a lot more Middle Eastern Prose soon. The West Indies are still stronger per capita than generally any area in the world, - generally, I'd say the so called "West", most of Canada included, has exhausted itself. The best works in all these countries seem to be coming from minority voices. Certainly in Canada, the best writing comes from minorities (though most Canadian specialists would scold me at this point). In the US too, I feel strong things from newly arrived immigrants, though their reaction to their new country is very, very different than Canada, and has produced some strange hybrids in terms of novels and stories, and scholarships for that matter (American culture politics mixed with immigration problems create sometimes interesting, sometimes quite annoying literature), but on the whole, guessing is hard to say.

I'm pretty much at the point where I think the novel is exhausted. So it won't matter exactly from where, but more in what form.

[Lokasenna]

I suspect that history will consider J. R. R. Tolkein as THE author of the last century...

Ha ha ha...:lol: Nothing like a good laugh after a day at work. (That was a joke... wasn't it?)

...and he's certainly going to survive.

He will survive for the foreseeable future in a manner not unlike Alexander Dumas (The Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte Cristo, etc...) as the writer of adventure tales that appeal especially to young readers and the unversed... but are barely recognized as "classics" by subsequent writers, critics, and the well-read.

I must, in a light-hearted and amiable way, leap to the defence of my beloved hero, Prof. Tolkein :lol:. For starters:

[URL="http://www.amazon.co.uk/J-R-R-Tolkien-Author-Century-T-Shippey/dp/0261104012/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1244278580&sr=8-3"/URL]

And Prof. Shippey (whom I've had the pleasure of meeting, and have listened to several of his lectures) is not just some random crank with a Tolkein obsession - he is one of the most respected Medieval scholars in the world.

Tolkein didn't just write adventure stories - rather, he was the culmination of a medieval revival that began in the mid-Victorian era. But while they merely began translating and rereading the old Icelandic and Germanic sources, he was the first to really start composing new material, and it really is brilliant, both from an entertainment and an academic point of view.

That said, I really do appreciate that it is a matter of taste. My dislike of Woolf and Lawrence is subjective, although I will admit that Woolf had some talent with wordplay. Similarly, I do know plenty of people who can't stand Tolkein. All I'm saying is that we should not write off either his considerable talent, or his major impact on the literary and academic scene.

[curlyqlink]

I think Scottish writer A. Kennedy has what it takes to be considered a "great" writer. As does Iris Murdoch.


Tolkein didn't just write adventure stories - rather, he was the culmination of a medieval revival that began in the mid-Victorian era. But while they merely began translating and rereading the old Icelandic and Germanic sources, he was the first to really start composing new material, and it really is brilliant, both from an entertainment and an academic point of view.
I'm glad you find Tolkien "brilliant". I found him to be long-winded, childish in his tastes, and remarkably unoriginal.

I have no idea where the "new material" enters into Lord of the Rings. It's based on a Wagner opera that is based on an Icelandic Saga, the Volsungs Saga. Wagner was understandably wowed by the story when he discovered it; in the original, it is extremely powerful stuff. Wagner uprooted it, romanticized it, "Germanicized" it; but for all his bombast Wagner was still a genius.

At its third remove, in Tolkien's labored and tamed version, the Saga has lost all of its native force. He made it into something polite, he took a savage tale and set it amongst the fairies and sprites of an imagined English garden.

In tone, it is a boy's fantasy, a fantasy of high adventure in suburbia, much like Harry Potter or Superman. Boys will always dream about swordfights and magical powers. Lord of the Rings may well live on, but then so may Star Wars; they have much of their appeal in common and they were both ripped off from a classical source.

[Scheherazade]

Nobody is going to mention Ms. Rowling?

[Jozanny]

At its third remove, in Tolkien's labored and tamed version, the Saga has lost all of its native force. He made it into something polite, he took a savage tale and set it amongst the fairies and sprites of an imagined English garden.

In tone, it is a boy's fantasy, a fantasy of high adventure in suburbia, much like Harry Potter or Superman. Boys will always dream about swordfights and magical powers. Lord of the Rings may well live on, but then so may Star Wars; they have much of their appeal in common and they were both ripped off from a classical source.

I am no expert on Tolkien's source material, far from it, but I read all five novels of the saga, with the last being the weakest. The Silmarillion was rather unnecessary as a summation novel--but I am going to hedge--and say that, in comparison to contemporary fantasy, LOTR is a great niche work. It does not mean that I rank Tolkien up there with great British novelists, but as fantasy entertainment LOTR hasn't been surpassed. It offers lessons about the seduction of evil, the waste of vainglory, the humility of simple decency, the exacting toll of the desire for absolute authoritarianism. In that sense, it works as a parable, and follows the English traditions such as can be found in Beowulf and the Arthurian legends. Byatt does this herself, but in a much more sophisticated fashion--but perhaps six does point to a particular problem.

The Spanish have Cervantes, and everything pretty much comes from him, in terms of great novels.

The French have Flaubert and Proust.

The Americans have Melville and Faulkner.

I cannot think of a British equivalent to any great European or American novelists, and I don't think the comedy of manners--such that Austen represents, is equal to other great works of realism or modernism; maybe I am just tired.

I mean, there is Dickens, but one can only laugh in comparing Dickens to another movement novelist.

I give up.

[Virgil]

I cannot think of a British equivalent to any great European or American novelists, and I don't think the comedy of manners--such that Austen represents, is equal to other great works of realism or modernism; maybe I am just tired.

I mean, there is Dickens, but one can only laugh in comparing Dickens to another movement novelist.

I give up.

There is Dickens, yes. Don't forget the 18th century novelists of Richardson, Fielding, Austen and Scott, though the last two straddled into the 19th. But I think Shakespeare (yes, I know a playwrite) set a standard by which no one has ever equaled. He remains at the pinnicle of English literature.

[meh!]

I think Scottish writer A. Kennedy has what it takes to be considered a "great" writer. As does Iris Murdoch.



I do think A.L. Kennedy is an excellent writer (and a good comedian, btw, I saw here recently in Glasgow). I've always liked her shot stories a lot.

[Mr Endon]

I'd say Henry Green. I've only read Living, but I remember really liking it, it's exactly what a novel's supposed to be.

[kelby_lake]

Lets be honest, is Atonement really a superb work? It's a rather silly story, written in a terribly boring omniscient voice, loaded with all the typical clichés, yet still is held as perhaps the greatest work in the vein of "British novel" in the last little while.

Traditional narrative practices hold no real weight anymore, and are only flings to be read once and discarded - the form is exhausted, and built on a set of clichés.


I don't think Atonement is a superb work, but I did find it moving. Cliches are cliches because they work- we repeat them over and over so they sound a bit silly, but they still work. With good books, the cliches are hidden, but they're still there.

On Chesil Beach was critically acclaimed but it's the dullest thing ever. At least Moby Dick had whales. At the end of Chesil, you sort of see all the clever devices but don't really care.

Can't think of any recent British novellist that was any good- I like the Americans :) We've had some decent theatre in between 1950 and now, I think.

[TheFifthElement]

Come on guys, don't you read? There's plenty of good writers coming out of all countries, and this speculation of what people will be reading in 100 years time is just that, speculation. Maybe no one thought Shakespeare would be read 100 years later at the time. Sure, there's a lot of stuff out there which is holiday reading, so what? Time to start thinking about what's good, instead of falling into the cliche of nit-picking and quibbling and claiming that everything even remotely contemporary must be cr*p. Or so it seems to me, anyway.

So, how about thinking about these guys:

Angela Carter
Jeanette Winterson
David Mitchell
Anthony Burgess
J G Farrell
Graham Swift
Iris Murdoch
John Fowles
Lawrence Durrell
J.G. Ballard
Kazuo Ishiguro
A S Byatt
Martin Amis

newer writers:
Steven Hall
John McGregor
? who knows


I think The Road may sour me on Blood Meridian, when I start it, which is perhaps unfortunate.
Hi Jozy :) I really enjoyed The Road but I found Blood Meridian boring and a bit of a disappointment. I thought McCarthy had something but then I read a couple more of his books and they seemed, samey. And I began to wonder if he could write without the words 'slant', 'wise' and 'stricken'. So I don't know. Bit torn on that one.


Martin Aimis's Lucky Jim is hilarious.
Come on Virgil, that'd be Kingsley Amis! He was Martin Amis's dad.

[Virgil]

Come on guys, don't you read? There's plenty of good writers coming out of all countries, and this speculation of what people will be reading in 100 years time is just that, speculation. Maybe no one thought Shakespeare would be read 100 years later at the time. Sure, there's a lot of stuff out there which is holiday reading, so what? Time to start thinking about what's good, instead of falling into the cliche of nit-picking and quibbling and claiming that everything even remotely contemporary must be cr*p. Or so it seems to me, anyway.

So, how about thinking about these guys:

Angela Carter
Jeanette Winterson
David Mitchell
Anthony Burgess
J G Farrell
Graham Swift
Iris Murdoch
John Fowles
Lawrence Durrell
J.G. Ballard
Kazuo Ishiguro
A S Byatt
Martin Amis

newer writers:
Steven Hall
John McGregor
? who knows


Some good ones there Fifth. I considered Burgess but the strength of his career as a novelists seems to be one novel, A Clockwork Orange. Truely a great work. Sort of like Orwell and 1984. I considered Ishiguro, but is he British? I guess so. Fowles is an interesting pick. I had overlooked him. I mentioned some you list, and the others I have idea on.


Come on Virgil, that'd be Kingsley Amis! He was Martin Amis's dad.

:blush: You're right. I always, always get the two confused.

[TheFifthElement]

I always, always get the two confused.
There's an easy way to tell: one is dead, one isn't. Just use your alphabet ;)

[promtbr]

I love this forum... I really do.

When I ocasionally have the urge for some literary amusement, I check back and can always count on threads like this, along with "What is the most boring...", "Who else hates..."

Pretty much all the opinions posted so far I find hilarious. Only stlukesguild took exception to dismissing all Modernist Fiction out of hand...

