Displacement activity, check.
Jan. 24th, 2007 12:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennySo the cem of The Mirador has arrived, and I am having an anxiety attack. And watching myself having an anxiety attack and thinking that there's something quintessentially life-of-the-writer about it. Also, you know, utterly counterproductive.
Yes, in my brain, the commentary track feature is always on.
I dreamed last night that![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
heresluck and I were discussing Tolkien (and along the way proselytizing someone we'd met in a library who thought she wanted to read Tolkien but wasn't sure about it)--and in the dream I was trying to explain something that I think is actually kind of interesting.
Maybe.
(Look, I'm having an anxiety attack, Giant Spotted Snorklewhackers and all, just smile and nod, okay?)
See, the thing is that secondary world fantasy, as a genre, has gotten the idea that it must have Epic Sweep and Casts of Thousands and go on for reams and reams, and we all know we think that because of Tolkien, because this is what happens when you redact a genius into a rubric. But Tolkien himself is doing exactly the opposite. He's doing that thing that they tell you to do when you're trying to learn to write short stories, which is that you figure out what the climax is, and then you work backwards to the minimum amount of information you can give to have that climax make sense.
And, really, The Lord of the Rings is a remarkably well-focused narrative, all things considered.
Christopher Tolkien has displayed to the world both the monumental quantities of material his father had to work with, and the fact that J. R. R. Tolkien was totally making shit up as he went along in writing The Lord of the Rings. So when I say, two paragraphs up, that "Tolkien" is doing something, I'm not talking about John Ronald Reuel, Oxford don. I'm in fact doing something incredibly sloppy: conflating the author as narrative construct with the author as historically-extant person.
This is what gets beginning literature students in trouble, time and time again. They talk about what Shakespeare wants us to learn from, for instance, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and are bewildered when told that they can't possibly know that. And I know why they're confused; it's because their professors are using the exact same language, talking about what "Shakespeare" "does" in this speech or that scene. And when you're using exactly the same signifier, how do you explain that you're talking about two diametrically opposed things?
This is the same problem I have with biographical criticism: this conflation between the historically-extant person and the narrative construct, the assumption that the latter can be used to deduce the former, and the assumption that that's a good or useful thing to do.
But wait! you cry, clutching your head. Dr. Monette, you're an author! Are you saying you don't exist? Or that you have no authorial intent?
And, of course, I'm saying no such thing. But I'm saying that deducing my authorial intent from my narrative products is an iffy proposition at best.
Let's do a smallish diagram.
AUTHOR ==> NARRATIVE ==> AUTHOR1/AUDIENCE1 <== AUDIENCE
The AUTHOR--the historically-extant person, like William Shakespeare or J. R. R. Tolkien or me--generates a NARRATIVE Which in turn gets read by a broad spectrum of other historically-extant persons (AUDIENCE). Now, it's easy to see that the narrative generates an audience (AUDIENCE1) which may or may not have anything to do with the individual historically-extant persons (AUDIENCE) who pick the book up and read it (I've posted about this in connection with James Bond, because I am not the audience Fleming's narrative generates.) But the thing is that the narrative, in the act of being read, also generates an AUTHOR1, that is the organizing intelligence one feels operating behind a work of fiction.
But AUTHOR =/= AUTHOR1
This is where students get in trouble--and professors, too, if they get careless or obsessive--in assuming that the AUTHOR1 which the NARRATIVE generates is identical to the AUTHOR who generates the NARRATIVE.
We don't know what Shakespeare meant. Or what he wanted us to learn. Or if any of the Cool Shit that modern scholars find in his work is in there because the historically-extant Shakespeare deliberately put it in. But that doesn't mean the Cool Shit isn't there (the other mistake students commonly make). Because the thing is, the AUTHOR is not inextricably yoked, wedded, or otherwise affixed to the NARRATIVE, any more than the AUDIENCE is. (AUDIENCES change.) But the AUTHOR1 and the AUDIENCE1 are, because they are part of the NARRATIVE.
When we talk about what Shakespeare does, in this speech or that scene, when we talk about what Tolkien is doing in The Lord of the Rings, we aren't talking about the AUTHOR. We're talking about the AUTHOR1--which could be described in a bunch of other ways, including the fact that, as a species, Homo sapiens has some seriously kickass pattern-recognition software. AUTHOR1 is shorthand, which gets shorthanded in turn down into "Shakespeare" or "Tolkien." Or, I suppose, "Monette."
