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squire
Gondolin
Jan 30 2012, 6:34am
Post #1 of 7
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** Rosebury’s ‘Tolkien: A Cultural Phenomenon’, Chapter One ** the real 6. – A novel is well-structured while The Lord of the Rings is not: yes or no?
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Before starting, I apologize for losing count of my post numbers. This is the real #6!
As we near the end of the first half of Chapter One, we see the shape of Rosebury’s “big picture” argument about the literary form of The Lord of the Rings. He tackles the standard claim that LotR is not a novel merely to frame his investigation in terms of the default form of modern literature. This makes sense because modern literature and not medieval philology is his professional specialty. In two inquiries so far – the question of realism and the question of language – he has shown that LotR stands outside of the novel (modern) / romance (anachronistic) divide, because its most distinctive artistic feature is absolutely unique to it: that is its setting in a fully-realized, linguistically diverse imaginary world, Middle-earth. Today we will follow his third inquiry based on novelistic qualifications: the question of structure.
Below is the usual outline of this section; please PM me if you would like to read excerpts from the actual text.
6. Is The Lord of the Rings not a novel because of its loose and incoherent episodic structure? (page 26)
- A. Especially in the first volume, the larger plot is only gradually unveiled to the hobbits who have numerous serial adventures while fleeing Sauron’s Black Riders
-- i) Ex. a synopsis of the on-again-off-again chapters of Book One (Frodo’s flight from Bag End to Rivendell)
-- ii) This structure may be a product of naïve authorship or a deliberate attempt to revive an archaic genre. For examples:
--- a. Pilgrim’s Progress (Bunyan, 1678; the masterpiece of the long allegorical form, in which an Englishman journeys from his home town (=this world) to a city (=Heaven)).
--- b. Medieval romances (“fantastic stories about marvel-filled adventures, often of a knight errant portrayed as having heroic qualities, who goes on a quest.” – Wikipedia)
--- c. The Odyssey (att. to Homer, c. 700 BCE; a seminal epic poem of Western literature, about a captain’s ten-year struggle to find his way home after a war)
-- iii) Arguably, modern novels require the opposite type of structure
--- a. Construction of the narrative must be interlocked and tight
--- b. Every episode must be integral to the plot and theme
--- c. The material must be developed continuously from start to finish
- B. But this categorical contrast of structures is not sustainable. Novels actually vary widely in their construction.
-- i) The tautly structured standard cited above is a 19th-century mainstream model. Examples:
--- a. Tom Jones (Fielding, 1749; one of the earliest novels follows the career of an honest but lusty young man of illegitimate birth)
--- b. Madame Bovary (Flaubert, 1856; a doctor’s wife has affairs to escape the banality of provincial life)
--- c. Many other works between the era of Fielding and Flaubert (i.e., 1750s to 1850s)
-- ii) But many novels do not follow this model. Examples:
--- a. Robinson Crusoe (Defoe, 1719; autobiographical style account of a man shipwrecked for 28 years)
--- b. Tristam Shandy (Sterne, 1759; comic novel of a character’s life story distinguished by its numerous excursions into sidelines)
--- c. Ulysses (Joyce, 1922; see my previous two discussions)
--- d. Most post-modern fiction, described as “structurally pluralistic.” Wikipedia suggests that post-WW II literature “relies heavily on fragmentation, paradox, questionable narrators, etc.”)
-- iii) The Lord of the Rings shares structural features with many novels, even 19th-century ones.
--- a. Shippey rightly points out that LotR employs the medieval device of entrelacement wherein various plot threads are intertwined without the characters’ knowledge.
--- b. Although this structure is found both in novels and earlier forms of literature, Tolkien’s use of it is clearly modern.
---- 1. He uses a map
---- 2. He uses a tight chronology
--- c. Examples of how the modern novel has fully appropriated the pre-modern technique of entrelacement:
---- 1. Wuthering Heights (Bronte, 1847; doomed lovers engage across social barriers)
---- 2. Works by the following authors: R. L. Stevenson (ex.: Treasure Island, 1883; Kidnapped and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, both 1886)
---- 3. Dickens (ex.: Little Dorritt, 1855; complex social satire originally published as a series of episodes in a magazine)
---- 4. Thackeray (ex.: Vanity Fair, 1846; also first published in serial form)
---- 5. Wilkie Collins (ex.: The Woman in White, 1859; he wrote 30 novels like with complex narrative structures that presaged the detective novel and modern thrillers)
- C. Journey rather than quest is the unifying image for the diffuse narrative structure of LotR
-- i) The structure of LotR does not follow any generic pattern, either novel or romance
--- a. The first book seems to be an episodic walking holiday, with little urgency or direction.
