Originally Posted by j. d. worthington  I like your summation here, and I think this is where the difference in tastes comes into play. Essentially, this is a much more modern take on things, and shows a narrowing of focus, rather than broadening of experience. Both are perfectly valid approaches, but the more modern one is much more focused on entertainment of a lighter, rather shallower sort, rather than expressing through one's art an experience of life (or certain aspects of life). The latter requires more patience and care in both the writer and reader, as it presents its primary characters against the living backdrop of their world, whereas the approach you describe is much more that of setpieces in a contrived sequence where only the primary characters are given any semblance of life, and even there it consciously excludes their interaction with the larger world around them. While this can be entertaining, it seldom conveys any genuine insight into the human condition (other than through conscious didacticism).
In Tolkien's case, the world is real, it has depths far beyond the focus of the main story; as I noted above, it has myriads of untold stories just around the corner, of some of which we catch a fleeting glimpse, while of others we only hear hints. But it is a world with much greater depth and thickness, and -- as was noted in one of the early reviews of The Hobbit -- it is "a world that seems to have been going on before we stumbled into it" and, for that matter, will go on long after we leave it; whereas the modern writers' worlds are very much literary contrivances rather than the result of a deep inner vision. As such, they will have less detail, because they are conscious constructs, and inevitably will have less depth and richness of depth and texture and detail. When I say the world is real, what I am referring to is that -- as Tolkien himself brings out in his essay "On Fairy-Stories" -- it is very much a revisioning of the real world, it is solidly based on the writer's experience of what Tolkien would call the primary world, rather than a milieu created to fit a story the writer wants to tell. In Tolkien's case, it is something of the other way around -- the stories grow ineluctably out of the nature of the world in which they are set, rather than the world being built to fit the story.
The upshot of all this (and where the conscious artistry does come in) is in the selection of which parts to include; which parts to tell fully, which to present fragments of, which to shadowily hint at, and which to leave only in the characters' minds, influencing how they react to the world around them. In order to give his "sub-creation" (again, using his own phrasing) such profundity, each detail included in LotR plays a necessary part. The reason why such aren't required by the writers you mention is because the world they present simply doesn't have this thickness of presence; it is a theatrical set built for the purposes of telling the story, nothing more. (Again, this is not to denigrate such, I happen to enjoy both, and think that both are worthy endeavors, but simply to make the distinction that one does, by its very raison d'être, have more depth to it than the other.) |