It's the same thing I do when I talk about genres "wanting" things or "believing" things or "asserting" things. I'll talk about narratives in the same way, if you watch me real close. The genre is just as much a construct generated by a group of narratives as the author is a construct generated by a single narrative. It's just easier to talk about them if you give them intentionality. And it points to the uneasy gray cloudy no man's land between the constructor and the thing constructed. Because the current does flow both ways. And you don't do yourself any favors if you forget about that, if you try to divorce them entirely, any more than you do yourself a favor by conflating AUTHOR and AUTHOR1.
And now, having digressed ourselves RIGHT OFF THE MAP, we return you to the discussion of Tolkien in progress:
As per usual, the trick is to imitate the deep structure of The Lord of the Rings, instead of the surface structure. Because they are radically different. Surface-structure TLotR gets you D&D and bloated fantasy "epics" and ObQuests and all the other trappings of whatpapersky calls Extruded Fantasy Product and the essential intellectual and emotional bankruptcy that gets secondary world fantasy so often tarred with the brushes of "escapism" and "hackwork" and all the rest of it.
It's the deep structure you've got to look for, the machinery that's doing the work. Because that's the stuff that lets the narrative reach out. It's not that there are elves and dwarves and dragons. It's what the elves and dwarves and dragons mean, what Tolkien makes them mean. And not in an allegorical sense, but in the sense of intellectual and emotional investment. That's why Tolkien is a genius rather than a rubric. And that's what we've got to learn.
Yes, in my brain, the commentary track feature is always on.
I dreamed last night that
heresluck and I were discussing Tolkien (and along the way proselytizing someone we'd met in a library who thought she wanted to read Tolkien but wasn't sure about it)--and in the dream I was trying to explain something that I think is actually kind of interesting.Maybe.
(Look, I'm having an anxiety attack, Giant Spotted Snorklewhackers and all, just smile and nod, okay?)
See, the thing is that secondary world fantasy, as a genre, has gotten the idea that it must have Epic Sweep and Casts of Thousands and go on for reams and reams, and we all know we think that because of Tolkien, because this is what happens when you redact a genius into a rubric. But Tolkien himself is doing exactly the opposite. He's doing that thing that they tell you to do when you're trying to learn to write short stories, which is that you figure out what the climax is, and then you work backwards to the minimum amount of information you can give to have that climax make sense.
And, really, The Lord of the Rings is a remarkably well-focused narrative, all things considered.
Christopher Tolkien has displayed to the world both the monumental quantities of material his father had to work with, and the fact that J. R. R. Tolkien was totally making shit up as he went along in writing The Lord of the Rings. So when I say, two paragraphs up, that "Tolkien" is doing something, I'm not talking about John Ronald Reuel, Oxford don. I'm in fact doing something incredibly sloppy: conflating the author as narrative construct with the author as historically-extant person.
This is what gets beginning literature students in trouble, time and time again. They talk about what Shakespeare wants us to learn from, for instance, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and are bewildered when told that they can't possibly know that. And I know why they're confused; it's because their professors are using the exact same language, talking about what "Shakespeare" "does" in this speech or that scene. And when you're using exactly the same signifier, how do you explain that you're talking about two diametrically opposed things?
This is the same problem I have with biographical criticism: this conflation between the historically-extant person and the narrative construct, the assumption that the latter can be used to deduce the former, and the assumption that that's a good or useful thing to do.
But wait! you cry, clutching your head. Dr. Monette, you're an author! Are you saying you don't exist? Or that you have no authorial intent?
And, of course, I'm saying no such thing. But I'm saying that deducing my authorial intent from my narrative products is an iffy proposition at best.
Let's do a smallish diagram.
AUTHOR ==> NARRATIVE ==> AUTHOR1/AUDIENCE1 <== AUDIENCE
The AUTHOR--the historically-extant person, like William Shakespeare or J. R. R. Tolkien or me--generates a NARRATIVE Which in turn gets read by a broad spectrum of other historically-extant persons (AUDIENCE). Now, it's easy to see that the narrative generates an audience (AUDIENCE1) which may or may not have anything to do with the individual historically-extant persons (AUDIENCE) who pick the book up and read it (I've posted about this in connection with James Bond, because I am not the audience Fleming's narrative generates.) But the thing is that the narrative, in the act of being read, also generates an AUTHOR1, that is the organizing intelligence one feels operating behind a work of fiction.
