the adaptor's quandary. and king arthur. lots of king arthur.

Ok, show of hands.  Who’s been super excited for a movie/ tv show/ whatever medium was being used to adapt something you loved, only to have your heart dashed on the rocks because the person in charge of transferring your passion into a new medium totally ruined it?  Like, everything good in the thing you loved was killed, fed to wolves, regurgitated, and then burned, only to be replaced by some weird statement on the political tensions between puffins and guacamole knights?

I remember the first time this happened to me.  2004.  Antoine Fuqua’s King Arthur comes to theaters near you.  A live-action movie about Arthur and his knights?  Intriguingly advertised as historically accurate?  I was so there, man.

Yup.  Talk about awesomeness.

I should explain why I was so there.  Man.

I literally grew up on the Arthurian legendarium.  The first stories I remember hearing where the adventures of Arthur and his knights, Merlin, and Morgan le Fey (in about a million different versions of her names and sometimes including her sisters); of Camelot, Excalibur the Round Table, the Sword in the Stone, and, well pretty much everything.  My mom read me those stories so many times, and when I was old enough to read on my own, I re-read everything we’d done together and then added dozens to the pile.

The stories about this beautiful, tragic, and lost Britain have shaped me in ways I doubt I fully understand.  I love history.  I think swords are basically the most amazing things, and I’d love to live in a castle (although I’d add modern amenities… once you’ve supped at the table of indoor plumbing, there’s no going back).  I tend to think a just monarchy is vastly superior to any other form of government.  I love fantasy, and while the Arthurian legends and romances aren’t fantasy, they’ve had an enormous impact on the genre.  Also, my grasp on reality is a bit tenuous, and that’s actually kind of true of most Arthurian stories… I’m sure there are other ways it’s impacted me, but you get the idea.  Big part of my life.

Hence, I was really, really excited for King Arthur.

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Aaaaaaaaand, as you probably guessed from that lead in, I was a little less than thrilled.  There were so many things wrong with it.  It seemed so bad, I wasn’t even angry.  I could only be disappointed. A King Arthur movie finally comes to theaters (I’d been waiting since about 2001, when The Fellowship of the Ring was released), and the don’t even have the decency to give Merlin more than a supporting role?  Madness.  I called my mom afterwards, despondent.

Seriously.  Arthur as Mr. UberRoman for most of the movie, Merlin his enemy for a while and barely better than a supporting character, Guinevere decidedly not a courtly lady, and the knights a bunch of indentured soldiers?  And that whole Pelagian subplot?  What gives, guys?

Ok.  I know, this looks a little different– the Arthurian legends aren’t a single piece being adapted, like Watchmen or The Great Gatsby, but are rather a large body of works that are, on the whole, fairly contradictory.  At the same time, the stories are almost always derived somewhat directly from the Sir Thomas Mallory take on Arthur, found in his work Le Morte d'Arthur– The Death of Arthur.  (Yes, it’s a grimly brilliant title.  Camelot doesn’t end so well.)

And you don’t encounter a gritty, post-Roman Britain for the bulk of those retellings.  A little in the beginning, which centers around Merlin more than Arthur, and then Arthur’s early victories over the Saxons, but by and large, the portrait painted is one of an established Medieval world, with courts and lords and noble ladies and courtly love and jousts.

Look at those knights, jousting away.  Joust on, guys.

There were not jousts in the fifth century.  Or the sixth.  And definitely no courtly love.

But it’s all part of the story!  It’s part of the beauty and otherworldliness that permeates the Arthurian legends.  We don’t really know what happened, but the point is that whatever Arthur truly was, his ‘reign’ represented a brief period of victory of the native Britons against the Saxon invaders.  After him, things got rough for a while.  The legends reflect that, but flesh it out into a powerful drama.

In essence, the details are all the various authors’ interpretations.  They read into the Arthurian framework elements that were important to them, then wrote those ideas onto paper.  Well, maybe not paper.  That might depend a bit on the era.  But nonetheless, they transcribed their versions of the Arthurian legend, and these accounts all became part of the way we now see the stories of King Arthur.  They’re all takes on the legend.  Most don't deviate too far from the now classic version of the story.

Back to the movie.

I was disappointed, as I said, at the time.  I now like the movie a lot, and re-watch it every few years.  There’s a lot of cool stuff going on.  The intense focus on Arthur as the last remnant of Roman authority in the process of going native is awesome.  The film’s efforts at reconciling the historical context of Arthur’s world with the characters that came to people Camelot is really cool.  Like, the knights as soldiers conscripted into military service?  Brilliant, and reasonably accurate with regards to Roman recruiting practices around that time.

Plus, there are some pretty epic lines.

This is Cerdic, in all his grainy quality.  He's the requisite bad dude in King Arthur, a Saxon warlord bent on the conquest of Britain, and he is a seriously violent and scary man.  Scarier than the Grinch pre-mountaintop conversion.
So, Arthur goes up to him and says:

'… it would be good for you to mark my face, Saxon, for the next time you see it, it will be the last thing you see on this earth.'

Just before the huge battle.  It was quite the statement.

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Ironically, the very things I at first disliked came to be the things I loved about the movie... yes, it differs tremendously with the stories I grew up on, but still represents a creatively strong take on Arthur.  The film isn’t even more or less correct, to my thinking, than the courtly Romance version of Camelot.  Both are based on supposition and creatively reading into a simple and historically vague time period in Britain’s history a fully imagined story.

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The transition, though, kind of begs the question: what changed?  The movie’s the same.  The things I like about it are even the things I used to find loathsome.

I mean, you could watch the director’s cut if you want.  That’d be a bit different.  But the basic idea remains.  So, nothing about the movie is different now.  Rather, it’s my perception of the film.

