All countries are made up; none is a natural thing.Quote:
Originally Posted by JBI
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All countries are made up; none is a natural thing.Quote:
Originally Posted by JBI
Original is what sense? Have you read his primary texts? in terms of originality it is best to contrast him with someone who drew from the same sources, the great Opera composer and librettist, Richard Wagner. Wagner's version is primarily about the conflict between the characters. He had borrowed more aspects of the plot from other sources than Tolkien had, but had created genuine characters, and believable conflict within his fantasy world. Wagner's Ring is character driven. Each character is a representation of his society, and the plot creates a commentary. Wagner's Wotan, compared to Gandalf is cruel, selfish, flawed, brutal, lecherous, violent, yet at the same time, shares the wisdom in common. He is far more believable than his Tolkienian equal in the sense that he has negative qualities, and personal flaws.Quote:
Originally Posted by Inderjit Sanghe
Tolkien on the other hand relied primarily on plot. His characters too are primarily borrowed, but his plot is more original (though in no way original). His prose is mimicking the texts he drew on as well, being both archaic and boring. His characters act according to the necessity of the plot, being where they have to be for the sake of everything working out. They have no personalities, and often stop at the most bazaar times to do the most predictable things.
If we take this even further, we can argue on the merits of Tolkien. He may have influence, but to what end? What exterior affect does he have, beyond the realm of fantasy literature? Did he advance prose to a new level the way Joyce did? no. Did he advance the genre of fantasy beyond where it had been before? many would answer yes, but since if you read his primary sources, you can see that he really created nothing that had not been done before, sometimes way before, we can only answer one way, No. Is reading him enjoyable? no, many readers, even fans, agree his prose is dreadful. His most favorable critics can in no way defend the verse he wrote (I am reluctant to call it poetry).
Tolkien is in no way even close to equal to his contemporary writers. Not by a long shot.
Either way, Tolstoi and Joyce were influential, but they were not central figures of a national literary movement. Joyce, though always writing about Ireland, was more away from there than there. Tolstoi had less of an affect than Pushkin (the fact that Pushkin seems his biggest influence, especially for the early works which he is most famous for, proves this). India's philosophy seems to have taken the west at many angles, even leading to the rise of free love during the 1960s. You are ignorant in the sense that you only look at novelists, and ignore poetry writers, and non-fiction writers.
Joyce didn't take English prose to a new level. He introduced certain fads and trickery into writing which don't actually make reading his books more enjoyable for all of their so called "originality". People like Hemingway and sometimes Faulkner took English prose to new levels in practical, reproducible ways, which Joyce's prose doesn't. Da Vinci might have envisioned the helicopter but it was the Wright brothers who actually got us off of the ground. Joyce is a pie in the sky intellectual who's more concerned with how he thinks prose should work than with how it actually does. To this day there are a lot more Hemingway and Faulkner followers than there are Joyces. They are the ones with living legacies.
Footnotes please. I would like to know exactly what backing in the reading of Joyce in context provided this outburst. Either way, just look at the influence of Joyce on Faulkner. Also, I would challenge the notion that Hemingway has had a bigger influence. Keep in mind that both Deconstruction, and many other schools of thought also evolved out of reading Joyce, not to mention the profound affect he had on people like Borges, Eco, and Woolf.Quote:
Originally Posted by mortalterror
.As Tolkien said in relation to Wagner, a somewhat tenous link, the similarities start and end with the rotundity of the rings. :)Quote:
Original is what sense? Have you read his primary texts? in terms of originality it is best to contrast him with someone who drew from the same sources, the great Opera composer and librettist, Richard Wagner. Wagner's version is primarily about the conflict between the characters. He had borrowed more aspects of the plot from other sources than Tolkien had, but had created genuine characters, and believable conflict within his fantasy world. Wagner's Ring is character driven. Each character is a representation of his society, and the plot creates a commentary. Wagner's Wotan, compared to Gandalf is cruel, selfish, flawed, brutal, lecherous, violent, yet at the same time, shares the wisdom in common. He is far more believable than his Tolkienian equal in the sense that he has negative qualities, and personal flaws.