Considering Post War American novelists (when the thread of course got sidetracked a ways back) as a weak group is also pretty comedic.

Find another country's Post War fiction practitioners that would stand the test of time against:

Bellow, Bowles, Roth, Gaddis, Pynchon, Barth, Gass, Hawkes, Coover, Elkins, Carver, Barthelme, Morrison, Ozick and McCarthy (who's Blood Meridian and Suttree will stand tall for a LONG long time).. You have Crowley on the horizon...

My guess would be that you have of heard of maybe half of all the above, am I right? Which fact does not mean it disproves my argument, it proves some of you need to get 'out' more...


I do acknowledge that the conclusion seems to be a rather weak representation of British Novelists Post War, but if any are going to stand it will be in fifth's list, he pretty much nails it



---

[stlukesguild]

Virgil... check into Burgess' Nothing Like the Sun, A Dead Man at Deptford, the Enderby Novels, etc... Probably the greatest follower of Joyce after Beckett.

[JCamilo]

And where will the next wave of brilliant literature come from? No... let me guess... Canada? (Or perhaps China):D. Seriously, this reminds me of the same sort of theoretical dribble that was thrown around some 25 years ago concerning the imminent "death of painting"... and yet the old boy still seems to be going strong. Perhaps he will never hold the position he once had before the days of photography and film, but he still hasn't quite given up the ghost. If anything seems to be petering out it is the sort of dry conceptualism that was imagined would replace painting.


Okay, but he is not exactly wrong about the concept of Novel/Romance to be exausted. After Joyce, Woolf (Someone suggested there is no great english romancist with her?), etc and after Pierre Menard and Magic Realism it do seems like a harder task to add anything new to the formula.
Sure, since in art all deaths are relative, we are going to find one or another great work. There is Lolita, there is The Devil to pay in the badlands, Gravity Rainbow but mostly, the formula is so struck that Dan Browns of life can write since they can make readers "follow one chapter after another" and this is a banalization... not something to be pround.
I think the americans and the great american novel dream is getting dust. Maybe the english are just free of that and thus they could be doing something else with literature (because it is not only about writing novels anyways), not sure if they are doing. But the americans still produce something good like Cormac MacCarthy. You can not even follow dialogues after dialogues, everything is movement, in this he do seems more latin american (Or Italo Calvino) than north american. Even The Road, it is like watching a good George Romero zombie movie. If the guy did a good movie...
There is a funny thing, I remember E.M.Foster arguing that english literature (and here he is talking about irish, american,etc) did not produced a single work worth of Crime and Punishment, Brothers Karamazov, War and Peace and Anna Karenina. It was in the end of 20's (so, we see, he was missing Joyce and Woolf under his noise, and obviously ignored Melville, Conrad, Kipling, Dickens) but I suppose this dramatic future of english novel is not something new. :D

[JBI]

So, how about thinking about these guys:

Angela Carter
Jeanette Winterson
David Mitchell
Anthony Burgess
J G Farrell
Graham Swift
Iris Murdoch
John Fowles
Lawrence Durrell
J.G. Ballard
Kazuo Ishiguro
A S Byatt
Martin Amis

newer writers:
Steven Hall
John McGregor
? who knows



I don't like to nitpick lists, but as for Carter, for instance, she is far better as a story writer than novelist - her novels are OK, but she really works better in shorter forms. Byatt to me seems rather dull and boring, Amis the same. Burgess is long dead, and I'm with Virgil on only valuing A Clockwork Orange, though perhaps only for the Kubrick film. Can we consider Ishiguro an English novelist? I don't particularly think he writes in the vein of English novel (as a genre), though perhaps we can, in the sense that we can call Rushdie an English novelist. But really, that list seems strained; from the ones I read on that list, most seem to be rooted in 80s modes of fiction, and seem to lack any real vision of the future.

The market of these books has become a joke. We now have "Literary Novels" as a section in a bookstore, which are essentially normal novels, with perhaps circuitous narration in places, and language above a 6th grade level. When I read these sorts of lists, I can't help but feel that all these names are such conventional, almost householdish names. Take the late Updike's work. Had he started writing now, we would have completely ignored him. He was a revolutionary for his time, but now, all his modes are conventions. That's how I feel about these novelists - they write in a form that has become convention, and don't do much in terms of innovation. They are all such 1980s novelists, that it's almost painful to read; when will literature move on? Clearly it is in the process of moving on, in the sense that there are more interesting works being written now that I know of (perhaps not in Brit Fiction, because underground and New voices rarely make it over here). But still, I can't help but feel there is this tugging to a sort of watered down post-modern novel (watered down meaning essentially a simplification and a decent back into older, usually 19th century conventions, as apposed to radicalized forms).

[Virgil]

Virgil... check into Burgess' Nothing Like the Sun, A Dead Man at Deptford, the Enderby Novels, etc... Probably the greatest follower of Joyce after Beckett.

Thanks I will. I've read The Wanting Seed, which I felt was a good novel, but not great. I do recommend it.

[kelby_lake]

Considering Post War American novelists (when the thread of course got sidetracked a ways back) as a weak group is also pretty comedic.

Find another country's Post War fiction practitioners that would stand the test of time against:

Bellow, Bowles, Roth, Gaddis, Pynchon, Barth, Gass, Hawkes, Coover, Elkins, Carver, Barthelme, Morrison, Ozick and McCarthy (who's Blood Meridian and Suttree will stand tall for a LONG long time).. You have Crowley on the horizon...

My guess would be that you have of heard of maybe half of all the above, am I right? Which fact does not mean it disproves my argument, it proves some of you need to get 'out' more...


But the authors you listed are American, aren't they? Whereas the thread is about the British novel in decline.

Have heard of a few of the above but they aren't definitively great, that's just your opinion.

[Trystan]

He has probably been mentioned already, but: the late, great JG Ballard. He provided some fascinating insights into the modern world and the modern mind. Dostoevsky and Turgenev did that in the 19th Century and will still read them for that. So . . . yes, JG Ballard.

[Lokasenna]

I'm glad you find Tolkien "brilliant". I found him to be long-winded, childish in his tastes, and remarkably unoriginal.

I have no idea where the "new material" enters into Lord of the Rings. It's based on a Wagner opera that is based on an Icelandic Saga, the Volsungs Saga. Wagner was understandably wowed by the story when he discovered it; in the original, it is extremely powerful stuff. Wagner uprooted it, romanticized it, "Germanicized" it; but for all his bombast Wagner was still a genius.

At its third remove, in Tolkien's labored and tamed version, the Saga has lost all of its native force. He made it into something polite, he took a savage tale and set it amongst the fairies and sprites of an imagined English garden.

In tone, it is a boy's fantasy, a fantasy of high adventure in suburbia, much like Harry Potter or Superman. Boys will always dream about swordfights and magical powers. Lord of the Rings may well live on, but then so may Star Wars; they have much of their appeal in common and they were both ripped off from a classical source.

Wagner actually based his Ring Cycle on the Nibelunglied, which is an old Germanic poem. Völsunga saga is indeed an Icelandic text, and both are derived from a much earlier source material, which is now lost (if indeed it was ever codified). Thought there are many similarities, the two versions have plenty of differences, the obvious one being that Sigurðr is entirely absent from the Germanic version, while he is the main character in the Old Norse source.

While I'm sure that Tolkein was familiar with Wagner, the fact that he is considered one of the greatest medieval critics that we have had, who lectured and wrote extensively on Old Norse and Anglo-Saxon literature, would suggest his great familiarity with the source material. One case in point would be the latest thing they've published (Sigurd and Gudrún) from his files - the man was writing his own Eddaic poetry, extrapolated from the source materials in terms of content and style, to fit into the gaps of the poetic canon surrounding the prose Völsunga saga. As far as I am aware, no one else has tried that, and if they have, they certainly haven't advertised the fact.

That said, he borrowed some motifs from Völsunga saga, but they're hardly uncommon. Aspects like the reforging of a broken sword, or the idea of a magic ring, are extremely common tropes in the Fornaldarsögur. Other bits of his material are startlingly original in their reinvention and reapplication.

As for your personal opinion on the quality of his writing, then I respectfully disagree, and I freely acknowledge that he won't be for everyone's tastes. But I honestly think that a comparison to Star Wars is to do it a disservice - to think of it as a mere escapist fantasy is to ignore the subtlety with which Tolkien uses his source material and his own imagination. His works are as much an academic exercise as they are a literary one.

[JBI]

Wagner actually based his Ring Cycle on the Nibelunglied, which is an old Germanic poem. Völsunga saga is indeed an Icelandic text, and both are derived from a much earlier source material, which is now lost (if indeed it was ever codified). Thought there are many similarities, the two versions have plenty of differences, the obvious one being that Sigurðr is entirely absent from the Germanic version, while he is the main character in the Old Norse source.

While I'm sure that Tolkein was familiar with Wagner, the fact that he is considered one of the greatest medieval critics that we have had, who lectured and wrote extensively on Old Norse and Anglo-Saxon literature, would suggest his great familiarity with the source material. One case in point would be the latest thing they've published (Sigurd and Gudrún) from his files - the man was writing his own Eddaic poetry, extrapolated from the source materials in terms of content and style, to fit into the gaps of the poetic canon surrounding the prose Völsunga saga. As far as I am aware, no one else has tried that, and if they have, they certainly haven't advertised the fact.

That said, he borrowed some motifs from Völsunga saga, but they're hardly uncommon. Aspects like the reforging of a broken sword, or the idea of a magic ring, are extremely common tropes in the Fornaldarsögur. Other bits of his material are startlingly original in their reinvention and reapplication.

As for your personal opinion on the quality of his writing, then I respectfully disagree, and I freely acknowledge that he won't be for everyone's tastes. But I honestly think that a comparison to Star Wars is to do it a disservice - to think of it as a mere escapist fantasy is to ignore the subtlety with which Tolkien uses his source material and his own imagination. His works are as much an academic exercise as they are a literary one.