---- 1. Ex.: Shippey’s comment that Frodo needs to be pushed out of five different refuges on his road.
--- b. The interlacement that Shippey identifies does not begin until Book II.
--- c. The delays and slow pace in Book I establish that Frodo is a victim of fate, not a questing hero.
-- ii) The romantic tradition of a ‘quest’ does not seem to describe the structure, but ‘journey’ does
--- a. Frodo’s goal is to lose, not gain, a treasure.
--- b. Rather, the emphasis is on the ‘journey’ or the ‘road’
---- 1. Ex.: Frodo recites Bilbo’s poem about there only being one road
--- c. The road is a metaphor for the adventure of life itself.
--- d. Middle-earth is a world of roads
---- 1. Only at the beginning and end of the book do the characters live at home, and even then they dream of journeys.
---- 2. The major characters are travelers by nature.
---- 3. The opening and closing scenes of the book introduce new journeys
---- 4. The “Road” song recurs throughout
-- iii) The less defined theme of journeying does not serve the plot so much as it serves the imaginary world that underlies the plot.
--- a. The image of the ‘Journey’ applies to and unifies the entire history that the book encompasses.
---- 1. ‘Quest’ may describe the plot of Frodo’s errand, but that is simply the axis of the main action.
---- 2. A quest structure for the entire story would require every episode and location to serve a purpose in achieving the quest
---- 3. A journey structure celebrates the diversity and loose ends of places and peoples visited
--- b. All the many connections or missed connections of the subsidiary adventures to the main plot seem lifelike and contingent.
---- 1. Ex.: Merry gets a sword in the Barrow that he uses much later to wound the Witch-King.
---- 2. Ex.: But Tom Bombadil, encountered at about the same point in the story, never comes back into it.
---- 3. Ex.: The Ents, roused by the wandering hobbits, end up destroying Saruman.
---- 4. Ex.: But the search for the Entwives never enters the story after its introduction.
--- c. The maps and landscapes of Middle-earth that frame the journeys are larger than the scope of the story, and suggest other journeys not taken.
--- d. Thus the structural use of the journey helps to elaborate the imaginary world that is the heart of LotR’s distinctiveness.
- D. It can be objected that expansiveness and contingency work against the artistic principle of coherence.
-- i) Journeying can look like an excuse for rambling rather than a unifying device
-- ii) If true, LotR offends not just novelistic principles of unity, but also the classic principles of proportion between parts and whole, or means and ends, which apply to any genre.
-- iii) The excess of journeying to meet people, places, and things is unnecessary and weighs the story down.
-- iv) Cutting large parts of LotR would make it more effective.
--- a. Ex.: BBC radio version, 1981
--- b. Ex.: Peter Jackson’s film version, 2001-03
-- v) But this does not ring true to readers, who respond to the expansive structure for reasons other than interest in the plot
--- a. Most feel as Tolkien did that the book is too short.
--- b. The amplitude of Middle-earth is structurally important, and thematically important.
- E. There are two types of structure in LotR which are ultimately integrated as a single work of art: plot-based structure and comprehensive structure.
-- i) The aesthetic dynamic of a plot-based structure is to arouse hopes and fears in the reader’s mind, whose resolution is the objective of the plot.
--- a. This works for novels and melodrama alike
--- b. For example, desires are gratified in
---- 1. Pride and Prejudice (Austen, 1813; country gentry endure the vicissitudes of courtship)
---- 2. The Winter’s Tale (Shakespeare, 1623; Near-fatal misunderstandings among royal families are resolved decades later)
--- c. Contrarily, desires are denied in
---- 1. Tess of the d’Urbervilles (Hardy, 1891; social mores and misunderstandings doom a country girl torn by her sexual past.)
---- 2. Othello (Shakespeare, 1603; jealousy and conspiracy combine to destroy nobles who have been competing for love and power)
--- d. In all such stories, every episode in the structure correlates to the arousal, quickening, gratification or denial of the readers’ desires. Methods include:
---- 1. Suspense and resolution in events,
---- 2. Attraction and aversion to characters.
--- e. Not all literary works have plot-based structure.
