Good books don't have to be hard

[KatG]

So what's in a Middle-Brow novel anyway?

 

[NickeeCoco]

Note: I have been reading this thread for some time now, but wanted to gather information, assess it and come up with my own interpretation before I dived in. I will be addressing various points that have been made by different people, and I am sorry if I do not cite all of you, since many of these points have been made more than once by more than one person. Also, most of the articles/papers I will be citing were gathered from Jstor, which is a non-profit organization that preserves academic journals in a digital database. In order to read these articles, you will have to have either access through an academic institution or library or have a subscription. Many universities nowadays allow alumni to access their journals and databases, that is, of course, if you remember your university user name and password and went to school when such a thing existed. I apologize for the length of this post, but since I haven’t been participating in the discussion until now, I wanted to brush upon some points I felt to be important.

First, I would like to address the original article that spawned this thread, Lev Grossman’s Good Books Don’t Have to be Hard. Specifically, I want to address this statement regarding readers and book sales:

You'll find critics who say they [the readers] have bad taste, or that they're lazy and can't hack it in the big leagues. But that's not the case. They need something they're not getting elsewhere. Let's be honest: Why do so many adults read Suzanne Collins's young-adult novel "The Hunger Games" instead of contemporary literary fiction? Because "The Hunger Games" doesn't bore them.

This idea is something that has interested me for the past couple of years. Why is ‘literary fiction’ ‘not as popular’? Well, honestly, I don’t think it ever really has been and I believe more than one person has made this point. It’s only popular within a certain intellectual crowd. The majority of people – people who do not have a university education in the arts and humanities – are not interested in it. They are not versed in literary terms and their applications. I am talking about things like allusions, metaphors, similes, motifs, rhetoric and so forth. For instance, I am not educated or well versed in biochemistry, so I am not about to read a scientific article regarding the subject.

Also, to read ‘literary fiction’ one must be literate. I am not talking about the mere ability to read, but the ability to internalize and understand the words and the ideas and arguments they are presenting. Out of interest to this argument, I looked up literacy rates around the western world. I found this interesting article from the Canadian government website, which was based on a five year study in twenty-two countries. The International Adult Literacy Survey was done with a mean prose, document and quantitative scoring system on a scale with a range of 0-500 points in different age ranges and education levels. For the purpose of this argument, I will focus only on the prose scores. I will also only list the Canadian, American and the United Kingdom scores, since these three countries seem to have the majority of representatives on this forum.

Ages 16-25

United States: 277.9 (1.0)
Canada: 286.9 (4.7)
U.K.: 273.5 (3.0)

Ages 20-25 with less than an upper secondary education

United States: 227.7 (4.0)
Canada: 231.3 (36.1)
U.K.: 261.0 (5.5)

Ages 20-25 with some college and/or university education

United States: 313.4 (2.3)
Canada: 309.9 (6.4)
U.K.: 304.7 (7.60)

Now, why am I supplying you with this information? To show that a large percentage of the population is just not going to understand complex language and grammatical use. I was watching CBC news recently and was about to change the channel when they suddenly announced that 46% of the Canadian population is considered illiterate. They then promptly went into a commercial. I was stunned. Could that really be? I continued to watch the rest of the program so I could hear more about this. Of course, they did not talk about it until the end. Apparently, 46% of Canadians are only able to read at a level 2, which means, they have a hard time functioning with daily reading. (As a side note, I’m wondering if this has to do with immigrants, or if it’s just a lack of education in those born here. Anyone know?) So, how is someone who can barely read in the first place, going to be able to read Jacob’s Room or The Third Policeman? Young Adult fiction, regardless of genre, is the answer, just like the pulp fiction of the SF “Golden Age” was used for new immigrants to the United States to learn English. (I don’t have a citation for that, I am afraid. It was just something I remembered from a Science Fiction course I took in university.)

Thus, I disagree with Grossman’s belief that people who love literature think that

plot was the coward's way out, for people who can't deal with the real world. If you're having too much fun, you're doing it wrong.

and that the YA market is the only place that does that. The YA market is selling largely, I believe, because of its more simplistic use of language. I am not saying that all YA books are ‘simple’, I myself am a huge fan of YA, but it does cater to an audience that does not have a post-secondary education.

Now, on to tribalism, genre and modernism.

Carl Freedman, in his article Science Fiction and Critical Theory, states:

A literary genre – SF or any other – ought to be understood not as a pigeonhole into which certain texts may be filed and certain others may not, but rather as an element or, still better, a tendency, which is active to a greater or lesser degree within a literary text which is itself conceptualized as a complexly structured whole.

I agree with him. He goes on to say that a literary genre only becomes a genre when there is a shared tendency, however, there are plenty of other written works which have crossovers:

It was hardly possible to define clearly what I have called the SF tendency until it was strongly embodied in a large amount of work explicitly published and marketed as SF: that is, the work. . . of such (modern) writers as Lem, Dick, Le Guin, Disch, Delany, Russ, Ballard, et alii. Though writers like Beckett and Kafka certainly belong more to SF than to any other genre; though the Joycean method, especially in Finnegans Wake, incorporates something of the SF tendency in its radical estrangement of the apparently smooth surface of everyday perception and consciousness.

