Prelude to Revision: Complex Composition from Tolkien, 1 - Frame Story
First off, I'm killing that extended metaphor of complex composition as mapping its real and untold 'imaginary' stories to the mathematical complex plane. Nice provocation but useless visualization. I'll keep the term 'complex' for the use of untold or very partially told implicit stories as critical elements of a whole tale, until I've a better. This done...
I don't think like Tolkien and, enormously as I admire his work, I have no desire whatsoever to write like him. That job has already been done once, and by a master. But when looking for a masterclass in really complex composition, who I gonna call? Who else?
In Lord of the Rings, Tolkien uses just about every possible technique and level of story composition. Around the central narrative of The Downfall of the Lord of the Rings and the Return of the King - which does exactly what it says on the tin - he works huge amounts of other matter, much of which one would not expect to work in a month of Sundays, to produce a whole enormously greater than the sum of its parts. Some of this is told directly, which does not so much concern me just here, and some of it is... not. His most audacious trick of all, the wrapping of that great story around the almost wholly hollow core of The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen, makes a positive virtue of not telling a tale which suits neither his Muse nor the novel he is writing. To this I shall recur anon.
Here I want to look at the really weird things Tolkien does in the framing material.
LotR begins with an extended, multi-section prologue, written in a dry donnish style, and alluding to various bogus texts from which the tale is supposed to be drawn. It contains what would normally be considered large spoilers for the story. The book ends with a proliferation of appendices, on every subject from background stories and side-chronicles of Middle-Earth, to calendar and alphabetical nerding at no small length, until it fizzles vaguely out in extracts from the hobbit genealogical tables against whose inevitability and tedium the author took special trouble to warn us in the Prologue! What, what, what?
Tolkien the mediaevalist is doing mediaeval tricks of inventing his own authorities here, in order to create a sense of respectable feigned history. To this he adds a modern academic flavour and a wink to the reader who does not, of course, really even pretend to believe that the author possesses the Red Book of Westmarch or any of the rest of it. But this frame story - in which Jerusalem may not have been builded in England's green and pleasant land but at least Bag End was, and echoes of downfallen Númenor trouble our legends under the hundred names of Atlantis, and our narrator in post-WWII Oxford really possesses the chronicles and poems and translations with whose sketches he amuses and teases us - is the first step by which he chooses to lead us into his world.
Only when we are made comfortable in it, and pre-familiarized in several ways with just what kind of a tale this is going to be, does the real Tolkien lead us with proper appetites and expectations to the fictional Tolkien's novelization of his material, which is also the real Tolkien's novel from which the material evolved. Of course, we may have just skipped ahead when he started to waffle: there's no pleasing some of us! But that is our problem, if we do.
The Appendices are the logical far bookend to this whole conceit, whether one actually reads them or not. We know what sort of thing they are.
But it isn't just a conceit. It also offers its own implicit frame story, and one which reaches right out to drag the reader in, warning them that not just this story but this world is supposed to matter. After all, in the frame story, that world is ours, and has a secret history both glorious and tragic, and the reader is living in a world wherein all those things are true and not quite lost. Somehow, we got from there to here. Somehow, this was how we got where we are now. Somehow, not all these things have been forgotten, and some of them might turn out to be rather important...
...on which last point Tolkien, though uninterested in forcing allegory on anybody, was of course very certain that they were. In the real world, poetically important; in the outer 'contemporary' frame of his secondary world, historically and metaphysically important; in both, spiritually so. I don't know exactly what he meant by the frame device, if indeed he meant anything but a little very academic fun. Still, the frame story in which LotR is a translated and modernized fictionalization of real events is not a negligible matter. For one thing, it spans about ten thousand years by all appearances, which justifies heroic levels of condensation and implication, and certainly puts Three Katherines' thirty-year central interval into perspective.
I haven't any intention of doing anything along these lines. What can I learn from it?
There are two issues to consider. One is the fact that the tale is told, and framed, from within its own world. The second is the game of identifying its world with our own, the game of Secret History.
My tale is positively not set in our world, and is not framed by academic materials or explanations from future ages of its own. (bluejo's King's Peace and Jane Yolen's Sister Light, Sister Dark are two cases where I think this more local and less grandiose frame has been used well.) So there is no Secret History connection, and indeed no overt framing matter at all.
Still there's an implicit frame story, because quite early on, it became apparent that the narrator of Katy Elflocks lived in the same world as their subject, and was deeply if often ironically engaged with the tale. The initial narrative voice of Killer-Kate was very specific to a particular time, place, and class, and not only proved swiftly wrong and unsustainable, but also in the event doesn't match well with the way the story now ends. Given especially the nature of the latter tale and its ending, it really matters who is telling it, and how far afterwards, and what they think of it. The asides and allusions they make, and the tone they take, hint at another story the present one leads onto beyond its own ending. It necessarily conditions the reader's perception of Three Katherines' value and meaning, by implying a tale about whose precise detail said reader needs to know practically nothing whatsoever.
I'll talk about the implicit narrator(s?) of the Katherine tales, and their developing personalities, in a future post. I won't tell their stories aloud, for it's no part of Three Katherines to do so, and there will not be enough data available to say very much for certain. If there were, it would just be a distraction from the story I'm trying to tell. But the telling of a story feels like something from some time afterwards - and what that feels like, is a part of the story, too!