---- 1. Some modern novels do not focus on a sequence of events: ex.: The Waves (Woolf, 1931; six individuals express their consciousnesses through monologues)
---- 2. Lyric poems may have no events.
---- 3. The aesthetic experience in these cases involves a response to plotless concepts or images, with diverse structures giving coherence to the response.
--- f. The Lord of the Rings does have a plot-based structure
---- 1. Review the basic plot elements that tie the War of the Ring to Frodo’s quest of Mount Doom (omitting Aragorn’s story).
---- 2. The intertwined climax of the story resolves several hundred pages worth of built-up tension.
-- ii) But The Lord of the Rings has a second, overarching structure which is identified with the imaginary world of the setting.
--- a. As seen in this chapter so far, many elements contribute to the unification of the rambling story that takes place in this world.
---- 1. The internal reality of the world’s history, geography and philology
---- 2. The multitude of linguistic discourses
---- 3. The interlacing journeys
---- 4. The complexities of the plot
--- b. Instead of incoherence, the layering of details contributes to the impression that the world is real, with the real world’s capacity for newness and surprise.
--- c. The Appendices, the least novelistic part of the book, seem to go on forever without running dry and give additional authenticity to the vision of an unlimited backdrop.
--- d. The comprehensive structure works aesthetically
---- 1. It engages the reader just as a character does in a novel.
---- 2. Since the plot revolves around Sauron’s threat to destroy Middle-earth, the reader desires the destruction of the Ring to save the imaginary world
-- iii) CONCLUSION OF PART I. The two structures are integrally related as a compelling unity.
--- a. Our desire for Middle-earth is the keynote to our desire for the fulfillment of Frodo’s errand.
--- b. The Lord of the Rings is a consummate work of art because it unites these desires in a compelling way.
1. Addressing the speaker
Rosebury starts his discussion of the structure of The Lord of the Rings by acknowledging how episodic it is “especially in the first volume”. He briefly summarizes the long string of in-again-out-again adventures that Frodo and his companions experience between Bag End and Rivendell. He argues that this simple, even repetitive, structure accurately reproduces the hobbits’ initial perspective: their unworldliness and their ignorance of the full scale of Sauron’s threat. For the moment he discounts the “complex plot” that evolves later in the story.
6.A. Is Rosebury confusing Book I (the first part of Fellowship, covering Frodo’s journey to Rivendell) with Volume I (Fellowship, also called Books I and II, covering Frodo’s very episodic journeys with his companions from Bag End all the way to Parth Galen, at which point the Fellowship breaks up and the book’s structure becomes far more complex thenceforward)?
6.A.i. In recounting the plot of Book I the way he does, is Rosebury distorting his lens and overemphasizing the ‘simplistic’ structure in order to demolish the criticism of it more easily?
6.A.i. In focusing exclusively on the structure of Book I is he addressing an unspoken assumption that many critics dislike LotR because the first third of the book is the most simplistic part, artistically speaking, and they never really get past that?
He offers what seems to be his idea of the critics’ response to this first part of the book: that the author is ‘naïve’ (i.e. not a good writer), or is deliberately imitating an anachronistic mode (i.e., just a medieval professor mucking about with story). Rosebury even offers three candidates for Tolkien’s presumed model here: Pilgrim’s Progress, medieval romances, or even the Odyssey (see my brief synopses in the outline above). Speaking for the critics, he declares that whatever structural model Tolkien is going for it is “emphatically not [that] of the modern novel, in which symphonic tightness of construction, the integral significance of each episode to plot and theme, the sustained development of exposition to closure, are of the essence.”
Again Rosebury speaks the part of the critics he intends to argue with; this time he doesn’t even cite one review that criticizes Tolkien on structural grounds. I wouldn’t mind so much if he wasn’t making such a big deal of naming long lists of novels, and providing long quotes from Tolkien, to illustrate his ability to construct a tight comparative argument.
6.A.iii. Do you feel that the structure of Book I (or Volume I, whatever) is a good argument that LotR is not really a novel? Does the structure feel flawed or amateurish to you, or did it on your first reading?
Well, again we have to give Rosebury his ‘gimme’ if we are to go on. Having defined the modern novel as tautly structured, he immediately points out that that is not really a universal model. That is only one way to write a novel, very popular in the 18th and 19th centuries (he gives examples, see the outline 6.B.i.) but not characteristic of many books from earlier and later years (again, see examples above at 6.B.ii.).