So, how do we view and internalise this perception? In Louis Kampf’s paper, The Permanence of Modernism, he discusses how modernism has changed the artistic world from reality based to perception based.

One of the principal reasons for the dominance of criticism. . . is the disintegration of any firm notion of artistic form. . . since the object [of art]. . . becomes an occasion for a peculiar, and in the event, necessary, kind of critical activity: we generally do not discuss the value of the thing, but what it is and how we perceive it. . .

The act of aesthetic perception has turned into criticism, but a criticism almost entirely concerned with defining the object and our perception of it: in short, epistemology.

In short, Kampf is stating that art, literature included, has morphed over the years into something that causes us to think for ourselves and view it in our own way, based on our own experiences, perceptions and ideas of knowledge. He explains this in more detail when he discusses modernist drama:

The play(s) demand that we transform ourselves – with more than a small dose of passion. We are to make connections with the world outside ourselves – with human beings who seem utterly strange, with society itself, which might seem even stranger – must we not transform ourselves first?

So really, what I am trying to prove, is that tribalism and genre are themselves irrelevant. Does the above quote, about modernism, not relate to the science fiction and fantasy genres? Are they not speculative fiction? "Human beings who seem utterly strange, with society itself, which might seem stranger", is that not what genre fiction does? Genre fiction is not going to smash modernism: it is a product of it.

Now, to your question, Randy M:

One thing I wondered about, is the shift toward greater attention to genre works in universities also due to generational shift?

I looked this up in Jstor. Fantasy fiction did not appear in any searches I made, but science fiction did. In university, though I only had a minor in English Literature, I found it to be the same. Though, the Harry Potter series was taught in a children’s literature course, alongside such works as Pilgrim’s Progess. I never took it. I focused more on 17th and 18th century literature.

I think it is a generational shift, but because of a current global situation and because of the legacy of postmodernism still prominent in western academia. Freedman puts it nicely, I think:

The flat Skinnerian rationalism of Asminov’s “Foundation” trilogy and of his robot stories, or the synthesis of romantic technologism with vulgar-Nietzschean evolutionism in Clarke’s major works, however unacceptable in themselves, gain considerably if they are understood as refusals to join in the Cold War anti-Communism predominant in post war America and (though to a lesser degree) Britain: in that impoverished intellectual culture, merely to insist that a Manichaean struggle between a diabolical Moscow and an angelic Washington was not the only or most important factor shaping human affairs in itself constituted a significantly critical act.

I also found a course syllabus from the University of Alberta that I thought interesting, and showcases how genre fiction is a relevant medium to convey current social views and changes:

Studies in the Literature of Popular Culture: Sf and Postmod- ernism. Sf and postmodernism have been linked in various ways in recent years. Post- modem theorists have taken up Sf to show how the traditional boundaries of genre have collapsed in the fluid new culture of postmodernity. Students of the Chaos paradigm have turned to sf texts as touchstones for understanding the transformation of Western culture into a culture of chaos, while other critics of both sf and postmodernism argue
438 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 23 (1996) that sf has become the preeminent literary form of the postmodern era, since its generic protocols and thematic systems are able to cope with the various and drastic transformations, especially in information/simulation technologies, of the postindustrial West. It has been argued that "sf has an advantage over most other disciplines in that it has had something like a theory of postmodernism ingrained in its futurism for many years," and that "with the catastrophic failure of traditional humanistic thought, sf has rushed in with a treasury of powerful metaphors and icons capturing the reality of insecure borders: the Female Man, xenogenesis, the cyborg, the simulacrum, viral language, cyberspace, Mechs and Shapers, and many others." In this course, we will look at various texts from the past three decades which will allow us to explore the fruitful connections between sf and postmodernism. There will be comparative analyses as well as close individual readings of specific texts.

TEXTS: Banks, The Player of Games; Dick, Ubik; Fowler, Sarah Canary; Gibson, Neuromancer; Jones, White Queen; Le Guin, Fisherman of the Inland Sea; Powers, The Anubis Gates; Russ, The Female Man; Ryman, The Child Garden; Stephenson, Snow Crash; Sterling, ed, Mirrorshades; Womack, Random Acts of Senseless Violence.-Douglas Barbour, Department of English, University of Alberta, Edmonton. Canada T6G 2E5.

That’s a class I wish I had been able to take.

Phew. I'm done.

Edit: I found the CBC article about Canadian literacy rates: http://www.cbc.ca/canada/montreal/story/2009/09/08/interactive-literacy-map.html

 

[Fung Koo]

So what's in a Middle-Brow novel anyway?

The keys to Oprah's book club?

