This is what I recently put up on Facebook
I'm coining a new term: "Hump Capitalism." Capitalism, especially the American version, has never met a meaningful thing in human experience it hasn't wanted to hump like a horny dog til it's lifeless..
A rule 34 kind of thing: if anybody anybody ever found any meaning in it, capitalists will find a way to hump it to death.
I recently bought a book that I very much look forward to reading as some point, probably piecemeal, a collection of essays on world-building in Tolkien by the likes of Tom Shippey and John Garth. I expect it to be quite good. And I think what Tolkien made as a world is incredible, but I also think he succeeded at creating a world better than anybody else ever has because he didn't waste time wanking over the idea of "building a world." He started off dreaming up explanations for words of Anglo-Saxon origin, and I've become more and more convinced over the past few years since reading Garth's book that Arda never actually made the turn for him of becoming a separate world in the way everybody "builds worlds" now, especially the likes of George R. R. Martin. And I think that most people like Martin who dwell on it so much (and those who try to capitalize on it, like him and Amazon) I think probably understand actually very little of what is at the core of any really good world-building. Jane Austen did it better than any of them by simply reproducing the core of the social world of her England as a world into which she could plug her characters, in which the towns were at the same time those real-world towns in England of that period but also unmoored enough from real history to work for her fictional characters ... I think Stephen King probably gets it at least somewhat with his idea of parallel earths with some things altered (one of the things I thought made Wonder Woman such a piece of brilliance was that it maintained a villain from OUR world while maintaining its own fictional-world protagonist, and it made it work ... no other super hero film has done that that I can think of; the villain always comes from the same realm as the hero ... in fact, interestingly, WW maintained the very our-world villain against which Tolkien himself actually fought: WWI German war-mongering [Ares says he only ever has to give a few whispers and they do what they already wanted to do, which is kill each other, and it's the self-sacrifice of the plain vanilla mortal Steve Trevor destroying the plane of bombs that is crucial, averting the immediate physical danger and being her motivation for winning the mythical battle]). But I think the people involved in "world-building" for pay these days, like Martin and Amazon's "LotR" project, probably actually for the most part miss the point.
At the end of the day, the world exists for the story, not the other way round. When Tolkien shifted from calling himself a philologist to calling himself a poet, I am relatively convinced that (in spite of his turn away from classics and to Anglo-Saxon studies) that he meant it in more the original sense of the word in Greek: a maker. And I don't think he was first of all concerned with making "worlds" in the way that people like Martin and others like to think about it. I think he thought of it as the Greeks did, and more importantly centered around a key thing for him: narrative. Homer didn't make Olympus, let alone Troy and Athens. He inherited the idea of the mountain and he knew the cities as part of his real geographical world (even more closely than Tolkien's cities and isles corresponded for him directly to places like Warwickshire and Oxford). Homer's originality was in his compiling together of the source material into the narratives of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Tolkien's essay on fairy stories is focused on what he calls "narrative art" ... the making of narratives.
I think Tolkien knew better than anybody that one of the things that made the anonymous Gawain and the Green Knight author great was the criticism the tale made of the "world" that "chivalry" had become (I think his translation of the tale is still pretty authoritative in that field, and his essay that comes in the same small paperback is really good too). And I think he would probably be as much in favor as anybody of Jeremiah 4:23 coming true of the "world" that projects like Amazon's try to make out of his work: It's the only passage in the Hebrew Bible outside of Gen 1:2 where the pairing "formless and void" (tohu wevohu) appears, when Jeremiah prophetically looks out on a land of Judah that is being returned to the "formless and void" of primeval chaos as the earth quakes under the iron wheels of the Chaldeans. The material Tolkien himself wrote will stand the test of time, and I think that works based directly on the actual stories, like Jackson's trilogy, will be able to fare well .. but as for the "Middle Earth" that a behemoth like Amazon will create, let it burn.
I'm coining a new term: "Hump Capitalism." Capitalism, especially the American version, has never met a meaningful thing in human experience it hasn't wanted to hump like a horny dog til it's lifeless..
A rule 34 kind of thing: if anybody anybody ever found any meaning in it, capitalists will find a way to hump it to death.