Next: Tolkien's use of reduction and exposition. "Alas!" said Gandalf...
This entry originally posted on Dreamwidth at http://caper-est.dreamwidth.org/76298.html - comments preferred there, if you have a foot in both camps.
I don't think like Tolkien and, enormously as I admire his work, I have no desire whatsoever to write like him. That job has already been done once, and by a master. But when looking for a masterclass in really complex composition, who I gonna call? Who else?
In Lord of the Rings, Tolkien uses just about every possible technique and level of story composition. Around the central narrative of The Downfall of the Lord of the Rings and the Return of the King - which does exactly what it says on the tin - he works huge amounts of other matter, much of which one would not expect to work in a month of Sundays, to produce a whole enormously greater than the sum of its parts. Some of this is told directly, which does not so much concern me just here, and some of it is... not. His most audacious trick of all, the wrapping of that great story around the almost wholly hollow core of The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen, makes a positive virtue of not telling a tale which suits neither his Muse nor the novel he is writing. To this I shall recur anon.
Here I want to look at the really weird things Tolkien does in the framing material.
LotR begins with an extended, multi-section prologue, written in a dry donnish style, and alluding to various bogus texts from which the tale is supposed to be drawn. It contains what would normally be considered large spoilers for the story. The book ends with a proliferation of appendices, on every subject from background stories and side-chronicles of Middle-Earth, to calendar and alphabetical nerding at no small length, until it fizzles vaguely out in extracts from the hobbit genealogical tables against whose inevitability and tedium the author took special trouble to warn us in the Prologue! What, what, what?
Tolkien the mediaevalist is doing mediaeval tricks of inventing his own authorities here, in order to create a sense of respectable feigned history. To this he adds a modern academic flavour and a wink to the reader who does not, of course, really even pretend to believe that the author possesses the Red Book of Westmarch or any of the rest of it. But this frame story - in which Jerusalem may not have been builded in England's green and pleasant land but at least Bag End was, and echoes of downfallen Númenor trouble our legends under the hundred names of Atlantis, and our narrator in post-WWII Oxford really possesses the chronicles and poems and translations with whose sketches he amuses and teases us - is the first step by which he chooses to lead us into his world.
Only when we are made comfortable in it, and pre-familiarized in several ways with just what kind of a tale this is going to be, does the real Tolkien lead us with proper appetites and expectations to the fictional Tolkien's novelization of his material, which is also the real Tolkien's novel from which the material evolved. Of course, we may have just skipped ahead when he started to waffle: there's no pleasing some of us! But that is our problem, if we do.
The Appendices are the logical far bookend to this whole conceit, whether one actually reads them or not. We know what sort of thing they are.
But it isn't just a conceit. It also offers its own implicit frame story, and one which reaches right out to drag the reader in, warning them that not just this story but this world is supposed to matter. After all, in the frame story, that world is ours, and has a secret history both glorious and tragic, and the reader is living in a world wherein all those things are true and not quite lost. Somehow, we got from there to here. Somehow, this was how we got where we are now. Somehow, not all these things have been forgotten, and some of them might turn out to be rather important...
...on which last point Tolkien, though uninterested in forcing allegory on anybody, was of course very certain that they were. In the real world, poetically important; in the outer 'contemporary' frame of his secondary world, historically and metaphysically important; in both, spiritually so. I don't know exactly what he meant by the frame device, if indeed he meant anything but a little very academic fun. Still, the frame story in which LotR is a translated and modernized fictionalization of real events is not a negligible matter. For one thing, it spans about ten thousand years by all appearances, which justifies heroic levels of condensation and implication, and certainly puts Three Katherines' thirty-year central interval into perspective.
I haven't any intention of doing anything along these lines. What can I learn from it?
There are two issues to consider. One is the fact that the tale is told, and framed, from within its own world. The second is the game of identifying its world with our own, the game of Secret History.
My tale is positively not set in our world, and is not framed by academic materials or explanations from future ages of its own. (bluejo's King's Peace and Jane Yolen's Sister Light, Sister Dark are two cases where I think this more local and less grandiose frame has been used well.) So there is no Secret History connection, and indeed no overt framing matter at all.
Still there's an implicit frame story, because quite early on, it became apparent that the narrator of Katy Elflocks lived in the same world as their subject, and was deeply if often ironically engaged with the tale. The initial narrative voice of Killer-Kate was very specific to a particular time, place, and class, and not only proved swiftly wrong and unsustainable, but also in the event doesn't match well with the way the story now ends. Given especially the nature of the latter tale and its ending, it really matters who is telling it, and how far afterwards, and what they think of it. The asides and allusions they make, and the tone they take, hint at another story the present one leads onto beyond its own ending. It necessarily conditions the reader's perception of Three Katherines' value and meaning, by implying a tale about whose precise detail said reader needs to know practically nothing whatsoever.
I'll talk about the implicit narrator(s?) of the Katherine tales, and their developing personalities, in a future post. I won't tell their stories aloud, for it's no part of Three Katherines to do so, and there will not be enough data available to say very much for certain. If there were, it would just be a distraction from the story I'm trying to tell. But the telling of a story feels like something from some time afterwards - and what that feels like, is a part of the story, too!
Next: Tolkien's use of reduction and exposition. "Alas!" said Gandalf...
This entry originally posted on Dreamwidth at http://caper-est.dreamwidth.org/76298.html - comments preferred there, if you have a foot in both camps.