And hey, we can't be sure it's "middle-brow" that's he's after. It might be one high and one low.

I think we'd probably call that novel cockeyed.

 

[Fung Koo]

Genre fiction is not going to smash modernism: it is a product of it.

Wellllllll....

On the one hand, you've got a point. I'm not sure I'd go so far as to put the chicken before the egg here, though.

Certainly genre lit of all sorts developed significantly at about the same time that Modernism crept into the picture. However, I'm not sure that a sufficiently supportable argument could really be made that Fantasy is a product of Modernism...

That's a causal link that I suspect would result in a resurgence of pitchfork production on both sides of the divide.

Certainly Modernism shaped Fantasy (and the other genres) into what we know it as today. But I suspect that Fantasy (and the other genres) has also shaped Modernist texts. As Kat quite rightly points out, there are no real lines between the genres/movement/fads of literature. So I'm gonna hedge my bets and say that Modernism and Genre have influenced each other, but I'm not prepared to say that genre was beget of Modernism.

(One example as counter-argument is Lord of the Rings[and seeing as how that's the quintessential Fantasy piece, it's a big counter argument]. Tolkien was following the English tradition established by Spencer's The Faerie Queene [and he was following the Greco-Roman tradition from Homer and Ovid]. Perhaps the writing of LotR was influenced by Modernism [seeing as how Tolkien was in Academia], but by no means is exclusively descended from Modernism. It's equally a descendant of The Epic [which is arguably a genre form in its own right].)

I think it is a generational shift, but because of a current global situation and because of the legacy of postmodernism still prominent in western academia. (And Freedman quotation)

Freedman's observation is quite interesting, and fits with what I'm saying about the embracing of the anti-establishment by the genre lit crowd (hence the reason I like it!).

But I would ask you to clarify: when you refer to "generational shift," are you talking Gen X theory, or contemporaneity?

 

[NickeeCoco]

So I'm gonna hedge my bets and say that Modernism and Genre have influenced each other, but I'm not prepared to say that genre was beget of Modernism.

Well. . . Heh. I did jump a little, didn't I? I just wanted to enforce a point against tribalism and Grossman's view that there was no connection to modernism and the all fantastic genre writing. However, Modernism began in the late 1860s, not after the 30s, when Tolkein wrote.

But I would ask you to clarify: when you refer to "generational shift," are you talking Gen X theory, or contemporaneity?

The latter..

 

[Psylent]

7) Pyslent then said that those particular media critics didn’t count as part of the Literary Establishment so their opinions didn’t matter.

Actually I argued that there are two meanings to the word literature. In the Guardian article Werthead linked to for example it mentions the "literary world" and later on mentions the "book world" in the same context, so I rather doubt that the writer meant the word in the capital L sense. My argument wasn't about dividing the critics but about making sure they meant the word in a particular way.

 

[Dawnstorm]

Yep. But it will be argued that it is because you are brilliant and knowledgeable, you see. Therefore it is not difficult to you. But others, poor souls, find it difficult and run from it screaming into the arms of comfort, like, say, feminist 1970's SF that bears more than a passing resemblance to Atwood's current novel.

But difficulty is relative to your knowledge and skills; and by implication to the way you learn, what you intuitively notice, etc.

Easy example, non literary: I have a hard time watching football. The differently coloured tricots don't mean much to me, for example. I know what they're supposed signify, but I have to make an effort to keep the teams apart. I never know where the ball is. I have to look for it. I have no eye for strategy, so all that's happening is people running around on a lawn. A fan can see, at a glance, what's going on at the field. I have to make an effort. Watching football, to me, is difficult.

This is partly lack of exposure (by lack of interest), but it's also that crowds confuse me (when lots of things move, I get dizzy, for example; those pinwheel "pull-the-lever-down-what's-the-result?" pics in IQ tests give me trouble; I have the ability to get lost in my own cupboard... - I'm not good at spatial co-ordination).

With regards to SF, for example, I remember an article by Delany, where he read a SF text with his academic context, and he noticed that they didn't even grasp the basic functions of words. I haven't found the article, but here's an article that goes into a similar direction. If you've always read SF, reading SF will be part of your skill set. (And this explains why SF readers are generally not impressed with Atwood's world building, even though mainstream readers often get wowed by exactly that. It's also why they explained the entire concept of the Matrix in a single speech by Morpheus near the beginning of the film. They'd have had a too small audience otherwise - the people who'd think it's hot and new wouldn't have understood what's going on, and the people who'd have understood what's going on wouldn't have thought it was hot and new.)

Grossman assumes that there's a scale of difficulty: pre-modernist --> modernist. But that depends on how you see the world. It's not necessarily linear. This would entail, for example, that Jane Austen is easier to read than Kafka. But I had no problem at all accessing Kafka, whereas I had to learn to read Austen properly. Kafka was intuitive; Austen was not.