Nothing brilliant there– our views on things change all the time.  It’s the nature of the change that matters.  A long time ago, I viewed King Arthur as a child whose own interpretation of the Arthurian legends was so different from the director’s that I couldn’t get my mind around it.  By the time the movie came out, I had six years or so of memory detailing my view on King Arthur.  The film was jarring, because it didn’t line up with that view at all.  At my age, I couldn’t reconcile the two visions.

A director’s adaptation– although now I’ll widen the scope to include any artist using a new medium to tell an old story– is, in essence, their critical take, their ‘reading’ of the story, put onto screen or brushed in paint or fanfictioned.  The artist delves into their source material and absorbs it into their creative subconscious.  It dwells there, but it can’t remain purely itself, by virtue of having been taken into a human being, specifically an artistic human being.  All of us are dominated by our own perceptions, and an artist takes this a step further by actively trying to express these perceptions through miniature creations.

Actually, it’s not unfair to say that no art is truly original.  Our creative minds are a portmanteau of influences.  At the same time, we, as humans and artists, are incredibly original, or at least have enormous potential to be incredibly original, if we let ourselves be ourselves.

(I felt a little wise there.  But only a little.)

Yoda, being all wise and stuff.  Not as wise as me, but, you know.  Pretty wise.

So, the originality in art– and I use art in the broad sense to mean the output of the creative mind– comes from the person themself, but the art itself is also wonderful swirl of other art, subliminally coming forth through the unique expression of the new creator.

Thus, adaptations become a problem, because a pure adaptation can’t truly exist.  Just as no human is identical to another human, just as no pathos has a mirror image, no artist can create the same art as another artist.  We’re all different, and thus a ‘faithful’ adaptation is a difficult concept.  What is a faithful adaptation?  We all ‘read’ into works different things.  Of course, there are underlying concepts and ideas that most of us will pick up on.  Anyone who reads Cormac McCarthy’s The Road will pick up on the core theme of love, expressed between the father and the son.  If you read Revelation, the final book of the Bible, you’d be hard pressed not to find the theme of judgment.  There are certain elements that everyone’s going to see, and those will make it into most adaptations.

King Arthur, since I spent so much time rambling on about it.  Fellowship of knights, attempting to define their kingdom.  That’s a pretty central element to most Arthurian legends.  But the intense focus on fighting the foreign Saxons, that’s pretty different.  Most Arthurian re-tellings (not a word I like to use, but my continuous variations on ‘takes on the Arthurian legend’ are getting a little stale…) don’t focus much on that aspect of the story, but to the film, it’s paramount.

That’s really only aesthetic detail, though.  A little deeper– the film focuses more on beginnings and a new world, being created by Arthur and his ragtag knights.  Fuqua’s reading of the Arthurian legends finds the promise of hope represented in Arthur’s Camelot and dramatizes the sacrifices and heroism structuring themselves into the kingdom.  The grittiness, and the choice to portray Arthur in a violent post-Roman Britain, rather than in an idealized medieval world, is almost required by Fuqua’s interpretation.

My reading of Camelot, though, doesn’t really focus on the hope of the beginning.  Mallory’s title, translated, The Death of Arthur, is very close to how the Arthurian legends have always presented themselves to me.  Camelot’s beautiful tragedy and the family drama (there’s the really important bit) that plays out through Arthur’s conception and the eventual ruin of his kingdom are the parts that resonate most inside me.  For me– and not necessarily anyone else, although in this case my feelings aren’t uncommon– this is the most important part of the Arthurian legends.  But that doesn’t make my reading the only valid way to view the legends.  Different minds, and many different artists, have latched on to different portions.

A rendering of Arthur killing his son, Mordred.  Things go very badly towards the end. (On the plus side, the versions I like best don't actually end in Arthur's death, but rather the beginning of his long sleep in Avalon.)

The adapter is faced, really, with an impossible task.  Fans of the original work will expect the adaptation to be ‘faithful,’ but what do they mean by faithful?  If they themselves are possessed of any originality, what they think constitutes faithful won’t truly match anyone else’s, and it likewise won’t really be the original creator’s meaning, either.  The closest anyone can come is basically recognizing the central tenets of a work, but beyond that?

Trying to be attentive to the original creator’s ideas is important, certainly.  But it’s only possible to a point, because we all read as ourselves.  Fuqua sees the hopeful beginning of Camelot; I see the sorrowful end.  The difference with our interpretations and the original is perhaps even more marked in this instance, as there is some historical basis in the Arthurian legend– but it’s vague enough that we really have no idea what truly happened.  We may never know how close either of our readings of the legends are to what actually happened.  Similarly, we, as outsiders, can’t truly claim to have access to the creator’s mind.  The mind of another person, especially when that person is consumed in some kind of sub-creation, is even more foreign than sixth century Britain.

There are rare instances when an artist tries to explain their own work, but even then, it’s only a transfer of what they truly mean, an attempt to explain an explanation.

An adaptor’s work, then, represents their reading of the source material.  The new work is a critical interpretation of the original, and this is one of the primary reasons we often respond negatively (at least at first) to an adapted version of a work we love.  The way we see the work is our way, and in a way, the work is ours.  Our reading of the work operates independently of any other person’s.  It might be influenced by those views– it’s safe to say that many fans of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings have had their views intensely shaped by Peter Jackson’s ‘reading,’ exemplified in his films– but it is still uniquely our own.

Thus, our reaction depends a lot on how closely the adapter’s reading aligns with ours.  If it all matches up pretty well, or (somewhat more rarely) if we like the director's reading better than the original work, fabulous, chuckles and smiles, you don’t regret the money spent.  If their reading is radically different… well, you can still end up liking it, but it takes work.  And sometimes time.  It’s a complicated interplay between the original artist, their work, the adaptor, and the fan. (Fan being used loosely here to indicate another person who experienced the original and is now in the process of experiencing the adaptation.)