6.B.i. Do the books cited help you understand the debate going on here? Have you read any of them with an awareness of their structure?
Rosebury signs on to Shippey’s well-argued case from The Road to Middle-earth that Tolkien’s primary structural device is entrelacement. That is a mode originally found in the medieval romances whereby several plot threads follow several characters whose fates or journeys are interdependent without the characters’ own full knowledge. The reader is more aware of it than the characters are, but satisfactorily, all is revealed and resolved at the end. Rosebury points out that this complex and difficult-to-manage structure may go back to medieval days, but it remains popular in modern times in novels, particularly the big Victorian ones (see examples above at 6.B.iii.c.), and he adds that Tolkien’s use of it is noticeably modern, what with his elaborate maps and chronologies. If I may put in my oar at this point, I haven’t read too many Victorian doorstops, but I recognize entrelacement in the contemporary social satires of Tom Wolfe, such as Bonfire of the Vanities (1987) and A Man in Full (1998). In fact, I bet it is a staple of the vast majority of generic “series” novels, teleplays and screenplays, soap operas, etc. (although I know Rosebury is trying to limit his examples to “literary” novels, his entire subject seems barely under control here).
6.B.iii.c. Still, since Rosebury seems to make a point of citing a wide range of novels to prove his various points, why does he limit himself in this case entirely to the Victorians of over a century ago?
6.B. How flexible and convenient is this idea of saying what “the novel” is or is not, simply by naming three or four examples, anyway? Doesn’t the English department believe in quantitative research that might show just what percent of the population of all narrative fiction over three centuries follows any given combination of defining characteristics?
Rosebury next develops in more depth the idea that although LotR seems to start out as a Romantic, dubiously-crafted and episodic “quest” – repeating even Tom Shippey’s criticism of the leisurely, almost monotonous pace of Book I – it is quite arguable that the plot is not and never was a quest narrative. After all, Frodo’s errand is not voluntary, and he does not seek to obtain a treasure; rather he seeks from the start to rid himself of it, or more precisely to keep Sauron from getting it. But Rosebury digs deeper than just finding a contradiction in terms. He maintains that the characters and the situations are never presented in terms of a quest or a goal, but are rather always experienced as part of one journey or another. He quotes a long passage from early in Fellowship in which Frodo philosophizes about life and its adventures being metaphorically one great Road.
This, Rosebury asserts, is the “unifying image” of The Lord of the Rings.
6.C. He says “unifying image” twice in this section – but that sounds more thematic than structural to me. But if we accept it, structurally a road journey seems to me to be perilously close to the pre-modern “episodic” model he rejected earlier. Is Rosebury fuzzing the difference between a book’s structure and its theme? Or is he saying that Tolkien did so?
To drive his point home, he lays out how Middle-earth itself – the setting for the story that he feels is so central to our understanding – is a “world of roads.” Almost no action takes place “in residence”; the distances traveled in the course of the story are many hundreds of miles on foot; major characters like Frodo, Gandalf, and Aragorn are partly defined by their travels or desires to travel; the book begins and ends with new journeys starting; and even the “Road Goes Ever On and On” song (from the above cited passage) repeats throughout the work.
So sure, Frodo’s “errand” (“quest” is almost never used in the text) is the center of the plot, but the “journey” is what accounts for everything else in the story. Rosebury explains the distinction of kind: in a quest narrative, the structure must be tight with every episode serving or obstructing the progress of the quester, but in a journey narrative the structure loosens up, to celebrate the chances and contingencies of travel in a wide world. The hobbits’ intermittent adventures and significant later events are tied together, but in life-like and random ways rather than systematically. Rosebury gives examples of just how random-seeming some of the connections are, and how much of what is introduced during the journeys is never again encountered or enlarged upon.
6.C.iii.b. Although Rosebury will argue that it is the actual point of the story, do you like or dislike all the loose threads and incomplete encounters in LotR?
Again on his own account, Rosebury raises the objection that he has seemingly prescribed a recipe for structural incoherence, rather than thematic unification. All that “rambling and superfluous invention” – what about “novelistic unity”? Novels be damned, what about “proportion between the parts and the whole”, or “sufficiency of means to ends” – key principles of any good art regardless of genre? Surely parts of this book could have been trimmed: Tom Bombadil, for instance, who was cut from both the BBC radio version of 1981 and Peter Jackson’s New Line film of 2001.
