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caper_estIn The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien has so many intricately detailed secondary stories which require exposition, that he uses just about every single expository technique on Earth, and several in some pretty exotic orbits. I think this variety is one of his strengths, because of all narrative techniques, exposition is one of those which get oldest fastest. And the richness of this particular story demands a lot of it.
What is exposition? Back to basics:
The crudest and simplest method of exposition is just this: the narrator dumps on the reader exactly what they need to know of the exposited story, when they need to know it, by Word of God, or at least Word of Phil the Fibber whom it is pleasing the reader to stand the drinks.
Example: as the Armies of Light march to their hopeless last stand before the Tenebrous Tower, they detach from their already-inadequate force Randy Red with all his Rough Riders, to distract the Bogus Boss's major minions by making to toss the Snowglobe of Sassafras into the Pit of Pointlessness. This is an obvious heroic sacrifice, the main plot involving getting Princess Perfect 'captured' from behind her lines into the Tower, where she can sing the isolated Boss into eternal slumber when he comes to gloat over her. The story follows this rather hairy enterprise lovingly and in detail, and presently Princess and Armies are returning to celebrate their fabulous yet tragically costly victory.
Tolkien does not do whacking great loads of this in the stuff he published in his lifetime, probably because a little of this trick goes a fair old way, and even its very greatest exponents - in relatively modern days, William Morris and E R Eddison come to mind - generally need to offer a lot of actual up-close-and-personal action in order to earn the right to this kind of condensation elsewhere. Lord Dunsany is probably the nearest I can come to an exception: his wild cold stylings can pile this sort of stuff on itself ad lib. Tolkien's own best examples, good as they are, had to wait for posthumous publication in the Silmarillion.
Not by accident are Tolkien, Morris, and Eddison all literary antiquaries of notable devotion and talent. This sort of summary-story exposition is all over mediaeval literature and fairy-story - sometimes to the near-exclusion of the close-focus narrative to which we moderns are used. Today, either it has to be rationed quite strictly, or else it gives a big old turn to the tone control, whether we wish it so or otherwise.
Tolkien was not a hardcore archaiser like Morris or Eddison, nor an out-there ironical stylist like Dunsany or Cabell. He rations his direct narrative exposition quite strictly, despite having picked up a default narrative voice to which it comes easy.
The Nazgûl invasion of Buckland; the salvation of Gondor and Rohan from the last of Mordor's hosts beyond Anduin; the heroic deeds of the Northern War, with the fall of Dáin Ironfoot and King Brand; and the last eventful year in the Shire, are the chief exposited side-tales in this long epic that stick in my memory.
Secondly, various boring linking matter is glossed over and reduced to its interesting incidents in this manner: Frodo's growth to maturity in the Shire, and everybody's charm-addled languors in Rivendell and Lothlórien, for instance. Almost any writer will use some such technique in various places, and LotR's only real distinction in this way lies in the unusual quantities and timespans of minor story so compressed.
Finally, he uses narrative exposition when he pulls the camera back to describe not only what a place like Bree or Isengard is, but also what it means and how it got that way. This is a very Tolkien trick indeed, and though he often chooses other approaches instead, it's a powerful way to emphasize the massive presence of landscape and history within his tales.
So. What does this mean for my own project?
On the one hand, I'm writing late mediaeval stories from viewpoints close enough in time to understand them by instinct. That argues for more exposition by direct narrative summary than contemporary readers might be used to. On the other hand, Tolkien is writing epic and high, whereas I'm writing folk and low. The detached perspective of narrative exposition looks a better fit for his mode than for mine, there.
Exposited side-tales have their work cut out to avoid being waffle or clutter on the one hand, handwaving and skimping on the other. Exposited linking matter is mostly just the author detailing a transition. Setting exposition is necessary only inasfar as landscape and history are supposed to loom large in the tale - which they are in mine - and must avoid becoming a lecture upon the author's clever worldbuilding, save vs. Attention Death or skim real fast to the end of it. In all cases, the narrator is directly drawing the reader out of the main tale in order to inform them about something, and had better have a really good reason for it.
What have I done along these lines, so far?
Not too much - not that I recall, and therefore thought important on first writing and reading. In Katy Elflocks, Luke is introduced offstage to a previously-realistic yarn in a clearly ritualistic fairy-tale manner, with triads of this that and the other, before being booted into the thick of it to fend for himself. Katy does some important but not very exciting work around the middle of the tale, and that part again is summarized with a fair few ritual sets in it. H'mmm. In the epilogue, the viewpoint draws back from the two elder Katherines and their lovers, as it comes time to exposit their locally happy endings, before dropping back quickly towards Katy and full-on narration for the one right ending of the story. Well and good, then.