It's true that the modernists were trying to create texts that counter reading habits; but by the time I was born (early seventies) the modernist techniques were cultural techniques. They went into my making. Listen to writing advice, these days. People are claiming that third limited is the easiest method to write with. This is modernism taken as default. (I don't buy this for a second, looking at what gets published. But it does suggest that there's a difference between now and then, in the perception of what's difficult.)

If you're doing an IQ test and are dissatisfied with the result, then practise IQ tests until you reach a result that you can live with, have you become more intelligent? Not really, you've become better at IQ tests; or from a different perspective, IQ tests have become easier. I think, though I have no proof, that you can generalise this across cultures and subculures.

The main problem isn't difficulty; it's boredom. Academic people study boring books. They have no exciting plots, the characters aren't necessarily likable, and so on. (At this point, I should probably say that I like many of those "boring" books; they don't bore me.)

Some texts are more difficult than others. But this has nothing to do with plot, etc. It has a lot to do with what's implied, and what's explicated in the text. Dan Brown isn't easy to read because of the plot (that makes him exciting); he's easy to read because - if the first chapter of DaVinci Code is anything to go by; I couldn't bear to read more - he's saying very little in a lot of different ways. It's very hard to miss what he's saying.

Clearly, knowledge of genre conventions also makes texts easier to read. But that's no different than understanding modernist modes. Many genre texts are suffused with modernism (a point which has been made before).

Is it really about difficulty? I'd argue it's about motivation to do well at tasks (e.g. reading a "difficult" text). The difficulty is not the problem (the more you read in one direction, the less difficulty there will be). It's that readers aren't motivated to do well, because they see no pay-off.

I think that's what he may have been meaning to say, but he overplayed the difficulty angle. Effort can be pleasurable. (Look at video games; why do they incorporate difficulty settings?) That is not the problem. It's the motivation to do well. It's the rewards you expect. With likable characters and suspense (probably a better word than "plot", in that context) you have incentives. Why would people want to read texts have no ending at all for people you didn't much care about in the first place?

Give them an incentive, and they'll give the techniques a chance. I think that's what he's saying. But the argument, relying on that invisible fault-line of value judgment, doesn't convince me at all. I mean, maybe those best sellers aren't more exciting modernist texts (true postmodern texts). Maybe they're buffed-up genre texts? Oh, wait, no, they're exchange students. Or maybe...

There was a time when difficult literature was exciting. T.S. Eliot once famously read to a whole football stadium full of fans. And it's still exciting—when Eliot does it. But in contemporary writers it has just become a drag.

See? Nothing wrong with difficult. Good books don't have difficult, but difficult books better be good. See?

Which is a non-argument, really. I'm sure he doesn't mean to say that easy books don't have to be good (which, IMO, explains Dan Brown, but I better lock up the imp on my shoulder now).

 

[KatG]

And you have to define what you mean by "difficult." Grossman's sort of vague definition revolving around plot is, as you note Eddie, not really accurate and it's been this that has drawn the most ire.

Elsewhere, "difficult" from someone can refer to anything from language use to narrative structure (which unless you're talking about something like Ulysses is really not an issue,) to ability to understand concepts, to not having a lot of hot action in it, to having classy sex scenes, to just telling people that literary novels are difficult, slow, hard and therefore, boring, thus causing many people to stay away from them.

Nonetheless, "literary" novels are not unpopular, nor are greatly unpopular compared to genre and other types of fiction. Any type of fiction has a pyramid sales structure, large low levels, medium medium levels, small high levels. With the greater turnover of bestsellers lists and an increased international market, we get a sizable number of literary bestsellers each year, which get more coverage and have more sales outlets than their fellows.

Seventy percent of the audience for fiction is female. Not only will women buy all sorts of fiction, including YA, SFF and suspense, but quite a lot of them believe they should read what is regarded as the edifying stuff. Women dominate the reading book clubs. My mother-in-law's group only reads New York Times Notable books and award winners, and this is common. The potential market for contemporary and historical works that are considered "difficult" in various ways is in the millions. Older works that are considered classics by many have steady backlist sales in enormous amounts, both for the education market and again, for reading book clubs. If you look at what's happening in the actual market, even if you discount half the titles because you don't feel they live up to your literary standards, it's never been a better time for the modernist/postmodernist/whatever novels. And if you're a non-white author, it's certainly a lot better than it was. (Female authors have run into a bit of a backlash, but that will probably adjust over time.)

Kim Stanley Robinson weighed in on the Booker, apparently:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/sep/18/science-fiction-booker-prize

What's interesting in the piece is the quote that essentially says it's all the publishers' fault for not sending stuff. I doubt that's entirely true, as publishers have probably been warned off of bothering, but it's been put out there in the media, so maybe British publishers will start submitting more titles. It may very well cause a shift for them.

 

[Fung Koo]

However, Modernism began in the late 1860s, not after the 30s, when Tolkein wrote.