Of course, this isn’t the only factor.  The sheer change in medium radically alters the way a story is told, and that in and of itself makes for some substantial differences.  Comic books, for instance.   Their film adaptations are often among the most controversial of adaptations.  The director’s reading vs. your reading remains, but the difference in length is also central– a high selling comic series is a publisher’s dream, and can run for years unabated.  Movies, if you want them to be good, can’t keep going along those lines.  Just an example.  I do believe the whole adaptation-as-a-form-of-reading remains central in most instances, but there are definitely other factors.

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Also!  This is an aside, but I think it’s important.  Of course, I think all of my asides are important, and I have the hardest time organizing my thoughts these days…

Bill is confused by my thoughts.  It's ok, Bill.  I am too.

The idea that the book is always better than the movie is ridiculous.  Ok, yes, proportionately there are more instances of an original work being better than the film version.  Often, the adaptor’s reading ends up being shallow and focuses mostly on what will sell, rather than actually viewing the source material with creative integrity.  I get that.

But there are instances where the adaptor’s reading is actually stronger than the original creator’s work– my favorite film, Howl’s Moving Castle, is based on a novel by Diana Wynne Jones.  It’s a good book.  But the movie… it’s profound.  To some extent this is subjective, and it’s not really a point I care to argue (both versions are beautiful and don’t deserve to be debated into the ground), but I believe Hayao Miyazaki’s interpretation, played out on screen, is actually a more powerful piece of art than the original novel.

A still from Howl's Moving Castle.  All of the beauty.

You can feel free to disagree with me about Howl’s Moving Castle.  Please do, if the book resounds in you more than the film.  But you get the idea.  Movies can be better than their original inspiration.  Some adaptors' reading is actually stronger than the original.

So, the next time someone tries to tell you otherwise, call upon Cthulhu to punish them for their transgression.

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Closing thoughts!  Thanks for reading.  I suspect this one’s probably not terribly entertaining– life has been rather stressful for a bit, and I’m concerned that my writing is a little lackluster as a result– but I hope you enjoyed it nonetheless.  As you can probably tell I’m very into discussing and trying to understand more intimately the creative process, and the relationship between the artist and those who embrace the art.  The interplay is all part of the same creative process, and I think it’s important for artists to delve into it ourselves, being that we’re all lovers of art in addition to being creators.

Also, props to James Franco!  He wrote an excellent article (check it out here: http://www.vice.com/read/james-francos-impressions-of-gatsby) that first got my thoughts rolling in this direction.  I’ve always liked him as an actor, but every once in a while I stumble upon something he’s written and am impressed by what a smart guy he is as well.

Is a James Franco.  He's probably James Franco-ing in this picture.

Take care, everyone!

anxiety, blood, & fantasy.

So.  I actually wrote my first two posts in this sweet-I-think-I-may-love-this-whole-blogging-thing furor.  Now we’re up to the third post, and I’m trying to figure out what I should write about.  *racks brain for ideas* I’ll ramble a bit and ideally it’ll dance somewhere fun.

At the same time, I’m also dealing with the minor annoyance of a cut on my left thumb, inconveniently found pretty exactly where my poor little thumbkin hits the keys.  I kind of sliced my finger a bit at work (yup, I has job! Is office work) with a retractable knife– the kind you use to break down cardboard boxes.  Which is what I was doing.  Oops.

It was going so well, until the second to last box.  Then, blood gushing everywhere.  The carpet is still soaked.

Aragorn.  See the blood on his left hand?  It's got nothing on my thumb wound.

 Eh, ok, that’s pretty untrue.  A teeny bit of blood welling, coupled with a quick handwash and bandaid rendered things pretty alright, aside from this annoying little sting when I use my left thumb to type.  Whine whine.

But, all of that gave me an idea for something cool to write about!  Let all the nations rejoice and be merry.  It’s a bit of a weird idea, but I think it might go somewhere.  Warning: this is going to be long, and probably rambly…

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Who’s read The Lord of the Rings?  For some odd reason, homeschoolers were obsessed with Tolkien a few years ago.  I mean, everyone was pretty keyed up on LotR early on last decade.  The movies led to the popular resurgence of the books and generated a lot of interest in fantasy in general.  But homeschoolers, man, we were obsessed with his stuff.  A bunch of us even read The Silmarillion.  I took it several hundred steps further and read dozens upon dozens of fantasy novels.

I still read fantasy.  Not as much as I used to– the reason why will probably emerge in this post– but enough that I probably go through somewhere between seven and a baker’s dozen a year.

Brief aside.  The Silmarillion is a whole new level of brilliant.  It’s not a novel– the thing is like its own literary form, without any true precedent or antecedent, which is in and of itself a striking achievement.  Plus, there’s an enormous, evil dragon:

Look carefully, friends.  See the expanse of landscape.  Look where his head starts and his tail ends.   Then realize that Glaurung is also extremely intelligent and can speak. 

I love enormous, evil dragons.  Enormous things in general, the kind that make you go insane after seeing them.  Hence the Cthulhu thing.

So.  Tolkien rocked our world, and continues to do so.  I joined in congregation with a roomful of graduated and current home educated folk and did a marathon of the movies (extended editions, because those are the only real versions) less than six months ago, a week after we all watched The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey in theaters.

So, Middle-Earth continues to enthrall us and make us buy swords and daydream about finding Gandalf on our doorstep, which are all wonderful things.  I know we’re not exclusive as far as mega-fans go, there are plenty of others, but still.  There’s a level of devotion going on.

And that’s part of the problem.