6.D. Well? Aside from the recurring problem of Rosebury framing his own objections, do you think there is there an artistic problem with the vast and rambling structure of The Lord of the Rings?
As we expect by now, Rosebury has the perfect answer to his own question. He starts by asserting that “no one who knows the book well” would agree with cutting it, and that “most readers are likely to agree” (as Tolkien proposed) that the book is too short.
Hmm, now. I remember reading and disliking the article about Tolkien criticism in the J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia. It said that anyone who knows Tolkien’s books well enough to write about them is no longer a “mainstream” critic, but a Tolkien scholar who has thus lost his or her objectivity as a critic. I feel like something equally circular is going on here. Rosebury denies that anyone who “knows” the book could want it shorter, implying that anyone who argues for a tighter structure simply doesn’t “know” the book well enough yet.
6.D.v. Is it possible to like The Lord of the Rings and wish the book was shorter?
I don’t mean to get too down on Rosebury, because when it comes to his opinions rather than other peoples’, he details his analysis and his reasons to a fault. In this case he will explain exactly why “what looks like excess” for a plot-based story is “wholly necessary” for another kind of structure. But to identify that “different kind of structure”, first he has to lay down his general theory of how literature works!
He proposes “generally…and crudely” that any plot, whether of a novel or a “melodrama”, works by creating “desire” in the reader for a resolution of whatever conflicts arise in the story. The desire might be hope for a good ending or fear of a bad ending. In any case, the reader’s desire engages him or her in the story. If the hopes are gratified in the end, it’s a comedy like Pride and Prejudice or The Winter’s Tale; if the fears are gratified, it’s a tragedy like Tess of the D’Urbervilles or Othello (see the outline at 6.E.i. for synopses of these works). But it’s not just about the resolution. All the scenes in the story serve, not just to lay down the narrative, but also to “arouse, quicken, gratify, or deny” the reader’s desire or “undesire” regarding specific aspects of the story – most usually, the characters. The main point is that a plot-driven narrative does not just engage the reader in the ending: will the hero succeed? but rather it also engages the reader in the process of reaching the ending.
6.E.i. Is this stuff basic Plot 101, or is Rosebury making it distinctly his own in some way?
6.E.i. Are you surprised to see Shakespeare suddenly pop up in Rosebury’s endless lists of other books to which LotR might be compared, especially in the guise of “melodrama”? Is melodrama a code word for Romance, or is this a new non-novelistic genre that we have previously neglected while trying to classify LotR?
But virtually plotless novels are possible (example: Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, see the outline E.i.e.1.), as are other literary works like lyric poetry. How do they work? The same way, by arousing and satisfying desire – only now it is aroused by “plotless conceptions” as simple as visual images or as complex as psychological questions.
Rosebury allows that The Lord of the Rings does have a plot-based structure. He gives a quick synopsis of the major elements of the plot, centering on Frodo’s struggle to get the Ring to Mordor and destroy it before Sauron overwhelms the peoples of the West. I love his final comment, which implicitly says why he does not offer here another long quote from LotR: “The work’s climax…has an overpowering force, the culmination of several hundred pages of carefully accumulated tension, which no quotation can begin to suggest.” (emphasis by squire)
Rosebury, if you haven’t noticed, makes a continuous and dedicated effort to back up his ideas or propositions with evidence in the form of quotations or lists of examples of literary works.
6.E.i.f. But was this plot synopsis necessary, especially since he previously gave us a similar one at the beginning of this chapter?
But in contrast to LotR’s obvious possession of a dramatic plot structure, now finally comes the answer to the implicit question posed a page earlier: what is the mysterious other structure, the “different kind of structure” that can ramble and stretch incoherently, yet does not offend every artistic principle of conservation of effort, and even actually works to unify the story? (Believe it or not, Rosebury is about to pull together everything we’ve read so far in Chapter One.)
It is, as you may have guessed, the “overarching, all-inclusive” presence of Middle-earth itself. He recounts all his previous arguments, originally posed in regard to LotR’s questionable status as a novel, to show how they contribute to this unified effect: the coherent “history, geography, philology” of an imaginary world (realism); the “multitudinous discourses” (language); the “complexities of the plot, the interlacing journeys” (structure). The more expansive the vistas, paradoxically, the greater the unification, as evidenced by the Appendices with their apparently endless additional and authenticating detail. As he concludes this stunning paragraph: “an essential feature of the invented world (as of the real one) is this exhilarating illimitableness.”