Hmm, I've not read that he was "one of the greatest" medievalists. I know he put out two books, one on fairy stories, another on Beowulf, and did a translation of Sir Gawain, but I wasn't aware that he was anything special, in terms of criticism. I think, actually the comparison to Star Wars is perhaps accurate - it certainly features the same themes, structure, and characters as the Star Wars trilogy, which, was, essentially constructed out of a reading of Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces. OF course, the cast in Tolkien is longer, but the ideas are pretty much the same.

[Jozanny]

I think, actually the comparison to Star Wars is perhaps accurate - it certainly features the same themes, structure, and characters as the Star Wars trilogy, which, was, essentially constructed out of a reading of Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces. OF course, the cast in Tolkien is longer, but the ideas are pretty much the same.

But what is wrong with this if we look @ LOTR as quality didactic entertainment? It was a decent saga. I cared about the way of life of the Hobbits, and Gandolph, and wanted them to succeed. Star Wars is a different medium, but relatively enjoyable, at least the first three. I really don't mind good trash JBI, and maybe that is a difference here.

Am I going to dash off and develop a thesis on Darth Vader's limited complexity as a flawed hero? Maybe not, but I don't mind a romp in a decent day camp, and I am not sure why Tolkien deserves castigation; his middle earth has an authentic legendary quality to me.

[JCamilo]

I do not think it is wrong comparing to Star Wars, specially because in the end, Star Wars have a decent use of narratives, but Tolkien didnt needed Campbell (not to mention, he had more a linguistic than a psychologist approach), anyways, I doubt many would deny Tolkien quality as scholar, but this does not exclude the flaws of LoTR (by the way, I think Silmarillion is much more interesting and original). The idea that he may be placed alongside Dumas seems to be correct and to me is more than a compliment (Dumas had qualities after all), to be some short of bordeline classic.
The notion that he created anything new is exagerated as it is the notion that he should be dismissed for using old sources. And the idea that he is just something popular should be considered: he is not a typical best-seller, his narrative is not exactly fluid, awkward poems and songs in the middle of the story, long and very detailed description of the geography, accurate timeline, linguistic experiments, some elements that could appear unecessary for the narrative (Tom Bombadill or the final chapters) which would be eliminated by any editor to reduce the size of the books. He is not a Dan Brown kind of guy, but people like him. I suppose it is fair to say something he learnt from his studies and applied well. But really, one could argue Agatha Christie is the greatest post-war english novelist because she did everything right, immortalized his characters, in her "area" she is also some short of "specialist"...

[Karl Rommel]

Simply ask yourself: What modern British novels do you possess?
A quick look on my bookshelf reveals:

David Nobbs
Angus Wilson
Fay Weldon
Jeanette Winterson

Now for someone who hardly ever reads a novel, this has to be saying something. What they all have in common is that one or more of their novels have been adapted into a TV series. Hence my reading them.

[prendrelemick]

Jeanette Winterson, could be a contender, but does the quality of the work count ?

Tolkien is the front runner, and deservedly so. OK he wrote fantasy and he's popular but so what?

[stlukesguild]

Tolkein is the 'front-runner"? Does anyone seriously imagine that Tolkein can stand along side of Saul Bellow, Phillip Roth, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Cormack McCarthy, or John Barth? That was the original question: what post-War British novelist do we imagine standing on such a level and surviving. If we're going the Tolkein route I'd suggest Mervyn Peake might be a far better alternative.

[PabloQ]

As I read through this thread, Anthony Burgess' name kept echoing in my head. Finally, FifthElement comes to the rescue and embeds his name in a substantial list of folks most of whom I've never read. The point that A Clockwork Orange may be the only work of Burgess to survive the test of time may be valid, but it's unfair. I can't go into a book store today and find his works on the shelves. That, in and of itself, may make Self's point. I read the Enderby novels many, many years ago and ended up enjoying them more than Orange. Burgess is worthy of some enduring recognition beyond that single novel.

[kilted exile]

Throwing in a good word for LeCarre. He suffers because he is popular & written best-sellers so is not taken to be a serious writer, but he was very talented & definitely not be cast out with the likes of Brown, Rowling & Grisham. Definitely an equal of Cormack McCarthy anyway.

[PabloQ]

Tolkein is the 'front-runner"? Does anyone seriously imagine that Tolkein can stand along side of Saul Bellow, Phillip Roth, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Cormack McCarthy, or John Barth? That was the original question: what post-War British novelist do we imagine standing on such a level and surviving. If we're going the Tolkein route I'd suggest Mervyn Peake might be a far better alternative.
But SLG, none of the folks on your are British, which is the original question. Much of what JBI is saying about the state of the novel in general apply to Tolkien. His most famous work will endure through time more through its popularity than as a novel. Tolkien's editor virtually ruined the novel by hacking it up into pieces. It's organization is irritating. Peter Jackson did the world a favor by telling the story with a chronology that made sense. The novel feels like someone lost a game of 52 pickup. Tolkien's work will endure, but not because he was anything special as novelist.

[meh!]

Along with Alasdair Gray I would suggest another Scottish author: James Kelman. Deeply moving, profound and doing great things with language.

[prendrelemick]

Tolkein is the 'front-runner"? Does anyone seriously imagine that Tolkein can stand along side of Saul Bellow, Phillip Roth, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Cormack McCarthy, or John Barth? That was the original question: what post-War British novelist do we imagine standing on such a level and surviving. If we're going the Tolkein route I'd suggest Mervyn Peake might be a far better alternative.

Mervin Peake!
The question hinges on the term "Major Author" I would suggest that Tolkien fits the bill. He's widley read, his works have inspired many artists and musicians and writers, they have spawned thousands of imitations, people are inspired by them. I won't say he invented a genre, but he picked it up, reshaped it and sent it on its way. Unlike Roth, Bellow, McCarthy et al, he was unpretentious enough to keep himself out of the story.

The problem is his subject. Major Authors don't do Fantasy. His craft is well up to scratch.

[Lokasenna]

The problem is his subject. Major Authors don't do Fantasy. His craft is well up to scratch.

Couldn't agree with you more.

That says more about our perception of literature more than the literature itself. I'm sure that an Anglo-Saxon/Old Norse audience would have regarded Tolkien as a powerful and visionary artist, while probably being horribly confused by Mrs Dalloway, though I suspect they would have appreciated the musicality of her prose. Alas, the modern world has become somewhat snobby about certain literary genres; some people seem to assume that if a text isn't based on reality, then it somehow loses validity and pertinence.

[Jozanny]

Loka,

I am somewhat in the middle ground here. I think Tolkien is above par as commercially viable entertainment, and I do not disparage LOTR for what it is not, and I also think the themes within the series are worth respect. I would put Golding, with LOTF, in the same category, along with Hammett, for an American, but I have a certain extra fondness for Hammett, as I studied him under an aging 60's activist who "has an FBI file" to paraphrase his own words, and then under a retired Jewish professor who provided me with additional insights through a less famous novel--

but that said, to me, for novels to be the absolute best, they have to transcend something. For an atheist, transcendence is still oddly important to me, and sixsmith inadvertently started me thinking that few British novels hit this watermark for me. Austen, ahem ahaw, is yes a great writer, but she basically says the same thing in five books, and in Emma, seems to deliberately undercut what she takes more seriously in P&P.

Dickens is a great melodramist, but he isn't quite Austen and he's no realist, at least not in the Jamesian fashion.

Now, the Brits and the Americans still spar over Henry James. Both claim him, but to me he is an American expatriate, so I don't cede him to England, but if I did, that would solve this problem--which is, that I cannot think of a British movement novelist that is close to Joyce, Proust, and other modernists, both European and American, whose work is in some sense, transcendent. I know of no Anglo Broch, or Musil, Faulkner, even a Hemingway--with two possible exceptions, as I mentioned before, who will grow in stature with time, and those are Byatt and Lessing--though with Byatt I have to read more.

Given your enthusiasm for Tolkien, you'd like Byatt's "Little Black Book of Stories". She does things with fableism that surpass Tolkien.

[TheFifthElement]

That was the original question: what post-War British novelist do we imagine standing on such a level and surviving.

Actually it wasn't. The original question was:


which contemporary (post war) english language novelists will be read 100 years hence

I think Tolkien will still be read 100 years from now whether or not he's considered 'high literature'. I believe LoTR holds the record as the second highest selling book (in Britain anyway). Second to the Bible, that is.

If Tolkien is in the frame then C.S. Lewis is likely to survive also. I'd dismissed Lewis as too early, but he was writing around the same time as Tolkien. They were pals, apparently.

Mervyn Peake is pretty cool too :)

I suppose the difficulty for British writers, when you're talking about innovation and the like, is the pressure of all that history of great writers which have kind of set the standard against which all following writers fail. And the further difficulty, of course, of not knowing if those original great writers were truly great or just lucky that printing was fairly new or not that widespread.

Interesting, all this talk of DeLillo. I found DeLillo oppressively boring and have no intention of reading any more of him now, let alone in 100 years ;) Never heard of Bellow either, or Barth. Just going off to look them up...

[sixsmith]

Originally Posted by stlukesguild
That was the original question: what post-War British novelist do we imagine standing on such a level and surviving.
Actually it wasn't. The original question was:

Quote:
Originally Posted by sixsmith
which contemporary (post war) english language novelists will be read 100 years hence


Interesting, all this talk of DeLillo. I found DeLillo oppressively boring and have no intention of reading any more of him now, let alone in 100 years ;) Never heard of Bellow either, or Barth. Just going off to look them up...

I think my original intent was more commensurate with what stluke has said but the question was admittedly vague. In any case on a practical level you are quite right. Whether we currently consider Tolkien sufficiently literary will not dictate his posterity. I have not read him so i cannot speak to either possibility.

De Lillo can be infuriating. Which book (s) have you read? The paranoia/conspiracy/plot motif can get a bit much and isn't particularly nuanced. I found Libra to be a very powerful and moving novel and White Noise to be a very clever and disturbingly funny one. The others are tough going. I assume you're joking re Bellow.