When you talk about 'genuine' and 'believable', I do not understand what you mean, such abstractions are merely parochial laws to reflect arbitrary definitions of character "believability"-taking to extremes, or even moderately, it leads to mediocre Maupaussant naturalism, realism and other such gash. So, according to your logic, so long as a character exhibits negative characteristics then he becomes what you would call "realistic"-a ridiculous, Dostoevskiaan form of characterisation.
To say that Gandalf does not have what you would call "personal flaws" also denotes a clumsy reading of the text. He is, or can be, grumpy and sharp-tongued-yes he does not commit mass rapes like every literary character seemingly should do, but he not without his flaws of judgement (in relation to Saruman) and of action. He is, by the way, the wisest character in the Lord of the Rings, so that would go someway in explaining why he is so "good" morally. He is no less believable than say, Charles Bovary or Leopold Bloom, sexual idiosyncrasies aside
The contention that Wagner is able to create a character which "represents society" is equally banal-how can an abstractive work of art, create characters who, magically, represent a whole group of people? Art is art and life is life, classifying people or races via art is a ridiculous way of looking at things.
Works which rely on 'great ideas', the cant of Kant etc. are often tendentious and platitudinous in the extreme.
So?Quote:
Tolkien on the other hand relied primarily on plot.
:lol:Quote:
His characters too are primarily borrowed, but his plot is more original (though in no way original).
Even when Tolkien is original he is not original? Fantastic!
Archaic-yes, boring-thay is your own opinion. As for mimicking texts-does Joyce not do that for a large part of Ulysses? Flaubert, Ibsen, sports journalism, romance novels etc. Joyce's pastiches are parodic but that does not take away from the fact that many of the greatest writers write in a similar way to predecessors and contemporaneous writers, Katherine Mansfield mimics Chekov but that doesn't make her short stories any less brilliant.Quote:
His prose is mimicking the texts he drew on as well, being both archaic and boring.
Thank your for informing me about the proliferation of Turkish markets in Middle-Earth a fact which I was hitherto unaware of.Quote:
They have no personalities, and often stop at the most bazaar times to do the most predictable things.
They do have personalities actually, multi-faceted ones, they are there is you read them close enough. Frodo fails in his quest, Boromir tries to steal the ring, Sam and all other hobbits are by and large ignorant and narrow-minded, though essentially charming, Saruman falls, the two main heroic 'races' in Tolkien's myth, the Numenoreans and the Noldor, were both arrogant. (their greatest strength and weakness)
The men in Middle-Earth are no more or less realistic or true-to-life than any characters in other novels, or, as Tolkien said, they do not represent anything which men cannot and do not aspire to in the "real world". It is no more or less realistic than say the perpetual eruditity of Stephen Dedalaus.
Tolkien is a very good writer, a very good describer, especially of nature; some of his passages are magnificently beautiful, LoTR is interspersed with passages of aesthetic beauty.
He pretty much created the modern fantasy lit. movement, yes he was influenced by "older legends" but he was able to rework them to his own ends-just as Joyce was able to rework Dujardin's concepts in Ulysses-to say that he created nothing original is to reduce novels to the bunkum of great ideas, in which case what did Joyce create, being uninterested in them?Quote:
Did he advance the genre of fantasy beyond where it had been before? many would answer yes, but since if you read his primary sources, you can see that he really created nothing that had not been done before, sometimes way before, we can only answer one way, No
He created a new way of writing and describing worlds of inventing races and characters and languages. Tolkien was brilliant linguist and fictional creator-his oeuvre contained a variety of new languages, of races, states and history. Tolkien created an entire world in that mediocre brain of his.