6.E.ii. Does this superlative-charged paragraph seal the deal for you? Did you see it coming?
Finally, to end part I of the first chapter – whose subject is the nature of the form, as opposed to the narrative, of The Lord of the Rings – Rosebury nails just why Tolkien’s imaginary world engages the reader’s desire and so creates a successful aesthetic effect. “Middle-earth, rather than any of the characters, is the hero” of the story. We readers are sucked into the “fascination and beauty of Middle-earth (including its peoples and their cultures)” as much as we are attracted by the more conventional excitement of the plot. But the plot, remember, involves the threat of destruction of Middle-earth! We would not care about the Ring, and Sauron, and Frodo as representative of the Free Peoples, if we had no emotional stake in the world that is at risk. Rosebury’s brilliant conclusion (in my opinion) is summed up this way: “the two aesthetic structures – the dynamic structure of the plot, and the comprehensive structure of the invented world – are integrally related: our desire for Middle-earth is the keynote, so to speak, of our desire for the fulfillment of Frodo’s errand.” His verdict: The Lord of the Rings is a masterpiece of art because it arouses two sets of desires and coordinates their satisfaction in a “compelling unity.”
End of Part I!
6.E.iii. Was it good for you? Would you do it again?
2. Comments from the peanut gallery
A. Can one really write a long analysis of LotR's "complex" plot and Middle-earth's "expansive" history that gives Aragorn one brief mention?
B. Gentle readers:
I am embarrassed to admit just how far behind I am in the schedule for this discussion. Having covered 35 pages in a week, I have 24 left to go: the entire second part of the chapter, which reviews the major themes of the book. The problem, for me at least, has been that Rosebury’s book is essentially one long, dense, and closely-reasoned argument. Because I can’t be sure that many of us actually have the book in hand, I have felt the need to analyze and report the arguments in some detail before asking any questions or making any comments on it. To my dismay that has taken more time than I have really had to spare.
With Modtheow’s permission, I would like to continue to post on the second part, through (honestly) the coming week – unless she or a reasonable number of respondents on the board object, in which case I will be willing to let it go. I am very sorry in either case, because I do like doing this and I want to follow Rosebury’s ideas on LotR’s form to the end, but I fear that going into the second week in conjunction with the following discussion leader will lead to a confusing overlap of topics under discussion.
squire online:
RR Discussions: The Valaquenta, A Shortcut to Mushrooms, and Of Herbs and Stewed Rabbit
Lights! Action! Discuss on the Movie board!: 'A Journey in the Dark'. and 'Designing The Two Towers'.
Footeramas: The 3rd (and NOW the 4th too!) TORn Reading Room LotR Discussion; and "Tolkien would have LOVED it!"
squiretalk introduces the J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia: A Reader's Diary
 = Forum has no new posts. Forum needs no new posts.
(This post was edited by squire on Jan 30 2012, 6:38am)
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N.E. Brigand
Gondolin
Jan 30 2012, 6:44am
Post #2 of 7
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Thanks for clearing that up!
And a question: "the first half of chapter one"? Elostirion's schedule posted at the top of this board shows Modtheow starting chapter two today -- is she to overlap you, or are we pushing the other chapters back a week?
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Discuss Tolkien�s life and works in the Reading Room!
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How to find old Reading Room discussions.
(This post was edited by N.E. Brigand on Jan 30 2012, 6:47am)
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Modtheow
Menegroth
Jan 30 2012, 3:32pm
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Fine with me to delay the journey
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I have been enjoying squire's meticulous presentation of Rosebury's arguments and have been wishing I had more time to digest everything and comment on some of what is being presented. I could post my first questions on chapter 2 today, but if it's okay with subsequent discussion leaders, I would vote to push back the schedule by a week -- for one thing, squire's section of the book is twice as long as mine, so I can well understand the need for more time, and overlapping discussions of chapter one and two wouldn't be helpful in developing an understanding of what Rosebury is arguing. Maybe those who are scheduled to lead discussions could consult via PM about a revised schedule?