Interested to hear your views on Byatt Jozanny. In Wood's essay (an essay on Iris Murdoch), he suggests that Byatt (along with Spark and Drabble) restricts the freedom of her charcters with 'bossy authorial intrusion'.
Not read her so i may have to find out for myself.

[Jozanny]

Interesting, all this talk of DeLillo. I found DeLillo oppressively boring and have no intention of reading any more of him now, let alone in 100 years ;) Never heard of Bellow either, or Barth. Just going off to look them up...

Fifth: I cannot fully defend DeLillo as a paramount post-modernist. Underworld is a very large novel, and I only got into the opening fifty pages before I was beset by library fines (I might buy the book), but he isn't boring. The opening of Underworld was riveting, the best of any contemporary writing I can think of.

He may be otherwise uneven, but boring really doesn't do his efforts justice, the meticulous attention to detail, the ability to glide the reader through movement sequences effortlessly. He can put you in the head of a black kid from Harlem besting the white man's world through his wit and survival instinct, and mesh this with the mindset of Hoover during the cold war, and then connect this to the perfection of modern mechanics in a fast driven Lexus.

I may be an obscure author, but I haven't spent 20 years of blood and treasure not learning something about the achievement of excellence, and DeLillo really knows how to pitch episodes in sharp and distinct bites of clarity.

How he adds up, at the end of the day, I can't say, but I know a narrative voice in the major leagues when I see it.

[JCamilo]

But SLG, none of the folks on your are British, which is the original question. Much of what JBI is saying about the state of the novel in general apply to Tolkien. His most famous work will endure through time more through its popularity than as a novel. Tolkien's editor virtually ruined the novel by hacking it up into pieces. It's organization is irritating. Peter Jackson did the world a favor by telling the story with a chronology that made sense. The novel feels like someone lost a game of 52 pickup. Tolkien's work will endure, but not because he was anything special as novelist.

Eh? Peter Jackson butchered Tolkien in a mindless show off of predicatable steriotypes. He destroyed Tolkien geography and chronology to satisfy people who can only read Dan Brown or watch James Cameron movies. When Tolkien was alive some dude sent him a script to approval and Tolkien listed the reasons why it was crap. It works for Peter Jackson (an awful director. The LoTR movie triology is just a thrailler for the DVD. 10 hours of movies to sell DVDs.) as well. And the editor and Tolkien worked alongside with the division of chapters of LoTR, Tolkien who separated the work with chapters, nto the editor (and I have no idea what is wrong with the chronology of such books).

And sorry, however is pointing that the problem of Tolkien is because he wrote fantasy, this is silly. Major literary figures wrote fantasy, Kafka and Borges, mostly in the XX century. And that is one of the reason why Tolkien occupies this bordeline position - he was just worst than them. Yet, I think he will be read yet in the future because of his merits, and he is not the one who will save the english post-war novel. No more than Agatha Christie will. Or Bram Stoker, or Dumas, or Conan Doyle were.

[kelby_lake]

Kafka didn't write fantasy, he was a surrealist. Fantasy is a genre relying on mythical worlds and creatures and magic.

[PabloQ]

Eh? Peter Jackson butchered Tolkien in a mindless show off of predicatable steriotypes. He destroyed Tolkien geography and chronology to satisfy people who can only read Dan Brown or watch James Cameron movies. When Tolkien was alive some dude sent him a script to approval and Tolkien listed the reasons why it was crap. It works for Peter Jackson (an awful director. The LoTR movie triology is just a thrailler for the DVD. 10 hours of movies to sell DVDs.) as well. And the editor and Tolkien worked alongside with the division of chapters of LoTR, Tolkien who separated the work with chapters, nto the editor (and I have no idea what is wrong with the chronology of such books).

Like the movies, don't like the movies, that's not my point. My point is that the work, The Hobbit and LOTR, will transcend time. But not because the writing is anything special or extraordinary or that the novel are well constructed. I've read LOTR three times. It really is poorly constructed as a novel (and it really is only one). The main characters disappear for an entire half of the second part so that the author can back track and tell the story of the other members of the broken fellowship. There is a tremendous amount of fluff there. And then there's the second part of the third book that has so much unnecessary anti-climactic material, you really have to be a fan to wade through it to the end. But it's a popular story and that is what will make it endure, not Tolkien's writing ability.

Which is a lot of what I take from JBI's entries. There is a million tons of popular fiction novels available, most of which are targeted to make a buck. If a truly artistic novel, welll-written, innovative, and revolutionary were to be produced by any modern day author it is questionable whether it would be published and, if published, whether it would get enough critical acclaim to be read. JBI has declared the novel dead. He may be right; I want him to be wrong.

We'll never all agree on any one point in these threads. StLukesGuild might look at a Jackson Pollack and see art; I might see a drop cloth for sale. But that's okay, it's what makes these forums fun. I'll admit that I am completely ignorant of the state of the post-war British novel. As I read through the thread, I couldn't get Burgess out of my head and he's dead. He may be remembered, in the long run, for just one novel, just like Tolkien.

I purposely kept American authors out my thinking as I readi the thread, despite the reference to English-writing authors and the number of American writers brought up in the course of the discussion. But if I were to pick a post-war American novelist whose works might endure 100 years, I'd pick Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., especially Slaughterhouse-Five and Cat's Cradle. Some of the other American writers mentioned might endure and for others it might be too soon to tell. Vonnegut might have the best chance of any of them.

Finally, J, you made me laugh, intentionally or otherwise. I'm not advocating the movies one way or another but exactly how did Jackson stereotype a hobbit? I don't remember the Hobbit Anti-Defamation League marching outside theaters. Same for the Equal Rights for Elves Union. You lost me there.:lol:

[TheFifthElement]

De Lillo can be infuriating. Which book (s) have you read?

The Body Artist.


Fifth: I cannot fully defend DeLillo as a paramount post-modernist. Underworld is a very large novel, and I only got into the opening fifty pages before I was beset by library fines (I might buy the book), but he isn't boring. The opening of Underworld was riveting, the best of any contemporary writing I can think of.

He may be otherwise uneven, but boring really doesn't do his efforts justice,
Hey Jozy, you may be right but I think when it comes to boring/not boring it comes down to personal opinion/preference. He may be the most excellent writer in the world right now but all I can say is the book I read, I was glad when it was over. As a reader, he left me cold. It might just be that his style isn't my style, I completely acknowledge that, but the one thing I am sure of is that I'm not likely to pick up another of his books any time soon. He's behind a very long list of other writers that I do want to read: Saramago, Laxness, Tanizaki, Bulgakov, Dostoevsky, Sartre, de Beaviour, Eco, Calvino, Brautigan, Zola, Durrell, Ondaatje, Ballard, Murdoch, le Clezio, Marquez, Flann O' Brien, and a whole load more who may not be as technically proficient but I enjoyed more.


I assume you're joking re Bellow.
Nope, wasn't joking. Looked him up and there's something vaguely stirring in the back of my mind that I may have heard of Hertzog, or maybe it was one of those titles that stood out as I was browsing the shelves at my local Waterstones. But no, until he was mentioned here today I'd never heard of him.

Maybe he's just not 'big' in UK? Or maybe I move in the wrong circles. I don't work in literature and neither have I studied literature beyond A level. If it makes you feel better, I hadn't heard of Wallace Stevens before Lit-net either, but again unless you're studying literature to a high level in UK you're not likely to either. Literature studies up to the age of 18 tend to focus on British or Irish writers, generally.

[Jozanny]

Nope, wasn't joking. Looked him up and there's something vaguely stirring in the back of my mind that I may have heard of Hertzog, or maybe it was one of those titles that stood out as I was browsing the shelves at my local Waterstones. But no, until he was mentioned here today I'd never heard of him.

Maybe he's just not 'big' in UK? Or maybe I move in the wrong circles. I don't work in literature and neither have I studied literature beyond A level. If it makes you feel better, I hadn't heard of Wallace Stevens before Lit-net either, but again unless you're studying literature to a high level in UK you're not likely to either. Literature studies up to the age of 18 tend to focus on British or Irish writers, generally.

That's okay Fifth. Saul Bellow is an ethnic writer, meaning Jewish, who transcends being an ethnic Jewish author the way Faulkner transcends being a regionalist, at least for some. I prefer Henry Roth to Bellow, but beyond that will take the fifth, lest JBI and Drkshadow nip at my heels for being a smug outside observer:eek:...

[JCamilo]

Like the movies, don't like the movies, that's not my point. My point is that the work, The Hobbit and LOTR, will transcend time. But not because the writing is anything special or extraordinary or that the novel are well constructed. I've read LOTR three times. It really is poorly constructed as a novel (and it really is only one). The main characters disappear for an entire half of the second part so that the author can back track and tell the story of the other members of the broken fellowship. There is a tremendous amount of fluff there. And then there's the second part of the third book that has so much unnecessary anti-climactic material, you really have to be a fan to wade through it to the end. But it's a popular story and that is what will make it endure, not Tolkien's writing ability.

It is not very different from what I said. Tolkien's book structure is not the typical best-seller, demanding a lot from the reader not only because the size, but because he wrote giantic stories, because the rythim is slow, very not descriptive, etc. But there is merits on his writting, wanting or not, he do a new reading of medieval themes with some competence, the care with the geography of the world, the linguistic work that are more his merit. Something good is in the books, but the problem is when the book is ranked that high when it should not.



Which is a lot of what I take from JBI's entries. There is a million tons of popular fiction novels available, most of which are targeted to make a buck. If a truly artistic novel, welll-written, innovative, and revolutionary were to be produced by any modern day author it is questionable whether it would be published and, if published, whether it would get enough critical acclaim to be read. JBI has declared the novel dead. He may be right; I want him to be wrong.

I think he is right. But death in art (literature) is not usually something written down into a stone. I am sure Novels and Romances still can be produced with quality, but inovation won't happen and when it happens, it will be something else, which is good - after all, why one need to write romance and novels.


I purposely kept American authors out my thinking as I readi the thread, despite the reference to English-writing authors and the number of American writers brought up in the course of the discussion. But if I were to pick a post-war American novelist whose works might endure 100 years, I'd pick Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., especially Slaughterhouse-Five and Cat's Cradle. Some of the other American writers mentioned might endure and for others it might be too soon to tell. Vonnegut might have the best chance of any of them.