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Talk about a letdown.  ‘Yeah, we homeschoolers love Tolkien and he’s awesome and Gandalf and swords and elves and can you believe they left out Tom Bombadil?’ Then I cap it off with, ‘Meh, part of some problem I haven’t yet revealed, man.’  It was a little Scumbag Steve of me.

I’m not criticizing our devotion.  Maybe saying ‘part of the problem’ is too strong.  But it bothers me that Tolkien’s creation has legions of devotees, yet so few of them live in the academic world.  The fans, hey, they’re awesome.  But the literary world hasn’t really always proven so cool with Middle-Earth.  At this point, few people are going to come out and say they don’t think much of Tolkien, but his absence, and the overall absence of fantasy in English Departments everywhere is a little bit of a silence that speaks.

There are a lot of reasons for that absence.  Going into all of them would be long and boring.  But one of them is actually kind of compelling, because it’s both a fairly credible reason for why fantasy as a whole has been left out and a major reason Tolkien, at least, should be included less hesitantly among the ranks of literature.

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More obscure enquiry: Who’s read The Anxiety of Influence?  It’s by Harold Bloom, a literary critic who specializes in being both brilliant and a curmudgeon.  Granted, he’s in his eighties, but I have a sneaking suspicion he might be one of those guys who’s always been a little curmudgeonly.  Not a bad thing.  The world needs its curmudgeons.

I think I might just like saying curmudgeon…

Hobbes understands what I'm going through here.

Don’t feel bad if you haven’t read it.  I have mixed feelings about The Anxiety of Influence myself, and it’s sort of on mixed ground as far as popularity goes.  Currently, a lot of the critical theories that Bloom abhors are ‘in,’ if a literary theory is ever really in.  They’re the cool kids.  But his ideas are still striking, and respected.

Bloom doesn’t really like fantasy, based on the few comments he’s leveled against it over the years.  Lewis Carroll is about as far as he’ll go with the genre.  Oh well.

It’s a bit ironic, then, that his book is spurring me on to make an argument about Tolkien.

So.  I should state some of the ideas Bloom presents in The Anxiety of Influence.  Honestly, I don’t entirely grasp everything he gets at– it’s a dense book.  Murky.  That word comes to mind with Bloom’s writing.  He’s fascinating, but I think I’m going to need to re-read this one before it entirely settles into my brain.

Ok.  Super streamlined version of his idea:

Poets in the Post-Enlightenment era– essentially Milton and afterward.  Think Romantic poets, like William Blake, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, and Lord Byron.  He focuses a lot on that era (technically, the whole book is a study of Romantic poetry) to explain his idea of influence.

Not really pertinent, but those guys are sort of becoming my heroes.  Don’t know for sure yet.  Crazy talented people.  Anyways.

[I’ll be using the male pronoun throughout.  Yes, I agree a gender neutral term would be a worthwhile addition to English.  But for the purposes of describing weird literary theories, the plural ‘they’ will just make slightly obscure points seem even more obscure.]

Bloom sees poetry and writing as subliminally competitive.  In a Freudian way.  So, Poet A writes The Rise of The Elder Gods.  It’s published.  Poet B, the younger poet, reads his predecessor’s work.  In it, he recognizes himself, but he inevitably sees something with which he differs, because he is himself, not his predecessor.

In fact, Poet B’s recognition of himself is likely not Poet A’s intent at all– here we hit on a central Bloom concept, creative misreading, or misprision.  The latecomer poet reads his own ideas into The Rise of the Elder Gods.  He creatively misreads the work that influences him.

With a title like The Rise of the Elder Gods, Poet A probably read a bit too much of this....

Poet B’s writing, like that of all Post-Enlightenment poets, is an effort to represent himself in his art, but Poet A’s enormous impact has already set in.  Poet B, by virtue of coming later and having The Rise of the Elder Gods coming before, experiences a subliminal anxiety.  He is in the imaginative shadow of his artistic father.  Genius has already come and gone, and it has expressed itself so perfectly as to permanently affect the later writer.  What is left to the new poet?

Essentially, rewriting the work that went before him– in his own writing, he must subtly shift our attention to his views, his self, rather than those of his precursor, so that even when we read the precursor’s work, we are to some extent reading his literary heir.  Poet B’s writing must match and exceed Poet A’s, so that The Rise of the Elder Gods feels to us as though it could have in fact been written, not by Poet A, it’s actual creator, but by Poet B.

Hmmm.

That might be overstating it.  Bloom’s a little unclear about this, but I think a more accurate interpretation would be to say that we read The Rise of the Elder Gods in light of Poet B’s great work, which we’ll go ahead and name The Harpy’s Tear.  If Poet B is successful, then we read The Rise of the Elder Gods in relation to The Harpy’s Tear, not the other way around.  The latecomer becomes his own father.  His work, metaphorically, makes itself the ancestor of the previous great work.

Also, to Bloom, influence is essentially inescapable.  Willful departure from The Rise of the Elder Gods is all part of the process for Poet B to write The Harpy’s Tear.  He can be deliberately different, but that’s still reactionary to Poet A’s work.  His difference (at least in part) is because of the great poem that’s influenced him.

Yes, it’s weird and not really at all what we think of when the word poet gets tossed about.  I’m honestly unsure if the whole literary theory (antithetical, if you’re into technical terms…) actually applies to modern poetry.  I think it might, though in an altered form.

Where I think the entire theory is splendidly useful is in describing fantasy literature and Tolkien.

~          ~          ~

Oh.  One more thing I should mention.  Very rarely, a writer consumes his influences so completely that we cannot find a trace, or at the very least only tremendously miniscule traces, of his predecessors in his work.

