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Until I started this comb-through of Lord of the Rings, I'd forgotten just how much of this Tolkien manages to pack in. You can hardly turn around at any point in the first book without falling into another bout of it. The fact that this impression never particularly lingered until I went looking for it, suggests that it's very well integrated indeed.
If exposition by loremaster routes large numbers of secondary stories through a single master-node, peer-to-peer exposition distributes them widely amongst whichever nonspecialized characters are appropriate. The technique can be as direct as having characters walk offstage, and return with a more or less condensed description of what happened while the reader was following the main story; or as devious as having them tell a secondary tale which is only relevant at a slant, at just the point where the reader needs to hear it. Sometimes the story might be more important for what its matter or its manner says about the character, or about a way of looking at the world, than for any content of its own. Sometimes, though not in Tolkien, it affords a convenient way of lying to the reader without making the actual narration unreliable.
( Peer-to-peer exposition in Tolkien, and its several subtleties. )
( Reflections on p2p, with its uses and absences, in my first draft and going forward. )
General thought. Peer-to-peer exposition seems naturally best suited to broad-canvas stories with large, strongly-differentiated casts and well-distributed character agency. This certainly describes Lord of the Rings. Three Katherines is deliberately a far more parochial tale, but the landscape is deliberately denser; and Killer-Kate has that feeling of broadness to me in a way that Katy Elflocks doesn't, because its threads diverge and rejoin so much. Does anybody else find this connection between the feel of the story and the method of the exposition a natural one?
If exposition by loremaster routes large numbers of secondary stories through a single master-node, peer-to-peer exposition distributes them widely amongst whichever nonspecialized characters are appropriate. The technique can be as direct as having characters walk offstage, and return with a more or less condensed description of what happened while the reader was following the main story; or as devious as having them tell a secondary tale which is only relevant at a slant, at just the point where the reader needs to hear it. Sometimes the story might be more important for what its matter or its manner says about the character, or about a way of looking at the world, than for any content of its own. Sometimes, though not in Tolkien, it affords a convenient way of lying to the reader without making the actual narration unreliable.
( Peer-to-peer exposition in Tolkien, and its several subtleties. )
( Reflections on p2p, with its uses and absences, in my first draft and going forward. )
General thought. Peer-to-peer exposition seems naturally best suited to broad-canvas stories with large, strongly-differentiated casts and well-distributed character agency. This certainly describes Lord of the Rings. Three Katherines is deliberately a far more parochial tale, but the landscape is deliberately denser; and Killer-Kate has that feeling of broadness to me in a way that Katy Elflocks doesn't, because its threads diverge and rejoin so much. Does anybody else find this connection between the feel of the story and the method of the exposition a natural one?
