Re: CHAT: JRRT

And Rosta scripsit:

> That excuses the incompleteness of the languages, especially the gross
> inadequacy of their documentation.
We must also allow for T's personality:  "great but dilatory and
unmethodical", as C.S. Lewis called him.  He was, in addition, a niggler
of the kind that makes most of us ordinary perfectionists look like
nothing.


David Peterson scripsit:

> And I still dislike that a Shakespeare class is a requirement at,
> for example, UC Berkeley (and I'm sure the same is true of many other
> institutions), but that he's the only *writer* that's a requirement.
I think that Sh's importance in such contexts is not so much a result of
his quality as of his influence on all post-Sh literature.  No other works
in English save the King James Version are anywhere near as influential.
If philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato, English literature is
a series of adaptations of Shakespeare.

> (Of course, I still think the idea of an *English* major, as opposed
> to a Literature major, is generally flawed, as the English courses at
> Berkeley specifically avoid including anything written in a language
> other than English.)
Justly so.  You can't expect people to understand multiple foreign
languages, and translations are notoriously unreliable.  There's no
knowing, for instance, how much of Ray's lack of appreciation for
Tolstoy is actually dislike for the work of his translators.


Mark J. Reed scripsit:

> Tolkien's writing is, as you
> said, mostly a means of getting the plot into the reader's head.
The occasional LotR .sig you see on my emails should indicate that
I don't agree.

> Sorry.  Not a Nabokov fan.  :) Especially disagree with him violently as
> regards what constitutes "poetry"; his "translation" of Yevgeny Onegin
> is a travesty.  But that's even futher OT. :)
But as you know (having read Hofstadter), N. by no means practiced what
he preached.

> (IMHO, with the exception of the Hobbitagonists, Tolkien's characters
> tended to have a fractal dimension closer to 2 than 3, admittedly in
> large part because there were just so darn many of them.)
Also because many of them are non-human, and (as Lewis said) wear their
insides on their outside.  When you know that someone is a Dwarf, you
already know quite a bit about them.

OTOH, what you know may constitute a stereotype: we don't get the Dwarvish
view of Dwarves, after all.


Andreas Johansson scripsit:

> You're not required to justify your dislike for Tolkien's writing - my point
> is precisely that whether someone finds anyone's writings good or not is
> subjective, and not to be elevated to a claim that that someone's writing is
> objectively good or bad.
Indeed.  Such intuitions may be useful for deciding whom to work on, but
they can't possibly constitute data about the structure of literature as
such.  In addition, what they provide comes in the form, as Northrop Frye
says, not of comparative greatness, but of positive goodness or genuineness.


And Rosta scripsit:

> >It just seems like writing from the era and place.   Like
> >Lord Dunsany (well, different era, but the same kind of thing).
>
> From the era and place? What, England in the 1950s?!
I'm surprised you didn't say more about this.  One might conceivably
mistake JRRT's prose, at least in the early parts, for mainstream
prose (and never mind the subject matter), though you would surely
be disillusioned quick enough.  But Dunsany's?  Unthinkable.  As
Le Guin says, made-up Dunsany never amounts to anything but a few
mentions of gorgeous cities, unthinkable dooms, and a great many
sentences beginning with "And".  :-)  Dunsany's style is a mix of
Anglo-Irish conversation and the King James Version, and it is
uniquely his own.


Jeffrey Henning scripsit:

> I would like to have a virtual volume of _The Collected Letters of
> John Cowan_, so that whenever I am researching any topic, I can have
> quick access to pithy observations such as these.
When I get a chance, I'm going to write some special-purpose blogging
software that lets me recycle (some of) my outgoing mail as blog articles.

--
John Cowan  www.ccil.org/~cowan  www.reutershealth.com  jcowan@reutershealth.com
Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.  --Oscar Wilde

Reply