~          ~          ~

Bloom, I suspect, would not be entirely thrilled with me appropriating his theory of Romantic poetry and applying it towards Fantasy literature.  But at the same time, I hope he’d be open to the idea.  The whole thing ties in so perfectly that it’d be remiss not to bring it up.  My love for literature compels me…

Harold Bloom, metaphorically giving me a skeptical look about my application of his ideas.

… though I can certainly sympathize with him if he were to look at my uber streamlined version of his theory of antithetical literary criticism and be annoyed that I didn’t represent it better.

Calling Tolkien the Father of Fantasy or something similar is a bit misleading.  Fantasy definitely existed before The Lord of the Rings.  It’s really the work’s effect on fantasy that renders it so important.  Thus, I disagree entirely with Moorcock and Pullman, who both tend towards being dismissive of Tolkien.  Sorry guys.  As long as we’re discussing this antithetical business, he’s got you both beat.

It’s odd to apply ‘beat’ to discussions of literature.  As a writer, I’m not in love with the idea that we’re in competition with our forbearers.  At the same time, I think Bloom makes brilliant points in The Anxiety of Influence, even if the phrasing is aggressive.  I’ve been reading a lot of Romantic poetry lately, and I can definitely see what he means, with their relation to Milton and each other.  You can almost feel these guys, brilliant young poets, struggling with the immensity of Milton’s genius and Paradise Lost.

So.  The Lord of the Rings.  Yes, fantasy as a genre was around before it was published, and had been kicking around since the late nineteenth century.  It was young, but potent– some really excellent stuff was being written in the early twentieth century.  The Worm Ouroboros, The King of Elfland’s Daughter, and Robert E. Howard’s many stories about Conan of Cimmeria are all pre-Tolkien fantasies, all of them strong works.  Nary a dud amongst them.  There are others we could throw out.  The Well at the World’s End, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and in fact Tolkien’s own The Hobbit, or, There and Back Again all serve as examples of excellent fantasy that existed before The Lord of the Rings.

Then, between nineteen fifty-four and nineteen fifty-five, Tolkien published The Lord of the Ring.  Very quickly, the face of the young genre shifts.  The most obvious change was that Tolkien was actually popular and reviewed.  Not all the reviews were positive.  Edmund Wilson (a professional critic) called it ‘balderdash’ and ‘juvenile trash’ (Oo, Those Awful Orcs!).  On the other hand, W.H. Auden (a poet) wrote, ‘The demands made on the writer's powers in an epic as long as "The Lord of the Rings" are enormous… but I can only say that Mr. Tolkien has proved equal to them” (At the End of the Quest, Victory).

Ahhhhhhh darn.  I promised myself when I started writing this that I wouldn’t put in quotes, in an effort to keep from getting all scholarly.  I even held off when I was summarizing Bloom.  Meh.  Dear Blog, ENG 220 this Fall is where I have to substantiate my opinions.  Stop making me do work.  Oh well.  At least there doesn’t need to be an annotated bibliography at the end.

The sad part is, I was actually tremendously satisfied when I found those quotes.  It’s quite possible I’ll some day be that professor who always tells his classes, ‘I never thought I’d be doing this, but…’

I will be the coolest professor, though.  My advisor is a hipster, so I feel comfortable saying that a precedent has definitely been set for me.

Anyways, the whole thing with Tolkien was fairly polarizing.  As long as we’re talking about them, both Wilson and Auden noticed it.  In their reviews– arguably the most famous articles to have addressed Tolkien while he was alive and publishing– both recognize the extreme opinions about The Lord of the Rings.  Basically, it was a love or hate situation.

In and of itself, the critical attention paid to The Lord of the Rings was a big deal.  Fantasy hadn’t really been substantially noticed before it.

The floodgates were open, but it took a few years for much to trickle through.  Some masterpieces, like A Wizard of Earthsea and its sequels, were published.  Lloyd Alexander wrote The Prydain Chronicles.  Those were both in the sixties, and both bore Tolkien’s mark.

Influence, as I’ve hinted at, doesn’t exactly imply that the new book closely resembles the old.  It’s subtler than that.  In lesser works, certainly, there’s bound to be fairly derivative elements.  But in writings produced by true brilliance, the influence manifests itself less clearly.  Earthsea and Prydain are both brilliant series.  Yet both stand in Tolkien’s creative shadow, because, in a way, The Lord of the Rings just ramped up everything that was already there in fantasy.  Central to Tolkien’s creative thought process is the idea of secondary creation– building a world.  That’s exactly what earlier fantasists did.  The difference lies in quality, not in kind.  The world Tolkien created and fleshed out in The Lord of the Rings is extraordinarily complete.  It gets thrown out a lot, but seriously, the guy made up languages for his fictional races that actually work as real systems of speech and thought.

And that secondary creation, that world building (which is the more current phrase), is a central tenant of fantasy.  It’s part of what defines the genre.  At the end of the day, the themes in fantasy, while told in an overblown, swords and thunder and God reaching out of the heavens and grasping the earth to tether it against the falling tears of Sak-Dalanya the Overdemon fashion, are not really different from the rest of literature.  But the aesthetics of fantasy are so striking, the world building, the ability to formulate a convincing and consistent world (which includes geography, topography, politics, etcetera ad nauseam), this skill becomes central.

(There are other differences.  Getting into all of that is a separate post.)

Tolkien permanently altered the world building game.  Middle-Earth is so complete, so internally consistent, that everything before it is redefined.  Tolkien sort of gobbled up his predecessors.  They’re still good, some of them great, but all of them are under a shadow that his legacy casts both backward and forward.

(There are also other reasons that The Lord of the Rings antithetically completes its predecessors.  Again, separate post.  Or doctoral thesis.  Maybe both.)

