Bethberry: You point out, perhaps rightly, that we have been imprecise and contradictory in the criteria we use to judge "good prose". You then present a well organized and well thought out definition description of three important properties of language. So far, so good. But then you fail to formulate any specific criteria based on those properties, leaving us in the same state you so incisively criticized.
You seem to imply that one criterion is that the writing conforms in general to common patterns in phrasing and grammatical structure:
Quote:
|
I see a very high rate of inverted sentence structure (clauses rearranged out of the 'conventional' pattern), a tendency towards using passive voiced verbs and verb forms which are not temporal, and a vocabulary that challenges temporal expectations.
|
Quote:
|
Where I think the difficulty lies is in the frequency of these items.
|
I fear I may be misreading you here, but more on that in a moment. If I am correct about what you intended, note two things: 1. The definition of "good writing" depends critically on what styles other people, who have nothing to do with the writing in question, have used; 2. a work that is good at one time can become bad, or vice versa, given certain changes in style generally employed. These thing seem radically counter-intuitive to me; should not the quality of a work of art depend on
that work of art rather than on
other works of art?
It would seem quite absurd to suggest that a book written in English is inherently better than a book written in Finnish. It would likewise seem quite absurd to suggest that a book written in Modern English is inherently better than a book written in Old English. It seems equally absurd to me to suggest that a book written in a modern style is inherently better than one written in an archaic style. And it doesn't seem that it should matter where or when the book was written. If someone wrote a great work of literature in Finnish, would it matter whether he wrote it in Finland or the United States? So if someone writes a great work of literature in a somewhat archaic style, why should it matter that he writes it now rather than in the past?
I may be ascribing views to you that you don't hold, but I think that they are whither your arguments ultimately lead - if I understood your criterion correctly. It occurs to me that you may simply mean that the too frequent use of
any kind of phrasing or grammatical structure is an detriment. But there are great modern works of literature that make incessant use of certain grammatical devices; and there are great works of older literature that make rather similar use of inversion and passive verbs to Tolkien. Surely these are not all poorly written.
I think it's easy to overlook the fact that Tolkien doesn't just use inversion for novelty or to make the tone sound falsely archaic. First of all, it would not be
falsely archaic for it is about the distant past and about people who thought and spoke in that terse, elevated style. More importantly, though, "inversion" has a real purpose. It serves to emphasize the word or phrase put first in the sentence. "Borne upon the wind they heard the howling of wolves" emphasizes the wind and the role of the wind as an agent. "The howling of wolves they heard borne upon the wind" would make the howling more unambiguously the central point of the sentence, giving it a sort of urgency or quality of surprise; the role of the wind comes almost as an after thought. "They heard the howling of wolves borne upon the wind" emphasizes the hearing.
So the structure of these sentences is not arbitrary or complex for the sake of complexity. And by the way, the placement of participial phrases away from the the nouns they modify is not strictly
incorrect; the trouble with it is that it is often
confusing and often has an unintended double meaning. If, as I think the case is in the sentence under discussion, there is little ambiguity and not much further complexity to the sentence, it is perfectly fine to separate them.
Regarding the whole business of popularity: I've discussed this in several other threads (as have several others in the present discussion), which might be of interest:
Book of the Century?
LOTR vs. Scholars, or Academics Can Kiss My As-taldo.
New Republic Article
Are There Any Valid Criticisms? (aka Kalessin's Rant)
. . . though these threads all veered into a variety of subjects.
To briefly restate my point of view: I think that the criticism of popularity expressed here by Eurytus and Bethberry and elsewhere by many others confuses cause and effect.
Some time ago I heard an interview with Tom Shippey on NPR; Shippey pointed out the enduring popularity of Tolkien's writings and the interviewer criticized this logic, pointing out that Elvis is also extremely popular and that doesn't make him great. Shippey's response was, I think, not quite on target; he argued (if I remember correctly) that LotR exhibited a more enduring popularity than Elvis and that, moreover, maybe there is something to the claim that because Elvis is popular he was great.
I think this is a mistaken line of argument; I would rather say:
It would be absurd to claim that popularity is the cause of greatness, or to define a good work of literature as one that is popular. But that's the not the claim being made. The claim is that a great work of literature tends to be popular. The greatness of the work is independent of the popularity, but the popularity can be an effect of the greatness. Other things can also cause popularity, obviously. And it's possible that other, independent factors could have the effect of preventing a great work from becoming popular. But none of that contradicts the premise that there is some kind of a causal link between greatness and popularity. Certainly popularity cannot prove that a work is great; but it can be counted as a piece of evidence.