[Bêthberry]

Originally Posted by Feanor of the Peredhil

Say we're reading Eliot's The Waste Land and get as far as:

Should I call it a day and assume I'm just too dumb to get it? Is it respectful to a general readership to muck about with language and to alter signifiers? And do authors hold a responsibility to their readership to make a story accessible?

Originally Posted by Pitchwife

I'm not sure there is anything to get here other than Eliot having a pee contest with Ezra Pound about who can drop the most random references to/quotes from tradition in the shortest sequence of verses...

Speaking as someone who was able to avoid studying any modern poetry, I'd say that passage leaves me 'etherised like a patient on a table', and I'd defend the allusion to Eliot by using Tolkien's defense of dramatic purpose.

And I'm serious about referring to Tolkien because I think his essay on Beowulf sets out a fairly interesting theory of poetic art. He of course was attacking critics who saw in the poem nothing but an historical document, a quarry for anthropological, sociological, historical mining. Not that he denigrates those disciplines, but that he argues the situation ignores the most profound quality of the poem, its art.

Originally Posted by The Monsters and the Critic

The illusion of historical truth and perspective, that has made Beowulf seem such an attractive quarry, is largely a product of its art. The author has used an instinctive historical sense--a part indeed of the ancient English temper (and not unconnected with its reupted melancoly), of which Beowulf is a supreme expression; but he has used it with a poetical and not an historical object. The lovers of poetry can safely study the art, but the seekers after history must beware lest the glamour of Poesis overcome them.

I would claim that Eliot and Pound were themselves guilty of ignoring the Poetic art in favour of building edifices of historical purpose. Tolkien argued that the shadow of research has lain upon criticism. It also fell upon those who felt a poetic urge and were unable to write a story or poem which did justice to art as well as archeology.

So I think it might also be fun to apply some of Tolkien's literary theories to other authors.

This is to ignore Fea's question about who the general reader is, because that is a thorny one indeed. I don't think a general reader exists; we are too splintered a culture and community and if in the past there was a sense of catholic (meaning universal) reader, it existed only because so much fell outside its range of vision.

Most of my undergrad lit profs took the established critical route of, "The text is holy. All the information is there. If you don't get it, it's your own failings. You probably lack strong moral fiber. You will never hold an advanced degree."

As far as I'm concerned the School of The Moral Superiority of Literary Studies was thoroughly undermined by the Nazi regime. Most of those brutes were highly educated cultural elites. But somehow that didn't sink in to a discipline that was floundering in its attempt to justify itself. If it wasn't creating new knowledge, like the sciences, what was it doing? Heaven forbid that the arts (that is, the humanities) were mere amusement. The bourgeois belief in moral worth overlooked the baroque attitude towards art, that it is entertainment, but entertainment that could still provide some thoughtful perspective on itself and its culture. Tolkien's worth is that he respected story and verse.

Originally Posted by Fea

The other question, then, would be: why do we write? And who do we write for? And does it matter.

Tolkien's professional life was devoted to literature that for the most part was anonymous. So questions of authorial intent, psychology, purpose were irrelevant. The text's the thing wherein to catch the conscience of the reader.

I saw the most amazing production of Hamlet the other night. (I'm remembering that Tolkien enjoyed theatre.) It opened up the play like I had never imagined it. It breathed new life into the old scrip (cliched old metaphor I know, but true). It set the story in modern and ancient Japan, employed three actors to play Hamlet, and cross-gender casting. Eliot and Pound never, ever gave me any sense of appreciation for the older literatures they alluded to, only a pathetic sense that they felt this museum-like dirge. Both that production and Tolkien, I think, have captured the sense of how to breath new life into old works.