Consider E.R. Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros, published in 1922.  It’s a bold, robust book.  Wars and magic, all set in an independently created world.  Touches on some dark philosophical places Tolkien doesn’t.  But it pales somewhat when set next to The Lord of the Rings.  Eddison’s world lacks the internal resonance of Middle-Earth.  It’s not a flaw, per se, just a lack, an absence of the fully fleshed out secondary creation.  Tolkien read and admired The Worm Ouroboros, and was in fact inspired by many of the same legends that Eddison, like Tolkien a scholar of Germanic mythology, immersed his imagination in.  Chronologically, Tolkien should have been experiencing the anxiety of influence from Eddison.

Yet there is not trace of The Worm Ouroboros in Tolkien.  Reverse the process, though, and Eddison seems like a less mature version of Tolkien.

Now, jump forward, from the nineteen twenties to the nineteen sixties.  OH MY GOSH THE BEATLES.

Sorry!  Forgot myself for a moment there.  Can’t wait to see them on Ed Sullivan.

60s.  Ursula K. LeGuin.  Lloyd Alexander.  I mentioned them a little while ago– both fantasists who published in the sixties, both brilliant writers.  The influence is, because they’re both excellent writers, understated.  But it’s there.  Both, in attempting secondary creation, must relate to Tolkien.  There are marked differences in both Earthsea and Prydain with Middle-Earth, little ways that LeGuin and Alexander swerve away from Tolkien.  That’s a Bloom idea– Poet B follows Poet A to a certain point, then swerves the idea to where he believes it should have gone.  Metaphorically.  As a writer, you can only be so aware of the whole influence-as-anxiety thing.

For example, Earthsea is exactly what it sounds like– a huge archipelago.  Prydain is a little kingdom place, world building on a miniature scale.  Both are genius.  Both remain in Tolkien’s shadow.  Their greatness is not tarnished, to my mind, by this association.  It’s merely a recognition of the strength of The Lord of the Rings.  On their own merits, if we ignored influence, perhaps Earthsea and Pydain are better.  They’re not, but that’s besides the point.  It’s just that influence is so essential to understanding literature, poetry (honestly, all art by extension), we must take it into account.  We read The Earthsea Cycle and The Prydain Chronicles in light of The Lord of the Rings, not the other way around.

The literary relationship here isn’t absolute.  There are certainly bits of both LeGuin and Alexander that are stronger than Tolkien, and it is there that we see the triumphs of later writers over their parent.  Parts are stronger, and force us to see Middle-Earth in relation to Earthsea, or Middle-Earth in relation to Prydain.  But, as a whole, The Lord of the Rings is still the most powerful work of fantasy, from that ever important world-building perspective.

Alright, cool.  But what does that have to do with the Tolkien-deserves-more-academic-recognition-not-just-street-cred?

J.R.R. Tolkien.  Observe the pipe & meditative pose.

I postulate (love that word, postulate) that it is in fact the tremendous strength of The Lord of the Rings preventing fantasy from being welcomed into English Departments everywhere.  Conversely, it’s not Tolkien’s fault.

(I think I just introduced my thesis statement almost at the end.  I think like that.  Oops.)

So, for a while, there’s a trickle of writers influenced by Tolkien.  Most of them are strong, with a genius of their own that, while not overshadowing their poetic father, establishes a vision, genius works that live up to and illuminate the heritage of The Lord of the Rings.

Cue the seventies.  Fantasy explodes.  Previously, you’d had a few handfuls of novels and a lot of short stories, occasionally put together in an omnibus.  Roughly starting with The Sword of Shannara, bookstores added extra shelves to accommodate the sudden growth.

Sometimes, creative eruptions are good things.  The first generation of Pokemon was awesome, and begat about two more amazing batches.  Let’s think about fantasy like that, as much as the analogy flies in the face of legitimizing the genre.  Pokemon, for the first few generations, were basically the most awesome things ever.  I am without shame in proclaiming this.  Behold:

My favorite t-shirt and my little Pikachu buddy!!  And a random pair of shorts, too.

Notice those are the original starters and Pikachu.  Not the one who’s based off an ice cream cone.  To be sure, there are some cool ones among the more recent Pokemon.  Some of them even live up to the early ones.  Think of fantasy that way.  Early on, less, but at the same time, more.  Later on, the lesser hordes of adorable little monsters makes the whole affair seem a little less legit.  Still a few amazing ones.  Same with fantasy.

Now, think back to those homeschoolers I mentioned.  Remember how I said we were obsessed with Tolkien?  Complete with reading The Silmarillion?  Well, a full generation of writers rocked said obsession for about two generations before we discovered The Lord of the Rings.  This is the generation that comes after the small and brilliant group writing immediately after Tolkien, now also inheriting works like The Earthsea Cycle, and The Prydain Chronicles, and, so I don’t sound like those were the only fantasists writing in the sixties, Michael Moorcock’s Elric novels.  In and of itself, the manner in which Tolkien influenced these writers and the quality of the writing his own work inspired should have assured him a place pretty quickly in the academic world.  But it has not, even as artists roughly contemporary with Tolkien not writing in the fantasy genre have become widely recognized.  Why?

I’m pretty sure it has to do with the fans, and by fans, I mean several generations of writers that followed the first(ish) wave after The Lord of the Rings’ publication.  The vast majority of works put out from the seventies until about now do not represent a compelling effort at channeling the anxiety of influence– rather, they are works so deep under the shadow of Tolkien that we see them purely in light of his work.  Incidental innovations occur in many such novels, and series, which are often fun.  But the essence of their work is so purely The Lord of the Rings– plus the additional weight of other great works– that they, and their authors, fail in realizing themselves.  They react to genius, but the sheer strength of The Lord of the Rings became so great as to prevent them from even trying to create their own vision.