Oh please. I never knew fans enjoy reading terribly written books. Tolkien was a philologist and had a fine prose style.Quote:
no, many readers, even fans, agree his prose is dreadful
Of course Pushkin was more influential than Tolstoi-he was at the forefront of the Russian literary movement. Pushkin is a brilliant poet, he was famous more for his verses than his prose, and he was enormously influential to both contempary writers and poets (Lermentov and Gogol) and great Russian poets and writers further down the line-Dostoevskii, Tolstoi, Nabokov, Block, Mandelstam and the rest, but I still think Tolstoi is the superior artist, as well as being more "Russian" than Pushkin who was influence by non-Russian writers such as Scott and Byron. Tolstoi's ability to create a 'Russian novel', so to speak, owed much to Pushkin's influence and creation of Russian literature. (He was far more 'Russian' than say Turgenev or Dostoevskii, howevermuch the latter derided European influences.)Quote:
Either way, Tolstoi and Joyce were influential, but they were not central figures of a national literary movement. Joyce, though always writing about Ireland, was more away from there than there. Tolstoi had less of an affect than Pushkin
Hemingway, though a great short story writer, was not much of a novelist. To compare him, or Faulkner, to Joyce is like creating a tennis amauter to a Grand Slam champion-Joyce's prose is inventive, brilliant and outstanding, more so than Hemingway or Faulkner.Quote:
People like Hemingway and sometimes Faulkner took English prose to new levels in practical, reproducible ways, which Joyce's prose doesn't. Da Vinci might have envisioned the helicopter but it was the Wright brothers who actually got us off of the ground. Joyce is a pie in the sky intellectual who's more concerned with how he thinks prose should work than with how it actually does. To this day there are a lot more Hemingway and Faulkner followers than there are Joyces. They are the ones with living legacies.
His stream-of-consciousness and interior monologue techniques, although borrowed, revolutionzed literature and how characters were supposed to think and speak. In terms of novelistic influence it would be difficult to look beyond Tolstoi, Flaubert and Proust in terms of more influential novelists.
Associating 'free love' with a sexually conservative country like Indian is tenous. Yes Indian philosophy influenced Western European thought (i.e. Schopenhaeur) and the kama sutra, but neither of those trains of thought are actually relevant in modern India, and besides anything else labelling such things as "Indian" is a misnomer since 'India' as a nation-state is a modern creation-there was no India when they were written, like there was an England when Shakespeare or Chaucer wrote. India preached a lot of wisdom, though it rarely practices it-it is a Western myth to believe that it does-Pankaj Mishra's "The Romantics" hilariously satircizes Western misconceptions of India.Quote:
India's philosophy seems to have taken the west at many angles, even leading to the rise of free love during the 1960s. You are ignorant in the sense that you only look at novelists, and ignore poetry writers, and non-fiction writers.
Yes I am only dealing with fiction as this is a discussion on literature.
Look. Each character in Lord of the Rings is no different than in the beginning of the novel. The whole plot is a quest to become nothing. It is circular, ending where it began, with the only thing that happens is that some characters die. Comparing Joyce's Leopold Bloom to Gandalf is ridiculous. Gandalf always shows up when you expect him to be the least expected (he shows up when he is least expected so often, that he creates a loop of expectation). Knows everything about everything, and yet does nothing. His flaws go as far as to forcing him to save the day. He is less round than even a Dumbledore. He is not a character, but simply a walking textbook, who happens to have useless magic to throw into the mix, which never seems to save the day.