I recently bought a book that I very much look forward to reading as some point, probably piecemeal, a collection of essays on world-building in Tolkien by the likes of Tom Shippey and John Garth. I expect it to be quite good. And I think what Tolkien made as a world is incredible, but I also think he succeeded at creating a world better than anybody else ever has because he didn't waste time wanking over the idea of "building a world." He started off dreaming up explanations for words of Anglo-Saxon origin, and I've become more and more convinced over the past few years since reading Garth's book that Arda never actually made the turn for him of becoming a separate world in the way everybody "builds worlds" now, especially the likes of George R. R. Martin. And I think that most people like Martin who dwell on it so much (and those who try to capitalize on it, like him and Amazon) I think probably understand actually very little of what is at the core of any really good world-building. Jane Austen did it better than any of them by simply reproducing the core of the social world of her England as a world into which she could plug her characters, in which the towns were at the same time those real-world towns in England of that period but also unmoored enough from real history to work for her fictional characters ... I think Stephen King probably gets it at least somewhat with his idea of parallel earths with some things altered (one of the things I thought made Wonder Woman such a piece of brilliance was that it maintained a villain from OUR world while maintaining its own fictional-world protagonist, and it made it work ... no other super hero film has done that that I can think of; the villain always comes from the same realm as the hero ... in fact, interestingly, WW maintained the very our-world villain against which Tolkien himself actually fought: WWI German war-mongering [Ares says he only ever has to give a few whispers and they do what they already wanted to do, which is kill each other, and it's the self-sacrifice of the plain vanilla mortal Steve Trevor destroying the plane of bombs that is crucial, averting the immediate physical danger and being her motivation for winning the mythical battle]). But I think the people involved in "world-building" for pay these days, like Martin and Amazon's "LotR" project, probably actually for the most part miss the point.
At the end of the day, the world exists for the story, not the other way round. When Tolkien shifted from calling himself a philologist to calling himself a poet, I am relatively convinced that (in spite of his turn away from classics and to Anglo-Saxon studies) that he meant it in more the original sense of the word in Greek: a maker. And I don't think he was first of all concerned with making "worlds" in the way that people like Martin and others like to think about it. I think he thought of it as the Greeks did, and more importantly centered around a key thing for him: narrative. Homer didn't make Olympus, let alone Troy and Athens. He inherited the idea of the mountain and he knew the cities as part of his real geographical world (even more closely than Tolkien's cities and isles corresponded for him directly to places like Warwickshire and Oxford). Homer's originality was in his compiling together of the source material into the narratives of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Tolkien's essay on fairy stories is focused on what he calls "narrative art" ... the making of narratives.
I think Tolkien knew better than anybody that one of the things that made the anonymous Gawain and the Green Knight author great was the criticism the tale made of the "world" that "chivalry" had become (I think his translation of the tale is still pretty authoritative in that field, and his essay that comes in the same small paperback is really good too). And I think he would probably be as much in favor as anybody of Jeremiah 4:23 coming true of the "world" that projects like Amazon's try to make out of his work: It's the only passage in the Hebrew Bible outside of Gen 1:2 where the pairing "formless and void" (tohu wevohu) appears, when Jeremiah prophetically looks out on a land of Judah that is being returned to the "formless and void" of primeval chaos as the earth quakes under the iron wheels of the Chaldeans. The material Tolkien himself wrote will stand the test of time, and I think that works based directly on the actual stories, like Jackson's trilogy, will be able to fare well .. but as for the "Middle Earth" that a behemoth like Amazon will create, let it burn.
Tolkien's depth of world making was great, and I think it's a mark of the greatness of the literature he wrote that it necessarily builds this world, but the narrative builds the world, not the other way around. I think the maps an amazing interpretive movement on Tolkien's part and that part of his genius was that he could do a map as an interpretive move that nobody who's come after can wrap their heads around, not really being able to wrap their heads around any idea of what interpretation is in the first place, although I'm pretty sure that Tolkien would not have called the maps interpretive (and more than he would have called the more detailed timelines in the appendices an interpretive move on the actual story as written, but I think that is the best description for what those are), but I highly doubt he would have said that the maps are simply of the same kind of scientific utility that the timeline mappings were that he did in writing to ensure accuracy between the character-event stands when the characters are separate ... the maps are kind of like his artwork, some if which (according to the placards in the exhibit at the Morgan Library last year) was simply to help him conceptualize for writing the story. Personally, I think particularly for the mountains, the maps of the "present" Middle Earth were an attempt to make a scene on which to do the same kind of archeology that he did on Anglo-Saxon words: see the present contours (of mountains, like the contours of present words) and start hypothesizing backward to the possible original shape of the world the Valar formed. It's still always about a story: the story of how the land came to be this way and how the words came to be the way they are.
But the maps are still not the original core of the world. That original core is the simple narrative line that "the elves came to teach men songs and holiness."
(On the personal level, of course, as he said, the "kernel of the legendarium" is the tale of Beren and Luthien: of course, really the tale of the mortal John and the immortal dancing Edith).
(On the personal level, of course, as he said, the "kernel of the legendarium" is the tale of Beren and Luthien: of course, really the tale of the mortal John and the immortal dancing Edith).
No comments:
Post a Comment