But AUTHOR =/= AUTHOR1
This is where students get in trouble--and professors, too, if they get careless or obsessive--in assuming that the AUTHOR1 which the NARRATIVE generates is identical to the AUTHOR who generates the NARRATIVE.
We don't know what Shakespeare meant. Or what he wanted us to learn. Or if any of the Cool Shit that modern scholars find in his work is in there because the historically-extant Shakespeare deliberately put it in. But that doesn't mean the Cool Shit isn't there (the other mistake students commonly make). Because the thing is, the AUTHOR is not inextricably yoked, wedded, or otherwise affixed to the NARRATIVE, any more than the AUDIENCE is. (AUDIENCES change.) But the AUTHOR1 and the AUDIENCE1 are, because they are part of the NARRATIVE.
When we talk about what Shakespeare does, in this speech or that scene, when we talk about what Tolkien is doing in The Lord of the Rings, we aren't talking about the AUTHOR. We're talking about the AUTHOR1--which could be described in a bunch of other ways, including the fact that, as a species, Homo sapiens has some seriously kickass pattern-recognition software. AUTHOR1 is shorthand, which gets shorthanded in turn down into "Shakespeare" or "Tolkien." Or, I suppose, "Monette."
It's the same thing I do when I talk about genres "wanting" things or "believing" things or "asserting" things. I'll talk about narratives in the same way, if you watch me real close. The genre is just as much a construct generated by a group of narratives as the author is a construct generated by a single narrative. It's just easier to talk about them if you give them intentionality. And it points to the uneasy gray cloudy no man's land between the constructor and the thing constructed. Because the current does flow both ways. And you don't do yourself any favors if you forget about that, if you try to divorce them entirely, any more than you do yourself a favor by conflating AUTHOR and AUTHOR1.
And now, having digressed ourselves RIGHT OFF THE MAP, we return you to the discussion of Tolkien in progress:
As per usual, the trick is to imitate the deep structure of The Lord of the Rings, instead of the surface structure. Because they are radically different. Surface-structure TLotR gets you D&D and bloated fantasy "epics" and ObQuests and all the other trappings of what
papersky calls Extruded Fantasy Product and the essential intellectual and emotional bankruptcy that gets secondary world fantasy so often tarred with the brushes of "escapism" and "hackwork" and all the rest of it.It's the deep structure you've got to look for, the machinery that's doing the work. Because that's the stuff that lets the narrative reach out. It's not that there are elves and dwarves and dragons. It's what the elves and dwarves and dragons mean, what Tolkien makes them mean. And not in an allegorical sense, but in the sense of intellectual and emotional investment. That's why Tolkien is a genius rather than a rubric. And that's what we've got to learn.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2007-01-24 07:59 pm (UTC)*enjoys the geekiness of you*
no subject
Date: 2007-01-24 08:32 pm (UTC)You can tell that in college I concentrated on dead Athenians trying to sell each other out by the wholesale lot.
However, it's much easier for me to see what you're saying about Tolkien and fantasy writers. We feel the weight of what's behind his characters, and we see the occasional detail of what gets thrown in--and the bad imitators assume that they have to tell us all about everything that's there, while Tolkien just gives flashes here and there. We don't get the whole history of Galadriel and her kin, we get an elf-woman living in a forest, with a ring and a fountain. From the way she's drawn, the rest of that is there, but while we can feel it (because Frodo and the others feel it) but Tolkien doesn't distract us with the details. The weight of Galadriel matters, but the details would just be a distraction for the readers of the narrative that is Lord of the Rings.
Unless you were saying something else and I missed it because I was too busy telling myself I understood what you were saying there.
As for the anxiety attack, consider how highly amused Mehitabel Parr would be by the cover art laid on for this. I imagine the sight of her looking like the heroine from the Medusienne equivalent of a Mary Stewart novel would tickle her funny bone quite a bit.
no subject
Date: 2007-01-24 08:54 pm (UTC)writer -- implied author -- narrator -- [narrative] -- narratee -- implied (or authorial or ideal) audience -- reader (what Rabinowitz and Phelan call "flesh & blood reader")
And then of course there are helpful distinctions to be made between narrator functions and disclosure functions, so that (for example) Mildmay the narrator may be telling something to the narratee, and meanwhile Monette the implied author may be *using* that narration to give hints of something quite different to the implied audience.