Well, I think prophecy is a risk, so I won't argue it. Vonnegut may be a good shot as any other, I do not see how we can have disagreements with "what if" scenarios.


Finally, J, you made me laugh, intentionally or otherwise. I'm not advocating the movies one way or another but exactly how did Jackson stereotype a hobbit? I don't remember the Hobbit Anti-Defamation League marching outside theaters. Same for the Equal Rights for Elves Union. You lost me there.:lol:

I wasnt talking specifically about Hobbits, but the medieval arquetypes used by Tolkien (the broken sword, the ring, etc) was turned in dull sterytipes in the movies. They are without any meaning, just nice F/X.

kelby_lake


Kafka didn't write fantasy, he was a surrealist. Fantasy is a genre relying on mythical worlds and creatures and magic.

While your definition of Fantasy is not correct, Kafka did wrote about magical creatures and magic. It is no wonder he is the main precussor of Magic Realism, you see, Fantasy wrote by those who give not damn about writing super-magical realms where anything was fantastic.

[Karl Rommel]

Literature studies up to the age of 18 tend to focus on British or Irish writers, generally.

And Mark Twain who said a few home truths about Jane Austen in his time.


If we're going the Tolkein route I'd suggest Mervyn Peake might be a far better alternative.

I'll second that. The former I could not appreciate. The latter I could.

[prendrelemick]

I repeat,

Mervin Peake!

He may merit a footnote in some obscure lit mag 100 years from now.

[Jozanny]

I repeat,

Mervin Peake!

He may merit a footnote in some obscure lit mag 100 years from now.

Apparently I now have to Google Mervyn Peake...His estate website is impressive, to put that on a positive note, but I am so tired I can barely type any irreverence into this post.

[curlyqlink]

Lokasenna:

Wagner actually based his Ring Cycle on the Nibelunglied
In point of fact, he did not:
"Wagner, in composing the Ring cycle, made less use than is normally assumed of the version of the story found in the South German Nibelungenlied, which is essentially a courtly epic. Instead he turned to the more pagan material and attitudes that he found in the Scandinavian sources, especially in Eddic poetry and in the Saga of the Volsungs..."
--Jesse L Byock, from the introduction of his translation of the Saga in the Penguin Classics edition

Or, quoting Richard Wagner himself, from his correspondence:

"Already in Dresden I had all imaginable trouble buying a book that no longer was to be found in any of the book shops. At last I found it in the Royal Library. It... is called the Volsunga saga-- translated from the Old Norse... This book I now need for repeated perusal... "

Tolkein's recycling of the material robs it of precisely that pagan energy, that elemental force, that Wagner found so attractive. And that I find so attractive. Tolkein's tale of bunnies at the bottom of the garden that go off on high adventure is a travesty, in my humble opinion. Quintessential British silliness, not without entertainment value (I have after all read the whole series beginning to end, and even sat through one of the films) but hardly the stuff of great literature.

In terms of Great British Literature, I'd sooner nominate Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide trilogy. Adams was at least original.

[prendrelemick]

Once again Tolkien is dismissed because of the story he wrote. It is a testament to his skill as an author that no one seems to notice the way he writes, the way he uses language and the way he engages his readers. He NEVER puts himself before the tale he is telling. He is invisible, he dosn't pontificate or play to the audience, he just tells the story in a simple and engageing way. It is a feat more highly regarded authors cannot seem to manage.

[Virgil]

Once again Tolkien is dismissed because of the story he wrote. It is a testament to his skill as an author that no one seems to notice the way he writes, the way he uses language and the way he engages his readers. He NEVER puts himself before the tale he is telling. He is invisible, he dosn't pontificate or play to the audience, he just tells the story in a simple and engageing way. It is a feat more highly regarded authors cannot seem to manage.

I was never really impressed with his writing. Is his prose outstanding? Nothing to write home about. Are the characters deep? Not really. Is the plot original? No. What it is about Tolkein? I guess he's got an epic scope with a detailed world view that is somewhat original. While he's an enjoyable read, I do not find him anywhere in the great writer's catagory.

[JBI]

Once again Tolkien is dismissed because of the story he wrote. It is a testament to his skill as an author that no one seems to notice the way he writes, the way he uses language and the way he engages his readers. He NEVER puts himself before the tale he is telling. He is invisible, he dosn't pontificate or play to the audience, he just tells the story in a simple and engageing way. It is a feat more highly regarded authors cannot seem to manage.

Well, if you want to go there, well then, he clearly was no Hemingway with the prose, nor Faulkner either, in terms of stylistics, he is dry, boring, and ultimately slow. He often throws in stupid didactic bits, or some of the crummiest poetry ever written, and rarely writes passages that are what I would consider beautiful. His world is set up that he could, had he the poets skill, explore through words and verse the beauties of the natural world, and the mystifying scenes drawn from legend and his imagination, but alas, boring details about family trees, silly didactic moments, crappy subplot moments, and ultimately uninteresting descriptions are all that is left.

Whether he is invisible or not is not the question - the text has very, very strong autobiographical elements, and though there is no Tolkien Character, like Pierre in War and Peace (though perhaps Gandalf can be argued to be an idealized Tolkien, I won't make the claim), Tolkien is hardly invisible. The Trilogy clearly has didactic moments, and to deny that would be to misread the text.

As for engaging prose, well, the most engaging prose I've ever read seems, by my judgment, to outstrip Tolkien by landslides. Even within the fantasy genre, I can think of writers whose prose is far more engaging, and interesting. Someone like, for instance, the late Robert Jordan, had a prose style far more interesting than Tolkien's (though, I will not judge his literature, as I wouldn't even dream of making a case for The Wheel of Time as superb literature). I don't think the long boring poems, long digressions, boring facts and quirks, or even the plots in general create an engaging story. If we look at, for instance, the movie versions of the texts, we can notice that what got the most attention, meaning what was deemed to be the most visually stimulating by the writers/directors of the films, were the elements that Tolkien stressed the least. Tolkien's aesthetic is one of a quirky, quite dated, most likely sexually boring (I bet his wife had a field day in bed!), fixated on the most trivial of things, lost in a world that has passed, ultimately conservative, and quite simply, boring, racist (or perhaps xenophobic is the right term) and quite simply dull.

In truth, from all his influence, Tolkien's prose style seems to be the one thing that hasn't gone very far. His concept of world-building is ultimately what later writers remember, as well as his reappropriation of a plot arc designed to bring in a series of characters. In terms of style, I would say the only real follower he had (and this guy essentially rewrote the Lord of the Rings) would have to be Terry Brooks, who I can't begin to make a case for as a writer, as, quite simply, he is one of the worst writers I have ever read, and how he ever became famous, or sold any books is beyond me.


I have, elsewhere, if you care to dig, posted at greater length on Tolkien's Prose, but quite simply, this is not the thread to digress so.

As an author, I think Tolkien could not ever be considered a contender for the best British novelist of his time, let alone stand as better than anything that followed. He quite simply, wrote three books that somehow became popular, and then got a handful of mediocre manuscripts published by his son, which are even worse, and lack any skill with words, or any real sense of imagination.

Quite simply, he is a boring, mediocre, closed minded, aged, archaic before being current snooze. To read Tolkien is to read one of the most dragged on closed minded texts that ever was considered to be "interesting".

Ultimately, the real discussion about him leads toward his work with language, which is perhaps interesting, but not worth much thought. What he does with language, is ultimately assign a "beautiful" language, to people he thinks "beautiful", and a harsh language to those he thinks monstrous. What that then means, is that his choice of sourcework ultimately reflects a sort of racial agenda - Dwarves speaking a Semitic-inspired language, Elves speaking languages inspired by Welsh and various Scandinavian tongues, while men speak in Germanic, Saxon-like - influenced tongues, as well as language highly influenced by Anglo-Saxon. One can only assume then, that the physical appearance, set to match the language reflects Tolkien's perceptions of the speakers of the real languages, and ultimately displays certain people's as being better than others.

[MarkBastable]

As it's come up, this is the best critique of Tolkien I've read (and, no, it's not by me).

------------------------------------------

One day the writer and theologian CS Lewis was passing through the senior common room of his Oxford college when he saw his friend JRR Tolkien working on a manuscript. “What are you doing?” he asked.

“I'm polishing the third part of my Middle-Earth trilogy,” replied JRR.

Lewis read a few lines and went on his way. As he left the room he was heard to mutter incredulously, “Not another f***ing elf.”

This apocryphal story sums up what’s wrong with the work of Tolkien - there is just too much of it. The Lord of the Rings is far, far too long and there is way too much detail and description - page after page to tell you that the forest was thick or the caves were dark.

Worse than that, it is all monstrously over-engineered. It is surely enough to know that wood-elves speak their own language; it is not necessary to establish the eight declensions of elvish noun, or point out the dialectical differences with the mountain elves. Clearly Tolkien enjoyed making all this up, but that’s the problem: he had more fun writing it than anyone can ever hope to get from reading it. It’s the death knell (Tolkien would call it the Alarum of Doom) for good storytelling.

And then there are the hobbits, the centrepiece of Tolkien's personal mythology. Somehow we are supposed to be charmed by their bourgeois obsessions – the mince pies and cheese, the singing kettles, the cosy mantelpiece. But it’s just smug Little England with hairy feet, and it is not appealing at all.

In 2003, The Lord of the Rings was voted best novel ever – but people were actually voting for the films. And the best thing about the films is that once you’ve seen them you don't have to read the books.

[prendrelemick]

Does no one like Tolkien then?

The faults and shortcomings listed so exhaustively and with such vitriol by so many critics, are the very reasons the books are popular.
The prose that doesn't go very far.
The bourgeois obsessions.
The niave morality.
Simple characters.
Engaging (as I found it) storytelling.
Do people arrive home from working in the real world, and want to read The Waste Land?
I mean supposing they are not critics or literary professionals that is.