OK, so should I take that to mean that you regard Lord of the Rings as a Modernist text? Or, is it distinct from Modernism?

http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/tolkien_studies/v002/2.1mortimer.html

But Tolkien himself was a self-proclaimed anti-Modernist... Or was he?

http://www.thefreelibrary.com/"Sure...+and+Pius+X:+anti-modernism+in...-a0154698399

Regardless of Tolkien as Modernist or Anti-Modernist, he certainly wrote a book during that era. Yep he did. And that's a fact!

 

[NickeeCoco]

OK, so should I take that to mean that you regard Lord of the Rings as a Modernist text? Or, is it distinct from Modernism?

http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/tolkien_studies/v002/2.1mortimer.html

But Tolkien himself was a self-proclaimed anti-Modernist... Or was he?

http://www.thefreelibrary.com/"Sure...+and+Pius+X:+anti-modernism+in...-a0154698399

Regardless of Tolkien as Modernist or Anti-Modernist, he certainly wrote a book during that era. Yep he did. And that's a fact!

Haha. Well, not every writer who wrote during the Romantic period was a Romanticist either. I wouldn't label Tolkein as Modernist per se, no. At least not in the Joyce or Wolfe way, but he used a certain medium (fantasy) to help express his personal horror in WWI and by using outside myth he's doing a very Modernist thing. But, you're right. There's a lot of debate.

Oh, and I liked that last link.

 

[Bond]

[...] by using outside myth he's doing a very Modernist thing. But, you're right. There's a lot of debate.

These statements baffle me. Using myth is a very modernist thing? Maybe in comparison to realists, but hardly anyone else surely? There is a lot of debate as to whether Tolkien is a modernist? The irony. The usual comment from its fans is that it is an epic in the line of Beowulf. Is Beowulf now considered a modernist work too?

 

[Fung Koo]

These statements baffle me. Using myth is a very modernist thing?

Using myth in and of itself is not exclusively Modernist. However, self-consciously referring to a extant literary work within your own work (to borrow certain symbols or forms, to draw certain parallels, to disrupt certain meanings, to enter into discourse on the matter, etc) is a particularly Modernist thing to do. The Modernist takes a self-awareness of the artifice of fiction and crafts it into the tale.

The advent of mass-production was seen as greatly cheapening the value of art. Thus, how we value art had to be changed. Instead of appreciating the object of art itself (which is easily copied), the focus shifted to the import, meaning, connotation, and connection of that object to the subject as the conduit to experience art. Then, the Modernist could take those semantic elements and weave them into their own text as referent.

That's the whole debate we've just had on what "literary" means. This sort of intertextual transaction is one that can only take place if the reader has read some/most/all the same works that the author is drawing into their text. Indeed, part of the evolution of Modernism was the realization that each member of the audience will come to the text with a different body knowledge, and this is where the idea that "no one ever reads the same book, nor the same book twice" comes from. The reader is a subject, and the subject evolves, and each subject is different and evolves differently, therefore causing each experiencing of the text to be different from the one before.

As an academic during the Modern era, Tolkien contributed greatly to Modernist discourse. Perhaps the best example, he coined the term "Mythopoeia," and insisted it was the proper genre name for Lord of the Rings. This is the notion of taking the semantic, formal, and structural elements of historical mythology and shaping them into modern artificial mythologies -- presumably for the transmission of truth by way of artifice.

Which is a decidedly Modernist thing to do, even though Tolkien regarded himself as anti-Modern. I'm not sure, however, whether he went so far as to call himself a Realist, but he is certainly involved in that tradition of discourse, too, whether in his own right or by way of CS Lewis.

The mythopoetic concept is one of the primary roots of modern Fantasy (Lewis, Lovecraft, Burroughs, Moorcock, Doc Smith, etc, are regarded as mythopoetic authors), but is also a major component in the history of Modernism (Joyce, Woolf, Eliot, etc, also wrote mythopoetic tales).

What, for example, is the reason for the title of Joyce's Ulysses? The story follows a mythological structure. It's both mythopoetic and modernist.

TS Eliot's The Waste Land, Woolf's To The Lighthouse and Orlando, and more... These are seminal Modernist texts that also happen to be purposely mythopoetic.

Even Borges is typically regarded as having accepted the mythopoetic concept -- even though he was in many ways an anti-Modernist, the mythopoetic and ultraism concepts are closely linked.

Maybe in comparison to realists, but hardly anyone else surely?

I can't tell if you're being sarcastic here or not...

I wouldn't say that that's the case in comparison to the Realists. Realists did write Fantasy, for one thing. Mythology was definitely not off the table for them.

There's a presentational difference, certainly -- Realists were deeply concerned with the presentation of Objective Reality, and major sticking points in the conception of Objective Reality are articles of faith such as transubstantiation.

Realism is split along a theistic/atheistic divide, and there's often very little agreement between the two sides. Assuming one allows transubstantiation as Objectively Real, then miracles and magic are perhaps thereby Objectively Real.

