an imaginary dialogue after the "Invention vs. Tradition" panel at WFC

[calimac]

I was really struck by Beth Meacham's story about her acquaintance who loved fantasy, but who'd never read Tolkien because he was "too complicated." What did this person think was too complicated about Tolkien?

That could be tied in with the discussion of predictable literature as "comfort food" and the comments by other panelists about readers using formula literature to learn what the tropes are. If that's how you read, The Lord of the Rings will leave you at sea, because it doesn't follow the tropes of formula fantasy.

Those would be the tropes that Tolkien supposedly invented? Like the one about all the characters being nobles. Claim that applies to LOTR, and just to begin with there's a simple two-word rebuttal: "Sam Gamgee".

Well, lines like that come from critics so allergic to Tolkien that they skimmed through the book or never finished it.

What mystifies me is that, here I am, just eating up literature far more complicated and "hard to read" than Tolkien, but I completely hit a wall with huge-selling, supposedly "lowest common denominator" novels. Lowest they may be, but common? You noticed that Dan Brown was the hidden "bad example" throughout the panel? Everybody I've ever talked to or read comment on it finds him totally unreadable! Yet he's the most popular author out there in the general readership.

It's not just the general readership, but the fantasy readership. Years ago, Tor sent me for review the first volume of a new fantasy series by an author I'd never heard of before. I dived in with eagerness, but it was like hitting a wall. I could hardly read a page of it. At that point I realized that it was sure to be a big hit.

And it was?

The first volume of The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan.

Typical. I suppose Jordan's defenders would just tell you to turn off your "inner critic." Maybe that applies to Dan Brown as well. Just don't notice that his prose is so abysmal ...

But I can't turn off my "inner critic." That's just me; it's how I read. These books are simply unreadable, to the extent that I doubt that the people who read them are really "reading" in the sense I understand. Maybe Dan Brown's readers are just skimming over the pages looking for the plot. I can't imagine what Robert Jordan's readers are doing.

Yeah, but then there are the "higher critics" like Harold Bloom who consider Tolkien unreadable.

Fie on them. As I said: it's allergies. Haven't you noticed that whenever these people criticize Tolkien, they always get it factually wrong? They criticize him for things he doesn't actually do. The critics of Dan Brown at least describe what's actually there.

At least they can just flip through Brown's books and find clunkers to poke fun at. I've never seen a sustained criticism of Robert Jordan like the ones of Tolkien.

Maybe the people who'd be capable of criticizing Jordan just find him as unreadable as I do, and are too honest to try bashing a book they can't read.

Unlike the critics of Tolkien ...

Comments

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

A point made more than once about Tolkien's own books is that both of the Bagginses are "heroes from the here and now": that is, they're Edwardians of independent means, who think a lot like "modern men" as Tolkien knew them, and their journys are partly travels backward in time. And the Narnia books are even more obviously examples of protagonists from the modern world in fantasy realms.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

But today's readers of Brown are neither Edwardians nor children.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I agree about Tolkien. Hobbits make good viewpoint characters within the invented world because of their similarity to us and their naivite, but they aren't the same thing as heroes from the here and now.

But Lewis is a different matter. Readers of Brown are not children, no, but readers of Lewis are.