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Closed readings
Have finished To Say Nothing of the Dog. It improved in the second half, before I quite lost patience with it, because the first half narrator was as hapless and irritating as Rincewind. And was a pleasant page-turning read, especially as I wasn't trying to keep track of what these slippages and anomalies were supposed to be.
And so it's done and so now what?
You read the book and the book's done. It doesn't connect with anything. It doesn't lead anywhere. You can talk about it with other people who've read it-- if there are any-- but that's about it. It's a subject like the weather that's useful for small talk; sometimes, as with HP, it's about the only thing it's useful for. (And filling the time between breakfast and bed.) Like HP, the more people there are to talk about it with, the less interesting the conversation is likely to be. Is it possible to have a profitable discussion with anyone about The Da Vinci Code?
I don't want to argue utilitarianism in reading. I feel reading should be a pleasure that needs no justification. But me personally, if a book doesn't lead into something beyond itself, it's like a bag of potato chips when I want protein and veg and rice. The 'beyond itself' can be hints towards stuff I can use in my own writing, or the clarification of an archetype, or a precise expression, or whatever. But I need something beyond the closed solipsistic circle of the book itself. Unless it's one of those kappa books that drags you in and drowns you, but that's a different kind of usefulness. 'Give me the beat, boys, and free my soul.'
Which is why Three Kingdoms feels the exact opposite of a solipsistic book. Things get clearer as I wade through Liu Bei's endless campaigns and Cao Cao's ever-iterated ambition. The Romance is the most accessible way of getting at events and personages that people have been referencing for almost two thousand years (which is why it's silly of me to snicker at the Romance on the occasions when it does indeed become romantic. Liu Bei coming *three times* in the *snow* uphill both *ways* to see Zhuge Liang and falling on the man's neck and being told, each time, that he'd got the wrong Zhuge yet again-- 'no, I'm his uncle, my nephew's out hunting'.) I knew in a general way who Zhuge Liang was but now I'm finally *seeing* the figure that, alas, grabbed so many people's imaginations, and seeing why he did. 3K is base knowledge for so much in Chinese and the Japanese culture. (The Japanese think they wrote Three Kingdoms as they think they composed Comin' Through the Rye.) Not knowing these guys in their proper setting, even through the necessarily distorted lens of a translation, is like not knowing the text of Hamlet or Macbeth-- stuff that's quoted for four centuries without cites because everyone *knows* what 'O my prophetic soul!' or 'All the perfumes of Araby' refer to.
And I can't think of a modern English book that does that. Even Tolkien and his labyrinthine world leads only to Tolkien fans and bad-by-definition Tolkien imitators.
And so it's done and so now what?
You read the book and the book's done. It doesn't connect with anything. It doesn't lead anywhere. You can talk about it with other people who've read it-- if there are any-- but that's about it. It's a subject like the weather that's useful for small talk; sometimes, as with HP, it's about the only thing it's useful for. (And filling the time between breakfast and bed.) Like HP, the more people there are to talk about it with, the less interesting the conversation is likely to be. Is it possible to have a profitable discussion with anyone about The Da Vinci Code?
I don't want to argue utilitarianism in reading. I feel reading should be a pleasure that needs no justification. But me personally, if a book doesn't lead into something beyond itself, it's like a bag of potato chips when I want protein and veg and rice. The 'beyond itself' can be hints towards stuff I can use in my own writing, or the clarification of an archetype, or a precise expression, or whatever. But I need something beyond the closed solipsistic circle of the book itself. Unless it's one of those kappa books that drags you in and drowns you, but that's a different kind of usefulness. 'Give me the beat, boys, and free my soul.'
Which is why Three Kingdoms feels the exact opposite of a solipsistic book. Things get clearer as I wade through Liu Bei's endless campaigns and Cao Cao's ever-iterated ambition. The Romance is the most accessible way of getting at events and personages that people have been referencing for almost two thousand years (which is why it's silly of me to snicker at the Romance on the occasions when it does indeed become romantic. Liu Bei coming *three times* in the *snow* uphill both *ways* to see Zhuge Liang and falling on the man's neck and being told, each time, that he'd got the wrong Zhuge yet again-- 'no, I'm his uncle, my nephew's out hunting'.) I knew in a general way who Zhuge Liang was but now I'm finally *seeing* the figure that, alas, grabbed so many people's imaginations, and seeing why he did. 3K is base knowledge for so much in Chinese and the Japanese culture. (The Japanese think they wrote Three Kingdoms as they think they composed Comin' Through the Rye.) Not knowing these guys in their proper setting, even through the necessarily distorted lens of a translation, is like not knowing the text of Hamlet or Macbeth-- stuff that's quoted for four centuries without cites because everyone *knows* what 'O my prophetic soul!' or 'All the perfumes of Araby' refer to.