In Killer-Kate, which is more down and dirty, the proportion is less, and it may well wind up less still before the end. Luke's storyline in Langdale after Kate departs to bear his message to Alland is a side-tale of the first kind. The Siege of Newborough is, in a very minor way, another. Finally, the immediate aftermath of the Peace Conference looks a lot like one from here, but looks also like it might serve a lot better if directly dramatized as a chain of vignettes, before the last move to the book's climax.
Some of the diplomatic dance in Garcastle falls into the second category: I couldn't just omit it, because it's crucial to know; and I didn't want to dramatize much of it, because it's kind of short of interest for people who don't care about the precedent set for the law of imaginary nations by Amir Scherer this or the White Cat of Flanhowell that. Also, I am one of those careless people. It doesn't presently work as pure linking matter, and now I know where it all leads, I'm going to have to revisit it with a completely open mind. Meh.
There is exactly one big old Tolkienesque setting dump upon the reader: the narrator's invocation of Garcastle bang in the middle of the tale, when Kate rides once more into the shadow of her ancestral pile upon her return to Allingdale. I am so absolutely satisfied with its aptness in terms of theme, timing, scale, and substance, that any changes I make are apt to be purely cosmetic or corrective ones.
And that, as far as I can tell, is all the direct narrative exposition in this tale.
Next up, a Tolkien favourite and now a big-time genre trope in its own right: Exposition by Loremaster.
What is exposition? Back to basics:
...most complex compositions fall into the intermediate zones, where only part of the imaginary tale is actually made explicit - just as much, in fact, as serves a proper reading of the real one. The methods of achieving this partial telling are what I mean by exposition.By imaginary stories, to recap, I mean stories which are not exactly told as stories at all, except in the limit as they approach reality and are glommed onto the 'real' story whole. But they are intended, essential to the overall composition, and actually presented in some clear sense, or else we don't care about them. In the next few posts I'm dealing with the expository techniques of making them somehow explicit and localized, as opposed to the incluing techniques of implicitly spreading them throughout the text.
The crudest and simplest method of exposition is just this: the narrator dumps on the reader exactly what they need to know of the exposited story, when they need to know it, by Word of God, or at least Word of Phil the Fibber whom it is pleasing the reader to stand the drinks.
Example: as the Armies of Light march to their hopeless last stand before the Tenebrous Tower, they detach from their already-inadequate force Randy Red with all his Rough Riders, to distract the Bogus Boss's major minions by making to toss the Snowglobe of Sassafras into the Pit of Pointlessness. This is an obvious heroic sacrifice, the main plot involving getting Princess Perfect 'captured' from behind her lines into the Tower, where she can sing the isolated Boss into eternal slumber when he comes to gloat over her. The story follows this rather hairy enterprise lovingly and in detail, and presently Princess and Armies are returning to celebrate their fabulous yet tragically costly victory.
"But there at the crossroads awaited them a Tenebrous force many times their own number; and they were drawing themselves up in good order to sell their lives dearly, when behold! Randy Red came cantering up with Shadow-Sharon and her Nine Nightmares, laughing free and wild; and their tale was this, that having chased him across the Plains of Pain three days and nights, Sharon had observed the lightening of the sky on the fourth, and guessed how her master must have perished; wherefore, having more lust for the ways of Randy than for the ways of the Lounge-Lizard-Lord who no more might constrain her, she had fallen suddenly upon the trolls and griefers of her host before they were well aware; and Guffhead Captain of Pollywogs fell weltering in his ichor upon that stricken field; and in concert with Randy did Shadow-Sharon overcome his remnant utterly, and the Polity of Pain was no more, and by the way Princess Perfect now owed her a well-maintained duchy and fifty-five million shekels sixpence, according to the terms of their treaty..."This is admittedly not very good in itself, but it is pretty much right on the money when it comes to illustrating what I mean by direct narrative exposition. Spike Milligan's infamous, "Meanwhile, in Ireland, nothing happened," is found close to the terser pole of this particular spectrum.
Tolkien does not do whacking great loads of this in the stuff he published in his lifetime, probably because a little of this trick goes a fair old way, and even its very greatest exponents - in relatively modern days, William Morris and E R Eddison come to mind - generally need to offer a lot of actual up-close-and-personal action in order to earn the right to this kind of condensation elsewhere. Lord Dunsany is probably the nearest I can come to an exception: his wild cold stylings can pile this sort of stuff on itself ad lib. Tolkien's own best examples, good as they are, had to wait for posthumous publication in the Silmarillion.