That’s not actually a criticism.  I’ve read, and enjoyed, many books in that tradition.  But literarily, it represents a kind of clogged intersection.  There’s been a lot of books, written in a very short period of time– about fifty-seven years– and a large amount have not represented genius reacting to genius.  Storytellers, with often wonderful takes on the essential story, yes.  Definitely.  Most aren’t even pretentious about it.  They’re really chill, and write what they write because they love Tolkien– or, in some very recent instances, love the books transcribed from Tolkien– and are so enchanted by the tale that they feel compelled to create stories based upon it.  Dennis L. McKiernan is a great example.  His trilogy, The Iron Tower, is one of the most charming things I’ve ever read.  It’s epic, in a homely way, and has an adorably exaggerated version of the whimsy we find in Tolkien.

Obviously, I don’t find them offensive.  What does bother me, though, is the fact that they’ve (they not being the authors as much as the publishing industry) been defining fantasy for decades, and derivative works, well or poorly written, written out of awe or written because they’ll sell, don’t do much for a genre’s reputation.

Correction.  They do a lot to negatively publicize the genre as mere entertainment (and no art is mere entertainment, even if much of it is entertaining), thus damaging its reputation, and by necessity of the genre’s reputation being harmed, Tolkien’s.

That’s not fair.  If anything, we should be slapping Tolkien congenially on the back and congratulating him for being such a strong writer, for so powerfully wrapping influence to himself that, of oceans of writers, only a handful have swum down to Atlantis to join him.

~          ~          ~

Not to be all Chicken Little or anything.  Tolkien’s reputation, and that of fantasists, the great ones, has been shifting lately.  It’s inevitable.  Because some of the work that’s been done is too brilliant to ignore, some of the attempts at channeling Tolkien’s influence too masterful to discount.

Yes, like Harry Potter.  J.K. Rowling is a genius.  (See,  I’m not a Tolkien snob.  I even own a replica of Lord Voldemort’s wand.) I’m not really a big fan of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire (better known as Game of Thrones), but there is a lot of brilliance going on in those books.  I know of academic attention being paid to both, which is very heartening.

~          ~          ~

Doooooooood.  My word count rests somewhere around 4k right now, and if you’ve made it this far, cheers!  For a guy who protests that he’s not really an academic, that he’s at heart a poet, I just wrote what feels suspiciously like an outline for a thesis paper.  Uh-oh. 

At the same time, though, Bloom’s pretty poetic himself.  There are passages in The Anxiety of Influence that are beautifully written.  One of my professors, Dr. Robert Vivian (wonderful man, and one of the most gifted writers I know) sees writing, reading, discussing literature, and even writing scholarly papers as all a part of the same flex of whatever muscle it is in the human soul we use for this art.  My phrasing, not his.  He’d’ve been far more eloquent.  But I think he’s right, so I guess I shouldn’t worry about diluting the artist for the academic, though it can be an awesome way to put off working on research when you’d rather write a poem.

Anyways.

As you can tell, I’m passionate about fantasy.  I love the genre, and I want it recognized for its great works.  I’ll write about this again in the future, and hopefully continue to explore the connection between antithetical criticism and fantasy, but for now, I hope you enjoyed my ramble.

In the spirit of taking a long time making your point, have a picture of Treebeard.

moving & iceland.

So.  I’m moving.  You got that and the whole change-is-a-thing-a-good-thing-my-friends in my previous post.  Groovy, and groovier yet if you’re reading this!  The first one wasn’t boring, or at least not so boring that you didn’t want to dive into another one of these things.

If you’re coming just for the Lovecraftian pics, well, I understand entirely (raising Cthulhu awareness is a central tenant of my life philosophy) and will endeavor not to disappoint.  I love Cthulhu, so he’ll (should I capitalize that?  Mr. Tentacles & Scariness is a god, but, at the same time, not a first-movement-create-reality kind of god…) probably show up in a lot of posts.

Back to relocating with my family+family dog+small private library.  I’m actually kind of excited.  Our new house… it’s pretty cool.  I’ve loved our home.  I still do.  But, aside from the whole ‘Embrace the change, the Force will be with you, always’ bits of wisdom, I’m actually digging the house we’re headed towards.

(Side note: It’s not 100% decided.  About 97.4y7x9%.)

Is a tri-level.  Spacious.  Has some charming retro features– it was built in the late 60s– like the living room wall being a giant mirror.

The enormous wall-mirror was a selling point for me, even though my mom’s fairly bemused by it.  I let out an excited cry of joy; she thinks it’s a good candidate for removal once we start updating the house.

So, that’s cool.  There are bookshelves built into the walls of the bottom level, cool mini-winding staircases, a deck that runs parallel with two levels of the house, and– perhaps best of all– I’d get my own little wing.  There’s a side hallway, accessed by door, which has it’s own little bathroom and bedroom.  My private quarters, ahem.  *clears throat snobbily*

It’s odd, because the whole place gives off this wonderful vibe.  Like, ‘Hey, come live here in this pleasant place!’  Complete with hokey alliteration.  With the layout and the stairs and tucked away places, all with a strong central design, it’s actually got a kind of Tardis-like feel.

That’s a big claim, I know.  Maybe it’s just me projecting my desire for the Doctor to come pull me out of my life and spend years traveling space and time that’s making me feel that way.  We’ll see, I guess.

This is basically what the new house is like.

~          ~          ~

Maybe I’m not as comfortable with the whole moving thing as I think.  In general, I’m not truly at ease with a lot of aspects of being alive, so I really would love it if the Doctor showed up or if I walked through an archway and found myself in Faerie or if God opened a little door to Heaven and said, ‘Come home’.