Realism sometimes gets lumped together with Anti-Modernism, but that only accounts for at most half of the Realists. Anti-Modernism was more concerned with the anti-establishment ethos of Modernism, not with the presentation of Objective Reality (though Realism certainly informs Anti-Modernism). But both could and did quite freely use, reference, examine, reimagine, etc, mythology.

CS Lewis approached mythopoetics as a fictionalization either of existing false myths or real myths. The Real Myth, in his specific construction, is really only one myth -- Christianity, the Objective Reality. All other myths, so he thinks, are false myths -- that is, they didn't really happen. As a Realist assertion, he's declaring in favour of an Objective Reality wherein miracles and magic are real. But only in the Christian sense. He's self-professed anti-Modern, like Tolkien, and is heavily involved in the Realist discourse.

However, not everyone regarded mythology this way. If we categorize Christianity and its stories as part of the body of mythology, what makes it any different from any other mythology? And if we take a Realist stance that makes miracles and magic in the Christian sense Objectively Real, why not too the miracles and magic of the Greek and Roman traditions? Or the Turks? Or anyone else's mythology, for that matter?

Mythopoetics, in the end, is an example of what was called by the Realists Simulated Reality -- the fictional world that is Objectively Real to the characters within that world. Simulated Reality in modern parlance is what we call Worldbuilding.

So I'm not 100% sure what sort of Realism you're after.

If I may: Where do you place Dadism, Surrealism, Ultraism, and Impressionism -- with Modernism, or Realism?

That would really help me understand what you're talking about when you mention Realism.

There is a lot of debate as to whether Tolkien is a modernist? The irony.

Not sure I see the irony.

First rule of criticism: what the author thinks is irrelevant.

The point of the first article I posted was not that Tolkien is a Modernist, but that him and his works should be included in any proper examination or study of Modernism and the Modern Era as he is the author of one of the most significant Modern literary achievements.

Whether Modernist, Anti-Modernist, or Realist, Tokien certainly contributed to Modernism on the whole -- even if only through mythopoetics. Mythopoetics is arguably one of the most important developments in literature stemming from Modernism. So yes, there's a lot of debate about Tolkien.

The usual comment from its fans is that it is an epic in the line of Beowulf.

Which is true...

Is Beowulf now considered a modernist work too?

*sigh*

That's not how it works, silly.

 

[NickeeCoco]

Thanks, Kung. You saved me a long dialogue.

As a side note, when I had to read The Waste Land I felt like I had someone taking a whisk to my brain. I took one modernist English course in university and never took another. I'm not a fan. Give me the metaphysical poets and the Augustans any day.

Also, I love this forum.

 

[opaloka]

I can't find much Realism in LOTR. Tolkien had no interest in exploring the real emotional states of his characters, their existence in relation to one another and their groups, or genuine political or economic relationships between people or nations. They are simply not Realistic as Realism is understood in literature.

While the mythological elements in the post-realist literature of the moderns might provide some superficial similarity, Tolkien's books are not inherently structured like Modernist works. Whereas Tolkien's plotting and characters serve primarily to further the illustration of his fictional world and his myth, the fantastic elements and mythopoesis in Modernism only exists to illuminate the inner life of the characters and their personal revelations. The internal directions of his work and the work of Modernism are at odds.

Also, both the 19th century Realists and the 20th century Modernists practiced an attention to detail in the prose itself that Tolkien does not seem to value. Tolkien does not pursue the language of Realistic description nor the Modernist's addiction to density.

Call him a latter-day Romantic and you're on to something.

 

[Bond]

Using myth in and of itself is not exclusively Modernist. However, self-consciously referring to a extant literary work within your own work (to borrow certain symbols or forms, to draw certain parallels, to disrupt certain meanings, to enter into discourse on the matter, etc) is a particularly Modernist thing to do.

Maybe it's simply because I didn't take the advanced English courses on the subject so I didn't get the establishment take but authors have been doing this long before the modernists and the literary work to refer to of choice for the most part was the Bible. Before there was Ulysses, the book to show off on one's bookshelf was The Pilgrim's Progress. So I don't see the self-consciously referring to an extant literary work as particularly modernist either.

The advent of mass-production was seen as greatly cheapening the value of art. Thus, how we value art had to be changed. Instead of appreciating the object of art itself (which is easily copied), the focus shifted to the import, meaning, connotation, and connection of that object to the subject as the conduit to experience art. Then, the Modernist could take those semantic elements and weave them into their own text as referent.

That's the whole debate we've just had on what "literary" means. This sort of intertextual transaction is one that can only take place if the reader has read some/most/all the same works that the author is drawing into their text. Indeed, part of the evolution of Modernism was the realization that each member of the audience will come to the text with a different body knowledge, and this is where the idea that "no one ever reads the same book, nor the same book twice" comes from. The reader is a subject, and the subject evolves, and each subject is different and evolves differently, therefore causing each experiencing of the text to be different from the one before.

