Quote:
Originally Posted by NogrodtheGreat
. . .
Brljak then goes on to challenge this view, and reading about his ideas here prompted me to create this thread, because they genuinely challenge a 'consensus' that has developed in Tolkien studies in a very fascinating way
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Brljak
In the midst of great adventure the reader, especially a careless one, is prone to submit to the illusion: after all, a good tale is supposed to "take us there". But the pseudophilological metafictional interface fulfills a task which is equally, if not more important - the task of dragging us back again, back to the "here", into the poignant awareness of the distance, of the chain of mediations stretching across an immense span of time and through the hands of various intermediaries. Tolkien's mature fiction is centrally concerned precisely with this inability of the text to ever take us to that vanished, irretrievable "there", from which even living memory was but the first remove.
|
|
I don't think one needs to go to po-mo theory to discuss the sense of layers of story--if that is what is meant by depth and not degree of realistic detail.
Tolkien himself had a theory of the the transmission of story and it's effect in story. See his essay on
Gawain and the Green Knight. His comments are tantalizingly brief but I do believe he was there first.
And welcome to the Downs,
NogrodtheGreat and
avar. We already have a
Nogrod so my money's on folks coming up with a different short nick for you than 'Nogrod'.