And I can't think of a modern English book that does that. Even Tolkien and his labyrinthine world leads only to Tolkien fans and bad-by-definition Tolkien imitators.
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Yes! We had a quite literally profitable discussion about it by running a lecture series on it and the things it claimed to be about. It was also intellectually profitable in introducing new ideas to people and letting them see specific ways in which novels and films have to rework material (and also in showing them that history is far, far weirder than Dan Brown could imagine).
I think part of the problem with books being solipsistic is that there are just too many books published for someone to have read more than a tiny fragment, and so conversations are also fragmented. Things are much tighter when there are a smaller number of culturally important texts to quote from and use of models. Hamlet and Macbeth have already receded for vast numbers of readers of English, as has the bible, source of so many other quotes (as one lecturer said when I was a student, "The book of Isaiah is like Hamlet - full of film titles"), and there are too many other newer texts for any of them to snatch those places.
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Thing is, even with a plethora of books, some should stand head and shoulders above the others even now, and spark their own traditions. And none has, as far as I can see, unless it first gets made into a movie. Which gives us the depthless wisdom of The Princess Bride or Pulp Fiction or people saying Pride and Prejudice and meaning Colin Firth unless they mean Matthew Macfadyen. Yes, the classics of my young adulthood have faded for most people, alas; meanwhile the Chinese classics keep on chugging away. I can only assume this is because the Chinese quote history-content proverbs more than we do. Is still a pity.
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New books, new traditions, hmmm. I think you may be being unfair to Tolkien - many of his imitators are total rubbish, but I think it could definitely be argued that he did spark a tradition of writing. Pre-Tolkien fantasy doesn't look much like what came after, and what became the default fantasy tradition for quite some time. By being picked up as a source for Dungeons and Dragons the influence spread further, with perhaps some surprising offshoots. If it wasn't for D&D, the Tekumel role playing game wouldn't have existed (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tékumel) - I don't know if the worldbuilding was done free of Tolkien's influence (possibly Barker was inspired to do it by Tolkien's professional influence in some way?). There are several novels written by M.A.R. Barker that were subsequently published. Raymond E. Feist's novels also grew out of the D&D games he played, and at least one of his settings (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelewan) was, I've heard inspired by Barker's worldbuilding.
There's no way I'm going to suggest that many of the books that follow Tolkien are anything but rubbish, but I think he did inspire a tradition, and possibly inspire at least one other linguistically-inclined academic to start an enterprise very similar to his own, both of their traditions then getting further adapted and spread through role playing games and back into novels.
I think it's a great pity that the great books (however defined) are receding. Shakespeare is no longer compulsory on our state syllabus (and in Irish, even Peig, a book at least 80% of the population would have read and feared is now merely optional) - I think there need to be more books, representing authors and cultures as widely as possible. (Is The Three Kingdoms taught on Chinese syllabi, do you know? That would certainly keep it in view and present).
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Somehow I can't see 3K being formally *taught* anywhere though I could be very wrong on that. Singaporean moral education, maybe?
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It's just that, I would really rather you didn't.
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You inspire me to go read 3K. It's not a romance as romance, I think it's romance as in "epic tale". Still, the online summaries miss all the homoeroticism, I guess.
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Yeah, it's epic tale romance, but I have to keep comparing it to the work I know it inspired, Arslan Senki. The homoeroticism and manly attachments flow freely in 3K and are nowhere to be seen in the antiseptic Arslan series. Which is odd, given that Narsus is a Zhuge clone and Daryun is a Liu Bei who actually *is* protecting the Han. And who never sheds a tear. One has to wonder what translation Tanaka was reading.
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Though apparently she has a new one coming out-- 悪夢城の主. amazon.jp says they're sold out but everyone else implies it isn't published yet. No one has a picture of the cover, which suggests that's the case
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Would that she could provide me an antidote to too much drama, but I fancy nothing will. Why must people be people all the time?
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oh dear god who is responsible for this travesty????? Where did they get a k out of a pinyin c? oh I think I must lie down in a dark room with a cold cloth on my forehead...
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