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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mallus" data-source="post: 3461709" data-attributes="member: 3887">Once more into the breach... And Harrison's suggesting that this constitutes 'going off the track'. Terry Pratchett's is quoted saying similar things about his Discworld; he won't draw a map of it because "you can't map the imagination". I'm not suggesting that Pratchett's remarks 'prove' Harrison's, merely that Harrison is hardly alone in those sentiments. Do tell. That's not especially telling. You've done a comparison between the two texts as a classroom exercise and found that your students agree with you. Great. I've read both. Heck, I adore both. I find Gatsby to be a model of compact, evocative writing (Fitzgerald can speak volumes with a single sentence, like when nails Meyer Woflsheim with the remark about his cuff links being made from 'real human molars'). LotR is not. One of its greatest strengths is that it stops being 'novel-like in places and instead becomes part encyclopedia, part atlas, part folk history, and part hobbit toast-buttering songs.It's not how much Tolkien crams into LotR, it's 'what'. To some readers LotR is effectively barren. They don't care about Middle Earth's history, hobbit customs, the genealogy of the Kings of Gondor and the fall of the Men of the West. To quote the immortal Morrissey 'It says nothing to me about my life."A personal example. My lovely wife tore through In Search of Lost Time a few years back. Something a lazy reader wouldn't do. Proust's salon culture is fairly far removed from the gun-crazy City of Brotherly Love we live in, but nevertheless, she could relate to it. She's tried reading LotR several times, but couldn't get through it. The enterprise that Tolkien excels at is meaningless to her. Middle Earth is meaningless to her. Now I wonder what Harrsion thinks of Proust? That'd me interesting... I've heard Ulysses described as 'a novel about everything'. All of the human experience. Personally, I think it's too dense to be readable as a novel. It's more like an artifact, sort of a map of Western cultural history... frankly , I'm not too fond of it. But Joyce's stories in The Dead, particularly "The Dead", are amazing. The last paragraph of "The Dead" is worth more to me that all of LotR. It says more. To me, personally, and all...  Which of course is silly. Critics of Baywatch weren't merely peeved that more people weren't watching PBS. To make a point. Which was apparently missed by a lot of people who got their dander up because they found Harrison to be insulted books that they liked, and refused to recognize that his statement's obviously weren't intended as universal. You know, because he was just making a point. I chalk that up to partisanship. And think about it for a minute. If we limited ourselves to making universally applicable statements about 'art' or 'writing' we'd never talk about them. Does 'researching' Mr. Harrison include actually reading his books? Does 'researching' Mr. Harrison include actually reading his books? And what position is that?</blockquote>

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