I think I'm about through with this thread, but one more thought: it was
Lewis or perhaps Tolkien himself (I forget who exactly) who said that on
occasion there are indeed books that at least for some of us seem to come
out of some deep place in the imagination even if they are badly
written--that the imaginative and verbal faculties are not always the
same. I had my doubts when I read that at first, but I think Lewis (or
whoever) had a point. Some scenes in George Macdonald, say, grab me and do
not let go but the prose is worse than Tolkien's (and the fairies are just
awful). For that matter, I've sometimes thought that what I deeply admire
in *The Shepheardes Calender* (remember Spenser?) had as much to do with
the basic conception of the text, which is wonderfully clever and
resonant, than with the power of the verse itself. Anne (Prescott)
> On Thu, 19 Feb 2004 12:11:03 -0000, Colin Burrow wrote:
>
>> 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.
>
> Admirable or not, Willett thinks he got it right. Burrow's first
> sentence reads: "For what it's worth I read The Hobbit to my seven
> year old boys a while back and thought, yes this is greatly imagined,
> but oh God it's badly written." The claim here is that Tolkien didn't
> write for the speaking voice and thus the trilogy is "badly written."
> The point of my little tour was simply to suggest that lots of great
> books aren't particularly written for oral recitation. That goes
> preeminently for the later Conrad or James. Even if I concede that
> Tolkien did not write prose conducive to oral reading (which in fact I
> don't for the reasons others have given), this would not in itself
> permit us to call the LotR "badly written" tout court.
>
> Burrow then compares the well-weighted words of the Narnia Chronicles
> unfavorably with Tolkien and adds: "...reading Tolkein [sic] 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." This
> charge goes well beyond the first: whole portions of the narrative
> stream, with the songs singled out for special ellipsis, can be
> ignored because "of the shape of the sentences." Here he is, I think,
> pressing too much evaluative authority on (for prose) the narrow
> virtue of oral recitation. I am quite willing to admit that prose
> written in a deft oral style is admirable, but that alone provides no
> aesthetic touchstone. Hudson's "Far Away and Long Ago," one of my
> beloved books, is a delight to read out loud as are all his works, but
> they are pretty lightweight, and I doubt very many of this list have
> read him. So far as I know, he's not even on the curriculum in US
> universities.
>
> Verse on the other hand must be written for oral recitation. It's
> hardly surprising that Spenser would come out well in a contest with
> Tolkien--or any other prose. That, however, has nothing to do with
> his unpredictability. The exigencies of meter and stanza structure
> make a great deal of Spenser highly repetitive and predictable,
> especially in the Alexandrine. The impasto of Chaucerian and faux
> Chaucerian words or syntax, as I noted, adds a further barrier to the
> pacing and voice prized by Burrow. Where we do find unpredictability
> in Spenser is in his technique of rhythmic variations. In _Poetic
> Rhythm: Structure and Performance_, Reuven Tsur has graphed (a) the
> percentage of deviations per position (36, Table 1) and (b) the
> percentage of stresses in even-numbered positions (37-38, Table 2 and
> Figure 1) for Spenser, Thomson, Pope, Milton and Shelly in descending
> order of metrical regularity. Spenser may be the least deviant of the
> five, but his line is weaker because it lacks sharp prominence in the
> key stress positions 4, 6 and 8. Regularity in one sense makes his
> lines seem looser than those of Milton or Shelley. But this is only
> half the story. When he does employ variations, they tend to be very
> strong and modulate emotion powerfully. This is his art of rhythmical
> unpredictability.
>
> I stand corrected on "greatly imagined." It sounded like a begrudged
> concession to such "badly written" prose, much of which can be
> skipped. My guess, however, is that Tolkien does not rate very high
> on his reading list despite the grand edifice.
>
>
> -------------------------------------------------------
> 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]
>
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