What a convenient way to keep it all in the family! You must read this work with the literary quality seal of approval to fully appreciate the deeper meanings and nuance of this other work with a literary quality seal of approval. Wash, rinse, repeat. Someone familiar with marketing techniques and keeping the customer hooked would appreciate the sales pitch. None of the books on their then have nearly as much value unless appreciated in the context of all the rest, therefore you should buy the whole set.

As an academic during the Modern era, Tolkien contributed greatly to Modernist discourse. Perhaps the best example, he coined the term "Mythopoeia," and insisted it was the proper genre name for Lord of the Rings. This is the notion of taking the semantic, formal, and structural elements of historical mythology and shaping them into modern artificial mythologies
[...]
Which is a decidedly Modernist thing to do, even though Tolkien regarded himself as anti-Modern. I'm not sure, however, whether he went so far as to call himself a Realist, but he is certainly involved in that tradition of discourse, too, whether in his own right or by way of CS Lewis.

What, for example, is the reason for the title of Joyce's Ulysses? The story follows a mythological structure. It's both mythopoetic and modernist.

TS Eliot's The Waste Land, Woolf's To The Lighthouse and Orlando, and more... These are seminal Modernist texts that also happen to be purposely mythopoetic.

Even Borges is typically regarded as having accepted the mythopoetic concept -- even though he was in many ways an anti-Modernist, the mythopoetic and ultraism concepts are closely linked.

I don't understand "mythopoeia". Seems like a very vague term. Is what Tolkien was doing similar to what Joyce was doing? I see more in common with what Tolkien was doing with 19th century romantic authors even in terms of creation of an artificial mythology. From what I can tell mythopoeia based on how you define it need not be restricted to works from the 20th century or later and again don't see why it is necessarily modernist.

Torture the data enough and one can come up with associations. Some might even have significant links but that does not mean they should be grouped the same way. I can see Tolkien's work for example being a reaction to modernism but to say it is also a modernist work kind of makes the entire concept of modernism an amorphous blob that could mean virtually anything. Hence my sarcasm concerning Beowulf. Not to say that I don't see there are traits in LotR that are now associated with modernism but the usual way of describing such developments if you look at other fields with contrasting schools of thought is to portray such things as an advancement on what came before within the same school of thought so a term like neo-romantic, neo-gothic, or something like that that would mark development but without conceding the fundamental differences with another value system. Saying LotR shows modernist elements therefore can be seen as a matter of framing and legerdemain with definitions.

If I may: Where do you place Dadism, Surrealism, Ultraism, and Impressionism -- with Modernism, or Realism?

Have not encountered the term ultraism, and quite frankly associate the first group of terms more with painting than with literature. Realism I associate with neoclassical painting and the really boring character sketches one finds from Anton Chekhov or Gustave Flaubert. Modernism I associate with more abstract art so dadaism and surrealism might qualify depending on intent and if not I will take it as more postmodern.

 

[NickeeCoco]

So I don't see the self-consciously referring to an extant literary work as particularly modernist either.

That was kinda the point of Modernism. Let's put it this way: Almost every word that a modernist used alluded to something else. Often times, words alluded to more than one thing.

Let's say in a story the main woman's name was Diana, she had red hair, with a single lock that kept falling in her eyes and her favourite fruit was pomegranate. She was unmarried, had a pear shaped body and then she gets married to a man who travels a lot and is never home and she becomes lonely and feels unloved. When he is around, he's distant and is always threatening to cut off that stray piece of hair. A modernist would have chosen these attributes for a reason. Such reasoning could be:

1. Her name was Diana and she was unmarried: The Roman goddess Diana was maiden and was in charge of unmarried women. When she gets married her name changes, so she's not so overtly like Diana, but maybe she's still childlike and doesn't see the signs of her husband cheating.

2. The pomegranate is a symbol of fertility. So is her pear shape. She has wide hips.

3. The pomegranate was also the fruit Persephone ate from Hades, which forced her to stay in Hades. Persephone was a maiden who was out picking flowers when she was abducted and raped by Hades, tricked into eating a pomegranate seed.

4. The first four letters of pomegranate, pome, is similar to pomme, which is french for apple. Innocent Eve, who was seduced by the snake ate the apple of knowledge, causing humans to lose Eden, and before the new testement of grace was created after Christ's sacrifice, the loss of the ability to go to Heaven.

5. She has red hair. Well, red could mean a lot of things. Caution. Stop. Passion. The loss of her innocence (the sheets after their wedding night could have been stained red.) She has a temper? Love. Pomegranates are a redish colour. So are apples. Anger. Fire. Martyrdom. The Pentecost

6. That lock of hair could be referring to Pope's Rape of the Locke which is a mock epic poem by Alexander Pope. It's about a woman who has an unwanted suitor cut a lock of her hair. Bad things ensue.

And so forth. That's what modernists were all about: referring to other things, let them be other works, religious, cultural etc.