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Luthien Rising
Menegroth
Jan 30 2012, 8:00pm
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Particularly delays with scenery and poetry in them ;) (And not just as a discussion leader)
I just finished re-reading LOTR and finding myself lingering particularly long over descriptive passages. My youngest child is reading LOTR during reading break at school; he came home enthusing about Tom Bombadil and wishing he was in the movie, just because he's awesome. I think he would understand the idea that these things that could be cut, to make for a shorter novel with a more commonly accepted "tight" structure, strengthen the book in the end. I do buy Rosebury's argument in this. Plot isn't everything that makes a book work; subsuming everything to plot structure — particularly to a particular kind of plot structure assumed to be better (plain language : tight plotting) — doesn't necessarily improve a book the way, say, replacing adverbs with descriptions does. The latter enhances emotional impact through visceral engagement; I never quite understand why some people who advocate cutting adverbs also advocate cutting back extraneous-to-plot elements that also engage the reader.
Lúthien Rising
All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us. / We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
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sador
Gondolin
Jan 30 2012, 9:05pm
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6.A. Is Rosebury confusing Book I (the first part of Fellowship, covering Frodo’s journey to Rivendell) with Volume I (Fellowship, also called Books I and II, covering Frodo’s very episodic journeys with his companions from Bag End all the way to Parth Galen, at which point the Fellowship breaks up and the book’s structure becomes far more complex thenceforward)?
It looks like it.
6.A.i. In focusing exclusively on the structure of Book I is he addressing an unspoken assumption that many critics dislike LotR because the first third of the book is the most simplistic part, artistically speaking, and they never really get past that?
It's not so simplistic as unfocused and rambling.
On the other hand, becuase it is simplistic it lends itself better to adaption - hence many fans' opinion that Fellowship was the best of the three New Line movies.
6.A.iii. Do you feel that the structure of Book I (or Volume I, whatever) is a good argument that LotR is not really a novel?
Structurally, it is far more of a novel than anything Kafka wrote,
6.B.i. Do the books cited help you understand the debate going on here? Have you read any of them with an awareness of their structure?
Are you sure about Tom Jones? It is quite picaresque - which hardly fits with the model Rosebury mentions!
6.B.iii.c. Still, since Rosebury seems to make a point of citing a wide range of novels to prove his various points, why does he limit himself in this case entirely to the Victorians of over a century ago?
Any serially-published novel with more than one hero needed somehow to juggle with keeping readers' attention; I remember seeing someone annalyse how wonderfully-structured Vanity Fair was.
But unlike Thackeray, not every serial novel did that quite as well. And Silas Marner used the same technique very well, despite not being published serially (I think it wasn't; at any rate it is pretty short).
However, Tolkien's solution - of having central characters not appear in whole books - is both original and radical; I think it was very successful.
6.C.iii.b. Although Rosebury will argue that it is the actual point of the story, do you like or dislike all the loose threads and incomplete encounters in LotR?
Naturally.
6.D.v. Is it possible to like The Lord of the Rings and wish the book was shorter?
Perhaps, but it is difficult. There is so much which might seem superfluous! If you do not enjoy Middle-earth, there is very little to keep you at it.
And you also miss the whole point of the ending.
6.E.i. Are you surprised to see Shakespeare suddenly pop up in Rosebury’s endless lists of other books to which LotR might be compared, especially in the guise of “melodrama”?
No. It was an obvious choice.
Is melodrama a code word for Romance, or is this a new non-novelistic genre that we have previously neglected while trying to classify LotR?
I take it to mean a near-novel, but non-realistic in being highly exaggerated in its events and gestures. Both The Winter's Tale and (to a lesser extent) Tess of the D'urbervilles get melodramatic (I remember Jude the Obscure being called a poetic work in prose - the melodrama in it is far more exaggerated than in Tess), and about everything by Dickens that I've read is sheer melodrama; Thacheray, however, is far more realistic - which means that once you have several less successful chapters in a row, you get bored (at least I did).
6.E.iii. Was it good for you? Would you do it again?
Aren't you going to ask about that last paragraph of yours?
Well, at least I must comment about Middle-earth as the 'main character' for whom we care - once again, in connection with an observation of Shippey's about how the readers seems to take on trust the bland and fantastical assumption that using the Ring is the worst evil which can be done: I think that the blasted and repellant land wherever Sauron and his servants pass, highlight this feeling in a way no explanation could.
Likewise, when the book is over and Frodo leaves Middle-earth, we do not see it as a tragedy: The Shire (Lewis' "real England"), and all of Middle-earth have been saved, if not for Frodo - for itself, and for us.