Not by accident are Tolkien, Morris, and Eddison all literary antiquaries of notable devotion and talent. This sort of summary-story exposition is all over mediaeval literature and fairy-story - sometimes to the near-exclusion of the close-focus narrative to which we moderns are used. Today, either it has to be rationed quite strictly, or else it gives a big old turn to the tone control, whether we wish it so or otherwise.
Tolkien was not a hardcore archaiser like Morris or Eddison, nor an out-there ironical stylist like Dunsany or Cabell. He rations his direct narrative exposition quite strictly, despite having picked up a default narrative voice to which it comes easy.
The Nazgûl invasion of Buckland; the salvation of Gondor and Rohan from the last of Mordor's hosts beyond Anduin; the heroic deeds of the Northern War, with the fall of Dáin Ironfoot and King Brand; and the last eventful year in the Shire, are the chief exposited side-tales in this long epic that stick in my memory.
Secondly, various boring linking matter is glossed over and reduced to its interesting incidents in this manner: Frodo's growth to maturity in the Shire, and everybody's charm-addled languors in Rivendell and Lothlórien, for instance. Almost any writer will use some such technique in various places, and LotR's only real distinction in this way lies in the unusual quantities and timespans of minor story so compressed.
Finally, he uses narrative exposition when he pulls the camera back to describe not only what a place like Bree or Isengard is, but also what it means and how it got that way. This is a very Tolkien trick indeed, and though he often chooses other approaches instead, it's a powerful way to emphasize the massive presence of landscape and history within his tales.
So. What does this mean for my own project?
On the one hand, I'm writing late mediaeval stories from viewpoints close enough in time to understand them by instinct. That argues for more exposition by direct narrative summary than contemporary readers might be used to. On the other hand, Tolkien is writing epic and high, whereas I'm writing folk and low. The detached perspective of narrative exposition looks a better fit for his mode than for mine, there.
Exposited side-tales have their work cut out to avoid being waffle or clutter on the one hand, handwaving and skimping on the other. Exposited linking matter is mostly just the author detailing a transition. Setting exposition is necessary only inasfar as landscape and history are supposed to loom large in the tale - which they are in mine - and must avoid becoming a lecture upon the author's clever worldbuilding, save vs. Attention Death or skim real fast to the end of it. In all cases, the narrator is directly drawing the reader out of the main tale in order to inform them about something, and had better have a really good reason for it.
What have I done along these lines, so far?
Not too much - not that I recall, and therefore thought important on first writing and reading. In Katy Elflocks, Luke is introduced offstage to a previously-realistic yarn in a clearly ritualistic fairy-tale manner, with triads of this that and the other, before being booted into the thick of it to fend for himself. Katy does some important but not very exciting work around the middle of the tale, and that part again is summarized with a fair few ritual sets in it. H'mmm. In the epilogue, the viewpoint draws back from the two elder Katherines and their lovers, as it comes time to exposit their locally happy endings, before dropping back quickly towards Katy and full-on narration for the one right ending of the story. Well and good, then.
In Killer-Kate, which is more down and dirty, the proportion is less, and it may well wind up less still before the end. Luke's storyline in Langdale after Kate departs to bear his message to Alland is a side-tale of the first kind. The Siege of Newborough is, in a very minor way, another. Finally, the immediate aftermath of the Peace Conference looks a lot like one from here, but looks also like it might serve a lot better if directly dramatized as a chain of vignettes, before the last move to the book's climax.
Some of the diplomatic dance in Garcastle falls into the second category: I couldn't just omit it, because it's crucial to know; and I didn't want to dramatize much of it, because it's kind of short of interest for people who don't care about the precedent set for the law of imaginary nations by Amir Scherer this or the White Cat of Flanhowell that. Also, I am one of those careless people. It doesn't presently work as pure linking matter, and now I know where it all leads, I'm going to have to revisit it with a completely open mind. Meh.
There is exactly one big old Tolkienesque setting dump upon the reader: the narrator's invocation of Garcastle bang in the middle of the tale, when Kate rides once more into the shadow of her ancestral pile upon her return to Allingdale. I am so absolutely satisfied with its aptness in terms of theme, timing, scale, and substance, that any changes I make are apt to be purely cosmetic or corrective ones.
And that, as far as I can tell, is all the direct narrative exposition in this tale.
Next up, a Tolkien favourite and now a big-time genre trope in its own right: Exposition by Loremaster.