The whole "the similarities and differences end with both rings being round" argument was used by Tolkien to dissuade comparison between the two works. Everyone can see exactly where Tolkien grabbed from, if they have read the primary sources (I would love to know which ones you have read, in order to better understand what sort of argument you can possibly be creating). Having read the primary sources, you can easily nitpick exactly who and what everything in Tolkien is. I would love for you to give me an example of exactly why Tolkien should a) be read, when more people find him boring than not, and his fan base is solidly built on the rare exception of people, who only read within one genre. Give Tolkien to an adult who read him in his/her youth, and I would love to see the results. His prose, even you admit is terrible. He stated there are no lessons in his books, and no form of allegorical connection with our world. His characters are flat by any standards (perhaps Wagner's are also flat, but a) they have more emotions, and b) they grow) and his plot was borrowed. What does he have to offer? Why does he deserve to be read? What does anyone get from reading Tolkien besides a) bordom, or b) escape from reality, which is not the purpose of literature.
and off the record, yes, more people desire to read Maupassant's characters than Tolkien's. The reason why is because they are characters, and not cut-outs. You betray your lack of knowledge of him by naming him a naturalist, when he clearly wasn't even consistently realist. (many of his works rely on fantastical and spiritual elements).
Leopold Bloom is a far more developed character than Gandalf. There is no doubt in that, simply because we know his thoughts, we know he varys, we know he has inconsistent views, we know he likes certain things, and hypocritically doesn't like others. We even know his dietary desires. What we know about Gandalf, is that he occasionally scorns the boys, has an indefinite amount of knowledge, which never seems to do anything, and likes to smoke a pipe.
Charles Bovary too is very developed in comparison. His character has roots, his actions always seem justified, and yet the justifications are just implied, and his character changes, and reacts. You don't get that in Gandalf.
Did you even read the books? To me it seems like you are just a movie fan, who read a Wiki summary and thinks he knows the secrets. Anyone who has read the books, and other books by his contemporaries, can clearly see his prose is rubbish. Archaic borrowing cannot be justified by the fact that others borrow styles. The book is archaic, because Tolkien had some fantasy in his head of being one of his dead authors, and writing in their language. It adds nothing but boredom, and it serves no purpose other than to try and make an unauthentic book seem authentic. If we compare it to, lets say, Eco's language in The Name of the Rose, that he mixes with Latin, and other Vernacular, we can see who clearly knows the use of language. Tolkien's language is boring, his poetry terrible, and his detail over-done. He provides family trees where names will do, and insists on describing every detail of something before moving on. Why should he be read? You tell me.
Faulkner, in terms of readability, is definitely the best of those all. Most of Hemingway's works are already period pieces, or on the road to become them. Joyce simply didn't write enough to outdo Faulkner though, but he is still quite important, and an excellent writer. People just don't seem to get that just because they don't like a book, doesn't mean it is a bad book. I personally don't like many novels which I rate highly. My personal aesthetic has nothing to do with the quality of the work, but rather it has to do with what I read.
Well said.Quote:
Originally Posted by mortalterror
Blasphemy pure and simple. You can not name any novelist in the same breath as Joyce, objectively, that is. Subjectivity is your personal affair and doesn't mean much in the outside world. There is only one Joyce, there was Proust before him and Beckett after, nothing else is!Quote:
Originally Posted by Antiquarian
What I like in Joyce is his command of language. It melts in his hands, he is a wordsmith, so is Beckett. They can make simple words do wonders and be creative and inventive if simple language fails. This is taking language beyond itself, putting it under so much creative pressure that it transforms. These writers are for listening to, get a good audio book version, something from Nestor Audio Books. BBC serialised an excellent reading of Ulysses as well. I have these gems in my huge collection:
http://www.naxosaudiobooks.com/northamerica/30912.htm
http://www.naxosaudiobooks.com/northamerica/729212.htm
http://www.naxosaudiobooks.com/northamerica/25312.htm
A good reader brings out the quality of language. These books are for reading aloud and listening to. I think Cyril Cusack is the best audiobook Hamlet ever and he is the best Stephen Daedalus as well:
http://www.amazon.com/James-Joyce-Au.../dp/1559946091
For BBC Ulysses:
http://www.amazon.com/Ulysses-BBC-Ra.../dp/0553471635