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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.
( Historical treatment of Tolkien's world, its identification with our own, and the implicit story arising when one tells a fantastic tale from within its own setting. )
Next: Tolkien's use of reduction and exposition. "Alas!" said Gandalf...
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.
( Historical treatment of Tolkien's world, its identification with our own, and the implicit story arising when one tells a fantastic tale from within its own setting. )
Next: Tolkien's use of reduction and exposition. "Alas!" said Gandalf...