LOTR has topped many polls before the films came out, and will probably continue to come top in any vote, where it is allowed to be considered by the public.

Tolkien is not the best or my favourite author by any means, but I think he should be considered a contender for the last Major British author.

[Emil Miller]

I am to old to bother with The Lord of the Rings but, although I haven't read it, it has at least provided a good deal of amusment reading the pro and anti arguments that constantly pop up on the forum. I could never seriously consider a book the has a character called Bilbo Baggins who celebrates his eleventy-first birthday, which a previous post accurately describes as quintessential British silliness. For comparison's sake I print below an extract from T.S.Eliot's The Waste Land:


When Lil's husband got demobbed, I said -
I didn't mince my words, I said to her myself,
HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME
Now Albert's coming back, make yourself a bit smart.
He'll want to know what you done with that money he gave you
To get herself some teeth. He did, I was there.
You have them all out, Lil, and get a nice set,

[meh!]

'Do people arrive home from working in the real world, and want to read The Waste Land?'

I've always found this view point fairly condescending/not thought out. Loads of people read 'hard' literature all the time. They really just do. Some people read quick-paced fantasy novels and some people happily stroll through War and Peace. I think this idea that people want to read light rubbish and feel like they should read hard books is largely constructed.

In fact, I think this view point is part of the reason that people can so easily be put off 'hard' literature'. If you keep telling people it's hard what are they supposed to think? They can no longer just read it for whatever qualities they are reading poetry for anyway, they're missing all the 'important bits'. Those qualities are there, but no one picks up a poem for the first time in their life and just understands everything and the idea that they have to puts you off. Put me off for a long time.

[MarkBastable]

Do people arrive home from working in the real world, and want to read The Waste Land?
I mean supposing they are not critics or literary professionals that is.




There's an implicit confusion here - and it's that people who like literary stuff think that all literary stuff is good, and that they also think that the popular stuff is not good.

That's not the case. A lot of literary stuff is crap, just as a lot of everything else is crap. And a lot of popular stuff is good - well-written, compelling, entertaining.

So the argument against LOTR is not that it's popular. It's that it's not good - badly-written, heavy-going, dull.

Yes, a lot of people like it. Which means that on top of everything else, it's over-rated.



....

By the way, before we get into a barney and become lifelong enemies, thank you for your comment on Amid the Alien Corn.

[JBI]

I am yet to find proof that the Rings is a fast paced engaging tale.

[Emil Miller]

Now I come to think of it, there is a good chance that Lord of the Rings will last a lot longer than many people realise. You know what they say, old hobbits die hard.

[MarkBastable]

Incidentally - Martin Amis.

[Michael T]

Now I come to think of it, there is a good chance that Lord of the Rings will last a lot longer than many people realise. You know what they say, old hobbits die hard.

:lol::thumbs_up:lol:

[prendrelemick]

Now I come to think of it, there is a good chance that Lord of the Rings will last a lot longer than many people realise. You know what they say, old hobbits die hard.

They're difficult to kick as well.


except in this thread.

[Virgil]

I was never really impressed with his writing. Is his prose outstanding? Nothing to write home about. Are the characters deep? Not really. Is the plot original? No. What it is about Tolkein? I guess he's got an epic scope with a detailed world view that is somewhat original. While he's an enjoyable read, I do not find him anywhere in the great writer's catagory.

I'm responding to my own post just to clarify. I'm not saying LOTR is a bad work, or that it won't last, or that it's not a fun read. In fact I said it was a fun read. But in my opinion it doesn't make the top tier of great literature.

[JCamilo]

I am yet to find proof that the Rings is a fast paced engaging tale.

And it will never be, because that would go against every intention of Tolkien to create some short of epic story for mythical england.
Most epics, with their oral origem, are fast paced, intense, lively because the
author do not used his time with description of every detail and chronology - since that was something the audience was already familiar. Since Tolkien was creating something new, he could not just do it, he had to, with dedication and zealous of a scholar, build, organized and describe the geography, historical background and languages of his word. His greatest merit is his greatest downfal, he did it in a world where guys like Chekhov, Robert Louis Stevenson, Poe, Borges, Flaubert have already takken the prose language to a level of precision and flow, a world of sensations and effects, that Tolkien could not master with his precise (or excesive, you pick) description. Hence he looks outdated (and also, he is outdated, it is his ambition), to have all that life he would need the poetic talent of Yeats, perhaps increased since he had to do with Prose and not poems... His ambition was beyond his capacity. Once he had all this world, everything correctly like a watch he had the good idea to keep and place his characters doing archetypical things and they are all archetypicals. Even if he says a war story is no place for love stories and it was saved for other tales, his characters had too much basic emotion, he could just not grow up with them. It is basic friendship, basic honour, ambition, greed, wisdow, courage. Of course, old stories are also working with the basic, Arthur is Arthur, Lancelot is Lancelot, it is uncessary to have a stream of conciousness to show why they are noble or brave. They act like it, so Tolkien may not be wrong since he was telling a story of archetypes. Yet, it was a world that saw Joyce, Kafka, Dostoievisky, Faulkner, Woolf... So, he was a prisioner of the form as well. But cleaver and you can say, with enough talent, to create the scenario for those characters to revive in the moderm world and use them well enough. Hence he will be remembered, hence he is not as great as some people are trying to argue.

[JBI]

Yes, but the world of Arthur, despite all the writings, ultimately was vague. The world of Homer, in terms of visuals, was formed out of current objects, not anachronistic items and lore - the world was inhabited, though by creatures, with very little in terms of distorted scenery, and very little geographical description. Beowulf's world too is built on familiar soil, as was, to an extent, Virgil's. Perhaps the most exploratory epic writers were Milton and Dante, who came a little late to really be considered "True" epics, but who nonetheless incorporated the visual. Of course, reading Dante, you can't help but notice he often doesn't give the visual, and instead reverts back to the "I don't have words to describe what I saw before me" method, whereby he both invites the reader to imagine it, and bypasses the limitations of language in describing a made-up place. Milton on the other hand, perhaps did this the best, though he balanced it all off, and essentially used simile as his device for conveying the physicality of his world, rather than outright descriptions. The visuals then, of the Garden, of Pandemonium, are left to the reader's imagination, and fancy over the Biblical narrative. God himself is reduced to Light as apposed to an actual form, and the angelic-looking Satan isn't described in full detail, with every corner of his armor discussed.

Tolkien on the other hand, got carried away. His quirky obsession with a world created out of his imagination (and the politics it conveyed) ultimately was his downfall. You can't create a world like that, and make it interesting. The proof of later generations of writers has shown that the actual plot of lord of the Rings can be transformed into around 200 pages (Le Guin writes a new world with a plot in 100-odd pages, but her's is a shorter, albeit more potent narrative). But no. We need the boring languages, cultures, histories, lore, folksongs, geographical descriptions, calendars, family trees, and boring content that Tolkien offers us.

Take Calvino's Cosmicomics for instance, his worlds are just as removed as Tolkien's. But his visual description is about 3-5 sentences (usually as an epigraph), and the rest brought in through the action of the story. Of course, his worlds aren't as well thought out or planned, but is it all really necessary?

That being said, the concept of a removed reality isn't a bad one. It is a great deal of fun keep in mind, but I think Tolkien went way over the top in his, at the cost of the real merit of the book, the story and moral at the end (which I don't think are particularly brilliant at all). Lets be honest, do people actually care about what a made-up universe looks like, and its history, languages, and people? Are we trying to read into the history of the diegesis, or do we simply want to read about a story, perhaps in the world. The Back story dominates the story, and therefore the book is more like a reference than a novel.

[JCamilo]

Yes, but the world of Arthur, despite all the writings, ultimately was vague. The world of Homer, in terms of visuals, was formed out of current objects, not anachronistic items and lore - the world was inhabited, though by creatures, with very little in terms of distorted scenery, and very little geographical description. Beowulf's world too is built on familiar soil, as was, to an extent, Virgil's. Perhaps the most exploratory epic writers were Milton and Dante, who came a little late to really be considered "True" epics, but who nonetheless incorporated the visual. Of course, reading Dante, you can't help but notice he often doesn't give the visual, and instead reverts back to the "I don't have words to describe what I saw before me" method, whereby he both invites the reader to imagine it, and bypasses the limitations of language in describing a made-up place. Milton on the other hand, perhaps did this the best, though he balanced it all off, and essentially used simile as his device for conveying the physicality of his world, rather than outright descriptions. The visuals then, of the Garden, of Pandemonium, are left to the reader's imagination, and fancy over the Biblical narrative. God himself is reduced to Light as apposed to an actual form, and the angelic-looking Satan isn't described in full detail, with every corner of his armor discussed.

Yeah, I agree. In oral tradition descriptions are not a rule because the familiarity of the listener. Dante and Milton are not just using the formula, they are really doing something else, their works are different. But since they are more talented, they can mix the narrative part of the poem with the lyrical part or philosophical part. The way of speaking gives away Satan, not his face, to say.



Tolkien on the other hand, got carried away. His quirky obsession with a world created out of his imagination (and the politics it conveyed) ultimately was his downfall. You can't create a world like that, and make it interesting. The proof of later generations of writers has shown that the actual plot of lord of the Rings can be transformed into around 200 pages (Le Guin writes a new world with a plot in 100-odd pages, but her's is a shorter, albeit more potent narrative). But no. We need the boring languages, cultures, histories, lore, folksongs, geographical descriptions, calendars, family trees, and boring content that Tolkien offers us.

Of course, it is now easier to make copycats of Tolkien, with less words, because now everyone is aware of what a elf is. His encyclopedical work is a reference. I would also argue that tolkien had any right to go overboard. It is his gimmicks. That he had at his disposal a format that could not cope with the demand of the work, plus less poetical talent to do so, it is another story. I would suggest a middleterm between you and the elf-lovers...


Take Calvino's Cosmicomics for instance, his worlds are just as removed as Tolkien's. But his visual description is about 3-5 sentences (usually as an epigraph), and the rest brought in through the action of the story. Of course, his worlds aren't as well thought out or planned, but is it all really necessary?

