(Plot+Characters)*Voice^2=Literature?

[Rimbaud]

The point being, as Lalwende explains, that in order to break a rule justifiably, you have to know it (and preferably understand it). Ignorance being no defence in matters of the pen!

[HerenIstarion]

it is vital that children are taught grammar

What, than, should be done to this coarse and uneducated person (that is, me), who never ever learned any English grammar whatsoever? For truly, my native is Georgian, my mother (and books I've read) tought me Russian, and French was foreign language of my choice when I've been visiting school (visiting occassionally, mind you, as I've been preparing myself for a career of a professional swimmer and spent most of my time afloat in a pool )

Not that I denounce what've been said. What I would you to see (and repeat after Aiwendil), is that exeptions only underline, or stress the vital importance of rules. But moderate mastery of English can be achieved by means of 'parroting' - per instance, I suppose I do not break that many rules now as I write current post, but not because I know them, but as I 'feel' them - as I've read many books and I've seen many posts where rules were applied in a proper fashion, and learned to discern them without knowing them.

Do not believe me? See my posts of some years back and compare the language and style (besides, since than I've invested my money into a software under the name of Lingvo 9.0. Good returns on investment I've got too - ctrl->insert->insert - and doubts as to meaning and spelling are magically resolved)

I constantly progress, and one day I hope to understand what Rimbaud writes on first reading. [Now his posts, especially short ones, require second reading on yours truly's part to get the meaning across ]

But that'd be personal information, probably of no interest. What I've got to say on topic, is that pursuit of originality, or pursuit of compliance to the rules, are equally ruinous to the work in itself.

Try to be original, and break the rules on purpose (making those two goals an end in itself) - reward will be contempt of critics and probably no readers. Try to follow the rules, and make that an end - the result, I suppose, would be the same.

But love the subject you write about with passion, believe it to be 'the Truth', write to communicate the subject, not for writing's sake, but for the sake of the subject and for the sake of 'the Truth', and - lo and behold! - if you are even moderately good with language, the piece of work produced will be praised and loved

That'd be general rule which bears no exeptions, which may make mere work about stamp-collecting a fascinating and absorbing read, - else is technicalities of no great consequence.

[Fordim Hedgethistle]

There are all kinds of ways in which LotR is a "bad" novel -- in fact, there are ways in which it is not a novel at all, but a long story (which is how I try to refer to it at all times).

The beginning is overly long, with whole episodes of action and character entirely dissociated from the plot (Tom Bombadil et al.); there are huge chunks of expository prose in which the writer is "telling" not "showing"; there's the awkward shifts in tone and voice that Rimbaud has lemonly pointed out, the climax is drawn out with a long and uneven denoument. . .and on and on.

For many people these variations from the established 'norm' of novelistic technique prove too great a challenge. I'm sure we've all run across people who have said that they started FotR but "could not get into it" -- to these people I now say "skip the chapters bewteen Crickhollow and Bree, and give the story a chance to grab you at Weathertop", and this usually works.

And yet it all, obviously, holds together and I think that Lush hitnts at why: the organisational logic of the work is not narrative but thematic. The action is not organised around the linear plodding of events, but around the ideas that it develops and explores in and through its characters.

[tar-ancalime]

Encaitare said:

But still, I have to wonder how many of the things we must analyze in school were actually done intentionally.

Well, I think that quite a lot of them probably were. One of the wonderful things about fiction (as opposed to journalism) is that in a work of fiction, absolutely everything is there because the author put it there. The author has total control over his/her world--if the main character has red hair, it's because the author wanted it that way. S/he's not bound by some external reality of blond or brown hair, and doesn't in fact have to tell the reader anything about hair color at all. So I think that we must approach literature with the assumption that anything the author chose to include is in the story on purpose, because that author always had the option of working any element in an infinite number of different ways, or of leaving it out altogether.

Which brings me to...

Fordim, I agree with you that LotR is not a novel at all, and I don't think it was ever intended as such--it's supposed, after all, to be a transcription of the Red Book, which would not have been written by the hobbits in the form of a novel. This would be because the hobbits, unlike my imaginary author above, were bound by the objective reality of what happened. They couldn't tighten up the plot by leaving out Bombadil and the Barrow-Downs, because those things happened to them. Galadriel has golden hair not for any kind of literary effect, but because Frodo saw here and that's the color her hair was. Even the inconsistencies Rimbaud rightly points out can be attributed to this device--think of Le Morte d'Arthur, another very long story with changes in style throughout, for much the same reason--Malory wasn't thinking in terms of a modern novel, but was rather sitting down to transcribe a story that already existed. I realize that I'm giving Tolkien rather a free pass here, but I've always thought that the meandering of the exposition and the long, long denouement, as well as the inconsistencies of tone and the unusual structure of The Two Towers, in fact powerfully supported Tolkien's premise that the work was not an original novel but a scholarly translation.