All of which is just to say that Wayne Booth, like Giles, smiles at you in our dreams.
no subject
Date: 2007-01-24 08:56 pm (UTC)*loff*
no subject
Date: 2007-01-24 08:56 pm (UTC)I think she did mean that. And that's why I love Tolkien, and if I am his imitator in some way it is because I do lots of behind the scenes world-building, because it does contain more substance that way.
Funny thing about him doing that is, I remember when I was about 18, hadn't read the appendices, and I could NOT understand why Aragorn couldn't return the love of Eowyn, and I was kind of mad about it. I didn't understand his relationship with Arwyn at all, and that is mostly because it was all in the background tapestry. But, when you dig, and you find all the background, it makes what is in the foreground that much richer and more meaningful.
no subject
Date: 2007-01-24 09:27 pm (UTC)Readers find things in books that the author, as a historically-extant, living, breathing, anxiety-attack-having person, did not intentionally put there.
Sometimes, this is because the readers are reading badly, for one reason or another. But sometimes the thing they find is there; it's part of the narrative/thematic structure. It's real.
So the idea that the narrative generates its own author-function (I'm sorry, I don't seem to be able to quit using the quasi-mathematical terminology, I don't know what's WRONG with me) is a way to be able to talk about patterns found in a narrative--patterns which enhance and deepen the work the narrative does--without committing the biographical fallacy.
It's something that it's hard to talk about because it's hard to find a vocabulary for it. Also because it is atypical for professional literary scholars to be talking about an author who is still alive and could conceivably be consulted about their authorial (anxiety-attack-having) intentions.
no subject
Date: 2007-01-24 09:30 pm (UTC)And this leads me to my theory about what footnotes are for, in literature, the irritating kind you get in books you are trying to just read, is to build a scaffolding to help you stand over there where the audience1 was supposed to be standing.
no subject
Date: 2007-01-24 09:40 pm (UTC)I just had an idea.
no subject
Date: 2007-01-24 09:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-24 10:23 pm (UTC)Some footnotes seem to be there to misdirect you about the location of Audience1, while the author does something sneaky. Byron's, for ex. Scott's, though, I think are more like what you suggest.
---L.
no subject
Date: 2007-01-25 12:28 am (UTC)2) The bloated fantasy epics aren't doing a good job of imitating LOTR's surface structure. For example, they usually have prologues which Explain The Great Issues in The War Between Good and Evil. The prologue to LOTR is about the history of the Shire; with some references to hobbits elsewhere, and some to other races. It doesn't say anyting about The Great Conflict.
no subject
Date: 2007-01-25 06:08 am (UTC)LOL. Perfect, just perfect. My brain is just like that.
no subject
Date: 2007-01-25 04:42 pm (UTC)FWIW, you might as well stick with the quasi-mathematical language, because the vocabulary for this has to start somewhere.*
If I'm understanding this business correctly, Authorial Intent 2.0 (we go from mathematics and physics to computer systems) isn't about: Does the gravediggers' scene come into Hamlet because, first and foremost, Will wanted to shock his audience, and be all punk** and inappropriate because he could if he wanted to, or because he had to throw in a clown's part to make a part-owner of the company happy, and so decided he might as well make it work with his narrative instead of against it (that would be Authorial Intent 1.0--Getting the Damn thing Finished So It Doesn't Suck Too Much and I Meet the Deadline). Instead, AI 2.0 is about setting up the audience reaction to the transition from the comic to the pathetic, and how this transition emphasizes that the action is complicated by this new event. The Audience is shaken up by it, but whether for good (OMIGOD! Ophelia's dead! That sucks! I mean, she was pretty fucked up, but now things are going to get even worse.) or ill (How inappropriate! Whyever do people say Shakespeare is so great, when he does these horrible and disconcerting things! Tragedy shouldn't have stuff like this in it, where the hero makes dirty jokes with common gravediggers and then gets into a fight all over the coffin at a funeral!) is specific to the individuals in the audience. However, all of the Audience reacts to this scene. Am I getting any warmer?
But, as I wrote earlier, I'm trained in dead Athenians.
*Hey, if Terry Pratchett can cop the rubber-sheets-and-weight bit from relativity for his ends, why can't you plunder physics and mathematics for yours? The US Marshalls don't care.
**In the modern, not the Elizabethan sense.