Well, Calvino is working from another direction and belongs to another tradition as well. I am sure one could argue dostoievisky could use less words, since Chekhov can. But of course, the prose of Calvino is much superior to Tolkien because he is not bound to the description of a world, but the development of an idea. He is a better writer, that simple.


That being said, the concept of a removed reality isn't a bad one. It is a great deal of fun keep in mind, but I think Tolkien went way over the top in his, at the cost of the real merit of the book, the story and moral at the end (which I don't think are particularly brilliant at all). Lets be honest, do people actually care about what a made-up universe looks like, and its history, languages, and people? Are we trying to read into the history of the diegesis, or do we simply want to read about a story, perhaps in the world. The Back story dominates the story, and therefore the book is more like a reference than a novel.

Well, JBI, considering the fanbase of Tolkien, his copycats (take the whole Dungeo and Dragons universe), Star Trek/Wars, some people do care about it. Of course, they must understand, as hard it is to create, it is not a greater achivement than writing about a plain day in a desert island like Robson Crusoe is. Anyways, I agree, LoTR is not a typical novel. Which is a clue that he can be placed in the same bag as the other modern best-seller writers. He did several no-no-no that Dan Browns, Sydney Sheldons, etc would not. And because the same ambition that lead to his failure. It is not a simple reading or easy. The books are split in two different storylines, so, the sequence of chapters is a little broken. His language is not clear, economic, do not flow like Calvino for example. Yet, he manages to make people who are too lazy to consider reading anything hard, to read.... possible because the simple and well-placed use of the main steriotypes, those the other writers manage to copy.
The middleterm is placing him alongside with likes of Dumas, Stoker or Jules Verne. Even if Verne is not as great, he gave a basis that most sci-fic writers after him would use, sparing them or all the work of explaining it again (It may work for Asimov too)... He is a good writer, with perhaps a flawed, yet, with merits, work. But of course, not in the league of great writers, best british novelist, etc.

[curlyqlink]

Do people arrive home from working in the real world, and want to read The Waste Land?
I do; I read The Waste Land just recently and for the first time, and mostly on the bus commute to and from work. I read it for enjoyment, and I found it beautiful, the language superb and incisive and stark.

I also enjoyed reading Tolkein. Just as I enjoy reading Terry Pratchett.

I can enjoy a writer without kidding myself that he is a great writer. There's a difference between great writing and merely enjoyable writing; the truly great writers, I would insist, are both. Flaubert, Balzac, Austen, Tolstoy, Proust, Woolf, Conrad... I read them first and foremost for pleasure.

I have a book on my shelf, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy. It reminds me a lot of Tolkein criticism-- a kind of end run at justification. That this story we love so much isn't "mere" entertainment; it's deep! There are Themes and Philosophical Implications at work here! And of course there are these things-- if one looks hard enough-- in just about anything.

[Emil Miller]

I do; I read The Waste Land just recently and for the first time, and mostly on the bus commute to and from work. I read it for enjoyment, and I found it beautiful, the language superb and incisive and stark.
There are Themes and Philosophical Implications at work here! And of course there are these things-- if one looks hard enough-- in just about anything.


When Lil's husband got demobbed, I said -
I didn't mince my words, I said to her myself,
HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME
Now Albert's coming back, make yourself a bit smart.
He'll want to know what you done with that money he gave you
To get herself some teeth. He did, I was there.
You have them all out, Lil, and get a nice set,


You probably missed it first time round, but this extract from The Waste Land give credence to your last sentence.

[mortalterror]

Of course, reading Dante, you can't help but notice he often doesn't give the visual, and instead reverts back to the "I don't have words to describe what I saw before me" method, whereby he both invites the reader to imagine it, and bypasses the limitations of language in describing a made-up place.

Although I agree that in several passages Dante does cop out with that explanation, it was only in cases of necessity. If he'd claimed to actually describe the likeness of God, for instance, the church would have skewered him. Otherwise, he's probably the greatest master of turning words into vivid pictures. I can still see the angels flying down into the rose like bees sucking honey, the cross of the crusaders burning bright, the three steps, the angel who wrote Dante's sins on his forehead with a sword, the burning sands, the river of boiling blood with the damned swimming and the centaurs firing arrows into them, Dante walking hunched over the mural on the floor, the serpents, the men throwing rocks, the tree people and their bleeding roots, the wind blowing Paulo and Francesca, the gnats swarming, the wall of fire, bodies frozen up to their necks and gnawing on the back of each others heads, light falling down like golden snowflakes, the demons falling off the bridge, Homer waving, Aristotle sitting, the nuns floating like shimmering ghosts on the moon. The one part I can't ever picture is the Earthly Paradise, the Garden of Eden, that little parade, or dumb show or whatever it was, like a mobile medieval drama. Other than that, Dante turned words into pictures like no other. Not even great naturalists like Tolstoy can match him.

[JBI]

Although I agree that in several passages Dante does cop out with that explanation, it was only in cases of necessity. If he'd claimed to actually describe the likeness of God, for instance, the church would have skewered him. Otherwise, he's probably the greatest master of turning words into vivid pictures. I can still see the angels flying down into the rose like bees sucking honey, the cross of the crusaders burning bright, the three steps, the angel who wrote Dante's sins on his forehead with a sword, the burning sands, the river of boiling blood with the damned swimming and the centaurs firing arrows into them, Dante walking hunched over the mural on the floor, the serpents, the men throwing rocks, the tree people and their bleeding roots, the wind blowing Paulo and Francesca, the gnats swarming, the wall of fire, bodies frozen up to their necks and gnawing on the back of each others heads, light falling down like golden snowflakes, the demons falling off the bridge, Homer waving, Aristotle sitting, the nuns floating like shimmering ghosts on the moon. The one part I can't ever picture is the Earthly Paradise, the Garden of Eden, that little parade, or dumb show or whatever it was, like a mobile medieval drama. Other than that, Dante turned words into pictures like no other. Not even great naturalists like Tolstoy can match him.

I think it was your imagination that did it, as it is everyone else's that forms the images. I'm of the mind that is why the Infernal images are the most potent, because, ultimately, negative things are easier for most people to imagine. The actual vividness though, is of your own design, Dante merely guides one. Tolkien tries to Ekphrastically capture every tree, whereas Dante encourages the vivid picture to pop in one's head. In that sense, Dante allows for a very well guided Trace, whereas Tolkien does not, he merely "shows" you it, in a way that doesn't give room for the great workings of the imagination to form. That is why, essentially, the movie adaptation works so well with Tolkien, whereas with Dante, I'm sure, even with the greatest CGI, the vision in one's head will be stronger.

Ultimately though, descriptions of things come in three forms; one form conveys the likeness of it, through words and descriptions, which favor mathematics and practicality, and another form uses simile and metaphor to do the same, but since metaphor isn't stable, the actual interpretation is left to the viewer. The third form, is one which attempts to capture the feeling of the place, the location - one thinks of, for instance, Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey, which holds very little concrete description of the place, but focuses completely on the reaction in the observer. Tolkien, ultimately, prefers the first form, and, I would argue, doesn't trust metaphors much in conveying his description. Dante generally mixes the last two, with actual numbers in place to try and keep the form concrete - we have the frame, and the things inside it, but do we really have much solid description, or is it part of our mind that forms it? Do we, for instance, all have the same vision of the men talking from the flames, or of the souls standing on the brinks of hell, or are we all creating our own vision of the scene? Eliot's reworking of it in section one of the Waste Land, I would argue, works, because quite simply, the unchanged visuals allow for a transfer of the sort to happen. Try using Middle Earth, and the whole thing seems silly. In that sense, I would argue, the visual benefits from a sense of vagueness quite often, especially when describing things that are unbelievably good or wonderful, beyond words, or unbelievably bad and vile - or any extremes really. The mind cannot commit itself to one vision of any extreme mode, and therefore, it is in the last two modes of vision, guided perhaps by the first one as a frame of reference, that poets like Dante are able to inspire such vivid visions. The vision isn't contained within the poem, and cannot really be drawn accurately, or to a suitable level, but the power of the words is able to allow a the reader to glimpse "What he is seeing." Dante, I am sure, would have written in all the descriptions, despite the politics, if he was able - he didn't seem to shy away from politics too much as it was, and though he may have elided over God, there are plenty of other spots he could have filled in - but to fill them in would be to lower them, to not do them justice, as clearly anyone with conviction or imagination can come up with a visual representation of a vision better than quantitative, and factual (I use this to mean words that can only lead to limited visual reactions in the reader) words can possibly convey.

[mortalterror]

Do we, for instance, all have the same vision of the men talking from the flames, or of the souls standing on the brinks of hell, or are we all creating our own vision of the scene?

You are right. My imagination rebels when I behold the versions depicted by Doré and Blake, recalling something far more majestic and fanciful in it's place.

[JCamilo]

jesus, mortalterror and JBI, it is Dante, The Master. Are you not going to argue if he wrote or we just imagine what he wrote, will you both? You know, it is pointless, he did both.

[WyattGwyon]

.....

[Heteronym]

The Spanish have Cervantes, and everything pretty much comes from him, in terms of great novels.

The French have Flaubert and Proust.

The Americans have Melville and Faulkner.

The British have Samuel Richardson, whose 18th century epistolary novels, in the opinion of Milan Kundera, were the first to explore the inner life of a character in depth. Cervantes was a great describer of adventures, but we don't really get inside the head of Don Quixote. Richardson was an important innovator. If he didn't invent stream of consciousness, he at least opened the path to it.

The British also have Henry Fielding, who is important in the field of meta-textuality, since the narrator in Tom Jones keeps breaking the fourth wall to discourse on the art of the novel, a trick commonly used nowadays by writers.

Oh, and the British have Laurence Sterne, whose Tristram Shandy is only the forefather of Ulysses and therefore the precursor of all modernism.

[JCamilo]

I would imagine that the merits of having Samuel Richardson would not represent such big merit...

[Heteronym]

Milan Kundera will disagree with you. But I guess that's the difference between someone who studies the art of the novel deeply and mere readers.

