I'm not totally sure that the admirable Willets has quite got what I said
right before whistling us around most of English literature with such a huff
and a puff and a house of cards blown down. I said T is not good to read
aloud, and that his syntactic structures are predictable and untight, but
that the imaginative edifice is grand. All I can say is try reading him
aloud at length. Then read a bit (more or less any bit) of Dickens aloud.
There is a difference, and it's a difference between someone who is
inflecting his syntax for the variety and pacing of a voice, and someone who
is delving into his head for imaginings and who has little interest (oddly,
given what he worked on) in the oral (he lectured inaudibly; my mother says
the lectures were wonderful despite this). I reckon Arcadia might come out
of this comparison fairly well too, but you'd need to take a deep breath
before you tried. Certainly FQ would come out well, and  your tongue would
be better for it. I always like the moments around Paridell, when Spenser
shows he can do brief: 'He nould be clogd. So had he serued many one.'

No clogging.

Colin Burrow, Senior Lecturer in English and Fellow, Gonville and Caius
College, Cambridge CB2 1TA
Tel. 01223-332483
email: [log in to unmask]
web: http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/faculty/cburrow/

-----Original Message-----
From: Sidney-Spenser Discussion List
[mailto:[log in to unmask]]On Behalf Of Steven J. Willett
Sent: 19 February 2004 10:21
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Theorizing J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings


On Thu, 19 Feb 2004 09:00:17 -0000, Colin Burrow wrote:

>                   When reading the Narnia books aloud to them I felt
> every word counted, even if some of the words had palpable designs
> on their souls in a way I find a bit unpalatable; reading Tolkein I
> found that not only could I skip clauses, sentences, and (yes
> indeed) lots of stanzas of songs, but that I KNEW in advance which
> clauses were going to be skippable because of the shape of the
> sentences.

I take this as a pretty representative criticism of Tolkien's
narrative style.  The parameters can swing rather more toward a
dyslogical or eulogical judgment, but Burrow's take on his clumsy,
predictable prose is probably average for those who think he's
essentially a failed imaginative writer.

What then would count as a powerful narrative style?  Cervantes, who
wrote what is arguably the West's greatest novel, has been repeatedly
charged with boredom by modern English readers and a fair number of
Spanish ones.  One of the most distinguished members of the American
Philological Association has publicly declared he simply cannot
stomach either the dreary prose or the often vicious treatment meted
out to various characters in Quixote's quest.  The novel's enormous
popularity in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had nothing
whatsoever to do with Cervantes' command of Spanish idiom and
everything with its satiric violence and ironical assault on medieval
romances. Even the new translation by Edith Grossman is unlikely to
overcome the inherent resistance by modern readers to the satire of
this most postmodern and selfreferential of all baroque novels.  "Don
Quixote" is probably an even more unread great book than "War and
Peace."

Do we find an engaging, sparkling, entrancing style in "Ulysses"?  All
those clever rhetorical imitations can pall pretty fast, especially in
something like the "Scylla and Charybdis" episode.  Then again Joyce
embeds references in references like Chinese boxes as Gifford's
"'Ulysses' Annotated" documents in over 600 pages.  Sections of the
novel can certainly be read easily, but much is opaque unless one
knows both the "Odyssey" and a vast repertoire of allusions and
symbols.  Now I love the book, but it makes inordinate demands on the
general well-educated reader let alone a Classicist who can identify a
lot of what he took for granted.  For most readers, the ore is not
worth mining.  Certain strands of his style also seem pretty dated to
me, especially his forays into imagist description, which read rather
like poor versions of the awful "Poems Pennyeach."

For much of his work, with the exception of "Great Expectations,"
Dickens is as predictable and clumsy as Tolkien is taken to be.
Lawrence is now dethroned and Conrad has taken many hits from the
po-mo crowd, but his greatest work--"The Nigger of the Narcissus,"
"Heart of Darkness," "Lord Jim," "Nostromo," "The Secret Agent" and
"Under Western Eyes"--will never appeal to a large audience because of
the demands his prose places on the reader.  Then there's Woolf, whom
I personally find much overrated and dreary, pinched and hysterical in
the extreme.  Not to mention life-denying.  So much for de gustibus.

For real perfection, perhaps we have to turn to Austen's "Pride and
Prejudice" and "Emma" or James' "The Portrait of a Lady," but then
each has been lambasted for various literary and conceptual
limitations.  No one tackles James last three masterpieces lightly,
and a good case can be made that "The Golden Bowl" is the most
difficult novel simply to read in all English literature, easily
beating "Ulysses."  Nothing sparkling, entrancing or immediately
engaging there.  Yet, they are transcendent works of the ethical
imagination.

So what is my point in this little tour?  To carp at Tolkien's lapses,
which to me are pleasant idiosyncrasies, is to miss his enormous
success in constructing a vast, intricate and moving polyphonic
narrative, the greatest since Spenser in my view.  Within that
developing polyphony is surely the finest depiction of the corrosive
effects of hubris and power in English.  The only parallel is the long
fall of Redcross into despair.  More immediately, the Fellowship
precisely delineates the criminal ambitions of the current US
administration like those that preceded and will follow it throughout
the world.  We should be grateful for what we have, whether in
Cervantes or Tolkien.  Perfection in style probably does not exist,
certainly not in Spenser with his faux Chaucerian vocabulary.




-------------------------------------------------------
Steven J. Willett
Shizuoka University of Art and Culture
1794-1 Noguchi-cho, Shizuoka Prefecture
Hamamatsu City, Japan 430-8533
Japan email: [log in to unmask]
US email: [log in to unmask]