Thirdly - the fact that so many people miss the significance of the temptation of Galadriel, and prefer to see her as a Mary-figure (!) is because of the magic of Lothlorien (the chapter, and the land itself); someone to whom Middle-earth itself responds so lovingly, must be good.
A. Can one really write a long analysis of LotR's "complex" plot and Middle-earth's "expansive" history that gives Aragorn one brief mention?
Not a comprehensive one, but yes.
B. Gentle readers...
Of course, I don't mind either way; but it is not just Modtheow's premission you need to ask - but also NEB's, Luthien Rising's, elostirion's and Elizabeth's. As there is nothing planned yet after this discussion is finished, another week of it will be only better.
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elostirion74
Nargothrond
Jan 30 2012, 9:13pm
Post #6 of 7
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Looks like we´re all ready to insert an extra week into the discussion, so I´ve posted the new schedule as a response to the original schedule post (see sticky at the top).
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elostirion74
Nargothrond
Feb 2 2012, 9:05pm
Post #7 of 7
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6.A.i. In focusing exclusively on the structure of Book I is he addressing an unspoken assumption that many critics dislike LotR because the first third of the book is the most simplistic part, artistically speaking, and they never really get past that?
He might be adressing an unspoken assumption, but I rather think he discusses the plot structure of Book I to underline the unusual unifying structures of the first part of LoTR compared to what you would see in a classic novel. I think he´s also rightly arguing how the adventures of the hobbits in Book I is a realistic description of the gradual understanding and enlightenment of the Hobbit about the Shire as well as the world without it. In many ways this theme and its implications for the structure of the book continues with Merry and Pippin´s adventures in The Two Towers.
6.A.iii. Do you feel that the structure of Book I (or Volume I, whatever) is a good argument that LotR is not really a novel? Does the structure feel flawed or amateurish to you, or did it on your first reading?
The structure of book I seems definitely like a natural way to contrast LoTR with an ordinary novel. The structure doesn´t feel in any way flawed to me. For one thing the skilfully evoked appreciation of landscape and scenery which is evident in these parts is a key factor of the work as a whole and one of several reasons why LoTR offers so much even after several re-readings. Typically plot-based books don´t do that. Secondly it´s a significant trait of LoTR that small sections and images in Book I are understood or given a greater significance much later in the story. There´s a lot of foreshadowing in this part of the book. You´ve got Sam´s feeling of new purpose after meeting the Elves (start of chapter 4) which is adressed again when he believes Frodo to be dead at the end of Two Towers. You´ve got Frodo´s dream in Tom Bombadil´s house. Their encounter with Tom Bombadil gives the hobbits a perspective on the History of Middle Earth, giving the reader an idea of the age of the Elves, and when he saves them from the Barrow-wights we get a foreshadowing of Aragorn and his heritage. You´ve got the dangerous short-cut through the Old Forest, a forest which is compared to Fangorn in The Two Towers. You´ve got the tantalizing view of the mountains in the distance in chapter 8, a desire on the horizon which is adressed in a different tone when Merry is left alone with the Rohirrim in Chapter 3 of Book V. Structurally I think LoTR shows a very strong coherence, but it´s not one of the shortest way from a to b-kind, but a slower approach where you gradually get a better sense of the whole picture - the world which the hobbits until then knew very little about. This is not to say that everything is enlarged upon later - many things are just mentioned once and only seem to be there to add to the richness of the world.
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6.B.iii.c. Still, since Rosebury seems to make a pointof citing a wide range of novels to prove his various points, why does he limit himself in this case entirely to the Victorians of over a century ago?
Well, probably just because he wanted to compare LoTR´s literary devices to classic novels that most critics and readers not easily can ignore or discount.
6.C. He says “unifying image” twice in this section – but that sounds more thematic than structural to me. But if we accept it, structurally a road journey seems to me to be perilously close to the pre-modern “episodic” model he rejected earlier. Is Rosebury fuzzing the difference between a book’s structure and its theme? Or is he saying that Tolkien did so?
Hmm - why should structure only be related to plot?
6.C.iii.b. Although Rosebury will argue that it is the actual point of the story, do you like or dislike all the loose threads and incomplete encounters in LotR?
I love them. I also like the fact that many of them are not explained, but leave you free to make your own connections about the meanings in the story. And at the same time I feel there are not so many loose threads after all.
6.D.v. Is it possible to like The Lord of the Rings and wish the book was shorter?
Oh, certainly. But I´m not one of them.
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