[Seasider]

No mention of Evelyn Waugh. Nor Anthony Powell whose 12 volume work Dance to the Music of Time is an amazing panorama of British cultural, political and academic life from the 20s to the 60s. His character Widmerpool is a major comic creation. I couldn't choose a favourite but I have read Casanova's Chinese Restaurant more times than any other.

[mal4mac]

Mitchell is a something else. I was astonished by the things he pulled off in Cloud Atlas and frequently moved...

I just read "The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet" - an astonishing novel, Mitchell might (indeed) be 'the one'.

[Patrick_Bateman]

Has Anthony Burgess permeated this debate yet? Or even William Golding, Roald Dahl, John Le Carre, Ian Fleming?

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has proven that detective novels have longevity so why not the espionage writings of le Carre and Fleming?

Roald Dahl is arguably the greatest children's author and Burgess and Golding don't need me to do them justice.


And let's not forget Orwell's most well known novels were both published after the war.

The aforementioned authors are not my predictions for who will still be read in the next century but they seem to have fallen through the net in terms of this discussion. It seems you've inexplicably wasted a lot of time on judging Cormac McCarthy's worth in the literature world.

[JCamilo]

Milan Kundera will disagree with you. But I guess that's the difference between someone who studies the art of the novel deeply and mere readers.

Kundera studies the art of the novel deeply? Apparently, he learnt very little from his study.

[Heteronym]

Kundera studies the art of the novel deeply? Apparently, he learnt very little from his study.

Your posturing doesn't impress anyone.

[JCamilo]

Neither Kundera, who claim that a author thousands years after Ovid is exploring the epistolar level or that Quixote is not explored on depth, which any student of Quixote knows it is false to an extreme, specially considering the clear different between the first and the second part. Or that deep exploration of psychological deepth of character is not something limite to romance and Dostoievisky learnt with Cervantes not Samuel Richardson, an author which influence outside england is minimal.

As kundera, he let clear Richardson is a naive and cannt be compared to Laclos, Goethe, and a few others. He would not disagree much about the merit of Richardson in any list, but really, Kundera is not a considerable critic. His authority is not considerable, so using him as shield, wont get much points.

[Heteronym]

Well, using him as a shield at least got you riled up enough to write more than one sentence of criticism.

[JCamilo]

Really? So, yet again, Kundera goes down the drain...

[Heteronym]

Neither Kundera, who claim that a author thousands years after Ovid is exploring the epistolar level or that Quixote is not explored on depth, which any student of Quixote knows it is false to an extreme, specially considering the clear different between the first and the second part. Or that deep exploration of psychological deepth of character is not something limite to romance and Dostoievisky learnt with Cervantes not Samuel Richardson, an author which influence outside england is minimal.

An epistolary poem is not an epistolary novel, and Ovid didn't give the final contribution to the possibilities of the epistolary novel. Your post is beholden to the grander of the classics. Yours is the typical view that because someone did something many centuries ago, someone else centuries later can't improve upon it.

As for Don Quixote's depth, that wasn't Kundera writing, that was me, and I certainly didn't write that Don Quixote lacked depth. What I wrote was that Cervantes only described things externally. Don Quixote is only seen from the outside, through his action and dialogue. The epistolary novel, by the use of the first person narrator, allows for a character to talk about himself, to reveal nuances that merely physical description can't reveal. Cervantes didn't explore all the possibilities of the novel; if he had, there'd be no room for innovation.

I would also disagree that Kundera isn't a considerable critic. He's certainly better read than either of us; thinking about the history of the novel is his reason for being, he's not a mere reader but someone for whom these questions are his life.

[JCamilo]

An epistolary poem is not an epistolary novel, and Ovid didn't give the final contribution to the possibilities of the epistolary novel. Your post is beholden to the grander of the classics. Yours is the typical view that because someone did something many centuries ago, someone else centuries later can't improve upon it.

As for Don Quixote's depth, that wasn't Kundera writing, that was me, and I certainly didn't write that Don Quixote lacked depth. What I wrote was that Cervantes only described things externally. Don Quixote is only seen from the outside, through his action and dialogue. The epistolary novel, by the use of the first person narrator, allows for a character to talk about himself, to reveal nuances that merely physical description can't reveal. Cervantes didn't explore all the possibilities of the novel; if he had, there'd be no room for innovation.

I would also disagree that Kundera isn't a considerable critic. He's certainly better read than either of us; thinking about the history of the novel is his reason for being, he's not a mere reader but someone for whom these questions are his life.

A Novel can be in verses, and it is irrelevant, the form does not make the exploration of psychological deepth of anything first than anything else.

Just a comment: Richardson could not be the one first to do something, if it was done before. It does not imply who will do after or there is anything else to do. It imply it is not the first. There is no claim from Kundera about the quality of Richardson and I really dont comment anything about it reggarding Kundera: yet, if we are considering the merits of english novelists, the place of Richardson in the story is not exactly a top place. Mentioning him even near Sterne or Fielding is not really a great deal.

Kundera do mean that with Quixote's contemporaries learnt about adventures, and Richardson was the one which discovered the psychological posibilities of novels, whic his a kidergarden reduction of Quixote and an exageration of Richardson (which is only because Kundera wrote after him), because Cervantes is the model of modern novels and characters, not Pamela, Clarice, Annabella, or watever.

Of course Cervantes didnt explore all elements of the novel. Nobody did. However, Cervantes didnt need to learn with anyone the capacity of to explore the psychology of characters and epistolary literarature was not such novelty, which would made the importance of Richardson less important... and even so, the inventor of the sonnet is not Petrarca.

Why is Kundera better read than any of us? Because he publish books? His book Art of Novel seems to be a rather limited reading experience, basead on a bias to justify himself and his works. No, by saying that Cervantes contemportaries teached us about adventures, he is either writting very poorly or reading even poorly. Cervantes is not about it, there was centuries of adventures already before Cervantes. And who are those contemporary? Shakespeare??? Yes, an age dedicated to plot...

[Heteronym]

When you have discoursed about Broch, Mussil, Proust, Gombrowicz, Kafka, Beckett, Malaparte, France, Fuentes, Paz, Sartre, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Joyce, Rushdie, Rabelais, Fielding, Sterne, Césaire, Mann, Dostoevsky, García Márquez, Céline, Roth, Goytisolo, Depestre, Diderot and Aragon in these boards, with new insight into their work, I may believe you're better read than Kundera. Until then, I suggest your curb your anti-intellectualism. Although I enjoy your posts from time to time, your thoughts on literature mean nothing outside this forum. And even if Kundera only writes crap about literature, which I don't think he does, it's crap that is establishing a dialogue with millions of people reading him across the world. Who are you establishing a dialogue with? A bunch of anonymous people on a forum. Not exactly setting the world on fire, are you?

So show some respect and be more humble.

[Heteronym]

Oh, and no, novels can't be told in verse. Verse belongs to poetry. The novel belongs to prose. Prose comes from the Latin prosa, or everyday speech. Poetry may be fine for the Gods and heroes of Homer, but to have everday characters speak in verse would be as silly as teaching English to a doormat.

[JCamilo]

When you have discoursed about Broch, Mussil, Proust, Gombrowicz, Kafka, Beckett, Malaparte, France, Fuentes, Paz, Sartre, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Joyce, Rushdie, Rabelais, Fielding, Sterne, Césaire, Mann, Dostoevsky, García Márquez, Céline, Roth, Goytisolo, Depestre, Diderot and Aragon in these boards, with new insight into their work, I may believe you're better read than Kundera. Until then, I suggest your curb your anti-intellectualism. Although I enjoy your posts from time to time, your thoughts on literature mean nothing outside this forum. And even if Kundera only writes crap about literature, which I don't think he does, it's crap that is establishing a dialogue with millions of people reading him across the world. Who are you establishing a dialogue with? A bunch of anonymous people on a forum. Not exactly setting the world on fire, are you?

So show some respect and be more humble.

Sorry, but do I need to be Humble? Kundera is quite wrong, I do not need to be humble about it. His dialogue with thousands (cough, as Paulo Coelho does) means nothing. And do you really think, the only place I talk about literature is this board and that discussing a handfull of names (probally less names than I have discussed) and here would give streangth to my arguments?

I am quite humble, Kundera is allowed to discuss with me. He may use his powerfull dialogue to reach me. I am quite open to his explanations. And from where I am anti-intellectual?

As novel and verse... novel, romance, etc, can be in verse. The words are not set on stone, Orlando Furioso is often called a novel, Aurora Leigh too. All in verse. And in this sense, Dom Quixote does not make the distinction between prose and poetry, when they call them novelas.

Prose in literature definide as everyday talking is insane. Cicer himself once sent a letter to a friend and said to his friend not to find strange that he was not using his daily form of discuss, but something more simple. I would point, there is several forms of prose which are not the daily form of talking, even realistic romances would be ridiculous (nobody makes silence when you talk) and talking in verse would not be less or more ridicuous than talking like captain Ahab?

[Heteronym]

No, but writing about whaling in verse would certainly be ridiculous.

[Seasider]

Or albatrosses??

[Patrick_Bateman]

I have come to the realisation that I do not like you people.

[dfloyd]

How does a thread which asks about the last great British writer wind up referencing DeLilo, Roth, et al. It seems when people have nothing to contribute, they change the subject and ramble on.

For my two cents, the one or two which should be mentioned are John Fowles and William Golding, not J. R. Tolkein or Ian McEwen or any of the others mentioned. How American writers got involved, I don't know. Changing the subject to fit some limited knowledge you might have is what makes these threads boring.

[Patrick_Bateman]

How does a thread which asks about the last great British writer wind up referencing DeLilo, Roth, et al. It seems when people have nothing to contribute, they change the subject and ramble on.

For my two cents, the one or two which should be mentioned are John Fowles and William Golding, not J. R. Tolkein or Ian McEwen or any of the others mentioned. How American writers got involved, I don't know. Changing the subject to fit some limited knowledge you might have is what makes these threads boring.

+1

Well done friend