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Originally Posted by davem
I take the point, but I'm not sure that it applies to Smith, or even Niggle - or maybe to the latter only if viewed as allegory. Smith, certainly, includes the unexplainable & the marvellous. And yet... it seems Tolkien struggled with that very aspect of SoWM - to the extent that he wrote an essay 'explaining' the inexplicable elements. Of course, if he hadn't been the kind of writer who was driven to explain & rationalise then M-e would have been so much less complete & believable.
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A good point. You could be right that Smith and Niggle--and Bombadil and Goldberry for that matter--are 'outside' that aspect of Middle-earth. Yet for Smith Faery is a place he desires to visit. Access to Faery seems to depend upon inheritance of the Star and while Faery does intrude slightly upon the 'real world' of those of the ilk of Nokes, it doesn't seriously disrupt or threaten their perspective, so it seems to be a place of selective or individual perception rather than a challenge to the norm of the Nokes et al. The two realities exist side by side so to speak, rather than in a collision. Does the marvellous exist in magic realism as a secret venue only for those who choose to see it? It still depends in Smith upon a King who forsakes Faery to live amongst the folk.
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Originally Posted by Nerwen
I tend to regard magical realism as a sub-class of fantasy. I feel that it takes too much special pleading to argue that it isn't fantasy at all.
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And fantasy is a sub-class of romance and we're back with the classification of one of those members of the literati, Frye.
It's interesting that magic realism became so identified with literature of South and Central America. I've seen one humorous definition that suggests it belongs to Spanish-speaking cultures. We can wonder what the influence of
Don Quioxte might be.
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Originally Posted by Beanamir, from Lost Tales
"I am doubtful myself about the undertaking [to write the Silmarillion.]. Part of the attraction of the L.R. is, I think, due to the glimpses of a large history in the background: an attraction like that of viewing far off an unvisited island, or seeing the towers of a distant city gleaming in the sunlit mist. To go there is to destroy the magic, unless new unattainable vistas are again revealed." J.R.R. Tolkien, Letters p. 333
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I suppose we could characterise Tolkien's aesthetic as the strip tease version of reader-approach.