 

[Fung Koo]

I can't find much Realism in LOTR.

It's not that it's in LotR so much as it is part of the overall intent of LotR.

That sounds like hairsplitting, I know. But that's what us English Lit types do for a living, and we love it, so

Tolkien had no interest in exploring the real emotional states of his characters, their existence in relation to one another and their groups, or genuine political or economic relationships between people or nations. They are simply not Realistic as Realism is understood in literature.

But, he did have an interest in promoting Christendom and the One Truth Catholic Faith, opposing the destruction of nature that came along with the rise of Industrialization (a key concern of both Modernists and Realists), reinforcing gender roles and patriarchal authority structures, etc. There was intent behind the specific content and formal construction of the tale, and that intent can be understood as either Realist or Anti-Modernist (or possibly both).

To get the Realist argument, you have to consider the entirety of the books as if they were a funhouse mirror (of sorts) to reflect Objective Reality back to the readership. That second article I posted about Tolkien as an anti-Modernist, as an example, discusses the content of LotR and its parallels with the 1907 anti-Modernist decrees "encyclicals Lamentabili" and "Pascendi dominici gregis" issued by Pope Pius X. I think it's a reasonably strong argument.

We know that Tolkien was writing what he called mythopoeia as opposed to fantasy proper. It's his term, and the stated difference between mythopoeia and fantasy is basically thus:

1) Fantasy builds a secondary world and its own internal mythology that is meant to be a wholly internally consistent reality, with the characters interacting with each other within that internal reality, expanding that fictional reality of those characters for those characters. Fantasy is not constructed to explicitly address issues in the Real World.

2) Like Fantasy, mythopoeia builds a secondary world that is meant to be internally consistent, but is constructed as a Simulated Reality, borrowing from historical mythologies and mythological traditions of the Real World for the specific purpose of creating parallels and analogues between the Simulated Reality and Real Reality to address issues in the Real World.

Fantasy was not necessarily described this way by anyone at Tolkien's time, but, the works that would be called fantasy today were part of other, differently named traditions. Tolkien is specifically defining his type of work against other similar and firmly rooted traditions, such as Allegory, Satire, and Utopia/Dystopia, which are intent-derived categorizations, while also defining his type of work as categorically different than mere entertainment fiction.

It's this latter point that reveals the taint of a Realist and/or Modernist about LotR. He's not creating the story solely for the enjoyment of the thing. He's doing it as a didactic, pedagogical tool to educate the readership on what is and is not Objectively Real.

While the mythological elements in the post-realist literature of the moderns might provide some superficial similarity, Tolkien's books are not inherently structured like Modernist works. Whereas Tolkien's plotting and characters serve primarily to further the illustration of his fictional world and his myth, the fantastic elements and mythopoesis in Modernism only exists to illuminate the inner life of the characters and their personal revelations. The internal directions of his work and the work of Modernism are at odds.

Also, both the 19th century Realists and the 20th century Modernists practiced an attention to detail in the prose itself that Tolkien does not seem to value. Tolkien does not pursue the language of Realistic description nor the Modernist's addiction to density.

On this we pretty much agree. Stylistically, he's definitely not going for Modernism. And in terms of his conception of things, he's certainly more interested in mythology-like language, structure, and content than what you would expect of a Realist.

Call him a latter-day Romantic and you're on to something.

But there I would disagree. Romanticism is intensely subjective, focusing largely on sublimation. I don't see a great deal of that either in the text proper of LotR, nor do I see his overarching goal as a Romantic one. That said, though, it's not a new argument, and it does have some merit. The emphasis on the conflict between the natural world and industrialization does bring Wordsworth to mind, and was certainly a key element of Romanticism.

So again, I'm going to hedge my bets and say that there are elements of Romanticism in LotR.

 

[owlcroft]

Er . . . .

That's what modernists were all about: referring to other things, let them be other works, religious, cultural etc.

I'm a bit confused. No one but modernists ever wrote fiction with symbolic content? All modernists write nothing but symbols, and no one else used symbols at all? Is that it? If not, at what density of symbol use does the work pass from non-modernist to modernist? Are there published density tests?

 

[NickeeCoco]

I'm a bit confused. No one but modernists ever wrote fiction with symbolic content? All modernists write nothing but symbols, and no one else used symbols at all? Is that it? If not, at what density of symbol use does the work pass from non-modernist to modernist? Are there published density tests?

Here, read this: http://www.henry-miller.com/narrative-literature/modernist-symbolism-ulysses-and-moby-dick.html

 

[owlcroft]

Treading on thin ice . . . .

Here, read this: http://www.henry-miller.com/narrative-literature/modernist-symbolism-ulysses-and-moby-dick.html

OK, to paraphrase Gertrude Stein, a joke is a joke is a joke.

I don't know whether the link was intended seriously or humorously. The linked content gives the English language a bad name. My prior question was, I thought obviously, sarky.

So now I actually am confused . . . .