So, it’d make sense that I’m not as chill with moving as I think I am.  Healthy suppression, transference, rock ‘n roll and all that jazz.  (I only sort of know what those words mean, but I think I’m basically using them right.  My roommate is a psychology major, so I’ve picked up on a lot of fun stuff from him, but I’m pretty bad at remembering technical terms…)  I have been kind of edgy, lately, though there are a lot of things on my mind.  That’s life.

       

Roomie!!  Isn't he adorable?  I loves my Jamie.  We have the same sense of humor, which makes life rather fun. (To be accurate, he's a psychology/ philosophy double major, and that combined with the humor thing makes our nighttime conversations the best.)

Ok.  Anecdote, then tie it back into the rest of that stuff, hopefully.

~          ~          ~

About a year ago, I was obsessed with Iceland.  Moving there, specifically.  What spurred that desire on, at least initially, was the fact that it was summer, and I unashamedly abhor heat.  I can barely distinguish anything over 75 Fahrenheit, because my brain goes all to mush and slides out through my nostrils and ears.  It’s pretty gross.  Hot is hot after 75, and I am miserable when it arrives.

Thus, I needed to find a cold place that was still essentially habitable, because I’m not really hardy or hale.  Love being outside, but I am no rugged explorer.  Other requirements: should be dark, because too much bright is annoying, and, in spite of needing awesome wilderness, I do require some urban, too.

In the midst of this, I was having a bit of a flashback interest in a band I’d enjoyed early in high school, Dimmu Borgir.  Symphonic black metal, man.  Cool stuff, if you’re into that.  I used to be and still listen to them upon occasion.  Anyways, they took their awesome name– which translates to dark cities or dark castles– from an absolutely absolute volcanic formation in Iceland, which looks like this:

Trolls be here!  If I lived in the Dimmuborgir, I suspect I'd become some sort of dark prophet.  Assuming the trolls didn't eat me.

   

Folklore maintains that Dimmuborgir is where Satan collided with Earth after he was cast out of heaven.  I don’t remember that being in Paradise Lost, but John Milton was Protestant, so some errors are bound to be in there.

(If you are offended by that, keep in mind that Milton is one of my heroes and remember that I post Cthulhu pictures.  Don’t take me too seriously.)

So, in the midst of googling Dimmuborgir or, alternatively, pictures of the band Dimmu Borgir (if you look up Shagrath, their lead singer, your day will become awesome), I thought, ‘Hey, why not check out Iceland as a whole?’

I did.

And I fell in love.

 

~          ~          ~

I was dying to move there, or at least travel for an extended period of time.  One of my closest of close friends, Caleb, was traversing Europe at the time, so that was probably a factor in my sudden and extreme desire for travel.  I was hot, and bright, and I wanted to escape all that and journey like Caleb.

Thus, time was spent researching Iceland.  Proportionally more time was spent discovering beautiful images of Iceland and daydreaming about traveling there.

 

Gods must roam Iceland.  I expect Odin's probably wandered eye-patched and ancient through this very landscape.

You can roam in Iceland.  As long as there aren’t any keep out signs, you’re free to wander private property in the great swaths of undeveloped land.  Whale watching.  Hot springs.  The sheer immensity, yet finitude, of the geography.  It looks so huge, but you know, at the same time, that it’s not a big place.  The population is less than half that of Detroit, and I’m pretty sure the whole island is smaller than Michigan.

But, to fulfill the urban lover in me, the capitol, where about half of the population lives, looks pretty fabulous.

 

Reykjavik, complete with sleek looking roadways and the biggest church in Iceland, The Hallgrímskirkja.

So.  That was my Iceland fantasy.

~          ~          ~

Obsessed with moving to Iceland, and it’s hot and bright outside.  Gearing up, at the time, to move away to college.  Also, was getting used to the idea of my best friend getting married.  Hmmm, that comes up a lot, doesn’t it?  I’m so happy for she and her husband (he’s a cool cat), but it was a transition.  A change.  Anyways.  Jump forward to the present.

It’s hot and bright outside.  Gearing up, right now, to move houses.  Instead of processing the change in my best friend’s life, I’m kind of locking on to my own and beginning to realize that poets a) tend to not have much money.  That’s not a bad thing, really.  But our society, whatever its pretentions, isn’t terribly humane.  I have a sneaking suspicion that homelessness won’t be as fun as it sounds and b) have an alarming tendency towards burning really bright really fast and dying really young.  Both of which are shields over my real concern– what am I actually supposed to do with my writing??  Woohoo, not really sure.  Only vague ideas.  But I’m borderline inconsolable when I’m in a position where I can’t write, be it writer’s block or unimportant things crowding up life, so it absolutely must have to be something with writing, but what exactly?  Really, really not sure.

  

Maybe if I drink from this water I'll have a better idea of what I should do with my writing.  Could work.

And, as long as we’re drawing suspicious parallels from 2012 to 2013, a bunch of my friends traveled in England for a month during a Spring Term class, so even friendfolk traveling abroad parallels my urge to pack my bags and travel north.

Apparently, I react to change and stress and moving by wanting to move far away to a country where I don’t speak the language or have any realistic way of supporting myself.

Sounds like a solid plan.

p.s. Also, the kraken legends originated in Norway, based on sailor’s accounts.  This is a very classic and horrifying picture of a kraken:

 

This is the first image of the kraken I ever saw.  As a child, it terrified me.  Didn't stop me from looking at it a million times, but it was still quite scary.  As a quasi-adult person,  I still find it horrifying.  Look at those eyes.

Norway’s not all that far from Iceland, and both are Nordic countries, sharing similar mythologies.  An Icelandic sailor might come upon a kraken.  It’s not too much of a stretch.  And krakens definitely share some attributes with…

Cthulhu!